East Lynne (1931)

I've been told that there is only one copy of Frank Lloyd's East Lynne and that it is housed at UCLA. I sort of despaired of ever seeing this movie, particularly since I don't live in Los Angeles anymore, but I found a bootleg DVD online and thought I'd see what that held for me. The actual movie is something like 104 minutes long, but the DVD doesn't include the last real of the film, and I was only able to watch about 92 minutes of East Lynne. But I feel pretty sure I got the gist.

I was pleased to find that this film starred Ann Harding, who was nominated for Best Actress this same year for her brilliant performance in Holiday. She is definitely charming in East Lynne, but they chose correctly by nominating her for Holiday.

East Lynne is yet another Oscar-bait, woman-sacrifices-her-child picture, though I will say that I think Lloyd's film is different in some ways from the usual tropes these movies employ. In the first place, literally everything that happens in this film is the fault of a man and absolutely never the fault of the main character, Isabelle. And the film makes no bones about this. The men in this movie are terrible, terrible people who throw this woman away and treat her like shit.

I'm gonna write a little synopsis because there aren't any accurate ones on the internet. Isabelle marries this suburban, neo-Puritan dude and leaves the gay life of London to go stay at this giant manse in the country called East Lynne. She's super excited about it and loves her husband. But as soon as she gets to East Lynne she finds that the place is run by her husband's dour sister in law, who actually hadn't even come to London for the wedding. She badmouths Isabelle immediately, and it's clear she's going to muck things up somehow. The film skips all of the microaggressions we can be sure this old bat perpetrated, and we advance quickly to three years later with a title card. Isabelle has changed visibly. She no longer wears any pretty dresses, she's stifled in this house, and she also has a little boy. Her husband is mean to her; the sister is mean to her. It sucks. Then one of her former suitors comes to visit.

The suitor declares his love for Isabelle. Then he kisses her. She runs up to her room and is like no, dude. Leave me alone. But the evil witch of a sister-in-law lies and tells Isabelle's husband that she and the guy are having an affair. Finally Isabelle loses it: tells the sister-in-law off, accuses her of lying. But the husband takes her sister's side. Isabelle says, OK, then, I'm out of here. I won't stay in this house another minute because you don't actually love me. Well, that's all good and well, but this man will not let her take her son. She says, I won't leave without my son, but he says, Actually yes. You are leaving anyway. There's a lot of crying at this point. I was surprised she didn't burn East Lynne to the ground or throw the old lady down the stairs. Those responses would have been appropriate.

New title card. Three months later. Miss thing is on the boat to Paris. She does have a rich father, at least, who loves her. The suitor who kissed and caused (some of) this trouble is on the boat with her and offers to give her all the things she's been missing: fun and food and dresses and champagne. This gay life lasts awhile, but then as it turns out he was swindling the English government, so he gets fired from the diplomatic service, and the two are reduced to penury and to hanging out with (gasp!) Bohemians.

Then the Franco-Prussian War begins. Apparently it's 1870 (which I hadn't actually realized) and Paris is under siege. Miss thing is like I just really miss my son, perhaps my asshole ex-husband has come around and is not being such an asshole anymore. (We see in a few scenes back at East Lynne that he has most definitely not stopped being an asshole, though he has remarried.) But Isabelle's current boyfriend, who was swindling the British government, is now a full on jerk. She says I'm getting out of Paris and I'm going back to London to see my baby. This is crazy. Paris is under siege. A building falls on both her and her man. The man is killed and she somehow has some illness where she's going to go blind unless she has complete rest and, like, sits in a dark quiet room or something. But Lady Isabelle will not listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene, and she refuses to trust the science. She says, Listen, if I'm going to go blind I need to see my babychild one last time. So she goes back to East Lynne in the dark of night.

Meanwhile, her child is sick with consumption and he needs complete rest and things are touch and go, and he cannot possibly be disturbed at all at least for this one night. But this is the night that Isabelle has sneaked in to see him. (She can still see.)

And then the film cuts out.

Unfortunately, this is a ridiculous melodrama. It's so divorced from any reality and takes itself so seriously, that I just couldn't come around to enjoying it, even with Ann Harding in the lead role. 

I actually don't know what happens at the end, and I think the film is so different from the original novel that there are no clues even to be found there. Every synopsis online gets things so wrong that I don't think they can be trusted here either. Does she shake the crib and he dies in her arms or something like that? That seems about the speed of this movie. Perhaps one day I will find my way to UCLA to see the final reel. Hopefully I can watch just the end by itself, though, without having to rewatch the rest of this mostly tepid melodrama.