"In the whirlpool of modern life, the most difficult thing is to live alone," states the intertitles, as we ride a train into the empty dawn of New York City (an introduction right out of Berlin: Symphony of a City and Man With a Movie Camera) and watch it wake up for the day. In one sparse but pleasantly personalized rented room is Mary (Barbara Kent), a young switchboard operator whose leisurely morning routine stands in sharp contrast to Jim (Glenn Tryon), a witty young man who oversleeps and races through dressing, breakfast, and the subway station to get to work (he stamps out razor blades on an assembly line) on time. Both of them are driven by the punchclock of the workplace (Fejos even frames shots of their workaday monotony through the face of a clock) until the workday ends and the promise of a holiday weekend sends their friends off in pairs. It only reminds them that they have no one. Setting out singly for a day at the beach, they cross paths, he preens self-consciously (there's something of the joker in him as he poses as a swell), she smiles and flirts coquettishly and runs off like a child tagging a new playmate. A lovely little romance blooms amidst the ever-present crowds.
Lonesome is right out of the late-silent film culture that gave us Sunrise, The Crowd, People on Sunday, and other films of youth and romance in the modern (circa late 1920s) urban world. Fejos' gentle affection and empathy for these lonely kids, and his inventive direction, lift the film from an overwhelming, potentially smothering society of the modern metropolis. The urban bustle of the city and the crowded, equally bustling vacation playground of the Coney Island getaway are as much characters in their own right as Jim and Mary. Fejos brings that world to life with an affection for that big city ambience even as it picks out our heroes from the crowd, never losing them in the human sea.
In the morning rush to work, Fejos crosscuts not so much for effect as simply to enjoy the personalities that emerge as they thread their way through busy urban world, she picking her space in the crowd, he forcing his way through to get to work before the whistle blows. Their holiday escape lands them back in the human crush, though this one is decidedly less urgent, and Jim once again snakes his way through mass of escaping city folk to follow the coquettish Mary in the merry chase of their romantic game of tag. An evening rainstorm isn't simply a sprinkle, it's a howling wind and pounding downpour that practically blows the crowds from the beach getaway and back to their urban lives. And to add dazzle to the carnival atmosphere of the Oceanside midway, hand-colored sequences light up the neon of the rides and the attractions in warm color.
Synchronized music and sound effects were nothing new to Hollywood and Lonesome has a well-integrated music and effects track running through it. More than simply an accompanying score, Fejos provides an impressionistic soundtrack of alarm bells, train engines, industrial machines, and the rumble of crowds befitting the visual survey of city life, and he makes poignant use of a recurring musical motif: the song "Always," which Jim plays on his Victrola and is picked up on the soundtrack as both a promise of romance and a painful reminder of lost romance.
The three short sound sequences in the film are essentially shoehorned into an otherwise graceful and delicate piece of visual storytelling. Whether or not they were shot after the film was completed or added during production as talkie fever gripped the studios, they are clearly not an organic part of Fejos' filmmaking. Each one is a single, unbroken take from a stationary camera and each is a dialogue sequence with rather prosaic dialogue and performers not quite sure how to speak for the big screen. By contrast, the sound sequences of The Jazz Singer were largely musical performances or comments from the performer to an audience, not dialogue. These sequences show how much Hollywood needed to relearn to turn sound from a new technology to an expressive medium.
The flow of the film stops dead for the first and last of these static and somewhat awkward diversions, but while they stick out, they are brief and a little endearing and they give the film its unusual historical status. For the second talkie scene, however, Fejos creates the romantic glow of the beach at night. The two get lost in conversation as the days eases to dusk and they look up from their reverie to find the beach deserted. Just two lovers lost in the company of one another while the world politely gives them a little privacy.
Fejos made Lonesome under a unique contract at Universal that gave him complete control over his projects, almost unheard of for an otherwise "unknown" director whose claim to fame in America was a single, visually dazzling low-budget production. (Fejos has a filmmaker in Hungary in the early 1920s, but his films apparently were not known in America.) He took full advantage to create something special, an intimate tale on a busy canvas, as if picked out of the details of an epic portrait of the city. Set over the course of a single day, morning to night, and focused on two souls picked out of the crowd, Lonesome is delicate and sweet, playful and creative, and cinematically inventive without showboating. The effects never distract from the story.
Criterion presents the sound version of the film, with the three talkie sequences and the synchronized music and effects soundtrack intact, preserved by the Cinématèque Français and digitally cleaned up and remastered by Criterion. Curiously, the sound sequences have stronger visual elements, as if these scenes were preserved separately and survived the decades better. Select scenes are tinted and others feature hand-painted flourishes.
The Blu-ray and DVD of Lonesome not only presents the home video debut of the Paul Fejos' most famous film (unjustly forgotten over the years in large part because its unavailability), it offers the debut of two additions Fejos features of the late 1920s. Which brings the number of films by this important, innovative director now available on home video to... three.
Fejos claimed that he made The Last Performance (1929), his follow-up film to Lonesome, largely for the opportunity to work with the great German actor Conrad Veidt. It's a fairly formulaic story, with Veidt as a famous magician named Erik the Great who is as generous as he is talented. When he catches a young thief in his apartment, tearing into his dinner like a starving man, he not only protects him from arrest, he gives him a job in the act, only to become lethally jealous when the boy, Mark, and his beautiful young assistant and fiancée Julie (Mary Philbin of The Phantom of the Opera), fall in love. His devious revenge involves turning a spectacular new trick into a murder box that kills one male assistant and frames the other. It's pure melodrama, with little of the nuanced character of Lonesome, but Fejos brings a theatrical flair appropriate to the world of stage performances (carried over to the courtroom trial scenes) and Veidt brings a worldly dignity to the role of Erik. His murder is carried out with the anguish and heartache of a man betrayed by those he loved and his cold pose melts under the pleading eyes of Julie, bringing back his dignity and benevolence for his final act. "That's all, ladies and gentlemen."
Originally produced in both silent and part-talkie versions, the sound version is currently lost and Criterion presents the silent version from an unrestored Danish print (with English subtitles on the Danish intertitles). It's worn and faded but watchable. Donald Sosin composes and performs an appropriately theatrical piano score, which is not his usual style, but it's a good match with both the showbiz drama and crime melodrama aspects of the film.
Broadway (1929), Fejos' biggest and most expensive Hollywood film, was his full-fledge talkie debut: a million-dollar musical (or so the promotions insisted) based on a Broadway show by Phillip Dunning and George Abbott. The story is even more conventional than The Last Performance, a backstage drama about a small-time hoofer (Lonesome star Glenn Tryon), the naïve showgirl he loves (Merna Kennedy), and the arrogant gangster (Robert Ellis) who plays the high society swell while knocking off the competition. The personal dramas play out between the production numbers. Evelyn Brent, the scuffed, streetwise star of Josef von Sternberg's Underworld and The Last Command, is memorable in a supporting role as a jaded showgirl with no romantic illusions left. Fejos spent the budget on the spectacle, notably an enormous theater set where the musical numbers play out and the camera swoops in and rises high over the stage on a massive crane, and a terrific exterior behind the club where an elevated train whooshes past. Movies in the early years of sound have a (not unearned) reputation for being stiff and static, as in the sound sequences of Lonesome. Broadway is a notable exception to the rule. Like King Vidor and Rouben Mamoulian and Ernst Lubitsch, Fejos refused to accept the limitations imposed by traditional sound production. His camera roams the set, his actors move freely about the shots, and the dialogue is delivered with the personality that would later define the dynamism of the best pre-code films of the early thirties rather than the declamatory stiffness of the first talkies.
The film was originally produced in silent and sound versions and featured a lavish two-strip Technicolor finale. Criterion presents the sound production, which is missing the final reel and has been reconstructed with elements from the silent version and soundtrack elements preserved by a collector. While the reel ends show signs of wear and the Technicolor scene is so degraded it's hard to make out the details in some shots, the image quality is otherwise surprisingly strong through most of the film and Criterion's mastering brings out the best in the materials with sharp images and good contrasts.
The disc also includes commentary by film historian Richard Koszarski, a 1963 visual essay set to interviews with Paul Fejos narrating his life story, and audio excerpts of an interview with cinematographer Hal Mohr discussing Broadway.
All Criterion releases include notes on the source materials and the technology used in mastering the film for DVD and/or Blu-ray. This booklet includes a short essay on the history of the preservation and restoration of the film over the decades and details of the 2008 restoration by George Eastman House, written by Dan Wagner, Head of Preservation at George Eastman House, in addition to brief notes on the transfer. The booklet also features an original essay on the film by Philip Lopate, an essay on the career of Paul Fejos by Graham Petrie, and an excerpt from a 1962 interview with Fejos conducted by John T. Mason Jr.
For more information about Lonesome, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Lonesome, go to TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
