by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
First of the two films I watched last night on Turner
Classic Movies’ “Star of the Month” tribute to Marie Dressler was The Divine
Lady, a 1929 (mostly) silent epic from
First National Pictures just after they were acquired by Warner Bros. First
National was a studio founded in 1917 by theatre owners worried about the
acquisitions Paramount head Adolph Zukor was making; Paramount not only had two
of the biggest stars in the business, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks,
under contract but they were buying so many prestigious theatres in plum
locations that other theatre owners were worried that soon they’d have no
major-star product available because it would all be monopolized by Paramount
and their principal competitors, Fox and Metro (later MGM). So they banded
together, formed a studio of their own, lured Pickford and Charlie Chaplin into
their company — only to lose them again when Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin and
D. W. Griffith decided to found their own company, United Artists — and
operated as a semi-major studio until 1928. Flush with the profits from The
Jazz Singer and the other early successes
with the sound-on-disc Vitaphone system, Warner Bros. bought First National
mainly to get access to their theatre chains (the logo of First National was a
map of North America ringed by a chain), which in turn led to the famous
Warners emphasis on working-class stories in the 1930’s: since First National’s
theatres had been the ones in less desirable neighborhoods Paramount, Fox and
Loew’s (MGM’s parent company) hadn’t wanted, they drew more working-class
audiences and so Warners made the kinds of movies people who lived in areas
serviced by First National theatres wanted to see. The Divine Lady was probably a project Warner Bros. inherited in the
First National merger — by 1929 almost nobody was planning a big-budget silent
film, so it had probably been greenlighted two years earlier and a lot of money
had been spent on it, too much for Warners to cancel the project and eat their
losses, and also too much for the studio to be willing to release the film
without some sort of soundtrack.
So we get an opening theme song over the credits sung by an unseen Frank Munn;
three traditional British songs (“A Laddie Loved a Lassie,” “Drink to Me Only
with Thine Eyes,” and “Loch Lomond”) ostensibly sung by the film’s star,
Corinne Griffith but almost certainly voice-doubled (though Griffith’s
lip-synching gets noticeably better as the film progresses); and a few of the
“wild” crowd noises often used during the silent-to-sound transition to get some approximation of human speech into scenes that had
been shot silent. There’s also a running musical score throughout the film and
such sound effects, novel then, as actually hearing drum rolls when the military drummers are playing
them on screen. The Divine Lady
is a tale at least loosely based on history: specifically on the notorious love
affair between Lady Emma Hamilton (Corinne Griffith) and Admiral Horatio Nelson
(Victor Varconi, whose best-known credit today is probably as Pontius Pilate in
the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille King of Kings) during the late 18th and early 19th century
while Nelson was leading the British navy as part of their nation’s war for
existence against Napoleon’s France. They’re both married to other people —
Emma to Sir William Hamilton (H. B. Warner, who played Jesus in King
of Kings — so Corinne Griffith’s character
is cheating on Jesus Christ with Pontius Pilate!), British ambassador to Naples
(remember that it wasn’t until much
later in the 19th century that Italy was united into one country);
and Nelson to Lady Fanny (Helen Jerome Eddy, one of those aggressively homely
actresses usually cast as the cuckolded wife in these productions at the time)
— but being movie lovers, that doesn’t stop them even though the prohibitions of
the Hays Office prevented director Frank Lloyd and writers Forrest Halsey
(credited with “adaptation” of an historical novel by one E. Barrington), Agnes
Christine Johnston (“continuity”) and Harry Carr and Edwin Justus Mayer
(titles) from being too explicit
about showing them as lovers. I’d known this story before only from the 1941
British remake, called Lady Hamilton
in its country of origin but given the more openly sensationalistic title That
Hamilton Woman in the U.S., the third and
last film co-starring real-life couple Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh —
Winston Churchill had shut down most of the British film industry as part of
the war effort but he let producer/director Alexander Korda go ahead with this
one because of the obvious morale-boosting potential of a story about one of
Britain’s great war heroes — but the two films track pretty closely except that
Korda and his writers, Walter Reisch and R. C. Sherriff, begin with a destitute
and dissolute Lady Hamilton, living as a homeless person in Paris, get arrested
for stealing a bottle of wine; she’s thrown in a cell with a British prostitute
and narrates her history as an elaborate flashback.
The Divine Lady doesn’t depict this depressing coda to the story but
gives us a bit more of the backstory: Emma Hart (to use her maiden name) is a
commoner, the daughter of a cook (Marie Dressler, who even though TCM was
showing this as part of a “Star of the Month” tribute to her doesn’t have much
of a role). Mom got a job with the Greville family, but Emma almost lost it
when one of the Grevilles saw her flirting and decided she was a shameless
hussy who shouldn’t be in their home. No problem; Emma simply shows off her leg
to Charles Greville (Ian Keith, who also has a Cecil B. DeMille connection; he played Saladin in The
Crusades) and he’s instantly smitten. He
arranges for her to be educated in music, dance and the other arts considered
appropriate for women to learn then in order to please men, and tells his uncle
Sir William Hamilton that she’s already “perfect,” but four months in Italy
with him, living in the British ambassador’s residence and picking up Italian
culture, will make her “divine” (the explanation for the movie’s title). Emma
is disappointed that Greville, whom she’s in love with, isn’t coming with them,
but he protests he has business in England that will keep him for four months.
She impatiently awaits the arrival of the British packet boat on October 1,
which is supposed to bring Greville, but when it comes instead of Greville it
contains a letter from him saying that his debts are keeping him in England and
he’s planning on getting married. (The obvious implication is he needs to marry
a woman with money so she can pay off his debts. The rotter!) Sir William
proposes marriage to Emma; she protests, “I will never love you … ” but goes
through with it anyway. Meanwhile, the Napoleonic wars flare up and affect not
only Europe but North Africa, and Naples is trying as hard as possible to
maintain its neutrality, friendly to England but not wishing to bring down the
wrath of Napoleon by doing anything to help its war against France. (Napoleon
eventually occupied Italy and some partisan fighters in Sicily organized a
resistance movement they called the Mafia — the name comes from the Italian
initials for “Anti-French Society” — and after Napoleon’s defeat the members of
the Mafia decided to stay together and support themselves by crime.) Admiral
Nelson anchors his fleet off Naples and pleads with the Neapolitan monarch,
King Ferdinand (Michael Vavitch, looking very much like the beta version of
Robert Morley), for food and water so he can rescue his struggling sailors and
go on to Cairo to meet the French fleet at the mouth of the Nile. Ferdinand is
reluctant but Lady Hamilton, who’s befriended Neapolitan Queen Maria Carolina
(Dorothy Cumming), gets her to countermand her husband’s order and allow the
English fleet to provision itself in Naples. Emma pulls this off by reminding
Maria Carolina that as the sister of Marie Antoinette she’s hardly likely to be
treated sympathetically if the French conquer Italy! Nelson gets his supplies,
he goes on to win the Battle of the Nile but during that struggle he also loses
his right arm and one eye, and he becomes a hero in England.
He’s recalled to
court to accept honors from the King and Queen (at the time that would have
been crazy George III of the House of Hanover and his wife, Princess Charlotte
of Mecklenburg-Strelitz — the Hanoverian monarchs were recruited from Germany
to keep Britain safely Protestant after the attempts of the Stuarts to restore
Roman Catholicism, and George III was the first Hanover king who actually could
speak English) but Lady Hamilton is blackballed — and Nelson angrily walks out
on the celebration because he won’t tolerate the disgrace to a woman whose
political maneuverings were crucial in winning the battle he’s being honored
for. Nelson and Emma retire to a country village to live out their lives safe
from moral censure — until Nelson’s country needs his services again because the
French fleet is threatening to blockade the English Channel, and if that
happens Britain will be cut off from the supplies it needs to survive. The
geography gets a bit confused here because the script makes it seem like
Britain is in imminent danger from being blockaded by the French fleet, but
Nelson’s final battle with the French in 1805 takes place at Trafalgar off the
coast of Cádiz in southern Spain (and the Brits were up against not only the
French fleet but the Spanish as well, since Spain had allied itself with
Napoleon). As anyone with a passing familiarity with the history knows, the
British won at Trafalgar but Nelson was killed (though his death scene here —
he’s picked off by an enemy sharpshooter just as the overall battle has been
won — is singularly unconvincing), and the final shot is of him and Lady
Hamilton embracing and then a shot of waves to indicate that they will remain
together forever in the memory of the sea. The Divine Lady is actually an excellent movie, proof that by the
end of the silent era the movies were a fully mature art form and much of the
early trauma of the sound conversion came from directors, writers and actors
who had to re-learn the basic
grammar of film that had been established in the silent days. At first Corinne
Griffith comes off like someone at First National noticed how much money Gloria
Swanson was making for Paramount and wanted someone as much like her as
possible, and there are portions of her performance that lapse into the
flibbertigibbety coyness that was the default setting for all too many silent
movie heroines, but mostly her acting is strong, understated and fully credible
— as is Varconi’s: though he usually played either villains or second leads
(like his part in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Roberta) he’s quite exciting and charismatic as a naval hero
(even though for someone used to seeing Varconi with dark hair it’s odd to see
him as a blond); any thoughts I might have had that Victor Varconi and Corinne
Griffith might not measure up to the inevitable comparisons with Laurence
Olivier and Vivien Leigh were quickly disproven!
The Divine Lady scores in virtually all departments; like director
Frank Lloyd’s two best-known credits — the 1924 silent version of The
Sea Hawk (for which Lloyd borrowed Buster
Keaton’s special-effects genius, Fred Gabourie, who created scenes of model
sailing ships so realistic they got used over and over again as stock footage,
including in Errol Flynn’s 1935 star-making vehicle Captain Blood; and in which Milton Sills made a dashing hero,
equal in attractiveness and charisma to Flynn, who did a quasi-remake in 1940
that used only the title and one scene) and the 1935 Mutiny on the
Bounty, it takes place largely at sea, and
though Lloyd seemed a bit more interested in the seafaring drama than the
romantic intrigue, he handles both brilliantly. The cinematography by John F.
Seitz (whose last name is misspelled “Sietz” on the credits) is suitably
spectacular and there are some incredible moving-camera effects of the type
that virtually disappeared from movies in the early years of sound. (One rather
testy critic in the transition days wondered why a silent camera could
encompass mountains, rivers and valleys while a sound camera was helpless in
the face of twelve chorus girls; it was because the sound cameras were locked
inside soundproofing booths and therefore couldn’t be moved.) The acting in The
Divine Lady is for the most part
understated and naturalistic — there are the very few lapses into the
exaggerated windmill-style gestures many people who’ve never seen a silent film
start-to-finish think they were all acted like — the settings are handsome and
believable, the crowd scenes effective and credible, and the whole thing is an
example of silent film as a fully mature artistic medium that in a few years
was going to disappear forever. The bits of sound that appear seem more like
after-the-fact spackling than anything integral to the movie — though the
reprise of “Loch Lomond” as Emma says goodbye to Nelson for the last time is
not only credibly lip-synched but emotional in a way most all-talkies wouldn’t
be until about 1933 or so, once the creative personnel got the bugs out of the
system and the cameras could move again, while the writers and directors
learned when to let the actors talk and when to have them shut up.
