THE CONQUERING POWER (1921)

Quick to ride the backdraft on FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE’s phenomenal success, most of that film’s principal talent repeats only six months later for another literary adaptation (Honoré Balzac doing the honors) to merely respectable results.  But as the talents in question are director Rex Ingram, scripter June Mathis, Rudolph Valentino, Alice Terry (Mrs. Ingram), Ralph Lewis in a career best and cinematographer John Seitz*, ‘respectable results’ ain’t nothing to sneeze at.  Perhaps suffering from a rushed production schedule, the film doesn’t look forward as APOCALYPSE did, Mathis relying too heavily on title cards and letters (epistolatory cinema?), Ingram letting his cast get away with pretty old-fashioned indicative gestural acting for 1921 and too often resting on his tableau vivant staging laurels.  All the same, involving stuff, with Parisian dandy Valentino (unaware he’s suddenly penniless) visiting rich country cousin Terry, a much courted beauty suffering under the over-controlling hand of miserly father Ralph Lewis.  And if her local suitors think only of her gold & riches, Rudy’s heart beats with true love even after he goes overseas to run gold mining excavations.  (Looking quite rough & manly in the process).  But with Papa Lewis making sure these two lovebirds lose touch, they each end up assuming the other has moved on and married.  It’s only after Dad goes mad and dies, that things can be righted.  And this late story arc is where the film suddenly comes into its own, becoming worthy of Ingram’s pictorial gifts.  Especially in a hallucination sequence with Lewis accidentally imprisoned, locked in his gold counting room, attacked by phantoms of his own imagination.  A highlight rich enough to make any film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Seitz’s cinematographic enthusiasm & visual panache would later make real movie directors out of word-oriented writer/directors Preston Sturges & Billy Wilder.

DOUBLE-BILL: As Lewis’s gold fever takes its fatal turn, Ingram seems to be looking back to D.W. Griffith’s great one-reeler A CORNER IN WHEAT/’09 and forward to Erich von Stroheim’s obsessive GREED/’24, a film von Stroheim hoped Ingram could edit down to a releasable length.  He did, from Stroheim’s 42 reels down to 18 (about three hours).  Both cuts destroyed in favor of M-G-M's official 10 reel version.