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117). The director corrects this fault by making her the agent of Clyde’s ultimate betrayal. In his cell on death row, Clyde confesses to his mother that he had wanted to kill Roberta though he could not finally do so. When later she has the chance to plead his case to the governor himself, she is asked: “Can you, Mrs. Griffiths, can you from the bottom of your soul tell me that you believe him innocent?” (Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Montagu 339). She remains silent and so, in Eisenstein’s words, delivers Clyde “into the jaws of the Christian Baal,” thanks to her religion’s “sophism as to the equality of action in thought and action in deed’’ (Eisenstein, “An American Tragedy” 118). Eisenstein’s decision here may actually have had something to do with dramatic economy as well as his antipathy to Christianity. Sending Clyde’s mother off to the governor’s mansion allows the director to eliminate altogether Reverend McMillan, the compassionate minister introduced late in the novel. But the banishment cost Eisenstein another opportunity to transfer a layer of Dreiser’s complexity to film. In the novel, the minister sees the governor but cannot vouch for Clyde’s innocence. Mrs. Griffiths betrays her son in the scenario because of what Eisenstein believed to be a simple-minded religious principle. In the novel, McMillan fails Clyde because his initial rigidly religious certainty has given way to tortured self-doubt brought on by his immersion in Clyde’s confusing case.
Whatever opportunities for Dreiserian complexity Eisenstein forfeited in his Soviet simplification of An American Tragedy, he did not fail to exhibit technical mastery of the medium once he settled on a political approach to the material. But, alas, Eisenstein’s scenario, the most promising of all the vehicles designed to transfer Dreiser to the screen, never was filmed. Once it was completed, the director submitted it to Paramount executives Jesse Lasky, Myron Selznik, and B. P. Schulberg. All of them seemed terrifically impressed, but Schulberg still worried that the director’s decision to absolve Clyde of guilt constituted “a monstrous challenge to American society.”20 Predictably, Lasky announced days later that Paramount’s agreement with Eisenstein was at an end (Montagu 120). The Russian genius went off to film in Mexico. After a decent interval, Paramount contracted An American Tragedy to screenwriter Samuel Hoffenstein and the renowned Austrian director, Joseph von Sternberg.
Von Sternberg had decided to provide Paramount with something closer than the Eisenstein scenario to what it wanted, namely “a straight detective story” (Eisenstein, Notes 105). But it would be a detective story devoid of the element of mystery that marks most examples of the genre — not a “whodunit” but a “hedunit.” In
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keeping with the moralistic preoccupation the Austrian director had displayed in his earlier Marlene Dietrich vehicles, including The Blue Angel,21 von Sternberg believed that Clyde was clearly guilty of murder. Of course, von Sternberg’s legitimate interpretation of An American Tragedy, which might have satisfied Dreiser six years earlier, could not please him in 1931 thanks to his leftward political trajectory in the interim. To the Dreiser of the 1930s, Hoffenstein’s script had turned Clyde into a “scheming, sex-starved drug store cowboy.”22 To show his ire, the novelist sued Paramount over this reduction of complexity.
Von Sternberg’s strategy would center on the elimination of the novel’s “sociological elements,” which in the director’s mind were “far from being responsible for the dramatic accident with which Dreiser had concerned himself.”23 (Interestingly, von Sternberg calls the central event an ‘‘accident” even though his film finds Clyde guilty of murder.) Following his judgment, downplaying “sociological elements,” von Sternberg decided to eliminate the Griffiths’ mission background and take up the story only after Clyde is working at the Green-Davidson. But just after the opening credits, the film starts sending signals that might lead an audience in a direction quite different from the one von Sternberg intended. Superimposed over the image of a stone thrown into water by an unseen hand, a symbol that appears at each turning point, von Sternberg’s dedication heralds “the army of men and women all over the world who have tried to make life better for youth.” Such a sentiment seems to imply possibilities for improvement through sociology of the kind that sees the Clydes of this world as victims rather than sinners. Furthermore, the film’s early scenes tend to reinforce the idea that Clyde is more acted upon than acting. At the bell captain’s bidding, for example, he escorts a middle-aged woman and her daughter to their.suites as the film opens. The daughter drapes herself across a bedroom doorway so as to make Clyde brush against her, an obvious come-on. But Clyde coolly resists her advance. Once out of the room and clutching the girl’s extravagant tip, he is cajoled by a chambermaid insisting he join the party of revelers whose drunkenness will lead to the fateful auto accident that evening. Not only does Clyde hesitate about the party, but also he rebuffs the chambermaid’s sexual groping. During the party scene itself, he is obviously quite drunk yet indifferent to the young woman’s overheated petting. Later at his uncle’s factory, he supervises a floor full of apparent nymphomaniacs while remaining markedly aloof. As he circulates among the work tables, he is ogled brazenly and incessantly by the women, who have perfected the
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art of simultaneous collar stamping and vamping. Critic Barrie Hayne writes that von Sternberg’s Clyde is “eager to sow his wild oats.”24 Andrew Sarris weighs in more portentously that the film focuses on “the dilemmas of desire which torment men and women eternally.”25 But there is precious little evidence for the first assertion and the second seems only to apply to the women in the picture. Sondra, for example, played by Frances Dee, seems more interested in bedding Clyde than vice versa.
These early scenes that paint Clyde far less the lecher than the ‘‘lechee” tend to muddle his motivation and cloud von Sternberg’s message once his protagonist meets Roberta. The audience might well be led to wonder what she offers that her more willing coworkers do not. Maybe the answer lies in the ludicrous scene wherein Clyde succumbs to his desire and plants three successive kisses on her mouth while her eyes widen more and more disbelievingly. Judging from her reaction, as opposed to the frank worldliness of the other women, we might logically conclude that Clyde has singled out for his attentions the only reluctant virgin in the Griffiths factory. This could be a striking dramatization of the Dreiserian given that we want most what is most difficult to get. But Clyde seems genuinely in love with Roberta, a circumstance that could solidify the audience’s impression that he is fundamentally virtuous.
Once Clyde begins to lure Roberta, however, his character undergoes what must strike an audience as an illogical change. He browbeats her for an invitation to her room and when she resists he sulks petulantly for days until she relents. But immediately after he seduces Roberta, he meets Sondra for the first time and begins preening himself for a society role. Soon he devotes all of his time to the rich beauty, while the poor one waits forlornly for word from him. These scenes are part of von Sternberg’s attempt to evoke sympathy for Roberta, winningly played by Sylvia Sidney, as it lessens empathy for Clyde. When he finally faces Roberta’s pregnancy and her demands for marriage, Clyde tries stalling tactics until the fateful moment when he concludes a call to her from a store’s pay phone. Walking out to the street, he encounters a newsboy hawking the evening edition with its lead story about a double drowning. Von Sternberg designs this scene so that the audience’s remembrance of it will incriminate Clyde later. First he directs Phillips Holmes, the actor who played Clyde, to achieve a maniacal facial expression as the idea of drowning Roberta insinuates itself. Second, Clyde visualizes the overturned boat and his hat floating on the water, the exact duplicate of the drowning scene a few film minutes later. This ploy links Clyde’s
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intention and enactment. Moreover, von Sternberg eliminates the intense inner dialectic Eisenstein transcribed in his “Kill-Don’t Kill” sound montage. The von Sternberg film’s crucial drowning scene itself pays only lip service to its source. Clyde tells Roberta that he had intended to do away with her but has changed his mind. When, however, she is accidentally tossed into the lake, he makes less than a split second move toward her before heading resolutely to the shore. If this flagrant display of self-absorption should prove inadequate to convince the audience of his guilt, the film’s final scene settles the matter. In it Clyde confesses to his mother that he could have easily saved Roberta.
The last third of von Sternberg’s film is devoted to Clyde’s trial and its brief aftermath. Here again the director stacks the deck against his protagonist. District attorney Mason, played histrionically by Irving Pichel, delivers a convincing opening argument for Clyde’s guilt. So convincing that Clyde’s attorneys immediately “reassure” him that at the most he will get twenty years. During Clyde’s testimony, his lawyer Jephson urges him to outline his mission background for the jury, but von Sternberg denies the audience access to this narrative of extenuating circumstances by cutting to later moments in the trial. Even the filming of the courtroom undermines Clyde in the eyes of the audience. Behind him throughout his lawyer’s examination, framed by a window, an enormous tree looms in front of a church steeple. One huge, gnarled limb dominates the set during Clyde’s testimony, and as the defense concludes its unpersuasive examination, an altered camera angle reveals a thick, rope-like vine trailing from the tree. Even the curtain cord suspended from the window frame is tied in a large hangman’s knot.