wes-connors This lesser-known version of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" (1925) was more successfully filmed by director George Stevens as "A Place in the Sun" (1951). It opens with the dedication, "to the army of men and women all over the world who have tried to make life better for youth." This references a theme present in the novel, but it really isn't placed properly, here. We jump to a scene establishing the fact that handsome protagonist Phillips Holmes (great as Clyde Griffiths), working as a bellhop in Kansas City, is attractive to young women. Visually, this is unnecessary.More important to the story is that Holmes' character had the difficult childhood noted in the opening. This is conveyed, next, with the introduction of his prayerful mother (a good performance by Lucille La Verne). But, the connection is lost, and Holmes is left carrying an empty character. The "tragedy" isn't what happens to his character - instead, it becomes what happens to poor girlfriend Roberta "Bert" Alden (another good performance, by Sylvia Sidney). This doesn't mean director Josef von Sternberg's "American Tragedy" is a bad film, just one that doesn't achieve its potential.******* An American Tragedy (8/5/31) Josef von Sternberg ~ Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, Frances Dee, Lucille La Verne

fillherupjacko Clyde, a poor boy whose mother runs a home for the needy, attains a job as a bell hop. From the very first he wants more; he's trying to break a date to see a ritzy dame who has taken a shine to him carrying her bags. Ma don't approve of his new friends though – "Boys and girls like that are the only friends I've got" – and after he's involved in a drink driving accident he sets out for New York (Mum's praying here is ludicrous. A sentimental note out of keeping with von Sternberg films.)Now Clyde has risen to foreman of the stamping department in his uncle's Samuel Griffiths collar and shirt factory. These are the best scenes of the film – the depth in the composition of the shots is incredible – with the girls squeaking away on their stampers and flicking their hair as Clyde walks passed. Sylvia Sydney catches his eye and is very Dietrich like in her mockingly wry approach to Clyde with "I hope you like the collar business" and "You really seem happy Mr. Griffiths" as he pulls a sulk when she won't let him come to her room. If it's not the sensual sound of the water – the film is divided into chapters with dream-like, ominous shots of the water – it's the sound of the girls stamping away, all examples of von Sternberg recording sound in an artificial manner. Listen to the bit where the newsboy is chanting "bad results of accident." Most of which von Sternberg directs in a perfunctory manner. He isn't interested in the effect that social conditions have on people's motivations/ actions (surely the theme of the book). In his films, people are only roused from their world weary inertia because of their own feelings. In short, von Sternberg is unsuited to the material. With such an unwieldy novel to film there are too many scenes where he simply points the camera at the actors (like almost every other director does) in boring scenes necessary for plot advancement. Compare this with the contemporaneous Shanghai Express, a film conceived and written by von Sternberg which never fails to be visually compelling, and the Scarlett Empress whose visual quality is unprecedented, perhaps in the whole of cinema.

Mike Wigley Not having read the book, nor seen the Taylor remake, I had no bias when I watched this film the other night on French television. I almost turned it off after the first 20 minutes, it was slow to start and seemed to be going nowhere. However I stuck with it and it was worth it in the end. The court scene was too long and the histrionics of the defence and the prosecution over the top, but I found the characters believable and became involved in the fate of Clyde. Not a film I would want to keep as a classic, but definitly worth watching.

mgmax Originally this adapation of the Dreiser novel was planned by Sergei Eisenstein, during the Hollywood jaunt that also led to Que Viva Mexico, and his version might have been a cracked masterpiece-- one can imagine him getting all kind of details about the American scene ludicrously wrong, but finding a real connection between Dreiser's depiction of a weak youth whose desire for wealth and comfort sends him on an assembly line to murder, and Eisenstein's own mechanistic editing style and view of capitalism's destructiveness.Von Sternberg, on the other hand, was the master of knowing sexual politics and intrigue, at his best with characters whose illusions had been left behind many beds ago. Given a Classics Illustrated-level cutdown of the book, and a stiff (if straight out of an Arrow shirt ad) leading man in Phillips Holmes, there's little for him to get hold of here, except for a few scenes in which Sylvia Sidney manages to convey the poignance of a poor girl in a bad spot, losing her boy and helpless to prevent it. There are some reasonably effective scenes between Holmes and Sidney, some nice chiaroscuro from Lee Garmes (though alas, even UCLA's restoration does not look as good as the clips I saw at Cinesation in the 1932 Paramount promo film The House That Shadows Built), and the courtroom scenes, though way over the top (not helped by Irving Pichel's too-perfect E- Nun-Cee-I-A-Shun), are dramatic-- it's fun seeing him defended by Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton, in that inimitable voice. But you can't really say it works, or does Dreiser justice-- and I'm not sure any movie could. The problem with Dreiser's passive characters is that on screen their plights may be involving, but they aren't; we don't get the interior life that the novel gives us, we just see the story of an ineffectual sap making a couple of bad mistakes and getting ground to dust by the wheels of modern society. James Cain's crime novels took the Dreiser- style story and put guilt and cunning back into the main characters' makeup, so they have things to do on screen-- and they know WHY they're doomed. Seeing Sternberg fail to find anything interesting enough to work with here makes you wish Eisenstein had made this film, and Sternberg had had the chance to sink his teeth into The Postman Always Rings Twice or Serenade.