"The Song of Songs" (the apparently high-flown allusion of the title is actually far more key to the plot than it might seem) is a wildly uneven film. It cannot be said to be a great triumph; from the very start there were times -- frequently -- when I was not even certain if it could be said to be any good. And yet it is undoubtedly striking. For all its artificiality and cliché (has Tchaikovsky ever been worse massacred?) and sometimes laughable devices, I found myself caring, fiercely, what became of the characters.
Brian Aherne's performance (far removed, alas, from his outstanding appearances only a few years earlier in British silent films) varied between the sensitive and the crassly wooden within the space of a single line-reading, never mind a single scene; the Baron, having won his wife from his rival and than won her consent, in two scenes of genuine conviction, takes an increasingly sadistic turn as soon as his ring is on her finger; Marlene Dietrich's innocent peasant girl sports painted brows and false lashes over her quaint bodice. The arty touches -- shrieking fiery trains, Dietrich tripping along a flowery lane or running on an idealised hillside, cuts between the girl stripping her stockings and the shadow slipping down a plaster nude -- come across as self-conscious insertions rather than an intrinsic part of the narrative, and I found the use of musical cues on this picture's soundtrack extraordinarily crude: in particular contrast to the seamless use of musical themes as comment in Mamoulian's previous pictures such as "Applause", "City Streets" and above all the joyous musical "Love Me Tonight".
And yet.... And yet despite everything, despite the penny-dreadful swerves of the plot and cardboard supporting cast (who still make sterling efforts with the clichés they're given), the film can grip the viewer. Ever the master of sexual awareness without salacious charge, Mamoulian conveys very vividly the heroine's confusion and embarrassment at disrobing before the impatient sculptor, and then her dawning anticipation and dread of her wedding night with her elderly, lecherous bridegroom. Lionel Atwill achieves an impressive performance with the lines allotted to him as the Baron, rising up to the final pinnacle where he brings his wife and her former lover together with a constant flow of barbed taunts in a nightmare scene across the dinner-table.
Miss Dietrich, required to portray a character who ranges from a gawking peasant to a tight-strung wife to a dissolute vamp, manages to put a sense of genuine feeling behind the most caricatured of façades. When she catches sight of her lover across a crowded café in mid-song, we can see and hear every aspect of her shock, shame and subsequent defiance simply in the way she continues to perform the tune. And her final scene, as the character's agony of spirit breaks through the brittle corrupt pose of the streetwalker, has a searing power that contrives to carry off even the histrionics of the sequence where she attacks her own statue with a handy sledgehammer.
That statue, commissioned -- and paid for in advance -- before the lovers even meet, yet ultimately never delivered, runs like a fated thread through the entire story. It is the pressure to execute the commission he owes that brings the young sculptor in search of inspiration into the bookshop; it is the long process of posing that brings the couple together, yet the completion of the project that comes to symbolise to the girl her lover's betrayal, and the statue left alone in the studio that holds his memories of her. It is the placement of the sculpture that forms the excuse for the fatal confrontation, and it is the impossible ideals that it represents that embody the chasm between the lovers when they meet again. It is not until the cold marble perfection is broken that they are free; free to start again as ordinary erring humans, as if the Song of Songs had never been.
I can't call this film an unqualified success. I'm unsure if I can even recommend it.
And yet I'm not sure I can forget it.
Brian Aherne's performance (far removed, alas, from his outstanding appearances only a few years earlier in British silent films) varied between the sensitive and the crassly wooden within the space of a single line-reading, never mind a single scene; the Baron, having won his wife from his rival and than won her consent, in two scenes of genuine conviction, takes an increasingly sadistic turn as soon as his ring is on her finger; Marlene Dietrich's innocent peasant girl sports painted brows and false lashes over her quaint bodice. The arty touches -- shrieking fiery trains, Dietrich tripping along a flowery lane or running on an idealised hillside, cuts between the girl stripping her stockings and the shadow slipping down a plaster nude -- come across as self-conscious insertions rather than an intrinsic part of the narrative, and I found the use of musical cues on this picture's soundtrack extraordinarily crude: in particular contrast to the seamless use of musical themes as comment in Mamoulian's previous pictures such as "Applause", "City Streets" and above all the joyous musical "Love Me Tonight".
And yet.... And yet despite everything, despite the penny-dreadful swerves of the plot and cardboard supporting cast (who still make sterling efforts with the clichés they're given), the film can grip the viewer. Ever the master of sexual awareness without salacious charge, Mamoulian conveys very vividly the heroine's confusion and embarrassment at disrobing before the impatient sculptor, and then her dawning anticipation and dread of her wedding night with her elderly, lecherous bridegroom. Lionel Atwill achieves an impressive performance with the lines allotted to him as the Baron, rising up to the final pinnacle where he brings his wife and her former lover together with a constant flow of barbed taunts in a nightmare scene across the dinner-table.
Miss Dietrich, required to portray a character who ranges from a gawking peasant to a tight-strung wife to a dissolute vamp, manages to put a sense of genuine feeling behind the most caricatured of façades. When she catches sight of her lover across a crowded café in mid-song, we can see and hear every aspect of her shock, shame and subsequent defiance simply in the way she continues to perform the tune. And her final scene, as the character's agony of spirit breaks through the brittle corrupt pose of the streetwalker, has a searing power that contrives to carry off even the histrionics of the sequence where she attacks her own statue with a handy sledgehammer.
That statue, commissioned -- and paid for in advance -- before the lovers even meet, yet ultimately never delivered, runs like a fated thread through the entire story. It is the pressure to execute the commission he owes that brings the young sculptor in search of inspiration into the bookshop; it is the long process of posing that brings the couple together, yet the completion of the project that comes to symbolise to the girl her lover's betrayal, and the statue left alone in the studio that holds his memories of her. It is the placement of the sculpture that forms the excuse for the fatal confrontation, and it is the impossible ideals that it represents that embody the chasm between the lovers when they meet again. It is not until the cold marble perfection is broken that they are free; free to start again as ordinary erring humans, as if the Song of Songs had never been.
I can't call this film an unqualified success. I'm unsure if I can even recommend it.
And yet I'm not sure I can forget it.