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By far the most promising project dedicated to filming a Dreiser novel was never completed. Subsequent to the enormous popular success of An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s publisher Horace Liveright sold the film rights to Lasky’s Famous Players (later Paramount). For four years no action was taken to bring the novel to film. In 1930 Lasky arranged for the brilliant Soviet director of the silent montage classics Battleship Potemkin16 and Strike,17 Sergei Eisenstein, along with several of his associates, to come to Hollywood. Eisenstein was interested in the American movie industry because its pioneering breakthroughs in sound technology had left the Russians, who were concentrating on camera and film systems, decidedly behind the curve. One of the properties offered Eisenstein was An Ametican Tragedy.
Dreiser could not have asked for a more respectful, sympathetic, or understanding director. Eisenstein regarded the novelist, whom he had met during Dreiser’s trip to Russia in 1927, as a “live Himalaya.’’ An American Tragedy he thought “a work which has every chance of being numbered among the classics of its age and country.”18 The reverence the Russian team felt for the text when they began to formulate plans for the scenario was summed up years later by Ivor Montagu, Eisenstein’s assistant screenwriter.19 Montagu, who attributes “immense power” and “majesty” to the book, also indicates the responsibilities to such a source that ought
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always to be acknowledged. The Russian team was not dealing with a minor work that had “no claim to act as more than a springboard when adapted for another medium.” Their source was a major one, and so they must “reflect the quintessence of the book” and endeavor at all costs to avoid any angle that might ‘‘pervert its content” (Montagu 114–6). If Montagu’s transcription of motivations is accurate in this regard, the deconstruction of Dreiser’s text was the furthest thing from Eisenstein’s mind. But this is not to say that the several implicit quarrels that developed among critics over the director’s interpretation of Dreiser were not justified.
Eisenstein’s most controversial interpretive decision was to find Clyde Griffiths innocent in the death of Roberta Alden. The director’s verdict, which flowed logically out of his Marxism, provided his scenario with a center around which all of the action and symbolism would revolve. To Eisenstein, the American capitalist system had thrust the “characterless” Clyde into irresistible temptation. Then “invoking morality and justice,” it had executed him (Eisenstein, “An American Tragedy” 113). In order to establish Clydes’s essential innocence, Eisenstein planned to apply a technique that he believed would revolutionize the way movies were made, namely sound montage. The director, whose storied command of diverse subjects included an encyclopedic knowledge of world literature, had for some time been fascinated by the interior monologue as practiced to “absolute literary perfection” by Joyce and Larbaud. He believed that of all the arts, and especially as opposed to the theater where O’Neill’s Strange Interlude showed the impotence of that genre to do so, cinema could render stream of consciousness most convincingly (121).
The crucial point in An American Tragedy where sound montage could serve to establish the whole meaning of the movie was, of course, the scene on the lake to which Clyde has taken Roberta, intent on killing her. Two voices struggle for dominance in Clyde’s mind. One, introduced earlier when Clyde stumbles on a newspaper article recounting an accidental drowning, becomes the film’s equivalent of the novel’s Efrit who urges him to do away with Roberta. The voice in the scenario begins as a “whisper from afar” that “gradually creeps up till it forms the word: ‘KILL’” (Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Montagu 286). This voice dominates Clyde’s thoughts until he has executed his ruse and lured Roberta into the boat. Now the first voice, an “echo of his dark resolve,” insists “Kill-kill” but is joined by a second that cautions “Don’t kill-don’t kill” (Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Montagu 293). This
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second voice articulates what Dreiser called in the novel Clyde’s “chemic revulsion against death.”
As the boating scene plays out, the “kill” voice becomes ‘‘harder and insistent,” but is eventually subdued by the “don’t kill” voice which “grows and tenderly supplants the other.” Clyde sits in the boat, his face “wild with misery” after his intense inner struggle, and Roberta sympathetically comes toward him. When he pulls away from her in his repugnance, his camera accidentally hits her and she falls back. Clyde moves to help her but he upsets the boat, tossing them both into the water (Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Montagu 294). These actions parallel those in the novel scene. But in portraying Clyde’s and Roberta’s struggle in the lake, Eisenstein and Dreiser differ slightly. In the novel, Clyde has time to think through the situation before Roberta sinks under the surface for the third time. He realizes that by a stroke of incredible luck an accident is about to accomplish what he had originally intended and so he elects not to save the thrashing woman, partly in fear she will drown him and partly to be rid of her. Then, with the remembrance of Roberta’s drowning cries as a spur, he begins immediately the tortuous assessment and reassessment of possible guilt that drive the rest of the novel. In the Eisenstein scenario, Clyde makes an abortive attempt to save Roberta but she sinks below the surface. Then he prepares to dive down after her. These actions are meant to further exonerate him, though the scenario preserves a portion of the novel’s complex vision when Clyde “stops, and hesitates” rather than diving for Roberta (Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Montagu 294). In adding to Clyde’s motivational profile the intention of taking action to save Roberta while preserving the novel character’s failure to do so, Eisenstein inadvertently illustrated the tension between his Marxist agenda and his perceived obligation to Dreiser. He could, after all, have sent Clyde diving repeatedly but unsuccessfully for Roberta and still have operated within the parameters of the novel’s plot.
Eisenstein’s presumption of Clyde’s innocence represents a legitimate perception of the novel which, in fact, invites its readers to choose among optional interpretations. Dreiser had been led into such an intellectual tangle by his study of the Gillette case on which An American Tragedy was based that he could not decide himself how to assess Clyde’s guilt. The attempt to explore all the possibilities became so exhaustive that Eisenstein could rightly describe the novel as an “epic of cosmic veracity” admitting of “any point of view in relation to its theme, like the central fact of nature herself.” Here Eisenstein put his finger on the core of Dreiser’s achievement in this expressive masterpiece. Although
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the novelist had begun the book with the intention of making it a vehicle for his deterministic thought, his immersion in the facts of the actual case on which it is based served to bewilder him, to render his preconceptions speculative, and to broaden his vision beyond the confinement of ideology. Eisenstein’s objective, on the other hand, was to bring to the screen version “some well defined psychological standpoint and direction” (Eisenstein, “An American Tragedy” 110). But such a narrowing could very well have the negative effect of insuring against the kind of multifaceted treatment I have argued to be superior.
In fact, when Eisenstein discussed the central issue of Clyde’s innocence, he himself used language that confuses rather than clarifies. His interpretation of the novel would center on a protagonist ‘‘driven to commit murder by social conditions,” for instance. At another point he refers to “the murder itself” as the “climax of the tragedy” (Eisenstein, “An American Tragedy” 112). But how can Clyde be innocent if the novel is about a murder? Later in the same discussion, the director speaks of Clyde as a “pawn in the hands of a blind destiny,” a reading that further discounts free will. Then he argues that Clyde’s inability to drown Roberta “actually was a change of heart,” in other words, an act of volition. At one point he invokes the specter of the “inexorable course of laws” as an emanation from an indifferent “cosmic principle,” but at another indicts the “by no means blind political intriguers” (Eisenstein, “An American Tragedy” 116–7). Eisenstein’s Marxism apparently blinded him to these lapses in logic. And that blindness in turn deflected him from matching the complex vision of the novel. Dreiser’s approval of the director’s ideologically purer and simpler scenario probably owed some of its enthusiasm to his own leftward political drift following the loss of his profits from An American Tragedy in the stock market crash. (Even Dreiser’s own responses often reflected his politics.) But the novelist’s outlook became irreversibly more complex through the experience of researching and writing An American Tragedy. His subsequent ambivalence concerning the efficacy of capital punishment and his new openness to previously scorned religious explanations of life, among other changes, testify to this evolving complication.
The most questionable change of Dreiser’s text in the Eisenstein scenario involves the role of Clyde’s mother. The director disliked what he called the “halo of martyrdom” the novelist assigned her. She works ceaselessly in the novel to extricate Clyde from his predicament. Such “sacrificial sublimity,” Eisenstein sneered, downplayed “the absurd religious dogmatism” she had substituted for meaningful child rearing (Eisenstein, “An American Tragedy”