The World and the Flesh
The World and the Flesh (1932) is an obscure Paramount pre-code: there are dozens of these movies, never granted a home video release or even a TCM screening. This one is sufficiently underseen for the IMDb to have its title wrong, omitting the essential first definite article.
Evidently made under the influence of Sternberg’s slices of erotic exoticism (the same year’s Shanghai Express is particularly close), TWATF stars Miriam Hopkins in place of Marlene Dietrich, co-starring her with George Bancroft, the hulking lug Sternberg made into an unlikely star in the silent gangster flick Underworld. And it all takes place during the last days of the Russian Revolution.
I don’t know why they kept making movies about the revolution. It’s an event not very conducive to Hollywood narratives. There’s no happy ending. Even Hollywood couldn’t quite get behind the brutal dictatorship of the tsar, and they were not likely to endorse a bolshevist takeover either. So you have a situation where good guys and bad guys get blurry, and nobody you like wins. John Barrymore’s two Russki romps, Tempest and Rasputin and the Empress, have to end with him running away, which isn’t the usual heroic option, but what are you going to have him do, win?
In TWATF, Hopkins is a peasant girl who’s been elevated to riches by an aristocratic lover, the reliably unappetising Alan Mowbray. Now they’re fleeing by train for Sebastopol, last imperial stronghold in the soon-to-be Soviet Union. The movie sets up a small crowd of fellow refugees, who we’re maybe supposed to care about, but it’s not certain. The train makes it to Theodosia, just as it falls to the revolutionaries, and the rich folks are taken prisoner by Bancroft, a former sailor and now a great, grand hero of the Revolution. The swaggering Bancroft takes an instant shine to sexy Miriam, and steals Mowbray’s boots, which he evidently plans to fill in more ways than one. Then a ship full of cossacks docks and it’s Bancroft who’s imprisoned. Everyone gets on the ship, Bancroft is set o work as a stoker (a job he essayed for Sternberg in Docks of New York) and then he arranges a mutiny…
That’s how it goes: first Miriam is his prisoner, then he’s hers, then it’s swapped again, and again. Each situation seems potentially fraught with tension, but the next reversal comes along before we’ve had a chance to feel anxious. And then there’s the cast: Hopkins at her best could rank somewhere near the other pre-code queens, but she was uneven, an actress who liked to act just a little too much. And Bancroft is an abomination, one of the few truly inexplicable movie stars. His head is a boulder wrapped loosely in chicken skin. The grossness of the jowls, nose, piggy eyes, is contrasted repellantly with the delicacy of the pencil mustache and the pursing, feminine lips. It’s a Mr. Potato Head face in which no feature belongs alongside the next.
Instead of Sternberg, than poet of the perverse, we have a reliable Hollywood journeyman at the helm, John Cromwell, but he’s assisted by the might Karl Struss, cameraman who also lensed Hopkins in the magnificently debauched The Story of Temple Drake. This is another story hinging upon the imperilment of Miriam’s… well, not virtue, exactly. Whatever it is that she’s got that she won’t have for long if the likes of George Bancroft or Jack La Rue have any say in the matter. Basically, pre-code movies could spin entire romantic dramas out of rapey menace.
Anyhow, Cromwell, who had plenty of visual sense, and Struss, who was a genius, make a visual tour de force out of this movie, which might actually be a masterpiece if we could see a print that isn’t fuzzy and robbed of all contrast. I mean, it’s clearly drivel in terms of content, but the chiaroscuro, the swooping crane, the lusty glamor shots and ridiculous costumes, all make it romantic tosh of the highest possible order.
During the counter-mutiny (!), the refugees prevail upon Miriam to screw Hopkins in order to prevent him noticing that the ship has been diverted for Sebastopol (its original destination: do keep up!), so now we’re in Boule de Suif territory. We know how this story should go: the wretched aristos blackmail Hopkins into whoring herself, then turn their noses up at her after she saves their bacon. Except the movie can’t even be bothered paying off that idea. Instead, Hopkins falls in love with Bancroft after an apparently extremely persuasive night of bumping uglies, tries to save him, only to find out there’s been a counter-counter-mutiny in the night and they’re not in Sebastopol after all, Toto.
Bancroft isn’t about to afford Hopkins the mercy she was willing to show him, he’s too sore at being used. “At least I only lied with my lips,” he pouts, which is kind of obscene if you think about it too much. Then he changes his mind and wants to save her, but the communist committee here don’t respect him enough. But then more commies come, BETTER commies, to the rescue! It turns out Hollywood in the thirties COULD make a blatantly pro-Bolshie movie, if the plot got so fankled there was no other way out of it.
And what happened to the refugees (old men, crippled war heroes, women and children)? Last we heard, they were under sentence of death, but that doesn’t dissuade Miriam from grinning as Bancroft sweeps her off to Petrograd. What awful people!
by David Cairns