"The Goddess," tonight's Silent Sunday Feature

[Big Silent Fan]

Copied from another topic.

PostFri Oct 11, 2013 12:24 pm
If anyone missed the TCM showing of The Goddess (1934) in conjunction with the series and gets Xfinity cable, it's currently available as a free 'on-demand' film. It's well worth seeing if you missed it, probably the best and most interesting of Ruan Lingyu's surviving films.

[SilentsPlease]

TCM's version is a better-looking print than the existing DVD made by San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Or maybe it is the same print but a better transfer.

[Brooksie]

There has only ever been one restoration of this and it was made off the only known extant print, so it would have been a transfer issue rather than a print issue.

[Mike Gebert]

So I watched this and it's neither bad nor great. It's on par, I'd say, with a Kay Francis maternal-self-sacrifice soap opera circa 1933 (in fact it clearly owes a lot to the way American studio pictures were put together, and often looks like a Warner Bros. programmer in terms of sets and blocking). The story is a little more frank, because she's acknowledged to be a prostitute and not a dance hall girl or some other euphemistic profession, but otherwise, it very much follows that mold, and doesn't reach its own national style as, say, Mizoguchi films about women in Japan do at roughly the same time.

Ruan Lingyu is a good actress, but I can't say I really saw why she was such a sensation in China before her death the next year. Maybe she was markedly more naturalistic than other actresses in China at the time, who knows; she's believable, and gets a few big scenes to emote dramatically without overdoing it. The big bulky guy who becomes her pimp also is very effective and has clearly learned a few things about portraying a lowlife on screen from Hollywood actors, too. In fact, the director, who sometimes seems to be leaving Ruan alone on screen to keep a scene moving, is very effective at making him and his bulk visually menacing in a way that's low-key despicable, like a millstone plopped into the middle of her life, rather than an overly frenetic mustache-twirling villain.

Anyway, interesting to see her in a starring vehicle that's quite competently put together, but I think you have to have been Chinese in 1934 to be enthralled as Chinese audiences were. The piano score by Donald Sosin was excellent, hinting at Asian themes without being cartoony.