“AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 13, 16 January 1932, Page 18 (Supplement)

“AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY”

DREISER’S WORK BANNED

ACTION TAKEN IN ENGLAND Filmland, which half expected that the exhibition of the screen version of Theodore Dreiser’s “The American Tragedy” might be hampered by the legal action which Mr. Dreiser has taken against the film in America, was surprised to learn recently that the Board of Film Censors had banned it in toto on the ground, it is alleged, of its murder-and-sex treatment. This decision complicates enormously a situation that had already become sufficiently acute, writes Mr. G. A. Atkinson in the London Daily Telegraph. The story of “The American Tragedy” is fundamentally concerned with a weak-minded youth who drifts 1 from one amatory foolishness to another until he ends by murdering his sweetheart. Mr. Dreiser admittedly wrote it as an indictment of the American social system, but his complaint is that it has been presented on the screen as a justification of that system. The protagonists of the story for which Mr. Dreiser is understood. to have received £27,000, are Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sidney, young people who have made a most able impression in recent American films. This screen version of the Dreiser epic has had a most chequered career. The idea of turning it into a monumental movie originated with the Paramount Company’s celebrated impressario, Jesse L. Lasky, who went to Paris and engaged S. M. Eisenstein, Moscow’s famous film propagandist, to direct the production. He also engaged the Hon. Ivor Montagu, son of the late Lord Swaythling, to act as Mr. Eisenstein’s assistant/ Mr. Eisenstein and Mr. Montagu are closely associated in film work, and collaborated in the production of Moscow’s “The General Line.” When they reached Hollywood there was so much trouble over Mr. Eisenstein’s Communist outlook that his engagement was reluctantly terminated, much to the disgust of Mr. Dreiser. The production then fell into the hands of Josef 'on Sternberg, the discoverer of Marlene Dietrich, who failed to secure the confidence of the author. Mr. Dreiser, in fact, went to Hollywood in the vain hope of .superintending the production, and in the American Press he has been quarrelling with Mr. von Sternberg ever since.