Popular reviews

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★½

  After being a passenger during a hit and run accident, creepy coward Clyde Griffiths (Phillips Holmes) flees to another city where he uses a connection with a wealthy relative to become a manager of a business. He starts hitting on Roberta (Sylvia Sidney), an employee almost immediately despite the potential consequences to their employment, and quickly ditches her as soon as she is pregnant for Sondra (Frances Dee) a more upper class woman. Tragedy ensues. 

  Though An American Tragedy is often visually striking thanks to von Sternberg, it is almost entirely lacking in narrative tension. The lead performance by Holmes is almost entirely listless and the story unfolds in a strange, matter of fact way that feels as though it…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½ 1

  Sternberg turning what is social forces on Dreiser's novel into pure damnation. There's a moment when he films the lake when one can sense the true call of death. Sternberg's An American Tragedy is deterministic on its own way as Dreiser's only the push that guides Holmes social climber towards the death row is very different. The long trial section is anti-ethical to all of Sternberg's strengths as an artist and it stops the film dead for some 20 minutes, but otherwise this very underrated, very expressive film.

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  Review by Stephen M ★★★

  I was eager to see this adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's famous 1925 novel, especially since it's less well-known that the later version ("A Place in the Sun" with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift). Not to mention that von Sternberg directed and it has a favorite 1930s star of mine, Sylvia Sidney. But mostly a disappointment, although not without its moments.

  Part of the problem has to do with the history of the production. Apparently Sergei Eisenstein was slated to direct as his first American feature (Now THAT would've been interesting). But once it was passed to von Sternberg, he intentionally scuttled the critique of American capitalism and the futility of class strivings that Eisenstein, as well as Dreiser in his…

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  Review by Matteo ★★★

  It is a cruel and dark film in establishing provocative and implacable conditions in a visible insistence of moral unease adding a complex treatment to the themes set in a simple script that takes the essence of a parable emphasizing a reiterative moral teaching, undertakes a daring exercise clearly falling in a circle without resolving those propositions that without an attentive exploration of the events is lost leaving a disconnected third act giving rise to an unnecessarily soporific extended rhythm. Yet the uncomfortable perversity leaves a vast space to express regrets of irreversible actions opening a participatory behavior in honesty game.

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  Review by Gentry 🗝 ★★½ 5

  “I could have saved her.”

  Josef Von Sternberg doing a message film? Von Sternberg thinking he knows better than Theodore Dreiser and reinterpreting his novel to explicitly focus on—what he apparently sees as—an unintentional drowning by a sexually repressed social ladder climber? Dreiser was pissed.

  Von Sternberg may not have fully grasped Dreiser’s overarching themes, but he makes it into his own little murder and morality tale. There’s only so much you can show, even in a 1931 film, so I’m not going to knock Von Sternberg too much for not being more explicit about Clyde’s complex, murderous character being informed by a mix of poverty, Christian fundamentalism and depression era scrabble-or-die capitalism.

  But none of this plays to Von…

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½

  Feels like one of those strong, authoritative, foundational texts from 1931 that set templates for future filmmakers to follow... except this one doesn't come with a genre attached, so it never earned the iconic status of a Frankenstein or a Public Enemy.

  Right from the beginning, with the 1931 hot-jazz playing over the credits, Von Sternberg foregrounds the modernist elements of the story, playing up the irony of that word 'tragedy' in the title. Class distinctions have evolved, and the nobility of the (classically-defined) tragic hero no longer exists; beyond that, the movie repeatedly highlights the ways this 'tragedy' is reproduced and sensationalized in news-cycle media. Tragedy in the era of mechanical reproduction...

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  Review by Avirup ★★★½ 2

  75/100
  
  Long and extremely dry court trial in the final act dragged things down a lot unfortunately. Also Holmes as lead had no presence and was outmatched by everyone basically. But everything before that trial was actually great, it was wonderfully cold and grim. Sylvia Sidney is terrific as always and there's some nice directorial flourishes in the first hour but shame even Sternberg couldn't flare up that court trial.

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  Review by brotherdeacon ★★★½

  I suppose we may call it a warning against moral ambiguity, but whatever the framework of its intent, I think its lopsided balance of appetites is subservient to the complex characterizations themselves; almost Biblical losers in their climb for worldly pleasures, attempted class jumping, and dismissing the power of societal taboos. Von Sternberg's simmering pot smells of Christian zealot myopia, gender inequality, economic disability, and the bubbling poisons of an American system praised as open to opportunity if one dedicates oneself ruthlessly to its attainment--with the unspoken caveat that frailty brings ruin like Moses brings frogs.

  The court sequence was a film in itself. Irving Pichel, a prosecutor for the ages. AAT boasted courageous temporal editing which may not have been lost on more modern auteurs.

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  Review by 4 Kongs, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ★★★

  Josef von Sternberg was a brilliant director and Sylvia Sidney a very fine actress, but because An American Tragedy is saddled with a flat, imperfect script, it can only achieve so much. As hindered as the content is by its day and age, it would have been unfilmable a few years later following the advent of the Hays Code.

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  Review by Neill Shaughness ★★★½

  This story hits different knowing Roe v Wade is about to be overturned.

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  Review by Emily ★★★

  JUSTICE FOR SYLVIA SIDNEY!

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  Review by PUNQ ★★★

  Sylvia Sidney was stunning in her role as Roberta. Sadly Phillips Holmes in the lead as the troubled Clyde Griffiths didn't match her presence. Holmes came across hollow and empty which close to killed any sympathy for his character. And just every actor over-powered him with their performances. In way I guess thats what director Sternberg wanted as to show that Clyde's was a weak man, but without much else going for him in his role it left something to be desired. Still a good movie.