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LOT IN SODOM
Lot in Sodom, derived from the Book of Genesis — and not a talkie — is the best art film I have seen. Directed and photographed by J. Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber ; with music by Louis Siegel.*
You have wefts of cloud ; a temple surrounded by buildings set together at various angles — greyed and unified in El Greco perspective (an air view) and one of the best pictorial effects in the film ; a glittering vertebrae of fire — the tree of life ; Lot's house with plaster walls, thick doors, and small windows ; a market-place and the men who vexed Lot day by day. Lot in profile, like a fresco, stands reading ; turns his back to you and is the bowed, intense, darkly caparisoned, overclothed, powerful, helpless Jew — ■ talking, gesticulating, resisting. (Played by Friederich Haak, and not with lapses). Lot's wife (Hildegarde Watson) is perhaps insurmountably the lissom nymph, and fair, as companion figure to so grief-stricken and striking a piece of archaeology as Lot ; but the rapt, listening premonitoriness of face and attitudes throughout, are right ; and as part of the pause before the destruction, the figure running down steps with garments fluttering aside, is a dramatic ace. With it, the daughter (Dorothea Haus) is well harmonised. The film is a thing of great strength and one has no wish, nor a very good chance, to pick flaws ; but to an imagination based on the Child's Bible, the men of Sodom do not look quite so responsibly sinister as the}' might, nor fully oriental. High points are Lot's House — Morning, with the blur of waving candle-flame on the undulating coarse-weave curtain ; the glass-black blood quivering along a prostrate body ; the glistening elaborate lily with snakespots ; the tortoise-shell spotted pallor of the snake with beady eyes. Of the Angel — first appearance (Lewis Whitbeck, Jr.) the real face, in its fixity, against suggested wings, achieves genuine splendor.
As I was coming out of the playhouse I overheard an incorrigible movieunenthusiast say, " It has richness of imagination enough to last you a year and makes you want to see a film every week." I agree. The paintingand-poetry — an atmosphere of the preface to The Wings of a Dove, of the later bloodcurdling poems of James Joyce, of E. E. Cummings' elephant-arabesques at their unlabelled truculent best — is very nearly too exciting for a patron of the old newsreel. One salvages from the commercial ragbag a good bisection or strange-angle shot, but there, even a cum lande creates no spinal chill, being intellectually unself -realised. Here, the camera
* Movie Makers says, " In this latest film, Dr. Watson and Mr. Webber have used a technique similar to that of The Fall of the House of Usher but differing from the latter in that it is smoother and more thoroughly controlled. In the new film, they have achieved far greater photographic beauty — a beauty of mobile forms of light and shade that is, at timss, bewildering in intensity. Movie Makers hopes that wider recognition will be given these two experimentalists for certainly nothing in the professional field ever has approached the subtlety of their technique."
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