Souls for Sale

Souls for Sale is a 1923 Hollywood film.  It's engaging throughout in a peculiarly noncomital and weightless manner.  Ukiyo-e is the Japanese name for the pleasure-districts in cities -- the so-called "floating world".  In these places, everything is for sale and ephemeral pleasures of all kinds are on offer.  The point is that these pleasures represent gratification for its own sake -- they are not designed to make you better (or worse for that matter); the "floating world" advertises itself as a kind of frivolous dream.  Romance, in the Shakespearian manner, is similar:  the world as depicted in "romance" is not free from pain and even varieties of tragedy, but suffering is treated with the same lightness of touch that we might expect from comedy -- in the end, the world presents certain archetypal patterns and these adventures, whether unpleasant or pleasant, are ultimately inconsequential in light of the persistence of the archetypes.  Souls for Sale in its own modest way is like a Shakespearian romance -- there is fear, danger, death, pleasure, and love:  but all of these elements are ultimately without gravity, ephemeral moments within the floating world.  In Souls for Sale, Hollywood with its studio dream-factories is the ultimate expression of the pleasure palaces and travails that comprise a "floating world" -- terrible things happen but these things are all fictional.  The film concludes with an overtly Shakespearian title:  the actors are merely shadows doing their best and "working as hard as they can" to entertain an audience that they have never met:  the paradox of their labors is that they can never know if they were successful until their efforts are finished and screened -- and, even, then, they will not really know the audience response for they will have moved on to other exploits. These concluding colophon reads like the last speech in The Tempest.

A young woman has married a cad.  She is the daughter of a righteous preacher-man who has condemned Los Angeles, the home of the movies as Los Diablos.  Presumably, the mesalliance is the result of her wanting to escape the strictures of her smalltown family life.  The young woman's name, curiously enough, is Remember Stedman. Names are expressive in this picture -- the evil husband is called Scudder.   

When her husband implores her to come to bed -- they are riding a train -- she flees instead, escaping at a water-stop into the barren desert.  It seems as if she is staggering across Death Valley.  The landscape is implacably barren and hostile.  Swooning with thirst and fatigue, she collapses on a sand dune only to be rescued by a handsome sheik on a camel.  "Mem" as she  is called has wandered onto a location where a desert romance is being filmed:  a title says "The Usual Princes on the Usual Camels appeared with the Usual Captives."  After recovering, Mem makes her way to Hollywood.  She works as an extra in some films and, gradually, becomes successful in the movie industry.  Her husband, Scudder, is arrested at the Los Angeles train station for murdering another woman, an earlier wife, and stealing her money.  He escapes through the train terminal, finds another lonely matron to seduce, and, ultimately, kills her for her cash.  With that bankroll, he flees abroad and is exercising his wiles on an Egyptian princess when he sees a film in Cairo in which Mem has a supporting role.  His schemes go awry -- the Egyptian princess is a confidence woman herself and outsmarts the cad.  He returns to LA, hoping to find Mem.  Apparently, Scudder actually loves her, although his love is destructive. 

Mem has now achieved humble stardom.  Two distinguished men are competing for her affections, Tom Holber, the actor who played the sheik, and Claymore, Holber's director.  After various adventures, Claymore casts Mem and Holber in a big tent circus spectacular.  On the last night of shooting, a typhoon blows in from the sea and lightning strikes the generator setting afire the big top tent.  Mem's husband, who has been lurking around the set, recognizes that Mem loves Claymore and so he tries to kill the director.  (For this purpose, he tools around in a wind-machine on wheels.)  There's a fight and the wind-machine breaks free, threatening to run down Mem.  Scudder, realizing that he really loves the actress, sacrifices his life to save the young woman -- he backs into the propellers of the wind machine and is killed.  The massive fire burns itself out.  Claymore, who has ordered his cameramen to film the whole catastrophe, shoots a final scene in the charred debris and embers.  This is a love scene between the leading man, Holber, and Mem.  Holber who realizes that Mem really loves Claymore embraces his leading lady and gives a bittersweet kiss, yielding to his rival.  Claymore calls "cut" and, then, takes Mem in his arms.  A title tells us that the actors have done their best, "working hard" to make the picture and that they hope the audience enjoys it. 

Souls for Sale is full of incidents, grotesque figures, and strangely poetic shots.  The picture is intricate with several subplots. The scenes in the desert have a fearsome beauty -- in one image, we see Mem collapsing at a cross marking a barren grave atop a desolate ridge.  A major star is famous for being a "vamp" but she is, in fact, warm-hearted.  A man with a grotesque face like a cartoon caricature loves her, but knows he will never be able to win her affections.  This man plays clowns and fools in the various films we see being made.  At the climax, he rescues the vamp from the burning circus tent -- she has suffered a burn to one side of her face and proclaims that her career is now over.  The clown looks on baffled -- perhaps, her misfortune will be his fortune:  maybe her affection for him will now progress into love.  (The vamp is mourning another lover, an actor who perished in a spectacular flaming plane crash while filming another movie -- the picture cuts back to that crash, a pillar of fire hanging in the night sky, from time to time.)  When Scudder kills the plain matron that he has seduced and whose money he plans to take, the scene is harrowing -- the woman is pathetic and Scudder's violence looks real and frightening.  But the film propels itself forward quickly moving on to new territory.  Mem's first screen test is similarly harrowing -- she can't keep herself from making ludicrous faces and it's obvious that she has little or no talent with respect to acting  The test is wholly cringe-worthy..  The film's photography features vertical space -- we see Mem in a circus tent astride a big white horse, the camera's deep focus picks out trapeze artists high above her.  When Mem's parents come to visit, she is high over them in a sort of loft in the studio.  At one point, she almost loses her balance and seems about to fall a hundred feet to the floor of the studio.  Mem gets her first big break when a 300 pound light plummets down from overhead and horribly crushes (and I assume burns) the actress playing the lading role -- Mem is promoted to the part because "the show must go on."  (This is the same callous attitude that animates the climax -- as the tent burns down, director demands that his camera crew take cover but still film the catastrophe.  And he demands that the injured Mem kiss his rival, the movie star Tom Holber as the rain and sooty embers continue to pour down out of the turbulent sky.  Scudder escapes the Keystone cops at the train terminal by diving off a balcony and, then, running through the station, this whole sequence shot from a steep overhead angle.  In fact, the camera is even peers down almost vertically on a procession of knights and regal ladies riding on horseback into the studio -- the name of the movie is Chivalry and it's this picture on which Mem seems to get her lucky break.  The image of the flaming plane plummeting out of the sky seems symbolic for being a star -- you may be beloved, but in the end will flame-out.  The picture's view of the audience and fans is sardonic -- in many ways, the film seems aligned with bitter satiric vision of Nathaniel West in Day of the Locust.  People who are off-screen are viewed as homely grotesques -- one man chattering gaily to Scudder seems to have little or no chin or lower jaw.  The projectionist who shows Mem's screen test looks like one of the Katzenjammer kids.  Grotesque old men grimace for a casting director.  When Mem's straitlaced parents wander into the studio, the casting director dismisses them -- he doesn't need more grotesques of their sort.  Women hoping for a break in the movie industry throw themselves at the unattractive casting director -- "I will keep  your picture with the 'Beautifuls'," he says, exhausted.  But in Hollywood, all the women are beautiful.  The film's acting is stilted and, in fact, intentionally old-fashioned -- the movie wants to proclaim itself as an artifice.  The final conflagration is spectacular -- huge friezes of leaping orange flames (the scenes are tinted), animal cages on wheels dragged here and there, mobs of people running this way and that; the trapeze artists lunge toward one another, miss their grip and fall horribly into the middle of the big top center arena while flaming debris pitches down pelting the panicked extras.  It's all dizzying, hard to grasp, and obviously unnatural -- nothing is at stake:  after all, it's just a movie. 

Souls for Sale was thought lost for many years.  It was rediscovered around 2006 and restored for Turner Classic Movies -- some of the film is in bad shape and remains somewhat murky.  There's a gorgeous wide-screen score written for the film's re-release on TCM.  We see von Stroheim leaning into the shot, directing Greed and there's Charlie Chaplin smoking cigarette after cigarette on the set of Woman of Paris.  I don't know who directed Souls for Sale -- the name is not one that I recognize.