I'm still trying to pore through the DVR and watch some of the many many movies remaining on it, courtesy of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" (an annual tradition that I love). Today's entry won for Best Actress Janet Gaynor, and "Best Original and Artistic Film", a category that was discontinued after the first year of the Oscars. Basically it said, "Yeah, we gave a different film the Best Film Oscar, cause it was popular and stuff, but we're going to bestow this other award on you because your film was better, but it wasn't a commercial success, so... nuts to you." Robert Osborne said this in not so many words prior to and after the movie aired. Or, at least, that's what I read into it.
I'm going to begin this post with a caveat: I would like you to see this film, but since many of you would not actually be interested in a 1927 silent film-- or if you do, you don't care if it's ruined for you-- I'm going to include the details I love most about it. There WILL be spoilers between the asterisks below. If you have not seen the film, but would like to take my encouragement and not be told significant details (like me), then skip the part between the stars.
The premise of the film is one we've seen in variations many times before (though not necessarily many times before this movie, considering its early release in the history of film): a married man is carrying on with another woman on the side, and that woman would like this man for her own. Her solution: he should kill his wife. (No, I haven't ruined anything for you, since this is the brief synopsis you'd find on IMDb, or if you watched the first seven minutes. It's all established very quickly.)
SPOILERS BELOW
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We find out early on that the mistress wants the husband to kill his wife. She tells him to fake a boating accident and have her drown, but he can stay afloat using some bulrushes. This is to be his alibi: he clung to life by some reeds, but she must have drowned. Okay, cool.
He decides he is going to do exactly this, and invites his wife on a boat ride. She is overjoyed, because she knows that her husband is seeing this other woman and hopes that this newfound esprit is a changing of his heart. But when the time comes on the boat for the husband to "take action", his wife (extremely ably acted by Gaynor) cowers at one end of the boat when she realizes that her husband, who seems far less interested in this boat ride than her, means to kill her when he stands up menacingly. He can't finish the job and they drift to shore, where she runs off.
Thus begins a reconciliation of sorts: the pair does a lot of neat things (after they crash a church wedding and the husband realizes he's been a fool and starts crying) like: he gets a shave, they get their picture taken, they go to a carnival and chase a pig. You know, like a normal Saturday. The whole time, the viewer gets a little lulled into this happiness, but someone like me is always thinking, "Okay, when's the other chick going to show up and blow this party?" It is to the movie's enormous credit that this does not happen. It takes the route of further suspense and wonder: you know that it's not just going to end with them renewing their vows or something saccharine like that, but you don't actually know what's going to come of the story. We know that the other woman is still around, and still in love, as we see her in a short intersticed scene, but we have to wait for the resolution.
At the end of this day of fun, the husband suggests a boat ride back home. Uh oh. The slightly evil side of me thought that this might be some sort of Hitchcockian way of adding suspense through the husband's quasi-contrition before offing the wife. Maybe he felt bad enough to finally treat her kindly before killing her more suddenly. Again this doesn't happen, but what does happen is almost more sinister: a freak storm all but capsizes the boat, as though this couple weren't meant to be happy.
The husband wraps both himself and his wife in the bulrushes he had stored there earlier, but when all is said and done, the husband survives and they can't find the wife. The plaintive call of a muted trumpet to simulate the husband calling for his wife is utterly magnificent and heartbreaking. We know finally what he truly wants, and it's so not this.
When the search ends, he is distraught and led back to his house. Here's where it gets even more amazing: the mistress realizes what has happened and comes over to his house, assuming the opposite-- that he has done the deed so that they might be together. She realizes, as she goes to embrace him, that he is pissed. He chases her and starts to strangle her. This image is juxtaposed with the scene of an astute fisherman and his buddies dragging his near-dead wife out of the water and her mother calling for him outside (a beautiful, high-pitched instrumental crescendo), and we aren't sure if he will have succeeded in killing the mistress and ruining his future with his presumably-coming-to wife before he finds out.
The story decides to go with the happy ending: he releases her in time-- as she gapes wide-eyed at him from the ground-- and he rushes to his wife's bed, just as the (ta-da!) sunrise comes over the hills.
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END SPOILERS
The direction of the film is top notch and Gaynor is phenomenal throughout (I was seriously almost in tears within five minutes as she cries over a soup tureen). Though I thought the husband, George O'Brien, was pretty awful in the beginning, he really proved his talent to me for the rest of the film. It's just as much about his choice than it is about her attempts to "save the marriage", and the movie doesn't work if either actor is terrible. The story, as told above, was pretty great for me, and it sure as hell is a superior movie to the actual "Best Film" of the year, the pretty-crappy and intentionally weepy Wings.
Score: 9.5/10
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