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Female trouble in Imperial Russia, Sternberg's turf but Raoul Walsh's speed. A land so vast that "every time you draw a breath, a Russian dies," so a little ghetto boy starts huffing and puffing in hopes of wiping out Cossacks. The Jewish teacher (Elissa Landi) can't travel to visit her imprisoned father unless she acquires the eponymous document, she learns it's a passport for traveling prostitutes and as inescapable as a mark of shame. (The camera descends the Saint Petersburg catacombs by her side and waits outside the cell for her shriek.) "Aw, tell it to the Tsar!" The unscrupulous Baron (Lionel Barrymore) sees her at the beer garden and then later in the theater, and one year ahead of Trouble in Paradise there's the tuxedoed rotter jogging his memory for a familiar face. "One of the blessings of despotism," exposed by the jaunty British journalist (Laurence Olivier) muckraking in tandem with the heroine. Tracking is deftly employed throughout, Walsh filters the house of pleasures through a kaleidoscopic lens and sneaks in a brief Degas nude for the benefit of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Life under oppression is a fresh corpse eulogized in a sorrowful Mischa Auer aria, "I heard the jailers arguing which one was to have his watch." The villain believes the country needs a new Herod and recognizes the cornered maiden as Judith of Bethulia, the brisk tempo slows down for an extended confrontation composed with deep-focus spaces and mirrors. (Chekhov's gun is but one item in the Baron's cabinet of mementos from assassination attempts.) The finale reverses Borzage so that war is declared to help the romantic couple escape. "There isn't any future, there's only now." With Walter Byron, Arnold Korff, Edwin Maxwell, Rita La Roy, and Boris Karloff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |