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Practically a Whitman formulation, the Muse in the New World surveyed by King Vidor in close relation to The Stranger's Return and Our Daily Bread. "Tripe" is all the Manhattan novelist (Gary Cooper) has to offer to sustain his frivolous lifestyle, he departs to the ancestral home in rural Connecticut with wife (Helen Vinson) in tow, deep in debt and short on inspiration. Tobacco country, the Polish farmer (Sig Ruman) buys the disused land but it's his daughter (Anna Sten) who catches the writer's eye. A bartered bride unimpressed by literary adoration, a groom (Ralph Bellamy) whose idea of romantic bonding is slaughtering pigs, a bucolic-metropolitan awakening. "Put that in your next book. It'll sound much better there." Life and art are works in progress, Vidor's keen braiding suggests a wellspring for much of Sirk's later work. Milk is of use to the rakish protagonist only when mixed with whiskey, his attempt at seduction ("Don't be so moral. It doesn't go with those eyes") earns a sharp slap from the peasant maiden. Their bond blooms with chaste ardor, the blizzard that strands them together is characteristic of the director's fascination with the emotive thrust of the elements. (The pint-sized ingénue dressed in Coop's oversized pajamas is a joke borrowed by Lubitsch for Bluebeard's Eighth Wife.) Rootless American flippancy and communal European gravity are equally investigated, Vinson's glib socialite reveals a seriousness of commitment while Ruman's avuncular patriarch grows cold and rigid. On the margins is the heroine's mother (Esther Dale), hugging her daughter at the ceremony while witnessing her own story tragically repeated: "Polish women cry their tears alone." Borzage recomposes the closing eulogy in Three Comrades. With Walter Brennan, Agnes Anderson, Hilda Vaughn, and Otto Yamaoka. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |