I watched Criterion’s DVD of Paul Fejos’s 1928 romantic drama “Lonesome” (which I discuss in this clip) somewhat belatedly, after seeing it mentioned a couple of times in my Twitter feed and hearing from a colleague that he had watched the movie and enjoyed it. What I didn’t do was to read the informative booklet that came with the DVD, and it would have helped. While watching the film, I was struck by the abstraction of its characters, whose particular traits seemed to have been filtered out in order to create exemplary working-class figures. Fejos’s drama felt like social science, a sort of ethnographic detailing of the representative habits of a group. Imagine my surprise when Graham Petrie, in his biographical sketch, noted Fejos’s scientific background (he was a medical doctor) and his later career as an anthropologist. Like a scientist, Fejos had an analytical temperament, but the grandeur of the movie isn’t in its social science alone but in its fusion with the turmoil of inner life, which the underlying politics turn universal. His blend of wildly subjective romanticism and the clinician’s cold objectivity gives rise to a distinctive art. Petrie’s notes mention that Fejos—whose Hollywood career was brief and unhappy—had hoped to direct “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which was instead made by Lewis Milestone. I imagine with fascination and a sense of loss what Fejos might have done with it. I doubt that he’d have improved on the performances or the scenographic reconstruction of war, but the visual realization of fear and horror might have been historic.
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