When anybody first arrives in Hollywood he is automatically the white-haired boy. Everything is laid out for him, and he is told, ‘Don’t hurry, just take your time, sit down, absorb everything, enjoy the fleshpots, be entertained, meet all these wonderful people.’
On May 8, 1930, Eisenstein and Tisse sailed for New York on the Europa which ‘carried us across the benign serenity of the Atlantic Ocean like a magic carpet.’1 (Alexandrov, who was completing Romance Sentimentale, followed a short while later.) While on board, Eisenstein received a cable from George Bernard Shaw giving him permission to film Arms and the Man ‘on condition that the entire text be altered not one jot.’ A condition which Eisenstein would have been glad to accept, as Shaw had never yet sold anyone the right to film one of his works.
Eisenstein’s arrival in New York was welcomed by a fanfare of studio publicity, as well as an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic campaign to have him deported. ‘This internationally notorious communist agitator is now here, undoubtedly preparing to let loose upon America more of that destruction which has flooded the rivers of Bolshevik Russia with the blood of the murdered. And that aims at shedding more blood throughout the world wherever communism can plant its agents,’ was how one Hollywood journalist expressed it.
Major Frank Pease, self-styled ‘professional American patriot’, led the campaign against Eisenstein’s presence in America, denouncing him as part of a ‘Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to turn the American cinema into a Communist cesspool. Why allow Eisenstein in, this red dog and sadist?’ At Major Pease’s instigation, the Fish Committee, the forerunner of the post-war UnAmerican Activities Committee, visited Hollywood later in the year in order to investigate Communist infiltration of American cinema.
Eisenstein, secure in the backing of his liberal and left-wing friends and supporters in America, and feeling confident that his Paramount contract would act as a safeguard, took the attacks with a certain amount of equanimity.
‘Almost since my actual entry into the USA, the reactionary press and particularly the Fascist-orientated movement of “shirt-wearers” under Major Pease, had raised a maddening howl against my invitation, and demanded that I be removed from the American continent. Apparently, my visit was “more terrible than the landing of a thousand armed men.”’2
Because of Jesse Lasky’s insistence that ‘We have a reputation to keep up you and I,’ Eisenstein was booked in at the Savoy Palace. Although he enjoyed the noisy vigour of New York, he found difficulty in memorising the streets of Manhattan, ‘because of their unfamiliar designation by numbers, which, in contrast with names, conjured up for me no pictorial associations … To produce these images, I had to fix in my memory a set of objects characteristic of one or another street, a set of objects aroused in my consciousness in answer to the signal “Forty-Second” and quite distinct from those aroused by the signal “Forty-Fifth.”’3 This not only illustrated how Eisenstein’s mind worked, but was another demonstration of the way montage was ‘the associative chain between a certain depiction and the image which it should evoke in our minds … a chain of intermediate depictions which coalesce into an image.’4
The day after arriving in New York, Eisenstein was whisked off by special train to give a lecture to Paramount licensees at a convention in Atlantic City, one of the most ‘terrifying’ he ever gave. ‘You’ll need to make a presentation to the people who’ll be selling your films in the future.’ Lasky informed him. ‘Personal impressions count for a great deal … Just don’t be too serious … On the whole Americans like their lectures to be funny.’5
Eisenstein remembered little of the speech, only that it seemed a success because as he descended the platform he felt a heavy slap on the back – ‘the highest sign of affection from the natives, delivered by the towering, thin figure of Sam Katz, the head of world film distribution for Paramount-Publix as it then was. “I don’t know what sort of director you are (this was a typical remark from the trade division of large companies!) but I could use you as a salesman right away!” There could be no higher praise.’6
Back in New York, he had lunch with Otto H. Kahn, the millionaire and financial director of Paramount, at his Italianate palazzo on Fifth Avenue. Kahn pointed out a portrait of a bearded man above the fireplace. ‘Recognise the brushwork?’ he asked Eisenstein, who replied he did not. ‘Only a Jew can paint a face with such subtlety,’ he proudly exclaimed, adding, as if as an afterthought, ‘Rembrandt’.7
Also present at the lunch was Kahn’s daughter and Horace B. Liveright, the publisher who had promoted the careers of younger writers, including Theodore Dreiser, and had produced a stage version of An American Tragedy in 1926, another subject Eisenstein was already considering filming. Just as artichokes were being served, a vegetable with which Eisenstein was unfamiliar, he was called to the phone. It was Alexandrov phoning from Ellis Island. He had just arrived on the Ile de France but there was something amiss with his visa, and he was not allowed ashore. Eisenstein promised to sort matters out for his friend immediately after lunch (which he did). When he returned to the table, he found the others had finished their artichokes and were now ‘waiting to see how this Russian barbarian would extricate himself from this difficult situation. My embarrassment derived from not knowing how to eat this strange vegetable, whose leaves form a cupola and end in a small spike that sticks maliciously upwards … To make matters worse, there was an endless array of countless forks and smaller forks, spoons and teaspoons, knives, breadknives and smaller knives still!’8
The next day, Eisenstein attended a prestige luncheon at the Astor Hotel where he was to meet the press. Arriving with three days growth of stubble on his chin and a worker’s cloth cap on his head, he astounded the conformist audience with sarcastic remarks. ‘I think you picture all Russians with beards. I didn’t want to disappoint you.’ He then announced that he had come to make ‘a truly American film’.9
Already at the back of his mind was the possibility of filming Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, something that may have prompted him to go ‘up river’ to visit Sing-Sing, where the novel’s hero, Clyde Griffiths, is sent to the electric chair. The memory of the details of the execution room reappeared in his screenplay for An American Tragedy.
‘I had the honour to sit in the electric chair, only, of course, after I had made sure it was disconnected. A monstrous experience! But the most depressing sensation was evoked by various details near the chair. Beside it, for example stood a spittoon. Gleaming, brightly polished, the sort you usually find beside you at the dentist’s … There was nothing fantastic about the place, no freakish lights or shadows such as people love to show in films … It’s just this primitive practicality that is so sinister.’10
It was in the lobby of the Astor Hotel, D.W. Griffith’s home for many years, that Eisenstein’s first meeting with ‘the Great Old Man of all of us’ took place. Griffith, the ‘old man’, was only fifty-five but drink, poor health, and the ‘nightmare of the mind and nerves’ – his description of the recent making of his penultimate film and first talkie, Abraham Lincoln – had aged him far beyond his years. (Griffith and Eisenstein were to die in the same year, the younger man preceding the older by six months.) Griffith gave Eisenstein the customary litany of his woes – especially his battles to finance his films, a situation the Russian had yet to experience. At the time Griffith was cultivating a rich widow, among others, who would put money into his next and last film, The Struggle, an adaptation of Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir (The Drunkard), updated and relocated to 1920s New York.
Eisenstein also renewed his acquaintance with Douglas Fairbanks, who took him to a speakeasy and informed him that both his marriage to Mary Pickford and his career were reaching breaking point. For Eisenstein, just arrived in the New World, certainly a new world to him, with Hollywood expectantly awaiting his arrival, he could only feel that he was ascending as his idols were descending.
Aside from film people, Eisenstein was feted by the academic community: the philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University; while at Harvard, where he spoke about the new possibilities of presenting abstract ideas through film, he was the guest of Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, grandson of the poet. Dana’s house had previously belonged to his grandfather, and had earlier been George Washington’s residence during the War of Independence. This prompted Eisenstein to express a desire to make a film about American history centred on this house. He might have had in mind one of his favourite short stories, Ambrose Bierce’s The Affair at Coulter’s Notch, which had had some influence on the battle scenes in Alexander Nevsky.
At a luncheon given at the Hotel Vendôme in Boston, ‘Harry’ Dana was among the assembled company of the wise and the wealthy, which included such illustrious society names as Mrs Ralph Adams Cram, Mrs Felix Frankfurter, Mrs Cornelia Stratton Parker and Courtney Crocker. The famous canine star Rin-Tin-Tin trotted over from the Keith Albee Theatre to greet Eisenstein, with whom he was photographed. Man and dog are seen on a sofa staring bemusedly into each other’s eyes as if to gain mastery. On the back of the photograph he sent to Pera Attasheva he wrote, ‘Red dog meets Hollywood movie star.’11 He then answered approximately a hundred questions about Russia, Russian movies, and the Russian soul.
The Boston Herald of May 27 reported: ‘Mr Eisenstein … is a young man apparently in his early 30s. His hair is light brown and bushy, receding slightly from his temples. He spoke fluently and well, taking the occasion a little less seriously than his hosts … He seemed, likewise, less worried than his hosts about the possible effect of Hollywood on his art … He is confident that an “artistic success” can be a commercial success – even in the movies – if the subject is wisely chosen. He does not know just what he will do here; that is, he says, a Paramount business secret. He has had no experience with sound pictures, but he does not fear the new technique; his four years with the legitimate stage plus his six years with the movies are enough training, so he thinks, for his direction of the talkies.
“You destroy illusions about Russia,” one woman told him.
“Illusions ought always to be destroyed,” he said. “The truth is better.” What director does he think is best in America? “The man who directs the Mickey Mouse films, animated cartoons with sound. Eisenstein likes them …”’
With Alexandrov and Tisse, he finally left New York for Hollywood, having meantime enjoyed a spending spree, buying clothes and the best film equipment available. The journey west was broken in Chicago, where the trio spent some days exploring the city, including its Mexican slums and black ghetto. In a cafeteria one day, Eisenstein suddenly pretended to be a waiter, serving an imaginary customer at an empty table with appropriate Chaplinesque flourishes and gestures, even down to leaving himself a ten cent tip.
In Los Angeles, Ivor Montagu had rented a Spanish-style villa at 9481 Readcrest Drive in Coldwater Canyon. It came complete with the requisite swimming pool, a well-used De Soto car and a black cook. The three Russians enjoyed a completely new way of life in the ‘incomparably picturesque’ Californian surroundings. ‘We bathed, played tennis, saw the sights, and made more friends,’ Eisenstein recalled.12
Paramount required him to attend innumerable meetings, banquets and other social occasions, where, in the studio’s eyes, he committed several social blunders. At a banquet given by a multi-millionaire he offered to change places with the butler on the grounds that he disliked being waited on.
Eisenstein found J.G. Bachman, one of Paramount’s supervisors and associate producers, ‘a kind man and a specialist in “Europeans”. When a picture is being made, the supervisor has to work like stink; when it is ready for release, he worries himself sick that the film will bring in less money than was budgeted.’13 Bachman was desperately worried at the time about Playboy in Paris, directed by German-born Ludwig Berger and starring Maurice Chevalier, which flopped, and resulted in Berger returning to Europe soon after.
Eisenstein met Greta Garbo at Ludwig Berger’s house. He had first been introduced to the Swedish star, who had just made her sound debut in Anna Christie, through Salka Viertel (née Steuermann), the bisexual Polish-born actress and writer and former manager of Garbo for whom she had co-written a number of screenplays. Eisenstein remembered Garbo sprawled across a billiard table talking intimately to her friend Friedrich Murnau.
‘I called her Garbelle (by analogy with beau-bel, Gar-beau, Garbel). She called me Eisenbahn (railway in German) … She never permitted anyone to see her while she was being filmed in the studio, because she acted – brilliantly! – purely by intuition without any formal training. And as is known, intuition is not wholly reliable … For Garbo, acting was a hard way of making a living.’14
He also watched Marlene Dietrich being directed by Josef von Sternberg on a set at Paramount in Morocco, her first American film. ‘There was deathly silence. A crowd scene: a packed Moroccan café and not a sound. Sternberg was on a platform wearing a black velvet jacket. A hand supported his head. He was thinking. Everyone was silent, holding their breath … ten minutes … fifteen. It didn’t work.’ Eisenstein also observed that Sternberg was not accepted into the higher circle of Hollywood society. ‘He tried to humble “this Hollywood” by a Europeanism. He collected leftist art. But it was not quite the thing. The names weren’t “right”, the pictures were of the wrong periods … He was short, greying with a slightly artistic haircut. He sported a greyish moustache which drooped unevenly on either side. He had a passion for jackets and short, square cut coats.’15
Of Sternberg, Chaplin remarked to Eisenstein, ‘I’ve never met a more disagreeable layabout in all my life.’ Sternberg was much more generous to Eisenstein in his memoirs. ‘We had met in Berlin while I was at work on The Blue Angel and we became good friends … Eisenstein was a fluidly expressive commentator, and we frequently discussed all our common interests. He barred none, not even one of such potential danger to him as the subject of government control of the arts. When I asked him how his country rewarded good films he told me jokingly, though he might well have been serious, that when a director made a good film in Russia he was rewarded by having a window added to his room and if a film was bad he was shot for treason. I enquired as to the numbers of windows in his room and he answered, one. We discussed modern painting and related subjects (to commemorate our first meeting he had given me a book by Malevich on his abstract work) … He always had pencil and paper with him and his sketches showed extraordinary talent. The sketches he made in my presence were probably destroyed for they could have been shown in only a very understanding circle. Had he lived longer he may have given them to Professor Kinsey.’16
When visiting the Paramount studio, Eisenstein also watched the filming of Tom Sawyer, starring sixteen-year-old Jackie Coogan, ‘an overgrown lad [who] had long since lost the unique charm of the “kid” … I cannot imagine Tom round-faced, brown-eyed, plump and well fed.’17 Of course, Eisenstein remembered the six-year-old Coogan from Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), elements of whose performance he had imposed on the hungry blond child in The Strike.
It was (and is) customary for European intellectuals in Hollywood to take a lofty view of its film celebrities, and Eisenstein found most of them ‘stupid and mediocre’. Apparently he received this message, sent to Paramount, from Samuel Goldwyn: ‘Please tell Mr Eisenstein that I have seen his film Potemkin and admire it very much. What we should like would be for him to do something of the same kind, but rather cheaper, for Ronald Colman.’ Eisenstein described Jean Harlow as ‘the platinum beauty queen, full of airs, gracing the marble surround of the Ambassador Hotel’s sky-blue bathing pool.’18
He wrote to Léon Moussinac that ‘on the intellectual level Hollywood is in the same class as Soissons or Brive.’19 However, neither Soissons nor Brive could have boasted the number of extraordinary people that Eisenstein met, admired and liked in Hollywood. There is a photograph that he sent to Pera Attasheva in September 1930 with the inscription (in English), ‘To my best friend in the USSR together with my best friend in the USA.’20 The photograph was of himself, smiling at the camera, one hand on his hip and the other holding the four-fingered hand of a small model of Mickey Mouse. It must be remembered that this meeting took place when Mickey was only two years old, and Walt Disney was some years away from working in colour and making his first feature. What fascinated Eisenstein, who adored Disney’s work throughout his life (although he later had certain qualms about his colour films) was the way Disney used sound, a subject uppermost in his mind.
‘Disney’s most interesting – most valuable – contribution has been his skill at superimposing the “drawing” of a melody on top of a graphic drawing … He has an incomparable feel for an into-national gesture in music, and he can weave this gesture into the outline of his figures. Disney is a genius at doing this. No one can do this apart from him.’21 It was Disney’s ability to match these ‘gestures’ that he and Prokofiev attempted to emulate in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.
It was not with Eisenstein that the American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the 1970s, suggested a parallel with Disney, but with Leni Riefenstahl, seeing ‘a dream of perfection and simplicity which makes every detail on the screen an expressive part of a continuous animistic whole, implicitly turning the entire cosmos into a single idea … a particularly aesthetic attitude that is usually open to ideology because of its childlike innocence and its predilection for primal myths of unity and perfection.’22 Rosenbaum’s comparison could be applied to much of Eisenstein’s work, particularly The General Line and Bezhin Meadow.
As late as 1946, Eisenstein noted Disney ‘as an example of the art of absolute influence – absolute appeal for each and everyone, and hence a particularly rich treasure trove of the most basic means of influence.’23 In the same year, in an essay called How I Learned to Draw, he wrote: ‘I have always liked Disney and his heroes, from Mickey Mouse to Willie the Whale [Make Mine Music, 1946]. Because of their moving figures – again animals and again linear. The best examples had neither shading nor depth (similar to early Chinese and Japanese art) and were made up of outlines that really did move.’24
Eisenstein and the twenty-nine-year-old Disney seemed to have got on well, and they corresponded for some time afterwards. (There is another photo taken at the same time, with Eisenstein standing, his arm around Disney’s shoulders, staring down at the figure of Mickey Mouse.) Eisenstein did not live long enough to discover that Disney later became an anti-Semitic, racist, union-bashing, anti-Communist right-winger.
Eisenstein also met another idol, Mack Sennett, the ‘King of Comedy’, whose rapid, irreverent, crazy slapstick comedy influenced many of the early Soviet comedies such as Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and Pudovkin’s Chess Fever as well as, to a certain extent, The Strike. Sennett was then struggling to come to terms with sound.
Eisenstein had seen King Vidor’s The Crowd in New York and was intrigued by some of the technical devices used in it. Vidor, who showed him round MGM studios and several of the location sites, recalled, ‘I remember his particular interest in what I can best describe as the first use of the “zoom”, though it was really nothing of the kind but a camera that could move forward and descend at the same time. He was also intrigued by another device we were using, which allowed us to take travelling shots up the side of a tall building. It was very soon clear to me that he and I, despite our national and political differences, really spoke the same language.’25
Eisenstein, accompanied by Alexandrov and Tisse, went to dinner with Vidor, and after the meal they screened The General Line, with Tisse working the projector. As Vidor told it, ‘He got along fine until the third or fourth reel at which point Eisenstein jumped up, went to the booth, and told him that he had put on the wrong reel. Tisse quietly assured him that he had done nothing of the kind, and that the reel was undoubtedly the correct one. So they stopped the film altogether, came back into the room and began to argue about whether it was the right reel or the wrong one. So here was one of the greatest directors in the world disagreeing with one of the greatest cameramen the cinema has ever known, about the order of reels of a film they had both made together. I can no longer remember which of them was right … I believe that story to have an important moral for film directors. It proves that film has its own form, and that this form, is so dynamic that it has no need of a First Act, a Second Act, or a Third Act. You don’t have to follow the traditional forms of the theatre or the novel, because the form you are working in is an art form in its own right. Which is why Eisenstein could argue in all seriousness about the correct reel being on or not being on. In a play, or at any rate in the conventional plays of the 1930s, you soon got lost if you skipped from Scene 2 to Scene 5. You also knew it soon enough if you began a novel with Chapter 6 and then went back to Chapter 1 … Eisenstein and I shared a faith in the unique and dynamic power of the camera and the cutting-room.’26
Above all, there was Charles Chaplin. ‘Of course, Chaplin is the most interesting person in Hollywood,’ Eisenstein wrote.27 Eisenstein was invited to United Artists by Douglas Fairbanks where he was shown Fairbanks’ gigantic office, with his own personal Turkish bath adjoining it.
‘Sitting on a crimson pouffe in the middle was “The Thief of Bagdad” himself, surrounded by what looked like ancient Rome: the monumental pink body of Joseph Schenck, the President of United Artists, draped in a sheet.’ In came Chaplin, who greeted Eisenstein in broken Russian. ‘Gaida, troika, sneg pushistyi … (Hey there, troika, snow’s like powder …’) Schenck commented, ‘Charlie and Pola Negri were close for a year, so he reckons his Russian’s fluent.’28
Despite vast differences in background, upbringing and culture, Chaplin and Eisenstein had much in common – not only in their shared taste for clowning and the type of comedy they responded to, but also in their intrinsically melancholy natures. Of course, Eisenstein valued Chaplin’s art highly.29
‘What makes Chaplin so remarkable? What puts Chaplin above all the poetics of comic film? Chaplin’s profound lyricism. The fact that each of his films makes you shed, at a certain point, tears of genuine, warm humanity. Chaplin is a queer fish. An adult who behaves like a child.’
Chaplin took the Russian trio on a three-day trip on his yacht to Catalina Island, ‘surrounded by sea lions, flying fish and underwater gardens, which you could look at through the glass hull of special steamboats.’ It was on this trip that Chaplin confessed that he disliked children. Eisenstein commented, ‘The director of The Kid, which made five-sixths of the world weep at the fate of an abandoned child, does not like children. He must be a monster! But who does not like children normally? Only … children themselves.’30
The Russians would also play tennis at Chaplin’s mansion in Beverly Hills. ‘They used to play very bad tennis on my court,’ wrote Chaplin. ‘At least, Alexandrov did … Even Sergei Mikhailovich, who bought ducks and tried pursuing the ball with a sort of savage spite, spoiled it all by wearing braces and scarlet ones at that, as well as a belt for security. When I told him this was improper he was downcast, but reassured when I added that braces for tennis were a practice of the late Lord Birkenhead … Discussing Communism with Eisenstein one day, I asked if he thought the educated proletariat was mentally equal to the aristocrat with his generations of cultural background. I think he was surprised at my ignorance. Eisenstein said, “If educated, the cerebral strength of the masses is like rich, new soil.”’31
Eisenstein described ‘a terrible evening’ spent at Chaplin’s home. Apart from the three Russians, there were also two Spaniards – Luis Buñuel and the writer Eduardo Ugarto – and Ivor Montagu. The Spaniards were communicated with in sign language until it was discovered that Buñuel spoke fluent French. ‘Chaplin was trying his best to keep his end up in a highbrow English conversation. Then he started clowning around. That day he was especially animated and mischievous … When you are with him he is not still for one moment … One moment he dances to the radio, parodying oriental dances. And the next he impersonates the King of Siam, whose nose would barely reach the table top … Chaplin is afraid of solitude. He grabbed his guests. He was like a child scared of being alone in the dark. He asked us to stay to dinner.’
The evening turned into a melancholy occasion, with Chaplin reminiscing about his bitter marriage and divorce from Lita Grey, and his love for Marion Davies, ‘his one and only real, long-lasting love.’ But Marion belonged to William Randolph Hearst, who did everything he could to crush Charlie.
‘Chaplin slid off his chair. Ran upstairs. We waited a little while. Then we left. We didn’t see Chaplin again that evening. We saw him then as few people see him. Pale, suffering, his face crumpled. He remembered a lot that was difficult and painful. But it takes even more pain and hardship to forget about something …’
Eisenstein ends this heartfelt empathetic anecdote (written in the twilight of his life in June 1946) by adding, in parenthesis, ‘Now around me is the dazzling gold of the midday sun. Yet I am burdened by melancholy. We all have our Marion Davieses …’32
If we take this literally to mean that Eisenstein, too, was in love with someone he could not possess, then we can only speculate as to who that was. In two fragments written in 1946, which he admitted were meant to ‘fictionalise one’s tragic romantic experience,’ he expressed this experience obliquely through the means of a fairy story entitled The Little Princess and the Great Cathedral Builder Who Swallowed His Tongue. The only clues given are that The Little Princess was a millionaire’s daughter (‘a dollar princess’), who might have been called Catherine (or another form of that name) and the Great Cathedral Builder was Eisenstein himself.
‘Once upon a time there lived the richest little princess in the world. Never married, afraid, and so she whored around … On the other end of the great big world there lived the famous Cathedral Builder, who had swallowed his tongue and talked through the edifices he built. At high table were the greatest Grands of the world at that time … Earl Venceslas with his fair-haired spouse – Pearl of the East … Then the Princess asked him to deliver her of a drunken beastly baron trying to seduce her by his love proposals … When somebody looked at him [the architect], he thought they looked at his cathedrals [films]. When somebody looked at her, she thought they were hunting for her millions. So he ran to her and wanted to tell her – sister, don’t we suffer of the same? And shouldn’t we go together? … But never, never could he get in touch with her. Fate was against them …’
Eisenstein remarked that ‘this meeting quite unexpectedly opened my eyes to the cause of the age-long trauma of the ugly duckling … And it certainly went a little way to overcoming this trauma.’33 Many have tried to decipher this fairy story, which bears a resemblance to the one that Count Danilo sings about in Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, though few have succeeded.
Naum Kleiman suggests that Earl Venceslas was the foreign minister Wenceslas Molotov, who had a fair-haired wife, though Pearl is the name of Eisenstein’s own wife, Pera. As Eisenstein was often invited to official receptions given by the Molotovs during 1944 and 1945, Kleiman feels that he might have fallen for someone at their house, perhaps a maid.34 Because Eisenstein went to such extremes to bury his secret in the story, it seems more likely to have been a far more hopeless and forbidden love.
While enjoying the social life of Hollywood, and living in comfort in the pleasant house in Coldwater Canyon, a subject for a film that would be acceptable to Paramount had to be found. Though Eisenstein still harboured a desire to film Das Kapital and felt that an American experience was necessary to the understanding of its subject, he knew it was obviously not suitable for an American studio. The fact that he was still thinking about it, and about Joyce’s Ulysses, shows how far his preoccupations were from those of the film industry in which he found himself.
Without considering Eisenstein’s particular skills or tastes, Paramount suggested an eclectic range of subjects. Lasky proposed The Criminal (Die Verbrecher) by Ferdinand Bruckner; J.G. Bachman suggested The Criminal Profession by Albert Londres, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Another was The Hairy Ape to be adapted from Eugene O’Neill’s raw and symbolic play about a ship’s stoker who lusts after the rich bitch who visits his boiler room. One would have thought the latter, with its proletarian theme and powerful emotions, would have appealed to Eisenstein, but he dismissed it mischievously as ‘one hundred percent propagandist.’
The first project Eisenstein suggested to Paramount was The Glass House, another idea that he had carried around with him for some time.
He had made the first notes and sketches for it after his 1926 trip to Berlin, where he and Tisse stayed at the Hotel Hessler in Kantstrasse, an example of new Berlin architecture employing a quantity of glass. It started him thinking about the contradictions of a society that was able to see through all walls but maintained a code of morals that prevented it from doing so.
In 1927, while editing The General Line, he wrote, ‘America seen through Hollywood clichés. Reality to be an element of parody, as if Hollywood clichés were factual element … Do it as farce, as grotesque, as nightmarish tragedy. Loneliness while constantly being “among people” and being seen from all sides … Introduce a series of episodes with typically American stars playing various characters – and “kill” them with reality … Indifference to each other is established by showing that the characters do not see each other through the glass doors and walls because they do not look – a developed “non-seeing”. Against this background, one person goes crazy, because he alone pays attention and looks. All live as though there are real walls, each for himself.’35
Eisenstein went on to suggest some of the inhabitants of the building – a suicide, a blackmailer, ‘moral police’, a woman dying in a fire – leading to the destruction of the glass house. He added: ‘Perhaps for the premiere worth trying a monster screen – four times the usual screen size? Why not???’ For this vast enterprise he suggested the help of the left-wing novelist Upton Sinclair. ‘Only Upton can help this … And perhaps later it could be accepted by the Douglas Fairbanks Corporation.’36
By the time he got to Hollywood, Fairbanks was a has-been, and the studio system was growing ever more powerful. While searching for an idea acceptable to Paramount, The Glass House resurfaced when Eisenstein saw an illustrated article in the New York Times magazine on Frank Lloyd Wright’s project for a glass tower. The story might also have been suggested by Eugene Zamiatin’s novel We, as well as by the futuristic aspects of Metropolis and the social ones in The Crowd.
Eisenstein wrote a synopsis of The Glass House, which included a number of sketches, for Paramount. Montagu explained its theme. ‘People live, work and have their being in a glass house. In this great building it is possible to see all around you; above, below, sideways, slanting, in any direction, unless, of course, a carpet, a desk, a picture or something like that should interrupt your line of sight … People do not see, because it never occurs to them to look … Then suddenly, something occurs to make them look, to make them conscious of their exposure. They become furtive, suspicious, inquisitive, terrified. Fantastic, you would say? Even silly? But it was not at all in this manner that Eisenstein saw it. He did not see it as a fantasy. He wanted to embody his idea on the most mundane possible plane. A serious, down-to-earth ordinary story.’37
In a letter to Pera dated July 7, 1930, Eisenstein wrote: ‘Chaplin considers the idea wonderful and demands that we make only this! (And the authorities say he is envious because he isn’t doing it! We’ve enjoyed talking a lot about it.)’38
Among the characters living in the building are two young lovers, a laundress, a clerk in a shoe store, a wife and her husband who beats her, a policeman, a poet, ‘Christ or a technician’, a leading nudist, bootleggers, and a parade of robots. From the incoherent, fragmentary, plotless, episodic synopsis, it would be difficult to blame Paramount for rejecting it. Though Eisenstein was worldly in many ways, he was a babe in Hollywood, and Montagu does not seem to have understood the mentality of the studio bosses any better.
A different case was Sutter’s Gold, based on Blaise Cendras’ novel L’Or, which Eisenstein had acquired the novelist’s permission to film. It was the story of John August Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who founded his New Helvetia settlement in California in 1839 and discovered gold there in 1848. Eisenstein wanted to show ‘the destruction caused by the discovery of gold on his Californian estates; it led to his prosperous farms being ravaged and to his own death … Mountains of spoilage still stand where they were flung up from the half-excavated mines … Beneath the soulless layer of stones lay once-verdant orchards, fields, pastures and meadows … the feet of thousands of madmen trampled over Sutter’s land; thousands of hands ran through it and turned it over; thousands of people raced towards this spot, coming from all corners of the globe and ready to tear each others’ throats out for the sake of a tiny clod of this earth which bears so strange a crop in its core. The flourishing paradise of Captain Sutter’s Californian groves and pastures were trampled underfoot and crushed by filthy crowds lusting for gold. Sutter was ruined.’39
In order to build up the atmosphere of the America of the first gold rush, Eisenstein travelled extensively in California. He visited Sutter’s fort in Sacramento, and in a San Francisco factory he was shown the saw-blade from Sutter’s wood mill, where the first grain of gold was found. ‘These comings and goings took us from the porches of small provincial houses, with the customary rocking-chair and old ladies sunk in their reminiscences, to harsh landscapes, where soil had been turned over by the dredges to resemble grey hills and mountains, burying the green fields and meadows. The scenery spoke eloquently of the lust for gold, devouring the organic joy of nature.’40
Eisenstein produced the preliminary scenario after three days of non-stop work. He outlined the action to Alexandrov who wrote it down in Russian. Paramount translators, standing by, immediately made a literal translation. Montagu took the translation to Eisenstein. They discussed it, changed it and made notes on it. Montagu wrote out in longhand an exact copy of the corrected and noted translation which then became the final script. Eisenstein then made his production sketches and costings.
In 1928, Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Pudovkin had published a manifesto on the sound film, stating that, ‘Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-à-vis the visual fragment of montage will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage. The first experiments in sound must aim at a sharp discord with the visual images … Sound treated as a new element of montage … cannot fail to provide new and enormously powerful means of expressing and resolving the most complex problems …’41
Eisenstein, like René Clair, who made the musical Sous les Toits de Paris in 1930, realised that sound which simply accompanied action on the screen was tautological. Here is how Eisenstein imagined the use of sound as a metaphor in a sequence from Sutter’s Gold.
‘GOLD. The word rings through the forests, and echoes through the hills and canyons, and then from the depths of these canyons a new theme of the noise symphony can be heard. The sound of thousands of feet trampling over stones. The sound of endless trails of creaking wagons. The mixed sounds of horses’ hoofs and screeching wagon wheels. And the murmur of limitless crowds … The sound of the approaching procession grows louder and nearer … Through these sounds can be heard the chopping of axes, falling trees, the whispering of saws, crashing trees. Pigs are screaming and frightened ducks quack frantically as they are pursued by the invaders. Sutter is driven wild by these sounds. The picks grow louder, and now the sound of stone striking stone – stone piled high from out of the river-bed, stones burying the fertile fields. Stones growing into mountains that crush all the fertility that preceded this terrible symphony of sounds …’42
Initially, Paramount objected that the film ‘would cost too much’. Eisenstein then broke down each page of the script to prove that it could be done in ‘57 and a half days (two and a half days in reserve) = 60 days.’ Yet, it was turned down. As Ivor Montagu wrote: ‘This extraordinary tale, full of moral lessons, was turned by Eisenstein – with some help from the rest of us – into what I still regard as a marvellous script. We took it to Paramount, who simply pointed out to us that nobody in America was interested in history, and it was very old-fashioned of us to think otherwise. It would be as dull, so they politely explained, as if we tried to make a film about Henry VIII in England. [Three years later Alexander Korda made a hit film on exactly that subject.] It was hard to take seriously such naive reasons for rejection, and I believe that the true reason lay among the conflicts that undoubtedly existed within the Paramount company. Those who were jealous of the others who’d signed us up were trying to discredit the ones that supported us …’43
Although its theme was the kind to appeal to a committed socialist, its moral and social messages were indirect and oblique. Eisenstein thought, however, that ‘not for nothing were my American hosts perturbed when I chose L’Or as the subject for a screenplay … “What? Let the Bolsheviks get at the subject of gold?”’44
Initially the synopsis of Sutter’s Gold reveals that Eisenstein made few concessions in either style or subject to the more conventionally minded American producers. Curiously, only the musical (a genre born with sound) was given the creative scope within the commercial structure of Hollywood to experiment in colour, overhead shots, trompe l’oeil, split-screen techniques, super-imposition, trick photography, surreal settings, animation and juggling with time and space. The musical would become an important force in imaginative film-making, without ever being accused of ‘avant-gardism’ by cautious studio moguls. Perhaps, if the plots were not so frivolous, the musical might have been the genre in which Eisenstein could have spread his wings in Hollywood. (It was Alexandrov who eventually made his name with Hollywood-style musicals in the Soviet Union.)
Sutter’s Gold would have sat uncomfortably among Paramount’s releases in 1930. These included The Royal Family of Broadway, Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s sophisticated comedy based on the Barrymores; Sternberg’s Morocco, the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers, and two ‘naughty’ Maurice Chevalier musicals. The Spoilers, from the Rex Beach novel about the Alaskan gold rush, starring Gary Cooper and filmed twice previously, was nearest in subject matter to Sutter’s Gold, but worlds away in conception.
In 1936, Universal Pictures made Sutter’s Gold, a conventional film directed by James Cruze, starring Edward Arnold. It cost $2 million, was a terrible flop, and almost sank Universal. In the same year as the American version, the Austrian Luis Trenker directed and starred in The Emperor of California (Das Kaiser von Kalifornien) in Nazi Germany after Universal had turned him down. Trenker portrayed Sutter as a visionary German nationalist who heroically rejects ‘degenerate’ American capitalism.
Theodore Dreiser was a visitor to Eisenstein’s apartment in Chysti Prudi in Moscow in November 1927. Eisenstein called Dreiser ‘the living Himalaya of an old man’, although he was only fifty-six at the time. In his notes on his trip, the author of An American Tragedy wrote: ‘On entering, I remarked that he had the largest and most comfortable looking bed I had seen in Russia, and I envied him the same, I having thus far only seen narrow and most uncomfortable looking ones. He smiled and said he had bought this magnificent thing from an American farming commune near Moscow where he had been taking pictures.’45
Paramount had secured the rights of An American Tragedy in 1925 (the year of its publication) and several directors, among them D.W. Griffith and Ernst Lubitsch, had considered the subject, but taken it no further. Lasky, therefore, offered it to Eisenstein.
The novel, based on an actual New York murder case, told of a charming but weak drifter, fatally torn between a drab factory girl whom he has made pregnant, and a rich society beauty. In order to free himself from his obligations and raise himself socially and economically, he takes the pregnant girl out in a rowing boat with the intention of drowning her …
According to Ivor Montagu, ‘We embarked on the script with a sense of doom, knowing very well that as a group of foreigners, led by a Soviet director with two Soviet associates, we would never be permitted to make a film whose theme was essentially a criticism of American society.’46 During the course of writing the script, Paramount boss B.P. Schulberg asked Eisenstein, ‘Is Clyde Griffiths guilty or not guilty in your treatment?’ The director replied, ‘Not guilty.’ ‘Then your script is a monstrous challenge to American society!’, Schulberg retorted. Eisenstein explained that he thought the crime committed by Griffiths was the summary result of the social relationships whose influence he had been subjected to at every stage of the development of his life. The main point in the treatment – conditions of education, upbringing, work, surroundings, and social conditions drove the characterless boy to crime. He explained that nothing was added to Dreiser’s novel, and that the important sociological points were all in the book. The characters in the book were ‘creatures of circumstance,’ Schulberg suggested they complete the script ‘as you feel it’ and then they would see47 – a directive similar to that which Stalin would give to Eisenstein many years later on Ivan the Terrible Part II.
So they went ahead, working round the clock at Coldwater Canyon. Montagu described it thus: ‘Eisenstein would be closeted with Grisha, narrating verbally the treatment he had planned. Grisha would go off and write it. As soon as it was written it would be typed and translated. I would take an English text, read it, and go to Eisenstein. Now he and I would go through it, discussing and making emendations. Then I would go off and rewrite it. Helle [Montagu’s wife] would receive my manuscript … to type fair copies. The Paramount staff would make more copies of this final state.
‘This process meant, of course, that Grisha would always be two or three reels ahead of me. While he was on, say, the draft of reel four, I would still be discussing with Eisenstein the revision of reel two. Eisenstein would have to keep the whole in his head and switch from one to the other, like a chessmaster giving a simultaneous display.’48
On October 5, 1930, Eisenstein sent the finished scenario to Paramount with an accompanying letter.
‘Gentlemen, So here we see the miracle accomplished – An American Tragedy presented in only 14 reels! Still we think the final treatment must not be over 12. But we withdraw from the final “shrinking” leaving it for the present “in extenso”, so as to have the possibility of making this unpleasant operation after receiving the benefit of notes and advice from 1) The West Coast Magnates 2) The East Coast Magnates 3) Theodore Dreiser 4) The Hays Organization. Accordingly, gentlemen, we have the honour to submit to your “discriminating kindness” The Enclosed Manuscript and … Honi soit quit mal y pense. The AUTHORS’ Among the notes attached to the first draft was ‘Inner monologue. Why not??! Joyce in literature. O’Neill in drama, we in cinema. In literature – good, in drama – bad, in cinema – best.’49
Almost everybody who read the scenario was impressed, and Eisenstein, confident that it would be accepted, set off to New York to meet Dreiser and the leaders of Paramount with whom the final decision rested. Dreiser, especially, was full of praise for the adaptation. Eisenstein stayed at Dreiser’s villa on the banks of the Hudson, and ‘the old grey lion’ showed him the lesser known parts of New York City, including speakeasies. (It was the era of Prohibition.) Schulberg said it was the best scenario Paramount had ever had. Then came the memo to Schulberg dated October 9, from David O. Selznick, associate producer at Paramount, that probably sealed the screenplay’s fate.
‘I have just finished reading the Eisenstein adaptation of An American Tragedy. It was for me a memorable experience; the most moving script I have ever read. It was so effective that it was positively torturing. When I had finished it, I was so depressed I wanted to reach for the bourbon bottle. As entertainment, I don’t think it has one chance in a hundred … Is it too late to persuade the enthusiasts of the picture from making it? … I think it an inexcusable gamble on the part of this department to put into a subject as depressing as is this one, anything like the cost that an Eisenstein production must necessarily entail. If we want to make An American Tragedy as a glorious experiment, and purely for the advancement of the art (which I certainly don’t think is the business of this organization), then let’s do it with a [John] Cromwell directing, and chop three or four hundred thousand dollars off the loss. If the cry of “Courage!” be raised against this protest, I should like to suggest that we have the courage not to make the picture, but to take whatever rap is coming to us for not supporting Eisenstein the artist (as he proves himself to be with this script) with a million or more of the stockholders’ cash. Let’s try new things by all means but let’s keep these gambles within the bounds of those that would be indulged in by rational businessmen; and let’s not put more money than we have into any one picture … into a subject that will appeal to our vanity through the critical acclaim that must necessarily attach to its production, but that cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans.’50
So An American Tragedy, directed by Eisenstein, remains one of the great might-have-beens of cinema. Why was it rejected and why was Eisenstein’s contract terminated so abruptly? King Vidor thought: ‘Because Eisenstein knew he was handling a new art form, and because in personality he was the man he was, he refused in Hollywood to compromise his ideals or be talked out of the way he himself saw things. Anybody who behaved like that in the California of the 1930s was bound to be heading for a pile of trouble, and in my view this was why he failed … the pattern in all our studios at that time was the conventional one of telling a story, and going through the normal routine … and Eisenstein was already seeing far beyond that … But of course Eisenstein was not the only artist in the history of the world to suffer by being ahead of his time.’51
Montagu, Alexandrov and Eisenstein should have sensed it was clear from the beginning that a sociological approach to the theme would not correspond to the studio’s demands. The Paramount bosses aspired to make of the “sensational” novel a run-of-the-mill (just another) albeit dramatic tale of “boy meets girl” without conceding on any of the “superfluous” issues,’ Eisenstein remarked. ‘These issues as I saw them were much weightier.’52 He wondered why they bothered to take Dreiser’s novel when they could just as easily have paid less for a story out of the newspaper.
‘Some people have said the reasons were political, a basic fear of a Bolshevik who represented Bolshevism,’ wrote Montagu. ‘This factor undoubtedly existed, and there were various elements of the lunatic fringe who ran around writing letters to the papers and making demonstrations as to how Paramount had betrayed America by signing up this notorious Red Dog, and a great deal of angry correspondence arrived in the company’s offices. All this must inevitably have carried some weight when it came to making the final decision but to claim that this was the only reason for Eisenstein’s failure in Hollywood is to make a great over-simplification. If this had been the only problem, I doubt whether Paramount would have surrendered to it … Lastly, but of considerable importance, was the general fear that existed in Hollywood in those days … of anybody with intellectual pretensions; and the brutal fact is that not only did we have intellectual pretensions, but we had them written all over us.’53
Perhaps if Eisenstein had delivered the sort of script Paramount could sanction then the political pressure might have been discounted. Though it must be remembered that the three Russians were practically the first Soviets in California, and the relations between the two countries were strained, existing purely on a commercial footing. In fact, both Paramount and Eisenstein had been visited by the police. The new Code of Production had also come into practice in 1930, so the screenplay could have been used as an excuse to escape from an embarrassing contract. Whatever the studio’s private views on its quality, they must have realised after The Glass House, Sutter’s Gold and now An American Tragedy, that Eisenstein could never adapt to the house style as even such independent personalities as Sternberg or Lubitsch had.
Looking at the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s, where each of the majors developed its own characteristic style and philosophy, one could have foreseen that Paramount, though the most European of studios, would not have been the most suitable company in which the radical Eisenstein would have been able to work. If MGM encapsulated middle-class values, then Paramount’s decorative opulence, with its mountain logo symbolising the upper crust, was the studio with aristocratic, even Tsarist, pretensions. Hans Dreier was the supervisory art director whose set designs established the lustrous surface that dictated the feel of the films. Ernst Lubitsch, the bon viveur with the inappropriate forename, embodied the Paramount spirit of elegance, sensuality, wit and cynicism in opulent surroundings, and Austrian-born Josef von Sternberg was just beginning his erotic-exotic cycle of films with Marlene Dietrich. In sharp contrast to Paramount’s sheen, and MGM’s nouveau-riche glitter, Warner Bros, was more in tune with the working class, and might have lent Eisenstein a more sympathetic ear.
It was to Sternberg that Paramount turned to direct An American Tragedy, which Eisenstein, naturally, found ‘very poor. So poor in fact that I could not sit through the picture to the end … The idea of “inner monologue” never occurred to Sternberg … he confined himself to a “straightforward” detective story.’54 Leaving aside how much Eisenstein’s disappointment might have tempered his criticism, his assessment was correct. Sternberg eliminated the sociological elements, reducing the novel to a flat and perfunctory drama, culminating in a hammy court scene, though it has two moving performances from Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sidney.
Dreiser was so enraged when he saw what Sternberg had done to his story that he sued Paramount for damages, although he had received around $80,000 for the film rights. He lost the case but for many years he continued to hope that Eisenstein would one day make the film in the Soviet Union. Neither Eisenstein nor Dreiser lived to see George Stevens’ romantic version, A Place in the Sun, made in 1951. In it, Clyde, for some reason renamed George Eastman (Montgomery Clift), is visited in his death cell by Sondra (Elizabeth Taylor), who declares her love, whereas in the book she refuses to visit him, thus demonstrating the inhumanity of the values of her class.
One has only to watch the conventional murder sequence in the boat in both Sternberg’s and Stevens’ films and read Eisenstein’s version to realise what an opportunity was missed. The passage below is from the ‘first treatment’.
‘As the boat glides into the darkness of the lake, so Clyde glides into the darkness of his thoughts. Two voices struggle within him – one: “Kill!-kill!” the echo of his dark resolve, the frantic cry of all his hopes of Sondra and society; the other: “Don’t-don’t kill!” the expression of his weakness and his fears, of his sadness for Roberta and his shame before her. In the scenes that follow these voices ripple in the waves that lap from the oars against the boat; they whisper in the beating of his heart; they comment, underscoring, upon the memories and alarums that pass through his mind, each ever struggling for mastery, first one dominating then weakening before the onset of its rival …
‘… the boat overturns. Once more rings out the long-drawn booming cry of the bird. The overset boat floats on the surface of the water. Roberta’s head appears above the surface. Clyde comes up. His face showing terrible fright, he makes a movement to help Roberta. Roberta, terrified by his face, gives a piercing cry and, splashing frantically, disappears under the water. Clyde is about to dive down after her, but he stops and hesitates. And the third time the long-drawn booming cry of the faraway bird. On the mirrorlike calmness of the water floats a straw hat …’55
Some of his earlier notes reveal how he might have shot certain scenes such as Clyde in the death cell. ‘Clyde visited by a preacher (terrifying coming out of darkness only the face of a skeleton) Necessary: that Clyde’s cell be flooded with light, like a stage but the corridor, from where the visitors come – must be in semi-darkness.’56
A month before his Paramount contract was terminated, Eisenstein addressed a symposium devoted to the problems of the wide screen, which was organised by the Technicians’ Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In a witty and insightful speech, printed under the title The Dynamic Square, he made the cases for vertical and horizontal screens, before opting for the square.
‘This vertical tendency can be traced in their biological, cultural, intellectual and industrial efforts and manifestations … [But] in the heart of the super-industrialised American, or the busily self-industrialising Russian, there still remains a nostalgia for infinite horizons, fields, plains and deserts … This nostalgia cries out for horizontal space … [The square is] the one and only form that is equally fit, by alternately suppressing right and left or up and down, to embrace all the multitude of expressive rectangles in the world.’57
*
The Paramount contract was cancelled early in October 1930. It cost the studio over $30,000 in compensation to Eisenstein, but that was a modest sum in the scheme of things. They had already invested three times that amount in securing the property and the company had grown accustomed to years of writing off ‘abandoned’ or ‘worthless’ scripts.
In order for the three Russians not to leave Hollywood without having made a film, they made a last desperate suggestion, put to both MGM and Universal, for a film of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. What Eisenstein liked about the book was the way ‘there occurs a change in the point of view towards the events being recounted. The author wanted to create an image of a small American town with many characters and extremely complex, interlacing events. He creates a collection of poems in the form of epitaphs in the town’s cemetery. Each epitaph is written as a monologue spoken by the deceased person …’58 This demonstrates how much Eisenstein was still gripped by the notion of ‘inner monologue’. Needless to say, the proposal was rejected.
Perhaps the best films are those that are never made, those that remain in the mind. There was a cinema in Prague when Franz Kafka was a young man called The Cinema of the Blind. This strange name (though not as strange as the cinema for dogs suggested to Eisenstein in Berlin) was more banal than it sounded. It was called that because it was owned by a charitable association for the support of the blind. Kafka believed that all cinemas should be called The Cinema of the Blind because their flickering images blind people to reality. We can only see Eisenstein’s unrealised dreams in our imaginations. It was really the studio bosses who were blind, unable to ‘see’ the screenplays Eisenstein offered them.
Eighteen months after his departure from Moscow and six months after his arrival in the USA, Eisenstein’s hopes of making a film in Hollywood were dead. It was time to return home.