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The proximity to Murnau's Faust is unmissable, though the closer kinship is with Lang's Der müde Tod. Dalí certainly remembers Lucifer's damnation on the celestial steps, a conscious allegory about selling your art as well as your soul gives the meat and potatoes of the yarn. "Hope may be deferred but rent is paid in advance," so it goes with poetic ideals in a materialistic world, the writer (Ricardo Cortez) struggles in the squalid boarding house alongside a fellow literary hopeful (Carol Dempster). A certain air of Puccini, the reviewer's position: "We find you condemn books that every one likes—and praise books that no one likes." Rejection breeds blasphemy, he offers his soul for sale and a top-hatted figure promptly materializes at his door, Adolphe Menjou with a touch of sulfur in his courtly polish. D.W. Griffith and the wicked Jazz Age, "the sensuous spell of a pagan rout" around defiantly outdated naifs. A windfall comes to the protagonist amid lightning bolts, his mysterious benefactor takes him to a sumptuous restaurant packed with writhing odalisques and throws in the bonus temptation of a heavy-lidded Russian noblewoman (Lya De Putti). (Meanwhile, the modest dinner prepared by his true beloved is covered with a white sheet like an abandoned corpse.) The bloke rattles in luxury as the poor maiden pecks at her old typewriter, and it's she who gets the attention of the otherworldly roué at a party—faced with a haloed close-up, he's moved by her bashful incorruptibility as much as by his own lost purity. "You're very kind... but I must go on... in my own way." A Victorian's expressionism, cf. The Avenging Conscience, to the very end hanging on to the faith that a couple's embrace can vanquish demonic shadows. With Ivan Lebedeff, Marcia Harris, and Lawrence D'Orsay. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |