East Lynne (Frank Lloyd, 1931)

East Lynne is best remembered today as one of the few generally unavailable films to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The UCLA Film & Television archive holds the only print known to exist. For decades, it circulated in a hideous bootleg with the last reel missing. But an intrepid lover of film captured that last reel during a MOMA screening (I think) and now a composite version exists on YouTube until the copyright police force it down. It's still rough looking. But that detracts not a bit from the primal melodramatics on display.

The 1861 sensation novel by Ellen Wood on which the film is based had long since become a melodrama ur-text by 1931. In fact, Lloyd's version was the eighth [sic!] produced not including parodies and poorly disguised copies. All of which was part of the mini industry Wood's best-seller created. Its numerous stage adaptations were so successful that the line "Next week, East Lynne!" signified a guaranteed seat filler after a flop. The great Tod Slaughter, famous for portraying the melodramatic archetype of mustache-twirling Pure Evil, produced many productions and noted, "No other play in its time has ever been more maligned, more burlesqued, more ridiculed, or consistently made more money."

The most captivating aspect of the film today is how precisely it hits so many of the beats of classic melodrama, namely, a woman entering a hostile household (usually, as a result of class clashes) and a mother who must abandon her child. In the former register, it recalls films like The Shining Hour (Frank Borzage, 1938) and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) and perhaps a bit of Laughter (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1930), especially when East Lynne borrows a scene in which a character dons a bearskin. In the latter register, one feels echoes of Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925), Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929), and Final Accord (Douglas Sirk, 1936). And let's throw in a dash of Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) for seasoning. As always with narratives so deeply set into a culture's psyche, it helps to ask why we keep (kept?) telling ourselves these stories over and over again. A fantasy of class mobility on one end and the possibility of being a woman and not a mother on the other, for starters. 

Grade: A-minus