Hollywood's American Tragedies: Dreiser, Eisenstein, Sternberg, Stevens (review)

In this substantial study of the several film adaptations of Dreiser's novel, Mandy Merck does not simply examine how Hollywood's several versions of An American Tragedy adapted Dreiser's work to make it fit the industry's picture of America. She also makes a compelling case that the movie business itself helped produce the social and personal conditions that resulted in his tale. As she says, playing off the ambiguity of the phrase, "these American tragedies are … Hollywood productions."

The initial inspiration for An American Tragedy, the murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in 1906, occurred at least a decade too early to have Hollywood, or even cinematic, connections, though there is much about the familiar story that is melodramatic, scenic, and suggestive. The story behind the writing of the novel and the several subsequent movie versions, however, does have a Hollywood connection, and Merck makes good use of this connection to show not only how artists transmute the mundane materials of life into art but also how artists themselves are shaped by the most mundane elements of popular culture.

Merck reminds readers that Dreiser's initial draft of the novel was written in the early 1920s in Hollywood, where he had followed his lover, Helen Richardson. She had gone there to attempt a career in the movies, and Dreiser followed, not only because of their relationship, but because he saw the possibility of writing for the movies as a way out of his then precarious financial situation. But the couple's experience in Hollywood was less than happy. Dreiser failed to sell any scripts, and, while Richardson had some luck as a bit player, she was also the target of unwanted attention by higher-ups in the studio. Dreiser was repelled by the casual way the studio executives assumed the sexual availability of the young women seeking work in Hollywood; he subsequently wrote a series of articles describing the exploitive conditions under which those young women worked.

Merck argues that the frustration Dreiser experienced in Hollywood partly affected the development of An American Tragedy. Helen Richardson's experience confirmed his own long-held perception that money gave access to women, a view that would be shared by his character, Clyde Griffiths, albeit unconsciously. But the cinematic influence on the novel goes beyond Dreiser's immediate experience with the more sordid side of movie making. Merck finds antecedents to Dreiser's handling of his material in the melodramatic films of D. W. Griffith, such as Way Down East and Intolerance. And the novel itself details how movies provide the imagery by which its characters make aesthetic judgments. In the course of the narrative characters are described as being as handsome or beautiful or as well turned out as movie stars. In a telling move Dreiser exchanges Gillette's class-aspirational tennis racket for Griffiths's ironically significant camera, and he uses specifically cinematic images to describe Griffiths's trial, opening that section of the novel with the words "Lights! Camera!" The novel also constantly focuses on the way its various characters look at each other, on those characters' mutual gaze, making An American Tragedy in part a novel about spectatorship. Merck points out too that the introductory material in each of the novel's three books, the sentence fragments setting the scene, for example, evokes the form of screenplays.

The first cinematic treatment of An American Tragedy was undertaken by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in 1930. Eisenstein had been hired by Paramount Studios producer Jesse Lasky, who had also secured the rights to the novel. Although never actually filmed, Eisenstein's scenario was substantial, and Merck spends several pages recounting his treatment of Dreiser's novel.

Because it was never realized and never had to face the interference of the studio or the censors, Eisenstein's adaptation seems the most inventive of those Merck discusses. Eisenstein used the montage technique made famous by his own Battleship...