#53
Post
by knives » Mon Aug 10, 2020 10:32 am
This is such a terrible film and really highlights the limitations of Hollywood storytelling in this era with the need to show a simple and straightforward story to audiences leaving us with a stupid, turgid showing of events just because. Dom has already torn to shreds Hopkins, but I just want to add that this is probably the worst performance by a star I've ever seen. What she's asked to do here would be hard for anyone, but her idea of the character as a slurring death mask bimbo is just too much.
As someone who has read, and adores, the book I'll talk a little about adaptation. The book is incredibly cinematic and could be adapted with great ease. The sole problem is that precode Hollywood had specific ideas of storytelling that means some serious changes needed to be made. That's okay and there are ways that could have been done well, but every time this film should have turned left it swerves right off a cliff.
Thor first necessary change is that the type of ensemble that Sanctuary is is one that is not supported by the era. It wasn't really until the '50s town melodramas that we get anything like the book though the Altman films, especially Nashville, are the closest. The film thus has a dozen characters to choose to be our guide. There are many good choices, but instead they chose Temple Drake, a passive character who is camatose for most of the novel and isn't even named until the last act. Presumably this choice was dictated by her being subject to the book's most famous scene, but that only seems to speak for the film's desire to only be salacious without thought or poetry.
This bad choice necessitates other bad choices in kind. Drake's story is told mostly in narration and doesn't occur in real time in the novel. Even though this isn't really an experimental touch for a book for films of the era filling in backstory that way wasn't done. What to do then except tell her story in conventional order and add a twenty minute prologue to fill in some details.
This again goes to show how unthinking the adaptation is. The book's reverse order helps breed sympathy for Drake. We see the effects of her rape even before we know the cause or the character. She's a sad character whose circumstances give us reason to care. As details come in our sympathies are heightened and lowered in a complex dance which highlights and makes theme out of the very idea of sympathy. This has a high point contrasting all of what we've seen with a black man condemned to death singing, a scene the film tellingly lacks, asking us again to see if we can sympathize just because of the scene. It's a literary Kuleshov effect in essence.
That's not our story here. Instead for the millionth time Hollywood provides a morality tale of a good girl of high class who because of a partying streak gets into trouble over her head with the film wagging its finger the whole time. I don't know about you, but I don't think rape should be used to explain the moral category of a character. It seems irrelevant.
The absolute worst thing though is this idiotic invented conclusion, the movie it should be said adapts only about 15 pages of the book, which is dictated more by convention then the needs of the story. The movie must reform Temple and make her end a real good girl. She's been bad and frivolous and gotten punished and so now must be shown making a moral stand to present to the audience she is actually reformed. What utterly gross garbage. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this movie and it in all honesty makes other films with the same structure look all the worse in my eyes. That's right this movie is so bad it makes other movies also bad.
Please don't make the badness of this film prevent you from reading the completely unrelated book which is truly great.
