This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This first film adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel is an extremely troubled release ... first disowned by Dreiser, and then disowned by Josef von Sternberg when Dreiser successfully sued to have footage put back into the theatrical release. In a sense, it's a very faithful adaptation, following the plot of the book more closely than George Stevens's "A Place in the Sun". It still feels pretty truncated as the book's plot is jammed into an hour and a half. As a pre-code film, it's allowed to not skirt around the themes of abortion, murder and erotic obsession. It's one glaring fault is that Phillips Holmes seems completely unable to gain much audience sympathy and thus the movie's main character comes off as a completely amoral monster.

Theodore Dreiser's lengthy 1925 novel was based on the sensational 1906 murder trial of Chester Gillette, who murdered his working class girlfriend in order to marry into a socially prominent family. His book deals with a man who wants to escape the poverty and hopelessness of his background only to be engulfed by the wealth he longs for. It became a successful Broadway play with Miriam Hopkins as Sondra, the society girl.Initially, Paramount engaged the prestigious Russian director Sergei Eisenstein as director but the deal fell through, then flamboyant director Josef Von Sternberg was hired. Coming in the middle of his Marlene Dietrich pictures the film dripped with atmosphere as he filmed scenes through beaded curtains, venetian blinds and lakeside trees. Even though Sylvia Sidney and Phillips Holmes last co-starring feature was a movie so bad that no director wanted credit ("Confessions of a Co-Ed") they were both immediately signed for "An American Tragedy". Holmes, a very sensitive actor, found the role of a life time as Clyde Griffiths, who we first meet working as a bellhop at the luxurious Green- Davison Hotel. His opportunism is apparent from the start as he would rather attend to the female guests every need than to hobnob with his fellow workers.When out with friends he is involved in a hit and run (he is not the driver) and though his mother (Lucille LaVerne, in a really over the top performance) who runs the local mission, pleads with him to go to the police, being a coward he refuses. He flees to New York where he has some wealthy relations and it isn't long before, with lying and wheedling, he has attained the post of foreman in the Griffiths Shirt Factory. He meets pretty Roberta (Sylvia Sidney), a factory girl and seems genuinely attracted to her, at the same time he meets his wealthy relatives and is taken up by them. Clyde and Roberta begin their affair, even though the factory frowns against romance in the workplace. Roberta is manipulated by Clyde (with promises of everlasting devotion) into letting him come up to her room. About the same time he meets Sondra (beautiful Frances Dee), a society girl and then conveniently forgets about Roberta. Roberta has some news for Clyde that he doesn't want to hear as he feels he has really fond his niche in life with Sondra by his side.After reading in the paper about an accidental drowning, Clyde begins to plan his way out - he takes Roberta out on the lake, knowing her fear of water. He plans to capsize the boat and let her drown but when faced with the act, he can't go through with it. Roberta is frightened and accidentally falls in but Clyde does nothing to save her and swims away.The last third of the film is devoted to the trial with Irving Pichel giving a gripping performance as D.A. Mason, who is determined to find Clyde guilty. Clyde's coldness and amoral attitude, plus the fact that he is already on the run from a fatal car accident does not get sympathy from the jury. Only at the very end, when he admits to his mother that he did intend to kill Roberta but changed his mind does the audience feel any sympathy for him.There is no comparison between Sylvia Sidney and Shelley Winters (who played Roberta in the 1951 remake). Sidney, a far superior actress, gave Roberta a naive sensitivity, Winters made Roberta seem coarse and crude. Frances Dee, who proved she was a good actress in films like "The Silver Cord" and "Blood Money", a couple of years in the future, in 1931 was just a very pretty face. I think, by making Sondra just a pretty cardboard cut out society girl (in comparison to Elizabeth Taylor's more sensitive portrayal) Sternberg keeps the emphasis on Clyde, defining his callousness and spinelessness and taking away any sympathy the audience may have felt for him.Highly, Highly Recommended.

Its time this well acted and good story older little known gem to be released on DVD. I saw it on TV years ago but never saw it again. It was made in 1931 and the mores of the day are outdated, but the story and consequences could be the same today as they were then. The acting is well done with Phillips Holmes as the male star Clyde. Holmes died when he was only 35 in a plane collision, cutting short a promising life and film career. Sylvia Sydney plays the part of Clyde's very pretty girlfriend Roberta. Everything goes well till Roberta finds herself in a situation she doesn't want to be in and for sure, Clyde doesn't want her to be in. Clyde has big plans for his job, he is ambitious but also selfish. He begins to feel trapped and thinks what he can do to be free of the situation as he doesn't want to be held back. So he plans a solution which has sad consequences and doesn't work out the way he planned. The movie is close to Theodore Dresser's book of "An American Tragedy". The acting is well done by the two stars. I was surprised that a movie made in 1931 could be so good. It didn't seem out of date at all to me. In my view, the acting of the stars in the 1931 film and the movie itself is a lot better than the remake called "A Place in the Sun" with Clift Montgomery and Elizabeth Taylor.I think a lot of classic type film buffs would like this movie. I'd be the first to get it on DVD.

Originally this adapation of the Dreiser novel was planned by Sergei Eisenstein, during the Hollywood jaunt that also led to Que Viva Mexico, and his version might have been a cracked masterpiece-- one can imagine him getting all kind of details about the American scene ludicrously wrong, but finding a real connection between Dreiser's depiction of a weak youth whose desire for wealth and comfort sends him on an assembly line to murder, and Eisenstein's own mechanistic editing style and view of capitalism's destructiveness.Von Sternberg, on the other hand, was the master of knowing sexual politics and intrigue, at his best with characters whose illusions had been left behind many beds ago. Given a Classics Illustrated-level cutdown of the book, and a stiff (if straight out of an Arrow shirt ad) leading man in Phillips Holmes, there's little for him to get hold of here, except for a few scenes in which Sylvia Sidney manages to convey the poignance of a poor girl in a bad spot, losing her boy and helpless to prevent it. There are some reasonably effective scenes between Holmes and Sidney, some nice chiaroscuro from Lee Garmes (though alas, even UCLA's restoration does not look as good as the clips I saw at Cinesation in the 1932 Paramount promo film The House That Shadows Built), and the courtroom scenes, though way over the top (not helped by Irving Pichel's too-perfect E- Nun-Cee-I-A-Shun), are dramatic-- it's fun seeing him defended by Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton, in that inimitable voice. But you can't really say it works, or does Dreiser justice-- and I'm not sure any movie could. The problem with Dreiser's passive characters is that on screen their plights may be involving, but they aren't; we don't get the interior life that the novel gives us, we just see the story of an ineffectual sap making a couple of bad mistakes and getting ground to dust by the wheels of modern society. James Cain's crime novels took the Dreiser- style story and put guilt and cunning back into the main characters' makeup, so they have things to do on screen-- and they know WHY they're doomed. Seeing Sternberg fail to find anything interesting enough to work with here makes you wish Eisenstein had made this film, and Sternberg had had the chance to sink his teeth into The Postman Always Rings Twice or Serenade.