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It takes Lang to recognize the horror of small-town America, for the tremulous delicacy of Weimar Germany there's Frank Borzage. The camera cranes down from the activist spieling atop a soapbox to Douglass Montgomery and Margaret Sullavan together in the rain, and at once the synergy between tumultuous national spaces and privileged private worlds is felt. Penniless and about to bring a child into a land of "too many organizations," the young couple move through a gallery of frail sanctuaries punctuated by vivid cameos (DeWitt Jennings' Neptune-bearded workshop tyrant, Alan Hale's affable pimp, Alan Mowbray's matinee-idol peacock). Beneath the soft-focus textures lurk poverty and demonstrations and "messages from the great leader," woodland idylls are brief yet palpably sensual while Berlin is a lavish edifice exposed as a bordello. Sullavan glides and glows like a Molnár nymph but Montgomery can't help remaining grounded in the darkening quotidian mood, modeling a template of vulnerability and violence for future Nicholas Ray protagonists. ("I'm afraid of the streets," he tells a potential employer. The reply slices right through him: "Of the streets... or of yourself?") Sharply corroding the atmosphere of brittle romanticism with each appearance, a seething protester (Fred Kohler) and his tiny wife (Mae Marsh) plod in and out like the lovers' cracked-mirror counterparts, more alarming than even a Mabuse conspiracy. A portrait of faces and hands clenched and caressed, a dreamscape of grime and satin, Borzage's Berlin Alexanderplatz, just about. Back from the darkness outside, Montgomery falls in supplication before his beloved ("Take care of me, please"). The newborn son receives the titular question, Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm provide increasingly distressed answers. With Catherine Doucet, Muriel Kirkland, and Donald Haines. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |