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The overture tips its hat to Dovzhenko, a bit of rhythm for wiggling branches and plodding plows and sowing servants in the fields. The prince (Fredric March) has progressive ideas, his copy of "Land and Freedom" ("The most moral book ever written") points the way. "We're going to have a revolution if we don't watch out." "Revolution in Russia? Ridiculous!" His childhood sweetheart is now a blonde beauty, given braids and squealing piglet pet in an attempt to make Anna Sten look plebeian. He rises in the Czar's army and comes back a libidinous cynic, the seduction is a procession of suggestive images—inflamed glances in church, a golden mane by the open window, a kiss in the greenhouse followed by a pelting downpour. "Love stories are for children." "I like them." Tolstoy abridged by Preston Sturges and Maxwell Anderson, Rouben Mamoulian crafts the tale of carnal-spiritual transformation as a companion piece to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Seduced and abandoned, a few rubles on the heroine's pillow, a makeshift grave for the unbaptized infant (cf. Polanski's Tess). The nobleman's set to marry a judge's daughter when it all comes back to him as a poisonous courtesan on trial, the pain of memory cracks the shell of disillusionment. "To live is to remember!" The extended tracking shot across the faces of prisoners goes into Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying, also in the dungeon is Sam Jaffe as a link to Sternberg. The lesson is that a woman is a woman and not "a principle," learned at last en route to Siberia. "Dear, dear, he's gone socialist!" Sirk is parallel with The Girl from the Marsh Croft. With Jane Baxter, C. Aubrey Smith, Gwendolyn Logan, Ethel Griffies, Jessie Ralph, Leonid Kinskey, and Dale Fuller. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |