Lonesome (Universal, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched two movies from the Criterion Collection’s release on one Blu-Ray disc of three films directed by Paul Fejos, a Hungarian-born filmmaker (the name was originally Pál Fejös – or, as it would have been spelled in his native country, Fejös Pál, since Hungarians, like many Asians but no other Europeans, put the family name first and the given name last) who was billed as being a bacteriologist (he briefly studied chemistry in college before turning to art and becoming first a painter and then a filmmaker). At this time – the late 1920’s, the uncertain transition in the movie industry between silent and sound filmmaking – directors with a science background were much in demand (Frank Capra recalled in his autobiography that a number of major studios asked to borrow him from Columbia because he’d studied astrophysics in college) on the theory that directors with a science background would be better able to handle the elaborate gadgetry needed to make sound films.

Fejos made his U.S. mark in 1928 with a film called Lonesome, which was the main feature on the Criterion Collection disc and turned out to be a gem, comparable to F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise in its sympathetic portrayal of a young couple and its highly stylized photography that for once added to the story instead of detracting from it. What it didn’t have is the romantic triangle and the temptation of the hero to murder his partner for the sake of the no-good “other woman.” Written by Edward T. Lowe, Jr. and Tom Reed from a story by Mann Page (whose other credits include the Wallace Reid vehicle Rent Free, In Pursuit of Polly and The Country Doctor), Lonesome takes place on Saturday, July 3 (I miss the perpetual calendars they used to publish in phone books – hell, I miss phone books – that could have told me whether July 3, 1928 actually fell on a Saturday) and deals with two proletarians, factory-press operator Jim (Glenn Tryon) and telephone switchboard operator Mary (Barbara Kent), who both live alone in what would now be called single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels.

Since in 1928 it was common to have what amounted to a 5 ½-day workweek – you worked full-time Monday through Friday and then a half-day in the morning on Saturday – the first scenes we see are both Jim and Mary waking up in their separate rooms and racing to get to work on time. They both go to a heavily crowded subway car and are crushed by their fellow passengers, put in their shifts – it’s clear what Mary does but Jim works in one of those elaborate movie factories where we see a lot of machinery (including the metal press he operates) but never find out just what it is the factory produces – and then have the afternoon off but no particular idea what to do with it. Jim is briefly invited to go out with a friend and his friend’s girl, but when he sees a button on his friend’s lapel reading “Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd,” he begs off. Then both Jim and Mary see, from their separate rooms, a wagon with a jazz band blaring away on it (a Black band, and from what we can tell in the head-shots of the musicians it’s a real Black band and not a bunch of white musicians in blackface) advertising an all-day carnival at the beach (actually Coney Island, unnamed in the script but clearly recognizable on screen). They independently decide to go there and purely by chance they meet on the beach (which ironically enough is as crowded as the subway cars they rode to their jobs), and there’s a dialogue scene in which they get to know each other but each pretends to be much richer than they are.

Lonesome was originally what was known then as a “part-talkie,” with dialogue sequences arbitrarily stuck in the middle of what was mostly a silent film with a synchronized soundtrack of music and effects. A number of films that were originally released as part-talkies have come out on home video only as silents, with newly recorded musical accompaniments, and I remember my disappointment when I saw John Ford’s Four Sons (1928) as a silent with a new score and thereby missed the scene I’d seen earlier in a documentary on Ford in which as a German soldier lies dying in the trenches, he called out “Mütterchen” (“little mother”) – a scene that still packs an emotional wallop and no doubt shook audiences in 1928 who still weren’t used to hearing people speak in the movies. None of the three dialogue sequences in Lonesome pack that kind of punch, but they’re still welcome and well enough done even though one problem with part-talkies in general is the jarring alternation between two quite different cinematic languages – which is probably why, of the five major part-talkies I’ve seen (Al Jolson’s vehicles The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation, William Wyler’s The Love Trap and this one), I liked The Love Trap the best, if only because it was 45 minutes of silent film followed by 24 minutes of talkie, and therefore you didn’t have the infuriating switching back and forth between the two media.

There are three talking sequences in Lonesome, of which the first takes place on the Coney Island beach in the afternoon and features Jim and Mary presenting themselves as far richer than they are and inventing more and more preposterous lies to do so (I wondered if the writers were inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s 1924 short story “I’m a Fool,” in which to woo a genuinely rich girl a non-rich boy adopts an alternate identity, only she leaves before he can tell her who and what he really is and as her train pulls out she promises to look for him – but the only clue she has is the made-up well-to-do identity and location he’s given himself to her). The second one takes place on the Coney Island midway at night and shows Jim and Mary ’fessing up to each other while the lights of the boardwalk twinkle behind them in what looked like two-strip Technicolor to me – and if this was indeed a two-strip sequence and not an elaborate example of tinting, toning or stencil color, this would make Glenn Tryon and Barbara Kent the first actors filmed doing a dialogue scene in color. The last sound sequence occurs in a police station after Jim has been busted; following a long day doing the various rides they ended up on a roller-coaster only on different cars, and the wheel of Mary’s car caught fire (a spectacular toning effect on an otherwise black-and-white image). Jim tried to rush to her after the amusement park’s security people pulled her off the burning car, shaken but safe, but a police officer blocked his way and arrested him. Eventually he’s able to talk himself out of being busted and is allowed to return to the amusement park to go after his new girlfriend – only the park is still so crowded he can’t find her, and after a few near-misses both Jim and Mary slink home, discouraged and still lonesome.

The movie might well have ended like this, but in 1928 as through most of its history Hollywood insisted on happy endings, and the two are brought back together when Jim plays the phonograph in his apartment and puts on a record of Irving Berlin’s “Always” – a favorite go-to song for romantic filmmakers for decades – on a real label (Brunswick) and by an actual singer (Nick Lucas, who introduced the song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” a year later in Warner Bros.’ musical Gold Diggers of Broadway – Tiny Tim’s celebrated version, which became a novelty hit four decades later, was an almost exact copy of Lucas’s). Mary overhears Jim play the record and is disgusted by the memories of love and loss that day it stirs up (and director Fejos and his sound crew remember to mix the record so it’s not as loud in her apartment as in his). She bangs on his wall to complain about the noise – and when he answers they realize that they’ve been living next door to each other in the same building all the time. (On her TV special Liza with a “Z” Liza Minnelli did a novelty song with the same plot: a woman trots the globe to find the man of her dreams, only he turns out to be right next door. Well, she was the daughter of the woman who introduced “The Boy Next Door.”)

Though the happy ending seems a bit jarring to what’s otherwise been a beautifully bittersweet film, Lonesome is a marvelous movie, well worth the rediscovery: vividly directed (Fejos’s visual fireworks add to the movie instead of detracting from it, and his skill at picking out his two actors in a crowd draws us simply and eloquently into their plight), sensitively written and well cast. Glenn Tryon isn’t exactly the most romantic or charismatic leading man imaginable for this role, but it’s his sheer ordinariness that makes him believable; and likewise Barbara Kent is good-looking and competent as an actress but not so drop-dead gorgeous as to throw off the film’s delicate balance. I also had a personal nostalgic glow at seeing the attractions – the rotating barrel, the giant slip ’n’ slide rotating wheel, the distorting mirrors that made you look either fatter or slimmer than you were (sometimes both at the same time depending on which part of your body they were reflecting), and the giant slide were all parts of Playland at the Beach, the large old-fashioned amusement park on the beach at San Francisco that lasted long enough going there was a part of my childhood.