Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
So, once
again, the compulsion to watch a very old film because Youtube allows me to do
so, and the discovery that what was once so highly praised can now look
painfully stagey and dated in its technique. And once again that mystery of how
an audience’s perceptions can change as technology and techniques change [look up the posting “Two Courses of Fury”
on the index at right].
The film in
this case is Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken
Lullaby, made in 1932. Adapted from a French play by Maurice Rostand and
originally called first The Man I Killed,
then The Fifth Commandment, the film
apparently had its title changed to the gentler Broken Lullaby because Paramount Pictures were afraid the original
proposed titles would raise the wrong sort of audience expectations. (Although
it was actually released in Britain as The
Man I Killed). On Youtube I discover a beautifully restored print of it,
every image clear and unscratched and with a good, un-hissing soundtrack.
Sophisticated in my appreciation
of early sound films, I am fully prepared for the conventions of the time. I
have reasonably high expectations of this film made twenty years before I was
born because (thanks to Halliwell’s Film
Guide) I know that, in the 1930s, reputable people like the documentary
film-maker John Grierson and the playwright Robert E. Sherwood called it a
wonderful film and rated it the best talkie so far made.
So it must have something going
for it.
It begins splendidly, with the
type of ironical framing and shot composition for which Lubitsch was famed. The
scene is Paris in 1919 at the time the French are celebrating their victory in
the Great War. There is a huge military parade. Hundreds of uniformed French
troops stride by to military bands, in what are clearly NOT newsreel shots
(Paramount must have spent a fortune for such scenes). But in one shot, the
passing warriors are filmed from under the crotch of a veteran leaning on
crutches and missing one leg. And when cannon fire a victory salute, we cut to
a shell-shocked soldier in a military hospital screaming in terror.
The scene moves to a cathedral
where a victory mass is being celebrated with a congregation made up
exclusively of military men. (Again, a huge expense for Paramount). On the
soundtrack, the priest’s voice is heard preaching a sermon about duty and
victory and welcoming peace, but as the voice continues, the camera slides
along at ground level, showing all the ceremonial swords the officers are
wearing, poking out from the ends of the pews; and the camera shows us the
soldiers’ medals and their military boots with spurs. The accoutrements of war
contradict what the priest’s voice is saying. The irony is rubbed in even
further when the camera tracks in to a close-up of a crucifix and the naked and
dying Christ. This war-like celebration is really at odds with the Prince of
Peace.
If Broken Lullaby went no further than these opening montages, then we
would recognize Lubitsch’s mastery of form and understand the praise the film
once won. But alas, the characters begin to speak and the spell is broken.
After the mass is over and the
soldiers depart, the camera gives us a long-shot of the empty cathedral and
then slowly, slowly tracks in to a pair of hands clutched in desperate prayer
in one of the pews. They belong to a young, conscience-stricken French soldier
Paul (Phillips Holmes) who has never got over his sense of guilt at having
killed, face to face, a German soldier in a trench. (When we see a flashback of
the event, it’s like a reversal of the famous sequence in the film All Quiet on the Western Front, made two
years earlier, in which it is a German soldier conscience-stricken at having
bayoneted a Frenchman).
Paul approaches the priest and
asks for absolution after having confessed, “I murdered a man”. The priest is kind to him, tells him he only did
his duty as a soldier, and grants him absolution. But the young man, hysterical
in his delivery, says this is not good enough. He is accused of blasphemy by
the priest when he says “Is this the best
I can get in the house of God?”
Paul is a musician. He knows the
identity of Walter, the German soldier he killed, and the address of Walter’s
family in Germany, because he read letters he found on the corpse. He
determines that the only way he can atone for his sin and set his soul at rest
is to travel to Germany, meet with Walter’s family, and beg for forgiveness.
This he attempts to do.
In Germany, he is welcomed into
the house of Walter’s father (Lionel Barrymore) after he is seen grieving at
Walter’s grave. But he cannot bring himself to confess that he was the enemy
soldier who killed Walter. Instead he lets the family – including Walter’s
fiancĂ©e Elsa (Nancy Carroll) – understand that he knew Walter as a fellow
musician and friend when Walter was studying in Paris before the war. On this
basis, the family come to accept and then to love him. This is in spite of the
film’s suggestions of continuing and fiercely anti-French feeling in post-war
Germany. In one sequence Walter’s father, formerly the most chauvinistic of
Germans, defies his patriotic beer-drinking friends in a restaurant, by
standing up and declaring that the war their sons have just fought was
pointless and has brought as much suffering and grief to French as to German.
He is applauded only by a crippled young German ex-soldier, who is not part of
the older (and clearly non-combatant) drinking group of patriots.
The crisis comes when at last
Elsa discovers Paul’s secret. She forgives him. She gets him to swear that he
will never tell the rest of Walter’s family that he killed Walter. He agrees to
this. Paul and Elsa are clearly in love. Possibly they will marry.
The film ends with Paul playing
his violin and Elsa playing the piano in harmonious parlour duet, to the
delight of Walter’s father. Love, humanity, music and forgiveness have overcome
international hatreds.
Like all synopses, this tells you
nothing of the quality of the work. It merely tells you a series of events.
The sad fact is that, in spite of
a few cinematic touches, Broken Lullaby
becomes a very stilted and somewhat ranty stage-play after the masterly opening
sequences set in Paris. I am aware that sound-recording on film was only a few
years old when it was made, and that camera and recording equipment were much
more ponderous and difficult to move than they were even a decade later. But
allowing for all this, and even in comparison with the better films of its era,
Broken Lullaby lets long, dead pauses
to develop between lines of dialogue as if the actors are not used to the
rhythms of real conversation. And when the dialogue comes it is as declarative
as a set of headlines, spelling out themes and ideas with an embarrassing
obviousness. There is no nuance here – just a message hammered.
As a small-town German doctor,
Lionel Barrymore is a good small-town American doctor. By the standards of her
age, Nancy Carroll was a pretty blonde actress, but of no discernible talent.
Then there is the problem of Phillips Holmes in the leading role. Phillips
Holmes was one of those actors who had every opportunity to become a major
star, but who never quite made it. As well as starring in this, he was given
the lead in Josef von Sternberg’s version of An American Tragedy and the lead in an early version of Great Expectations (eclipsed by the
brilliant version David Lean made in 1946). But, well before his death in an
air crash at the age of 35, he failed to click with the public and sank into
minor roles – with very good reason. In Broken
Lullaby he can be hysterical, as he is in the confession scene, and he can
swoon away into a faint, as he does three or four times in the film. But he can
never convince you that Paul is a real human being. He has only two ways of
delivering dialogue – woodenly or manically. There is nothing in between.
Lubitsch was from Germany and was
a stalwart of German cinema before he moved to Hollywood. On the plastic level,
the studio’s version of a small German town is convincing enough. When, in the
flashback scene to wartime, we see Walter’s letters, they are considerately
written in English for the benefit of the English-speaking audience (a
cinematic convention that would no longer “play”). But in the German small
town, street signs and hoardings are in German, as Lubitsch would doubtless
have insisted they be. Yet the English language and bearing of the actors
constantly breaks the sense of authenticity. We cannot shake the impression
that this hymn to international solidarity was strictly made in Hollywood.
So to the big mystery.
Why was it so highly praised by
highbrows in its day?
The sheer film craft of the
opening sequences is probably part of the reason, but I would suggest that the
film’s historical context has more to do with it. In 1932, internationalism and
sentimental pacifism had a huge emotional pull. We would have to be
hard-hearted not to understand why, and we would have to lack all sense of
context if we were to point out that Hitler was only one year away from power
and that the whole attitude to war was about to change once again. So, instead
of being a powerfully emotional film for us, Broken Lullaby is an historical artefact, and an illustration of
how much film techniques have changed. You sympathise with its humane
sentiment, but you can’t help hearing how loudly it creaks.
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