An American Romance (1944)

[Harold Aherne]

Has anyone seen this one all the way through? I've only seen the clip on the Warner Archive site, but my curiosity may lie not so much in the film itself as in its place in Vidor's career.

It was, reportedly, an enormous flop and ended Vidor's association with MGM. There was persistent controversy with its depiction of organised labour (Vidor was a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals around the time the film premiered) and 30 minutes was cut from its 150 minute length. Bosley Crowther's reaction to it in the NYT of 24 Nov. 1944 was negative, dismissing the film and Brian Donlevy's performance as shallow and stale. The picture does not figure prominently in most standard histories of MGM, but present-day critics have continued to write about it. In Have You Seen? David Thomson calls it "an amazing lost treasure", but other modern reviews tend to be lukewarm at best. And in Hollywood's War with Poland it is pointed out that the surname of Donlevy's character, Dangos, is a Lithuanian word rather than a Czech name.

Perhaps one problem that the film couldn't overcome was its relative lack of star power (I had to look up who Ann Richards was). Probably the length didn't help either, but An American Romance is also the kind of film whose apparent pretentions either move you or fail miserably, and they mostly did the latter for picture-goers of 1944. Is there any chance that the deleted 30 minutes still exist? More is hardly better in all cases, but I wonder how the deletions worked to the film's detriment or advantage.

-Harold

[Lokke Heiss]

Has anyone seen this one all the way through? I've only seen the clip on the Warner Archive site, but my curiosity may lie not so much in the film itself as in its place in Vidor's career.

I know nothing about this film, but I think Vidor is one of the most interesting directors of his time, in that his films weren't always good, but they were always political, and had a clear moral agenda. Most directors had to 'subtext' the politics to get away with it, ala John Ford, but Vidor, if anything, flipped this, and made the politics text, and the plot -- as it was -- the subtext. I think he got away with it, mostly, because his politics tended to be populist.

And I think what he did would have worked more often than not -- it's clear in most of his films that he has Something Important To Say, and often says it with great passion and technical skill.

But I think he was his own worst enemy. The reason you use Western Union if you have something important to say, is that it forces you to Keep it Short. It was very hard for Vidor to do that.

[Mike Gebert]

To me, if you see his two back-to-the-land movies-- The Stranger's Return, based on a romantic potboiler, with sensitive and appealing performances by Miriam Hopkins and Lionel Barrymore, and Our Daily Bread, with its explicitly political bent, Soviet borrowings, and Tom Keene in the lead-- you get as good a demonstration as you could want of why he was often better off with commercial assignments than trying to Say Something.

[Richard P. May]

I can't tell you anything about the content of the deleted footage, but having supervised preservation of the film at Turner, have seen it.
It has all the trademarks of an attempted epic. The immigrant steel worker who ended up owning the plant and converting it to auto manufacture. His marriage to the school teacher who helped him with English, falling out with his son who was taking the side of the unions, and ending with conversion to defense work, and a massive montage of the manufacture of B-17 bombers at the end. This was shot in 3-strip Technicolor, so obviously had the cooperation of the government's war effort to have access to the manufacturing scenes.
I have seen running time listed as 150 minutes, although the release version was 124 min. It was obviously cut rather hastily, as this running time is assembled on 8 reels, some rather short. A normal picture of this length would be about 6 1/2 reels. There are dissolves that begin, then suddenly become a scene change.
We worked from the original negative, which is at Geo. Eastman House.
There was no additional footage either there or in the inventory of MGM unused sequences, so I feel certain that the deleted film was destroyed.

[boblipton]

I've seen the shortened version and I liked it, but it had the air of trying to say something deep and populist, but not saying it. I think King Vidor was a great technical director and if you gave him a job of work, he could figure out how to do it as well as anyone. He could figure out how to shoot a scene and how to get a performance, but he was a great studio director. No slight is intended by that remark: you have all these people working for you, from gaffers to stars, and you manage them so they make a great picture.

But we've gotten into our heads that the great film maker is the auteur, and the more tragic the better: von Stroheim is a great man and so was Orson Welles. Buit someone like William Wyler who simply went ahead, decade after decade, making successful films that covered every subject and that won lots of awards.... well, that's hardly the stuff of critics and film schools. Given that a critic has maybe 150 words to sum up a picture, it's nice to have a director you can slot into a category -- and a little tragedy is nice, since it promotes the Artist struggling against the Philistine Dream Machine. That's one of the reasons that John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, who had definite styles, have fallen out of favor. They must have sold out, they died rich.

But Vidor never gave up the idea of being a great artist with a vision and turned out some awful stinkers when given his head.

I think Cocteau was right: so long as movies are expensive propositions, it's impossible for them to be art, at least in Cocteau's sense. And, speaking for myself, that's good thing. I think the 20th century cult of the Artist is one of the biggest cons in history. I want artists -- and this includes people in the film industry -- to be worried about pleasing their audiences. I want them thinking about how to get me to part with $10.

Vidor lacked that vision on his own hook. He wanted me to eat spinach, and I say to Hell with it. Pity, because when it came to putting it on the screen, he knew how to do it. He manages to make spinach look interesting. But not interesting enough.

Bob

[moviepas]

This film was one of the first MGM package collection shown on CH7 Melbourne when they got the c700 film package rights minus GWTW(at the time). They showed this, I think, in their Friday night Academy Theatre slot at the time in black & white as we had to wait until about 1973 for color. Some people have told me they don't like the film because they don't like Brian Donlevy but I don't mind him. Certainly, 150mins was long for its day and in color at the height of WW2 but maybe government OK was obtained. However, if the footage was not destroyed at the time maybe it was lost in a vault fire of bits & pieces(visual not audio) in the 1950s that has been written about. Who knows. By a coincidence, I ordered this title today at the DeepDiscount current sale.

[Lamar]

From the interview with Vidor from the book The Celluloid Muse by Higham & Greenberg:
I wrote "An American Romance" for a star cast consisting of Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotton, and at one time the studio promised to let me have these people. When I finally came to do the film, I had none of them: I wasn't enough of a lunchroom politician to prevent someone taking them over, and so I received secondary casting.
I compromised by taking Brian Donlevy and a girl (Richards) they wanted to develop, justifying it to myself on the grounds that I'd become a kind of "company man" at MGM and had been on salary for a year without making a picture.
But neither Brian Donlevy nor the girl was very exciting. and that, combined with wartime conditions and studio cutting, spoiled the film. I cut a lot out of it to begin with, and then the studio cut more. I'd discovered, when taking it out on the road in the Middle West, that it was too heavily loaded on the documentary side at the expense of the human side, and wanted to cut it accordingly. Well, the studio did the reverse: they cut out the human story and kept all the documentary stuff. Then, to avoid having to redub the music, they made further cuts according to where the music ended, which was of course nonsensical and ruinous to the film. That's when I became very annoyed and left MGM for good.
I shot much of "An American Romance" at the mills of United States Steel in Gary, Indiana, because I'd seen them from a train window and realized it was the biggest, most spectacular, most photogenic plant of it's kind in the country, bigger even than those in Pittsburgh, which I also looked at.
Shooting close to naked flames was extraordinarily difficult, because we quickly became enveloped by sulphur fumes and steam and couldn't see anything for a while. Sometimes we had to stand quite still while a running river of molten steel ran right alongside us. The only consolation was that it warmed us in the prevailing cold weather."