Sadie Thompson

 Raul Walsh's 1928 silent version of Sadie Thompson is reputed to be the best version of W.Somerset Maugham's story "Rain" (There are, at least, three other film versions).. Walsh himself appears in the movie as a cheerful Marine sergeant, Tim O'Hara, a soldier stationed in Pago Pago when Sadie (Gloria O'Connor) arrives by steamer.  Sadie is reputed to be a prostitute from San Francisco who hopes to establish herself as a shipping clerk on a nearby South Sea island.  She decamps from the boat sashaying along the gangplank to the amusement of the local troops and says that she looks forward to "meeting the army."  Installed at Joe Horn's hotel, she feuds with Lionel Barrymore playing the part of Andrew Davidson, a reforming evangelist, and a prudish fellow who has, nonetheless, a glittering eye and seems to harbor sadistic impulses with respect to Sadie.  There's a smallpox quarantine in effect and Sadie is trapped with the reformer at Horn's hotel while torrential rains continue for most of the movie.  After O'Hara humiliates the preacher, Davidson contrives to get her deported from the island.  O'Hara has an army buddy who has married a San Francisco whore and eloped with her to Sydney, Australia.  Sadie pleads with the governor to let her sail to Sydney and the official says that if Davidson "agrees to this measure", he will revoke his deportation order and let her depart for Australia.  Sadie may be charged with murder or something similarly dire in San Francisco and if she is sent back to that city, she will be convicted and, at minimum, thrown in jail. Davidson locks Sadie in a gloomy chamber in the hotel while the rain pours down incessantly outside.  The shadows gather and there are some picturesque expressionistic effects as lightning flashes outside and Sadie paces back and forth like a caged animal.  When the window is blown inward by the gale, she decides to repent, scrapes off her make-up, and negotiates a truce with the loathsome Davidson.  She falls to her knees in front of him while lightning scintillates about his white profile and, here, the general decomposition of the film stock contributes to the effect -- a whirling vortex of rotting celluloid spins around Sadie and she seems to be touched with Pentecostal fire -- it's an artifact of the desuetude of the old nitrate film as the movie progresses toward its climax, footage that has completely rotted away and been replaced with a half-dozen brightly lit and bland production stills.  O'Hara  tries to rescue her, but is driven away by the half-crazed Davidson.  Sadie is fully resigned to returning to San Francisco and its penitentiary -- she has now becomes saintly in a particularly saccharine and morbid manner, a transformation that is wholly implausible and unpleasantly masochistic.  We see Davidson snooping about with his eyes a-glint.  Apparently, he rapes her and, then, cuts his own throat although none of this visible in what remains of the film.  Comes the dawn and a native fisherman hauls in Davidson's corpse.  There's no viable footage of Sadie's final encounter with O'Hara although a title says:  All men are pigs -- Pigs!  PIGS!  After making this sage observation, Sadie exempts O'Hara from the general rule, sits with him at the sunny turnstile to the hotel, the rain now having ceased, and happily plans her trip to Sydney with him.  The happy ending is, at least, as  implausible as Sadie's sudden conversion from all-time good time girl to the Virgin Mary.  The film isn't particularly interesting, Raoul Walsh's performance is monotonous, and subsidiary parts are underwritten to the point of being examples of blind conformity to Maugham's story, something that no one reads or cares about anymore, but senseless in the larger context of the film.  Walsh's nasty misogyny is on display -- although maybe this is also sourced in Maugham's text:  there's a fat native woman married to Horn filmed in big, ugly closeups solely so that her coarse features can be compared to the softer, more elegantly lit shots of Gloria Swanson.  Despite it's exotic South Seas location in American Samoa, the movie is studio-bound, apparently based on a talkie Broadway play.  The picture scores obvious points against the Christian missionary, a figure of derision even in 1928 -- he has to teach the native's the meaning of sin and is reported to be vainly attempting to keep them from "dancing on the beach" at one point.  But the hypocritical clergy man is a staple of American drama dating back, at least, to Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter and, although Barrymore is an effective villain, it's a very shallow part.      

I have never warmed to Gloria Swanson in her silent roles.  She seems to have been primarily a comedian who was forced into glamour-girl femme fatale roles for which she appears to me to be ill-suited.  She has a tom-boy irreverence and her sexuality always seems like a "put-on", as if meant ironically or merely notionally.  Of course, she's very beautiful and has a fantastic grill of teeth (when she grins she looks like FDR) but she seems curiously chaste, notwithstanding the roles in which she's cast.  In Sadie Thompson, she cavorts around like a girl scout ingenue; her relationship with the Marine seems entirely innocent -- they spend lots of time shaking hands and hugging and Walsh's O'Hara carries her about on his shoulders during a rainstorm as if she were his kid sister.  (The situation is similar in the fragmentary von Stroheim picture Queen Kelly -- in that film, she plays a virginal convent girl with a mischievous streak who ends up in some kind of horrific West African brothel; the film breaks off in the brothel sequences because even von Stroheim doesn't seem to know how to dramatize his wholesome star's depravity:  he makes her the victim of a monstrous male character played by Tully Marshal who has a long distorted body like a crippled spider:  she recoils and the spider advances in an endless series of what look like outtakes and, then, the ruin of the film simply comes to a stop.)  It's hard to judge Sadie Thompson since about a third of the film is missing.  But what's there of the old chestnut isn't much good.