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The déjà vu effect is next picked up in Hathaway's Peter Ibbetson, "why were we born out of our time?" Louisiana, 1825, death of the cotton magnate, international merger. The scion (Franchot Tone) and his English counterpart (Madeleine Carroll) stifle their mutual passion, their great-grandchildren consummate the affair amid the fluctuations of history. Duels, weddings, battlefields, with sections in France and Germany. Alliances and ruptures, the happy Teutonic ceremony is a photograph in a submarine as war breaks out in 1914. "Family first." Acres and acres of melodramatic plot, bracketed by visions of crucifixes, enlivened by the sweep of John Ford's filmmaking. Rapid panning shots survey the opulent ball at the antebellum mansion, slaves stand outside with their backs to the camera. After the inferno of bombs in the cemetery, the idyll of a cozy inn chamber for honeymooners. In between explosions in the trenches, Stepin Fetchit's squawk as he's sent home with a bullet-shattered hand: "That's all right. I ain't no piano player." Windows as screens, hand-held views of burning craters, water filling a sinking vessel until the image is blotted out. Sig Ruman gives voice to the land's ruination, a Griffithian treatment of the returning soldier (Reginald Denny). Postwar prosperity is a New York City office with a Futurist mural, it collapses to the rattle of a stock ticker and a dissolve to a fateful intertitle, "1929." Nationalistic emblems from Swastikas to the Stars and Stripes crumble the grand illusion at the close. "Why, surely people aren't so foolish as to be thinking of another war." "Trouble is, wars come without thinking." With Louise Dresser, Raul Roulien, Lumsden Hare, Dudley Digges, Brenda Fowler, Russell Simpson, Claude King, and Ivan F. Simpson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |