An American Tragedy (film)


An American Tragedy is a pre-Code drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg. It was produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film is based on Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy and the 1926 play adaptation. These were based on the historic 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette at Big Moose Lake in upstate New York.
The film performed well at the box office.
In 1951 Paramount Pictures made another, very loose adaptation of the novel, titled A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens, and starring Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. Among its changes, the 1951 film version assigned different names to the characters from the novel and earlier adaptations.

Cast

Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights for Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy for $150,000. The widely acclaimed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein was hired to film an adaption, with Dreiser's enthusiastic support. When Eisenstein was unable to get studio approval for his "deterministic treatment", reflecting a Marxist perspective, he abandoned the project.
Paramount, with $500,000 already invested in the film, enlisted Josef von Sternberg to develop and direct his own film version of the novel. Dreiser was guaranteed by contract the right to review the script before production, and complained bitterly that the Sternberg-Hoffenstein interpretation of his novel's themes "outraged the book." When the movie was completed, it was clear that the Sternberg screenplay had rejected any interpretation attributing protagonist Clyde Griffiths' anti-social behavior to a capitalist society and a strict religious upbringing, but rather, located the problem in "the sexual hypocrisy of the social class." As Sternberg himself acknowledged in his memoirs "I eliminated the sociological elements, which, in my opinion, were far from being responsible for the dramatic accident with which Dreiser concerned himself."
Dreiser sued Paramount Pictures to suppress the film, and lost.

Critical response

Film historian John Baxter reports that An American Tragedy "met with mixed critical success. The New York Times called it 'emphatically stirring," the New York Daily News wrote it is 'intensely dramatic, moving, superbly acted', but many other papers, recalling Dreiser's protest, found the film less intense that the original novel, which is undoubtedly the case".
Marxist film critic Harry Alan Potamkin commented on "Sternberg's failure to understand Dreiser's larger thematic purpose: Before the story opens repeated shots of water disturbed by a thrown object. And throughout the picture the captions are composed upon a background of rippling water. Sternberg saw the major idea of the matter in the drowning. How lamentable!"
The film fared poorly at American theatres, but was well-received among European moviegoers.
By 1932, Sternberg's career was at its zenith, with Vanity Fair equating his talents with those of famed Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, and Berlin's journal of film Der Querschnitt ranking him as among America's creative elite.

Theme

John Baxter identifies a thematic element in the struggle for human control over our destinies:
Critic Andrew Sarris singles out the following scene for its thematic significance: