Film Review
Julien Duvivier's invitation by producer Alexander Korda to direct a remake
of his earlier success
Un carnet
de bal (1938) in Hollywood came at an opportune moment. With
the outbreak of WWII and France's capitulation to Nazi Germany not long afterwards,
Duvivier was fortuitous in having a safe haven in which to continue his career.
The fact that
Lydia impressed neither the critics nor audiences and
was one of Korda's bitterest failures did not persuade the French director
of
Pépé-le-Moko
he should curtail his stay in America. Instead, he persevered and made
three further films before he finally gave up and returned to France.
Lydia was not Duvivier's first Hollywood feature. In 1938, he
had lent his talents to MGM's period extravaganza
The Great Waltz,
the most successful of his American offerings.
An admirer of the director's work, Korda gave Duvivier a mostly free hand
on
Lydia, so whilst the film has the familiar trappings that we associate
with Hollywood melodramas of this era, there is a noticeable sour underbelly
to the film that is unmistakably Duvivier's signature. In reworking
the marvellously well-constructed
Un carnet de bal screenwriter Ben
Hecht greatly diminishes the story's poignancy and it ends up like a lachrymose
version of
Citizen Kane,
borrowing that earlier film's flashback structure and some if its visual
flair without achieving anything of its narrative power and irony.
Duvivier manages to incorporate some of the more successful elements of his
earlier film - notably the memorable ball sequence which, filmed in slow-motion,
has a haunting dream-like quality - but his efforts are mostly undermined
by a script that is too wordy for its own good and too reliant on the excessive
sentimentality that Hollywood was prone to in the 1940s.
Lee Garmes, one of the most gifted cinematographers working in America at
the time, comes to Duvivier's rescue and makes it a visual tour de force.
Beautifully photographed as the film is, there is an abject bleakness beneath
the schmaltzy fairytale surface, razor-sharp shards of bitterness and regret
that not even the treacly dialogue (worsened by Merle Oberon's flat delivery)
can take the edge off. In her last screen performance before her untimely
demise, Edna May Oliver practically steals the film as Oberon's stiff but
loveable grandmother. The only other cast members to leave a lasting
impression are Joseph Cotten and Hans Jaray, who, as the more admirable of
the rejected lovers, engage our sympathies in a way that the lead actress
singularly fails to do. Korda's insistence on casting his wife (Merle
Oberon) in the lead role was to be the film's downfall. Critics were
merciless in their assault on her acting and, inevitably, the film struggled
to find an audience. Imperfect though it is,
Lydia does have
considerable artistic merit - although, verbose and simpering, it can't help feeling slight compared
with the doom-laden poetic masterpieces that Julien Duvivier had routinely
put his name to in the 1930s.
© James Travers 2016
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Next Julien Duvivier film:
The Impostor (1944)
Film Synopsis
In old age, the American benefactress Lydia Macmillan is visited by one of
her former suitors Dr Michael Fitzpatrick and invited to take tea with him.
When she arrives, Lydia is surprised to meet up with two other men who had
once hoped to marry her - footballer Bob Willard and blind musician Frank
Audry. As they reminisce, Lydia and her three former beaux recall how
they first met, and how the stunning Boston socialite passed over these three
charmers, any one of whom would have made a fine husband, for a self-centred
adventurer named Richard Mason. It was the heartbreak that Lydia suffered
in falling for Richard that made her give up any notion of marriage and instead
devote herself to good causes. As she rakes over past memories, Lydia
begins to wonder if she has made the right choices in her life. A surprise
visitor will set her mind at rest...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.