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

To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1946)

Happy 104th birthday to Olivia de Havilland who won her first Best Actress Oscar for To Each His Own. This was Mitchell Leisen's entry in the maternal melodrama genre in which women mother from afar. Here, de Havilland becomes a cold cream mogul and gets her child back four years after losing him in an adoption scheme that backfires. But she realizes that she cannot make up for all that crucial lost time simply by reclaiming her legitimate motherhood. So she gives up her son again and requests "fourteen hours work a day" as a fire warden in WWII London to occupy herself in his absence. It's a request many women would make (or at least fantasize about making) after the war which helped make To Each His Own a top 25 grosser in Hollywood's biggest year.

Side note: The film's theme song was no such thing. It wasn't included in the film as it charted three months after the film's release.
Grade: B+

The Other Side of Midnight (Charles Jarrott, 1977)

You know what film is better than Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)? The Other Side of Midnight! I make the comparison only because according to Wikipedia, Fox worried that the budget-busting Star Wars would flop whereas they assumed Midnight, based on Sidney Sheldon's 1973 blockbuster novel, would soar on to box-office glory. Midnight performed better than history remembers but nowhere near as well as the Lucas/Diznee franchise that refuses to die (to be fair, though, Sheldon fed his franchise jones by writing a sequel called Memories of Midnight in 1990). And today, it's largely forgotten when not being dismissed as trash. But as a portrait of the straitjackets placed on women by patriarchal capitalism, it stings like Valley of the Dolls*, if not Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995).

One might expect a slog given Jarrott's sterile filmography including the disastrous 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon. Instead, its 165 minutes become increasingly agitated and desperate, connecting the fates of two women, Noelle (Marie-France Pisier) and Catherine (Susan Sarandon), to one good-for-little hunk, Larry (John Beck), who winds up ruining both their lives. Noelle uses her body to get ahead, Catherine her smarts but both wind up dogged by Larry who cannot keep his cock in one continent (moral: don't ghost!). Catherine's devolution into alcoholism is unconvincing even in terms of raw screen time (we barely see her with a drink), leading to the conclusion that the creators could not imagine a fate for women beyond being wed, dead, or sequestered in a nunnery. But maybe that's just the filmmakers' way of being honest. To imagine otherwise might open up the film to empty fantasy. Andrew Britton, one of the few (only?) critics to take the film seriously, comes to a similar conclusion at the end of a brilliant 1981 review (available in The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton):

"The dramatization of the oppression of women, as is so often the case in even the most distinguished melodramas, builds in the impossibility of the struggle against it, so that patriarchal relations seem at once intolerable and mysteriously impermeable and women are compelled to assume the role of 'victim.' This clearly limits the film’s achievement, but it doesn’t outweigh or invalidate its substantial insights, or diminish one’s gratitude for it at a moment when Urban Cowboy (1980), Honeysuckle Rose (1980), and the rest are setting the tone for a systematic antifeminist reaction" (284).

Britton died of complications from AIDS in 1994. But given the above insights, I have full confidence that he would have recognized Showgirls for the masterpiece that it is.

Grade: A-minus

*the novel, not the dull 1967 film although Midnight may loosen me up to its charms on a rewatch