“Once something is presented to us in one way it becomes very difficult to see it in any other way.” — Gabriel Josipovici
We haven’t been to the pictures since leaving Robert Aldrich in Hollywood: his incendiary Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and his Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), back in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Since then we’ve made a detailed trek across the Book of Genesis, with side trips to other biblical books and stops for Hebrew grammar, politics, holy history in the quarrelsome Middle East, mythology, and Orientalism. I hope it didn’t seem too much like a long Sunday in church or a synagogue shabbat.
Now we come to an oasis….How about a silent movie?
What? You don’t like the silents? I believe you’ll like this one. It’s an over-the-top masterpiece of the silent screen. It’s Sodom und Gomorrha. Note the different spelling. That's because this pyrotechnical extravaganza from 1922 was filmed in Austria, which accounts for the German title.
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It wasn’t until three decades after the invention of motion pictures that the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah reached the screen, a surprising fact if you recall how the new medium loved to titillate. It's less surprising, however, when you consider what a forbidden topic this suggestive, provocative story was, even in the early years of modernism. Throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, the very phrase “Sodom and Gomorrah” was code for pleasures unspeakable.
Europe was braver than the United States, for in 1922 a Hungarian director working in Vienna dared to make the very first Sodom und Gomorrha. It cost so much that to this day it remains Austria's most expensive film. Long unseen but now on DVD, the
picture's gigantism shows the influence of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and of other cinematic behemoths. Its many scenes of grim, depressive merrymaking foreshadow the later work of Erich von Stroheim and other directors whose genius exceeded their budgets.
Mihály Kertész (1886-1962), the director of Sodom und Gomorrha, came to Hollywood a few years later and, as Michael Curtiz, directed such classics as Casablanca and Mildred Pierce.
Sodom und Gomorrha opened on October 13, 1922, in Vienna, with a running time of about three hours. What remains today, however, is a restored print roughly one-half the length of the original, at ninety-five minutes. (Several slightly longer versions can be viewed on youtube, but they look muddy.) The restoration of this odd masterpiece represents a cinematic marvel, for until the 1980s only fragments were known to exist. Film scholars eventually discovered additional footage of varying lengths in Berlin, Prague, Milan, Moscow, and elsewhere. These odds and ends they edited together to reproduce a vivid impression of the whole from its surviving parts. Any statements made here, however, ultimately refer to those salvaged parts and not, of course, to the original film in its entirety. In this regard, Sodom und Gomorrha chimes with its source material, for in its dishevelment it has as many jumps and gaps as the story in Genesis 19.
As in many early silent films, a modern-day framing story wraps around the ancient legend. Sodom und Gomorrha, however, has an even more complex structure: three subsidiary stories are embedded within the main one. This scenario competes, in its convolution, with the most outlandish opera plots, and anyone viewing these cinematic remains of Sodom und Gomorrha will surely need a guide. For that reason, I include a brief synopsis.
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Although the tale is set in London (not in America, as Wikipedia reports) the buildings, streets, gardens, indeed every locale looks Viennese. In “London,” then, young Mary Conway becomes the fiancée of Jackson Harber, a wealthy, unscrupulous
capitalist more than twice her age. Earlier he was the lover of Mary’s mother, an aging flesh-peddler who forces Mary to desert her true love, the sculptor Harry Lighton. In a studio as grandiose as a museum gallery, Harry is just finishing a monumental sculpture that rises twenty feet or more. It's a likeness of Mary. Even before its unveiling, newspapers have dubbed the work “Sodom -- a Symbol of Beauty and Sin.”
Jilted, Harry attempts suicide and is rushed to hospital. Mary, devastated, hopeless, and filled with remorse, decides to give herself up to a life of sinful abandon. She joins the revels at Harber's vast estate. There Harber lives like a Teutonic Jay Gatsby in a Hapsburg palace beside the Vienna Woods. Hundreds attend his louche parties, though no one seems thrilled by the regimented choreography meant to entertain them. Countless dancers, male and female, move in stiff straight lines, then weave through the forest with arms raised like celebrants around a maypole. Eventually the dancers regroup in militaristic rows, suggesting a mix of Leni Riefenstahl and Busby Berkeley — both at career low points.
Harber's son, Edward, returns from university accompanied by his tutor, a handsome Roman Catholic priest. Mary, beginning her spiral into decadence, zooms in on young
Edward. But one man is not enough. She lures both father and son to an assignation in an outlying summerhouse on the estate. While waiting for them, she falls asleep and into a Freudian dream sequence, which takes us into the first story-within-a-story. Mary dreams that her fiancé and his son fight over her, which she finds arousing. The son stabs the father. Meanwhile, still dreaming, she vamps the priest, who denounces her sins even as lusty heat builds under his clerical robes.
Still dreaming, she denounces Edward to the police as the one who killed his father, but the priest in turn denounces her. This dream then morphs from Freudian Vienna to an Expressionist prison sequence heavily influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). When the priest, in this second dream-within-a-dream, visits her cell to comfort her before she is hanged, she tries again to seduce him. Struggling to resist her blandishments, he condemns her as “You daughter of Sodom!” This denunciation pushes her into the third dream, viz., the Sodom sequence, which runs for half an hour, or one-third of the restored film. Only at the end of her Sodom dream does Mary awaken. She returns to “London,” rushes to the hospital where she finds Harry convalescent. Their love is now undying, as befits a morality tale.
When Norma Desmond, in Sunset Boulevard, wrote the demented script of her Salome, which she imagined would return her to stardom, she surely had in mind something like the last half-hour of Sodom und Gomorrha. In place of DeMille, she might have proclaimed, “I think I'll have Curtiz direct it!” For with Sodom und Gomorrha he had filmed one of the magnificent follies of the silent screen.
In Mary Conway's third dream, she is Lot's wife. But dream becomes nightmare at the end when she turns to salt. Despite that familiar climax, this story line adheres but loosely to the biblical one. Curtiz the auteur, unlike the Genesis author, makes Lot's wife a priestess of Astarte, the Near Eastern goddess of fertility, sexuality, and war. (The ancient world knew this goddess also as Ishtar.) In this context, the word “priestess” is a euphemism; Curtiz and his script writer knew the real term was “temple prostitute.” And the director signals her true calling: she is surrounded by panting young men who pass her around like anything but a clergywoman.
When an angel arrives in Sodom, it's not the handsome boys of the town who surround Lot's house to get at the stranger. The young bloods are at frenzied worship in Astarte's temple. Rather, it's the rough-hewn older men who start a feeding frenzy. These codgers could be the Three Stooges -- or rather, the Three Thousand Stooges, for that’s the number of wizened, leathery extras who swarm the streets of Sodom to crash Lot's living room. (The spacious room’s design and ornamentation reflect Vienna Secession style.)
Meanwhile, back at the temple, young male acolytes are bearing Lot’s wife on a litter at the head of a procession, for today's feast demands general abandon, including orgies. That temple is one of the grandest movie sets ever constructed. Rising ten stories or higher, it looks as tall as an Egyptian pyramid. Teeming worshippers throng the great stairways. Others man the parapets, and battalions of soldiers on the ground
turn it into a human anthill. When revelers convey a towering statue of Astarte into the square before the temple, the grandiosity of the scene recalls Elizabeth Taylor’s triumphal entry as Cleopatra into Rome. (A friend of mine commented that it looks like the Rose Bowl parade.) Sources differ as to the number of people who worked on Sodom und Gomorrha, some claiming 3,000 and others as many as 14,000. This breathtaking sequence makes you wonder whether most of that number were extras.
The unyielding angel is brought to Astarte's temple and tied to a post for burning. Lot's wife, bejeweled and plumed like a Ziegfeld showgirl, taunts the captive: “If you're an angel, prove it to me.” She lights the fire, puffs of smoke rise up, and then — suddenly the angel, unfettered, is standing in the center of town. The crowd has vanished, and Sodom combusts. This destruction represents yet another engineering feat on the part of the filmmakers: smoke chokes the city, buildings collapse, and panicked refugees pull carts of goods through the streets — all done, of course, almost a century before the invention of CGI.
Sodom is now a war zone. Firebombing, strafing, earthquakes rip the city like flimsy fabric. The angel commands Lot to get out, but he demurs: “I'd rather die than leave Sarah, the wife I love.” (Why, one wonders, was this errant woman given the same name as Abraham’s wife. Didn’t they have a Bible on the set for reference?) Lot darts into Astarte’s burning temple, grabs his wife, rushes with her and the angel out of the city gates. In this telling, they have no daughters to slow them down.
From the angel comes a familiar warning: “Don’t look back!” But the woman disobeys. Even as she turns, her body is transformed. She is pure at last: white and svelte. Lot, in his grief, caresses her saline breasts and falls to his knees before her. Quickly, the angel leads him away. This dream ended, we are back in the prison cell with Mary and the priest. She is led struggling to the scaffold.
But that too is only a dream. Mary awakens in her summerhouse bed. “In one-half hour I lived through a frightful tragedy,” she pants via title card. The antidote is virtue. The film ends with Mary reunited in the hospital with her one true love, the sculptor.