Watch An American Tragedy For Free

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

***SPOILERS***Based on the true story of 20 year old Grace Brown who was tragically drowned-On July 11, 1906-in Big Moose Lake in upstate New York whom her lover 23 year old Chester Gillette was executed for. In the movie version-the first of two-we have clothing factory worker Roberta Alden, Sylvia Sidney, get romantically involved with her boss handsome Clyde Griffiths, Phillips Holmes. It's Clyde who after impregnates Roberta while on a date with her later falls madly in love with pretty and rich socialite Sondra Finchley, Frances Dee, finding he's stuck with no way out of the mess he got himself into.Clyde at first tried to get Roberta to have the couples soon to be born child aborted which in him being deeply religious is against all the principles that he was brought up by his bible thumping mom Mrs. Asa Griffiths, Lucille La Veme, with. Conflicted in just what to do Clyde decides to take Roberta out to the country for the weekend and plan what to do next. Out rowing on the middle of Big Moose Lake things go terribly wrong with Roberta, who can't swim, slipping as Clyde is about to take her picture and falling into the water and drowning herself. That's with Clyde in a panic taking off and swinging back to shore some 500 feet away when he was just a few feet away where Roberta ended up drowning.Arreated and tried for the murder of Roberta Alden Clyde gets no sympathy from anyone not even his defense attorney Mr. Belknap, Emmett Corrigan, in how cowardly he acted in letting Roberta drown without lifting a finger to save her. The verdict is a forgone conclusion with Clyde convicted of 1st degree murder and sent to Sing Sing to be executed. What we find out is that despite being a coward and two timing heel Clyde in fact, in his own words, didn't really murder Roberta but in being more interested in saving his own neck made no attempt to save her. Told by his mom to take it-his punishment-lake a man Clyde for the first and only time in his life accepts responsibility for his actions: Which in his case was not murder but leaving the scene of an accident and bravely goes to his fate in the state electric chair. P.S Remade 20 years later in 1951 as "A Place in the Sun" together with Montgromery Cliff and Elizabeth Taylor as George Eastman & Angela Vickers as the star stuck lovers with Shelly Winters as the tragic left out on the cold or at the bottom of Big Moose Lake Alice Tripp or the Roberta Alden character in the 1931 original.

Josef von Sternberg brings an uncompromising quality to Theodore Dreiser's most American of novels. The drowning scene is appropriately ambiguous. The unusual upbringing of Clyde Griffiths, whose name is even changed in the remake to something supposedly less mundane, is also more faithful to the novel, delineating the mother-son relationship in detail. George Stevens' remake, A Place in the Sun, is highly romanticized, which is seriously at odds with the naturalistic character of the novel.Lee Garmes' shimmering photography is a perfect example of chiaroscuro. The opening credits immediately establish the water motif that is to figure so prominently later in the story.Phillips Holmes excels at portraying his character's ambition as he climbs the social ladder. He goes beyond portraying your typical "weak youth" and suggests an attachment disorder that is all the more disturbing to see because not even a modern film has gone into this psychological territory. Although her role is short, Frances Dee is infinitely better than Elizabeth Taylor in the remake. As the put-upon character, Shelley Winters overplays her pathetic qualities in the Stevens version and is more irritating than Sylvia Sidney. As terrible as it sounds, Winters almost explains her boyfriend's decision to drown her. But that's hardly the point of the event.The courtroom scene has been criticized for being overacted, but it convincingly depicts Holmes' total loss of control as his attorney (Charles Middleton) concocts a bogus excuse for the drowning. And I wouldn't give up Middleton's flamboyant performance for anything!If you want a more faithful adaptation of Dreiser's novel - and a more complex if less slick movie than the remake - von Sternberg's film is the one to see.

Originally this adapation of the Dreiser novel was planned by Sergei Eisenstein, during the Hollywood jaunt that also led to Que Viva Mexico, and his version might have been a cracked masterpiece-- one can imagine him getting all kind of details about the American scene ludicrously wrong, but finding a real connection between Dreiser's depiction of a weak youth whose desire for wealth and comfort sends him on an assembly line to murder, and Eisenstein's own mechanistic editing style and view of capitalism's destructiveness.Von Sternberg, on the other hand, was the master of knowing sexual politics and intrigue, at his best with characters whose illusions had been left behind many beds ago. Given a Classics Illustrated-level cutdown of the book, and a stiff (if straight out of an Arrow shirt ad) leading man in Phillips Holmes, there's little for him to get hold of here, except for a few scenes in which Sylvia Sidney manages to convey the poignance of a poor girl in a bad spot, losing her boy and helpless to prevent it. There are some reasonably effective scenes between Holmes and Sidney, some nice chiaroscuro from Lee Garmes (though alas, even UCLA's restoration does not look as good as the clips I saw at Cinesation in the 1932 Paramount promo film The House That Shadows Built), and the courtroom scenes, though way over the top (not helped by Irving Pichel's too-perfect E- Nun-Cee-I-A-Shun), are dramatic-- it's fun seeing him defended by Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton, in that inimitable voice. But you can't really say it works, or does Dreiser justice-- and I'm not sure any movie could. The problem with Dreiser's passive characters is that on screen their plights may be involving, but they aren't; we don't get the interior life that the novel gives us, we just see the story of an ineffectual sap making a couple of bad mistakes and getting ground to dust by the wheels of modern society. James Cain's crime novels took the Dreiser- style story and put guilt and cunning back into the main characters' makeup, so they have things to do on screen-- and they know WHY they're doomed. Seeing Sternberg fail to find anything interesting enough to work with here makes you wish Eisenstein had made this film, and Sternberg had had the chance to sink his teeth into The Postman Always Rings Twice or Serenade.

This film, based on the great Theodore Dreiser novel, is not really available in many video stores or libraries most likely due to its age and lack of popularity. However, the film does parallel the book somewhat in that the characters all have the same names, but it is difficult to comprise an over 800 page book into a film. "An American Tragedy" was also later adapted into "A Place in the Sun," which has become more recognized because it stars Elizabeth Taylor. However, though this film takes its basis from Dreiser's novel, its character names have all been altered. If you really want to learn about this great story (which is actually based on a 1906 murder case), then read Dreiser's book because his writing and plot are amazing and no film is capable of adapting it.