Ray C. Smallwood | Camille / 1921

the set

by Douglas Messerli

 

June Mathis (scenario, based on the novel La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils), Ray C. Smallwood (director) Camille / 1921

 

I am sure that many people watching Alla Nazimova perform Camille in the silent film from 1921 today might describe her method of acting, as Geoff Andrew did in Time Out, as consisting of “hammy histrionics” and perceive the film in general as “all Style and no substance.” Her acting, after all, was honed on the melodramatic methods of late 19th century theatrics. But if you can momentarily wipe out the idea that “acting” has in fact to be realistically motivated, which Hollywood and US theater directors have taught it must be for more than century after her performance, one might rather describe her art as being arrestingly expressionistic and Natacha Rambova’s art deco-influenced sets of this film and Nazimova’s Salomé of two years later as a wonderful exploration of American film into the territory so brilliantly explored by Robert Weine, F. W. Murnau, and G. W. Pabst in post-World War I European theater and film in which story is not revealed so much through action as it is in tableaux.

    If nothing else, the frizzy-haired statuesque Lady of the Camélias who at the Paris Opera appears more as Klimt figure than a 20s flapper, draws our attention away from all others just as she does for Gaston Rieux (Rex Cherryman) and the young man who has just come to Paris from the provinces, Armand Duval (Rudolph Valentino). Despite the fact that previous to Gaston’s quick introduction of Armand to the golden-swathed beauty, this Marguerite has already sold herself to the devil in the form of the Count de Varville (Arthur Hoyt), it ends in an invitation to Armand and Gaston to her after-opera party.

   There we realize that even she has been locked up, not in Varville’s arms, but in a splendidly moderne vision of the future in which all of life has been subsumed into play and pleasure, including her own body. Her partying guests, who campily move themselves and the apartment’s furniture from room to room in a moveable feast as if somehow attached to the very contents of conspicuous wealth, could care less about Marguerite’s “illness,” yet are perfectly ready to help to keep her away from the lurid embracement of the Count, caught up, as they are they all in a world of sparkling conversation, drunken dancing, and late-night dining.  In this world there is literally no room for an unexpected guest such as Gaston, who is made to sit on a pillow on the floor, or the new boy in town Armand, who for that very reason is asked to share Madame Gautier’s seat at the table.

      Despite Andrew’s description of Valentino’s “impressive performance,” accordingly, I suggest that even his gentle beauty is washed out in the shallow focus of his good-boy antics in the midst of the constantly-in-motion “company,” who sometimes even look like are performing in a Stephen Sondheim musical comedy.

     Gaston in this early party scene and throughout the film appears almost as lovely as his “boyfriend” and as displaced, particularly when he clumsily intercedes on what appears to be a quick lesbian liaison between Marguerite and her former dressmaking friend, Nichette (Patsy Ruth Miller) who pays an unexplained quick visit to her female friend. The two are able to get in only a couple of quick kisses before Gaston intrudes, seemingly to drunkenly accost the new visitor before Marguerite demonstrates the special place Nichette has in her heart when she almost violently declares that he is not even worthy of addressing the young girl let alone touching her shoulder. Gaston, perhaps the truly nicest male figure in this movie, apologizes, properly kissing her hand in greeting and in that very moment falling as deeply in love as it is clear is Marguerite with the socially lowest figure in the entire work.

      What Armand perceives about Marguerite that the others will not is that her illness is serious and not a ruse, and demonstrating to her that unlike the others he truly cares for her well-being he finds a way to court her that all the jewels of the Count and the flattering of her friends do not achieve, permitting him entry into her igloo-shaped, glass-enclosed bedroom chamber, a room from which the Count, in particular, excluded.

     For the next third of the film, we see Armand delightfully court her in the open air of parks and orchards, offering her up gifts of serious literature such as Manon Lescaut, a story also about social standing, sacrifice, prostitution, and death. But even here, Valentino’s truly subdued performance compared with Nazimova’s enchantment and returned health often push the Latin lover out of frame, and at moments his friend Gaston, now planning to marry Nichette, looks every bit as pretty as Valentino.

      Despite the boy’s good intentions, in fact, we recognize that he is still a rube when it comes to comprehending how Paris society functions. Immersed in his law studies and offering her no financial support, Armand does not even realize that Marguerite cannot now pay for her previously lavish life, nor can he imagine that society never forgives what it imagines to be a digression, society in this case appearing in the form of Armand’s own father who in trying marry off the boy’s sister must obtain the promise from Marguerite that she never see his son again.

 

      Marguerite, who has all along seen herself as simply another acquisition, believes that she has no other choice, returning to the Count and the world she had abandoned. That the dumb Armand sees her abandonment of their love simply as a moral flaw, as a kind of recidivism the way a criminal returns to crime or an alcoholic cannot give up her liquor, demonstrates his own shallowness as a human being. Even imagining that by taking up gambling and women such as Olympe (Conseulo Flowerton) he might grab her attention and bring her back to sobriety reveals that he is far more consumed by social piety than he is by love. It is not surprising, accordingly, that even his mentor/creator June Mathis drops him from the script after Valentino’s encounter with Marguerite at the Casino. In La Traviata, if you recall, Alfredo does return to Violetta just before her death. But here, the movie is perhaps happily rid of him.

      Certainly, Nazimova was happy to be alone, just as I presume later Garbo was in her 1936 version of the tale so the camera might focus endlessly upon her face. Here director Ray Smallwood’s camera, which as critics agree, has not a single notion of how to move, settling down instead on Nazimova’s long deathbed scene as she fetishizes yet one more object, the book of Manon Lescaut, perhaps the only jewel remaining of her entire career.

      Oddly, it is Gaston and Nichette who attend to her last moments coming to her directly after their marriage. Just after the officials have counted up every franc of her remaining belongings, they alone—presumably along with a few of us sentimentalists—shed tears for the great beauty.

      If, as I describe it below, Valentino’s film Monsieur Beaucaire is all about the costumes, Camille is all about its “set” in every meaning of that word, from the backdrop to the predetermined mode of societal behavior which dominates most of the cinema’s characters who make up Marguerite’s social set.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).