(minor spoilers)
Take all of modern movies’ whispering and yelling – a couple quietly cooing to each other in bed after making love; the gruff voice of a man on a mission; the thunderous threats of a gigantic, murder mad jewelry junkie.
Take all of modern movies’ ambient noise – background restaurant chatter; wind blowing through the trees; the metallic rambling of a speeding locomotive.
Take all of modern movies’ explosions – cars slamming into even more cars then bursting into flames; a whole hospital blasted to smithereens by the manipulations of some far off hired gun of a hacker; entire cities laid to waste by alien invaders in an ear splitting cacophony of crunched metal, blasted apart concrete and ripped to shreds asphalt.
Take it all, please, and dump it in a trash can for just 81 minutes. Travel back to a time when movies had yet to hit 30 and words coming out of actors mouths were still a few years away. “The Red Lily” will reward you for your noble sacrifice.
Fred Niblo. Ring a bell? Not even a tiny one? Directors come and go and the years march on and, sometimes even the good ones are left to watch as audiences turn their backs on them and disappear into the distance.
According to IMDB, Fred Niblo, born Jan 6, 1874, directed 44 films from 1916 to 1932. Says he came from vaudeville. Heck, he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – at least the sidewalk won’t forget him.
Slipping away from the visual and aural assault of today’s films and settling down to watch something so quiet can be a real treat. This is especially true if the images are beautifully framed, expressively lit and chosen with a storyteller’s instinct for repetition and juxtaposition.
The story is sweet and simple. Marise (Enid Bennett) and Jean (Ramon Novarro) are two lovestruck young people living in the sunny splendour of rural France. He’s a mayor’s son and she’s the daughter of a cobbler. You know it’s the real deal because, in the very first scene, they are so lost in each other’s eyes that they almost get hit by a train. Though a tad on the ridiculous side, the image is an apt metaphor for the uglier side of life that will soon threaten to flatten them and their love forever.
The couple suffers their first split when Marise’s father dies. Not able to support herself, she is sent to live with family she has never met. The stay doesn’t last long. Her relatives turn out to be a grubby and violent bunch – the scene is as subtle as a chainsaw cutting through watermelon. Fleeing during a terrible storm, Marise returns to her childhood home – now empty and uninhabited. There she reunites with Jean. They spend the night together. Love endures.
Trouble returns quickly, though, as Jean’s father orders his son to dump Marise. Ah, but whenever Jean looks at Marise, he sees, “The face of an angel.” He stands his ground. His father stands his ground. Soon, the couple is off to Paris to get married and live happily ever after.
Meanwhile, someone has broken into the safe in the mayor’s office. Jean is suspected. Unbeknownst to Marise, he is picked up by police and taken away. Marise waits in vain in a Paris train station. The couple’s 2nd separation is the first domino to fall in their downward slide into criminality and self-corruption.
“The Red Lily” is one of those films that makes its listed running time seem like an error. 81 minutes? Are you sure? Niblo and co-scenarist Bess Meredyth pack so much into 81 minutes that the feat is not unlike trying to stuff a closet full of clothes into a modest overnight bag.
To that point, there was at least one moment during the de-evolution of Jean where I thought the filmmakers leapt too far too quickly – A to Z in the time it takes to go from A to H.
That aside, “The Red Lily” is one hell of a ride. Two wide-eyed, soft hearted lovers lose all hope. Smiles turn into scowls and laughter is smothered somewhere in the dark and damp underworld of Paris.
Niblo and Meredyth ultimately present conflicting views of rural life. We open just outside of the little French town of Vivonne, in Brittany. As soft, romantic music plays, we see Jean at the reins of a horse drawn wagon. Marise is by his side as they slowly inch forward. On either side of them, are long rows of trees that extend far into the background. Their branches tower over our young lovers – their abundant leaves forming a natural canopy. Sunlight falling down through the dense greenery transforms thick, coarse branches and tender, thin leaves into the same soft shadows that sway back and forth on the dirt road surface beneath our young lovers.
We are in the midst of a cliched rural scene of calm and clarity. It pleases the eyes. The tempo of life here is slow. Love has room to spread its wings. The title cards reinforce the optimistic nature of the images by assuring us that this sweet young couple have a bright future ahead of them.
Then, Jean turns off the road and the music picks up. A train is speeding towards them. The music panics. We cut back and forth from the oblivious young couple to the charging bull of smoke and steel heading right into their path. The train speeds through as the young lovers just make it across the tracks in time. Phew!
As mentioned earlier, the metaphor could not be any clearer. It’s a warning – which the couple naturally miss. Though, at the same time, the scene suggests that Jean and Marise’s love for one another will see them through. It is their protection against the morally diseased and decaying outside world. But, it’s only protection if they stay together. Individually, they are vulnerable.
Later, when Marise is left homeless by the death of her father and is sent off to live with relatives, the peace and beauty of rural life shown in the opening scene is nowhere to be found. Her relatives are depicted as savage animals: the husband and wife bark angrily at each other; their dinner is slop; the kids scratch at each other’s faces. Later, the father is about to give one of his kids a whipping. Marise steps in to defend the child. The father then turns his rage on her, instead. She escapes into the barn and, then, races off into the stormy night.
The blunt nature of the depiction of Marise’s next of kin is borderline comical. They are animals practically foaming at the mouths. The father and mother have dirt covered faces permanently frozen in a scrunch of a scowl. Their kids either mimic their parents’ savagery or are traumatized bystanders trying – not too successfully – to stay out of the way. Two versions of rural life – one perpetually sunny and one perpetually dark.
Before Marise is sent to her savage relatives, she has to contend with the death of her beloved father. Niblo handles it with great care. After the priest gently informs Marise, she makes her way into her father’s bedroom. Hands folded, walking haltingly to her father’s side, Marise is the perfect picture of fragile beauty. Niblo puts his camera behind and to the right of the bed so that only the father’s limp hand is in view. Marise kneels and takes hold of her father’s hand. Niblo will return to this shot again, much later in the film. Only, the hand will belong to someone else and Marise will be in a much more vulnerable state. Credit Niblo and cinematographer Victor Milner for matching these two moments via the placement of the camera. The contrast between these two visually similar yet emotionally different moments is jarring and revealing. This is detailed filmmaking at its finest.
After escaping the hell of living with her lunatic relatives, a frightened and alone Marise returns to her home. It’s now empty – except for a stool, a box and a candle that Marise lights. Jean is wandering somewhere outside. He sees the candle light coming from house. He enters and the couple is finally reunited.
Jean gathers some crumpled up newsprint and some wood that he finds in the corner of the living room. He places them in the fireplace and strikes a match. With the fire now warming the room, Jean tends to a shaken Marise. He removes her soaked shoes and places them close to the fire to warm. Surely, Marise’s cobbler father would have greatly appreciated that. The moment is a quietly moving baton handoff from a man who cared for Marise in the past to the man determined to care for her in the future.
So, the young couple flee the iron fisted grasp of Jean’s father and make their way to Paris to marry. But, that train from the first scene comes roaring back disguised as two cops who quickly arrest Jean for robbing his father’s safe. We know he didn’t do it, but it hardly matters. Still patiently waiting inside the train station for Jean to return, Marise sees none of it. She continues to wait and wait while Jean is taken away by the authorities.
That gets us to the 25 minute mark. Much has happened with so much more to go. From here, the film details the sordid steps the two separated lovers take while trying to survive in the unforgiving stench and smoke of the big city with no money and not a single friendly face in sight.
Well, strike that, Wallace Beery (Dinner at Eight) makes a memorable appearance as the wily petty criminal Bo-Bo. He’s not all bad and he’s not all good. The streets have moulded him to its liking. He does what he needs to do to survive while leaving just enough space for his heart to make an unscheduled appearance every once in a while.
The fall that Jean and Marise take is starkly rendered in nakedly cruel scenes of predation and degradation. Marise takes the worst of it. In a time when women had little to no power and were, consequently, at the mercy of wicked men, the soul-sick slobs of 1924 Paris predictably pull Marise down into the muck with them. Once bright faced, quietly elegant and the perfect picture of innocence, it doesn’t take long for the cruel city of Paris and its dutiful dregs to make Marise over into a worn down, dirty faced scavenger. Plainly put – she is broken.
Jean, on the other hand, hangs with Bo-Bo, gets arrested, serves his time, commits another crime and spends the rest of the film running from the police. That delicate way he had in the opening scenes is gone. Jean is now hard hearted and full of rage. He is in survival mode – all fangs and angry faces. He keeps on taking to keep on living and he keeps on living to keep on taking. A hamster of a hood, Jean is quickly running out of gas as his running wheel continues to spin.
Remember that scene in Marise’s father’s bedroom? Remember the father’s hand? Niblo, Meredyth and Milner bring it back, late in the film, in the squalid, upstairs apartment belonging to a now very much lost and emptied out Marise. Emotionally and physically bruising, the scene replays Marise’s tender bedside moment with her father – this time as a brutal face-off. I say face-off, because, truly, it’s all in their faces – that slow, sad descent the two lovers have taken down into the dark. And things get even worse from here.
Jean’s remarks about how his beloved Marise has, “the face of an angel” is, at first, a lovely compliment. Later though, it comes back to haunt him. First, Bo-bo repeatedly mocks him for it – at one point holding up a cooked chicken wing and cruelly asking whether this was the angel he was talking about. After being separated from Marise and falling into petty thievery and drunkenness, the memory of her “angel face” becomes a faint light that glows in his mind’s eye as he roams through the unforgiving dark of the streets of Paris.
Then, suddenly, it becomes an obstacle. “The face of an angel” and all the assumptions that a phrase like that contains, pushes our Jean further away from Marise than ever before, even though, by this point in the film, the actual physical space between the two has narrowed to a thin sliver of air.
Hypocrisy is a coat that the person wearing it cannot see. Jean is appalled by Marise even though he too has fallen into a life of disrepute. Yet, the coat hangs comfortably from Jean’s shoulders. It is part of a fashion statement that the men of the world have made famous the world over. And that coat never seems to go out of style. If not for certain forces – governmental, religious, social – it would have left our closets long ago.
Throughout, “The Red Lily”, Niblo and cinematographer Victor Milner choose their shots carefully as they create memorable images that stick in the mind long after the scant 81 minutes has played itself out. Striking images abound: that opening shot of rural paradise; sunlight punching through the tall narrow windows of the mayor’s office suggesting not so much a government building as a sacred place of worship; Marise’s father’s limp hand and it’s echo further on in the film; the pretty pattern of the half washed concrete steps that Marise and another woman work on hands and knees to scrub clean; Jean hiding from the shadow of a police man; Jean’s hallucination of a younger, purer Marise while the real Marise – now a fallen woman – stands right beside him; the silhouette of Jean huddled in a tight hiding space behind a small waterfall in the sewers of Paris. Far too often you would need to enlist the help of a hundred strong search party to track down just one striking image in any given film. It’s not unusual for whole films to pass by without a single decent shot. “The Red Lily” is not one of those films.
With all this talk of images, I don’t want you to think that the Warner Brothers Archive Collection has released “The Red Lily” without a musical score – it hasn’t. Composer H. Scott Salinas has done a terrific job matching music to image. An expressive score, full of gently plucked strings and softly tapped piano keys, Salinas’ pieces soar high above the clouds when they need to and sink low into the murky depths when they have no other choice but to.
The pretty, overlapping piano runs that greet Jean and Marise when they first arrive in Paris effortlessly suggest the sweep and giddy heights of love at its most invigorating. Soon, that beautiful buzz will wear off and leave them with one hell of a hangover. But, until then, here, in the train station, on their own for the very first time, Jean and Marise get to enjoy a half moment of happiness and the music couldn’t be more fitting.
Wrapping up with a brilliant bit of action – which must have inspired a much more celebrated filmmaker and a much more celebrated film some twenty-five years later – “The Red Lily” is gripping cinema.
Through the tale of Jean and Marise, Niblo and company dig through the dirt of double standards and illuminate the sorry fates that await the vulnerable in the clutches of an unforgiving city. They touch on class prejudices and throw a dagger at the barely beating heart of modernity. Lowlife criminals rise from their subterranean status to play the hero – if only for a moment – while well respected men of means sink into selfishness and predation just when the moment begs from them a small sprinkling of warmth and decency.
Turns out, all that yelling and booming and crashing and banging that is the modern movie soundtrack is but a bundle of audio nonsense worth ditching – from time to time anyway – for the silent pleasures of wonderful films like “The Red Lily.” During the drip, drip, drip of its scant 81 minutes, images whisper and yell and coo and bark more than loud enough for our eyes to hear them.
