Peter Ibbetson

 Peter Ibbetson is a uncategorizable 1935 film starring Gary Cooper and directed by Henry Hathaway.  Cooper, of course, was famous for playing stoic cowboys and soldiers; Hathaway was an action director -- most notably, he had directed Cooper in the preceding year in The Lives of the Bengal Lancers.  (Hathaway made film noir and Westerns -- he ended his career directing John Wayne in True Grit.  Peter Ibbetson, therefore, is a disturbing supernatural  romantic fantasy featuring an actor famous for playing strong, silent warriors and directed by filmmaker who specialized in rowdy action movies.  The film has an effective, if bizarre, script based on a once-famous novel by George du Maurier.  The movie's production values are lush -- it has spectacular photography by Charles Lang.  The movie is disquieting because it traffics in forbidden fantasies:  what if we were able to enjoy all of our desires in a world of dreams?  What if we could escape the sorrow and grief of our every day existence by fleeing into fantasy?  What if pain and misery are only illusions and that our real existence is blessed, a sort of perpetual idyll in a dream-world in which all desires are satisfied?  These are radical questions because they destabilize our life in the real world, the place that should contain everything for which we hope.  Most of us are resigned to existing in the muck and mire and disappointment of the world into which we are born, but the suggestion that there is another happier realm and that, indeed, it may be somehow available to us is a distressing  notion-- it promotes sadness and causes us to reject with dismay the actual terms on which we live.  Peter Ibbetson traffics in the forbidden zone of our most extravagant and, therefore, deeply suppressed desires.  It's both haunting and a bit horrifying.

The movie is simply and efficiently constructed in three acts.  In the first part, we see two beautiful children living in splendid bucolic isolation somewhere near Paris.  The little boy is called "Gogo" and he is quarreling with a tiny blonde playmate, Mary.  An iron fence separates the children but Gogo is slender and he can pass between the iron spikes.  The children are realistically portrayed and they bicker and behave selfishly toward one another.  The idyll is interrupted when Gogo's mother dies and his uncle takes him away to London.  The little boy longs to stay in Paris with his playmate but they are separated -- it's a scene of primal trauma, rather brutally staged, similar in form to the scene in Citizen Kane in which the young Kane is separated from his sled, Rosebud, and his mother.  In the film's second act, Gogo has now grown to be an architect, Peter Ibbetson.  He is gloomy and exhausted with the world.  His boss sends him on a holiday to Paris where he meets a beautiful and flirtatious young woman (played by Ida Lupino who makes a deep impression in this small role).  Instead of accepting the young woman's implicit invitations, Peter takes her on a tour of the "secret garden" where he and Mary played when they were children.  In effect, Peter rejects the young woman's fairly direct sexual offer in favor of nostalgia.  Back in England, Ibbetson is hired to remodel some stables at a spectacular and palatial manor hour in Yorkshire.  It turns out that the Duchess of Towers, the lady of the house, is Peter's old playmate, Mary, now grown up and resplendent in a severe black velvet gown and wielding a riding crop.  After some more bickering, the childhood friends recognize one another and fall in love again.  They discover that they are sharing the same dreams.  Mary's husband interrupts them in a passionate embrace and there's a fight.  A gun goes off and the husband is killed.  After a trial, Peter is sent to prison. 

The film's  jaw-dropping third-act takes place in some kind of hellish penitentiary in which prisoners are chained to the walls or fettered to wooden pallets in a dungeon.  Peter Ibbetson refuses to work and is starving himself to death.  He rejects drink and water.  When someone mocks Mary, the cause of his imprisonment, there's a fight.  The sadistic guards break up the brawl between the fettered men and Ibbetson's spine is shattered by a blow from a heavy truncheon.  He's pronounced dead, but, while dreaming, Mary comes and summons him back to life -- she arranges to have a ring delivered to him in the prison.  Mary and Peter, then, meet every night in their dreams, exploring together a beautiful wooded landscape with mountains, fairy castles, and pellucid alpine lakes.  When they approach a dream-castle too closely,  it collapses and there's an enormous rock slide with spectacular torrents of boulders falling off the peak.  Mary and Peter are separated but rejoin one another after the calamitous avalanche.  The next twenty years or so, the couple meet each night in their dreams.  Peter remains paralyzed, apparently immobile on a wooden pallet in the gloomy dungeon.  But in their dreams, the couple roams freely through the glorious mountain meadows.  At last, Mary dies.  Peter can no longer find her in his dreams.  Then, she comes to  him as a voice and says that she has "passed over" and that he should follow her into this new realm which is even more wonderful than the dreams they have shared for the last twenty years.  On this note, the movie ends.  

The movie's peculiar details stick in the imagination.  This film has been unavailable for many years and only rarely revived.  Because the movie couldn't be seen, a legend has grown up around it -- the film is, in fact, a sort of cult movie.  Certainly, it was integral to the European surrealists and influenced everyone from Salvador Dali to Jean Cocteau.  (Bunuel said that Peter Ibbetson was one of the ten greatest movies ever made.)  Paul Eluard, the surrealist poet, was in the habit of stalking beautiful women around Paris.  One afternoon, he was trailing a desirable young woman when she suddenly stepped into a movie theater.  Eluard followed her and found himself entranced by the movie that was being screened to the extent that he entirely forgot about the woman that he had been pursuing.  The film, of course, was Peter Ibbetson.  The film has a surreal aspect from its very outset.  The wheels on a doll's perambulator rhyme with the wheels on a wagon that Gogo is attempting to build and the children's quarrel over bits of lumber seems bizarre.  The death of Gogo's mother involves sinister-looking nuns in elaborate wimples and extreme unction administered to the dying woman as glimpsed through a mirror -- many of the shots look like fragments of Welles' Citizen Kane. The little boy is compared to a horse by his creepy uncle and, later, we see Mary's much older husband, obsessed with horses, breaking a new mare -- his casual brutality casts a harsh light on him.  Peter Ibbetson designs gothic, turreted mansions and his boss, Mr. Slade, is blind, "blind from birth" we are told -- certainly, a curious impairment for a famous architect (and a handicap that imparts a weird intensity to his scenes with Peter.)  Ida Lupino's sexual voracity is surprising and it's odd to see Mary reappear toying with a riding crop.  There are little scale models for buildings displayed throughout the movie -- these models are also strange and remind me of the scale models that we sometimes see in Tarkovsky's movies.  Reality exists in different forms and shapes -- real buildings have miniature counterparts.  The film's final twenty minutes is an expressionistic torrent of strange camera angles, vehement high-contrasts lighting and strangely sepulchral staging -- Cooper lies flat on his back with a chain running over his crotch and his trousers marked Justicia for some reason; he looks like a mortuary statue of himself.  The dream sequences involve sylvan woods and meadows.  The climactic landslide with its wild cascade of boulders is not convincing -- but, why should it be?  Everything that happens is happening in a dream.