What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

An American Tragedy from 1931 with Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney and Frances Dee


This uneven effort at bringing Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy to the screen has been eclipsed by the better-known 1951 movie version titled, A Place in the Sun. Still, for all its issues, there is something engaging about the rawness of the 1931 version.

The novel and the two movie efforts have the same core story, which starts with a poor boy, raised by religious zealots who run a mission. He grows into a troubled young man who hangs out with a bad crowd. He even flees the scene of a crime in which a young woman was killed.

His wealthy but distant uncle offers the boy a chance in his shirt factory, where, after an apprenticeship, the boy becomes a manager of the collar-stamping department. Despite company policy, he begins an affair with one of the young women working under him.

Through his uncle, the young man also meets a pretty and wealthy socialite who opens up "a place in the sun" for him, which is what he has always wanted. Just as the future is looking bright, the factory girl tells him she's pregnant and demands that he marry her.

So close, yet so far. He puts the factory girl off as much as he can, but she's rightfully persistent, so murder enters his heart, his head, or the penumbra of his thoughts. After an event similar to what happened in A Separate Peace, there's a body, a trial, and a verdict.

Phillips Holmes plays the boy, but the part exceeds his range, so he often has a dumbfounded look on his face, no matter what emotion the scene calls for. He's not talentless and is a nice-looking young man; he just doesn't have the acting range needed to carry the picture.

Sylvia Sidney, who plays the factory girl, does have the range. Her performance is movingly sweet, yet with backbone when the going gets tough. In the 1951 version, Shelley Winters plays the girl as a vicious harridan, while Sidney brings a more-rounded touch to her characterization.

Frances Dee, in the much smaller role playing the girl representing the place in the sun, also has a nice balance to her acting. In the 1951 version, the role was greatly expanded for Elizabeth Taylor, but in this earlier version, Dee is appealing as the just-out-of-reach dreamgirl.

The trial itself also stands out in the earlier version, with both the prosecuting and defense attorneys presenting their cases like bad actors in summer stock. Their performances are so obviously hammed up that one assumes they were directed to perform this way.

That direction would have come from Josef von Sternberg, who never focuses his picture on one theme, perhaps owing to the weakness of Holmes. The core, or centering, story is that of a boy reaching for the American Dream that proves to be just outside of his grasp.

The question is why is it outside of his grasp: his upbringing by religious zealots, his own limitations and demons, or an upper class that shuts the door to outsiders? The latter, as presented here, is the least likely, but the first two are never explored to the degree they should have been.

While the movie is often noted as showing the difficulty of achieving the American Dream for those of the lower classes, the movie's story shows a boy who got a girl pregnant and then didn't want to do the right thing by her (in that era) because he now had a better option.

That isn't a condemnation of the American Dream, it's a condemnation of one boy's moral failings. He had a respectable position in the company and a good future; the dream was in his grasp, but he wanted the rich not poor girl now.

Since we only have a sketchy outline of the boy's past – a poor upbringing, but heavy with Christian values – it's hard to say definitively, but if anything, his humble upbringing would have taught him that marrying the girl was the right thing to do and, of course, murder is mortal sin.

Maybe being poor instilled in him a blinding desire for wealth and status, but as presented here, he is only sympathetic in an abstract way. His actions, though, are not justifiable, so while you feel a little bit sorry for him, you still believe he, not "the system," is responsible for his behavior.

For modern audiences, much of this will seem foreign because contraception, abortion, and major shifts in societal norms have thankfully removed almost all the risks and stigma around premarital sex and pregnancy, but those events could destroy lives back in the 1930s.

What's left for viewers today is seeing that wreckage, and seeing the passions raised when the norms were broken. It's easy now to dismiss that as "ridiculous," but all societies, even ours today, has its deeply held, oh-so-important beliefs that will look silly in decades to come.

An American Tragedy is clunky, dated and needs a strong leading man, but it has such a passion for its ideas that it still holds your interest. You care about what happens to these tragic characters: You feel for the factory girl and the poor boy reaching for the brass ring.