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Henry King in Italy recognizes the "seething ferment of unrest" within Mount Vesuvius, the highest compliment has Rossellini taking up the metaphysical note three decades later. The aristocratic beauty (Lillian Gish) is the subject of a reverent portrait, her dashing beau (Ronald Colman) prefers the woman to the icon on the gauzy canvas, "why shroud her in all this holiness?" Her envious half-sister (Gail Kane) incinerates the will after their father kicks the bucket, inheriting the estate then banishing the now-illegitimate sibling. Off to North Africa goes the officer, off to the convent goes the heroine when she learns of his demise in the dunes. "The spouse of Christ," shutting the world's doors, rationalizing the tragic: "Death was jealous of me." Cloistered halls comforting and caging the soul, the dungeon in the middle of the desert, the observatory at the foot of the volcano—mysterious spaces in a drama of spiritual-elemental-scientific dimensions. "A trance-like state of dry-eyed despair" follows the thunderstruck realization of the beloved's fate, an indelible Gish shock reprised when the chap turns up alive and well and their sudden embrace shudders with the conflicting impulses behind her habit. "A broken officer and an outcast nun," cf. Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Fleeing villagers framed by an archway while lava spews in the distance, a screen suffused with smoke, a deluge soon dilated in The Winning of Barbara Worth. The ending finds the heroine gazing at the skies and there's Gish again in monastic veils in Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie, still longing for the otherworldly reunion of estranged lovers. With J. Barney Sherry, Charles Lane, Juliette La Violette, Gustavo Serena, Alfredo Bertone, Bonaventura Ibañez, Alfredo Martinelli, and Ida Carloni Talli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |