ETERNAL LOVE (1929)

With the exception of cinematographer Oliver Marsh, just about everyone involved on this heavy-weight production bid adieu to silent cinema after this underwhelming romantic folly.  While better than its rep, no one could have been happy; especially director Ernst Lubitsch, quickly substituting this frigid, fatalistic idyll (lovers forced to marry their second choice, run off to die as one in a snowy avalanche - that’s the plot!) after producer Joseph Schenck (at United Artists) sold off the play Lubitsch thought he’d signed on for.  (Ernst in the midst of leaving Warners for Paramount via a series of masterpieces everywhere but here.*)  John Barrymore, clean-shaven to look his youngest, is the independent mountain man living rough in The Alps, longing for the beauteous Camilla Horn, settling for debuting Mona Rico, the latter styled to look just like Clara Bow.  While Horn (best known for F.W. Murnau’s FAUST/’26) weds love-struck, class-appropriate, boringly conventional Victor Varconi.  Lubitsch, shooting in rugged locations for the first time since LOVES OF PHARAOH/’22 (as hot as this is cold), makes sure it’s handsomely caught, using floods of mass movement thru the village and more late-silent camera moves & ‘push-ins’ than was his wont.  (Neatly handled ‘matching’ studio Alpine exteriors, too.)  All to little avail.  How typical of Hollywood that the far tastier sounding preceding pic, THE PATRIOT with Emil Jannings, a spectacular historical, his first at Paramount, is now lost.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Masterpieces as in SO THIS IS PARIS/’26 (Warners); THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG/’26 (M-G-M); THE PATRIOT/’28 (Paramount-now lost); then right after this, inventing the screen musical with THE LOVE PARADE/’29 (Paramount). https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-student-prince-in-old-heidelberg.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note the even squarer than usual frame ratio of 1.1:1 thanks to the synch music & effects soundtrack added on the left-hand side of the film strip in post-production.