"It would be pleasant, sir, to walk beside thee and hear thee condemn me for my sins." - What a come-on line, 1640's style.
First and foremost, this adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic book features the lithe, expressive, and simply radiant Lillian Gish. Any time she's on the screen, she's mesmerizing, and she delivers a marvelous performance. Director Victor Sjöström/Seastrom certainly turned out a well-made film here, but seeing it felt more like an academic exercise rather than one I'd leap to watch, even if he does play up the love story to make it more appealing.
How ironic is it that Gish got Seastrom to direct the film because she thought the Swedish people were closer in spirit to the characters in the story than modern-day Americans, even as she had to appeal to the puritanical (though not fully empowered) Production Code office and conservative clergymen across the country to get the film taken off the list of books banned for adaptation. The story has a Reverend getting a young woman pregnant, which was shocking in Hawthorne's day as well as Gish's. Perhaps just as importantly, it's a short leap from seeing the cruel, hypocritical, and patriarchal laws imposed by religion in the film (including the demand to take a baby from its mother) to thinking of the issues with modern religion (in 1926 or today) relative to controlling a woman's body and her sexuality.
Seastrom gets some of the tone right, but it didn't feel severe enough, perhaps because of the emphasis on Gish's natural charms. The bigger mistake in my mind was in revealing Reverend Dimmesdale's relationship to Hester Prynne early on, in contrast to the book, where it comes as a surprise. Why did he do that, I wondered. To avoid putting the sinister thought in audience member's minds that the devout Reverend had all the appearances of a holy man but was harboring such sin, making them wonder about possible skeletons in their own clergyman's closet? To allow scenes throughout the film showing the angst on his face (badly overplayed by Lars Hanson), thus softening the story to make it more palatable? Regardless, it loses dramatic power this way.
The film is also a bit too long for such a simple story. Seastrom gets in amusing little bits, like the guy having to talk to his girlfriend through a speaking tube until they're married, as well as breezy bits of modern romance, such as when Gish says "Why are we taught to be ashamed of love?" (both inventions of the film). The main reason to see it is Gish though; she's sublime.
First and foremost, this adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic book features the lithe, expressive, and simply radiant Lillian Gish. Any time she's on the screen, she's mesmerizing, and she delivers a marvelous performance. Director Victor Sjöström/Seastrom certainly turned out a well-made film here, but seeing it felt more like an academic exercise rather than one I'd leap to watch, even if he does play up the love story to make it more appealing.
How ironic is it that Gish got Seastrom to direct the film because she thought the Swedish people were closer in spirit to the characters in the story than modern-day Americans, even as she had to appeal to the puritanical (though not fully empowered) Production Code office and conservative clergymen across the country to get the film taken off the list of books banned for adaptation. The story has a Reverend getting a young woman pregnant, which was shocking in Hawthorne's day as well as Gish's. Perhaps just as importantly, it's a short leap from seeing the cruel, hypocritical, and patriarchal laws imposed by religion in the film (including the demand to take a baby from its mother) to thinking of the issues with modern religion (in 1926 or today) relative to controlling a woman's body and her sexuality.
Seastrom gets some of the tone right, but it didn't feel severe enough, perhaps because of the emphasis on Gish's natural charms. The bigger mistake in my mind was in revealing Reverend Dimmesdale's relationship to Hester Prynne early on, in contrast to the book, where it comes as a surprise. Why did he do that, I wondered. To avoid putting the sinister thought in audience member's minds that the devout Reverend had all the appearances of a holy man but was harboring such sin, making them wonder about possible skeletons in their own clergyman's closet? To allow scenes throughout the film showing the angst on his face (badly overplayed by Lars Hanson), thus softening the story to make it more palatable? Regardless, it loses dramatic power this way.
The film is also a bit too long for such a simple story. Seastrom gets in amusing little bits, like the guy having to talk to his girlfriend through a speaking tube until they're married, as well as breezy bits of modern romance, such as when Gish says "Why are we taught to be ashamed of love?" (both inventions of the film). The main reason to see it is Gish though; she's sublime.