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"Is real life interesting?" True Heart Susie, Anne Elliot's American cousin, braided twintails and beret and plaid dress, one of Lillian Gish's loveliest turns. (Funniest, too—her splayed-foot walk rivals Chaplin's.) She confides in her late mother's picture, hugs her cow like a sister, and pines for the aspiring young minister (Robert Harron). "I must marry a smart man," she decides, so off to college he goes, secretly financed by the wallflower. He returns with a mustache and an eye on "the little milliner from Chicago" (Clarine Seymour), who sees marriage mainly as an early retirement. The "battle against the paint and powder brigade" is over before it can begin, makeup and silk stockings are swiftly abandoned following a rebuke from the aunt. D.W. Griffith's impressionism, "story of a plain girl," a pearlescent pastoral. The stroll into town to the ice-cream shop is remembered by Welles, who borrows the reflective screens of store windows for The Magnificent Ambersons. The shutters that swing open and throw a spotlight on the illicit couple, the flowering shrubs that bisect the frame when viewed from an elevated angle. A Lubitsch gag, the imaginary ideal household versus the real one with cold cuts on a plate, meanwhile the jilted heroine whips up a lavish meal. "Be sure to get the right one," says the lad before a wave of rue washes over him. Thoughts on a diary page, daintily written and angrily erased, words treated like images nearly five decades ahead of Godard (La Chinoise). The missing key, the clenched fist that melts into an embrace, the overdue kiss at last. An expansion of The Painted Lady, and a model for Renoir's Partie de campagne. "To the women of the world, enslaved by civilization..." With Loyola O'Connor, Wilbur Higby, and Carol Dempster. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |