A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925)

Belle Bennett in Stella Dallas
Cast: Belle Bennett, Ronald Colman, Lois Moran, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Screenplay: Frances Marion, based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Film editing: Stuart Heisler. 

Although eclipsed by the 1937 version directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the first filming of Olive Higgins Prouty's lachrymose novel Stella Dallas is well worth seeing, chiefly because of Belle Bennett's blowsy, undaunted Stella. It's hard to see why suave Ronald Colman's Stephen Dallas  would fall so completely for Stella's unkempt charms that he's willing to marry her, except as a kind of penance for his father's criminality and loss of the family fortune, but this is not a story for skeptics or realists. This is domestic melodrama of the purest sort, in which conventional psychology plays only the faintest role. It's a tale that requires you to believe that there's a maternal instinct that overcomes all, even the disapproval of polite society, and that it will be rewarded by seeing your daughter married to a product of that society, even if you have to do it standing in the rain outside the wedding. Bennett is grand in the role, even if her character doesn't have the complexities that Stanwyck brings to it. 
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