March 16 1970

Partially re-directed by Alfred Werker; adapted by Leonard Spigelgass from the play by Dawn Powell; Camera, James Wong Howe; 6 reels

With James Dunn, Boots Fallory, Zasu Pitts, Minna Gombell, Terrence Ray, Henry Kolker, Will Stanton, Claude King, James Flavin, Astrid Allwyn, Wade Boteler, Walter Walker.

Together with Greed, Hello Sister is Stroheim's only thoroughly "modern" film and, with the exception of the apparently long-lost The Devil's Passkey, the one that has proved the most elusive through the years. I don't want so much to discuss it as a film here as to talk about what happened to it, and conjecture on how much of what is left may - or may not - be Stroheim’s. Contemporary criticism is of little value, since one leading critic and Stroheim partisan attacked the film as being "the greatest butchery perpetrated since that on Eisenstein's Mexican film" - this without having seen (at that time) a frame of Hello Sister. Actually it might be pointed out that Alfred Werker was a pretty fair director too, and apart from the absurdity of some of the writing, some of the obviously reshot scenes are in themselves quite good.

The mutilation of Walking Down Broadway was done for reasons quite different from those responsible for the cutting of earlier Stroheim films. It was brought in ahead of schedule, under budget, amicably, and was apparently all ready for release. Ads for the completed film carried a full credit for von Stroheim. Then suddenly it became a kind of pawn in a power struggle between two Fox executives, and the editing and re-shooting began. Publicity releases at the time named a number of directors as replacements on the new footage, including Alan Crosland.

The major change of course is in the minimising of the Zasu Pitts role, and in the climax wherein originally she died. The silly sub-plot with the dynamite-stealing drunk is an entirely new addition (though events in 11th Street last week make it curiously topical!) But for the rest, it seems to be mainly a matter of cutting and softening. One can perceive jump-cuts within scenes, odd words of dialogue are blooped out (including the doctor telling the girl that she is to become "a mother," even though the rest of that scene is quite explicit) and it's easy to see where weak comedy material has been inserted to relieve the grimness. For example, the fight between the prostitute and the would-be seducer is raw stuff, shot and lit in the diffused style of Greed; the "comedy" cutaways to the drunk below have an entirely different, blander style of photography, and were obviously shot much later. That the story is basically trivial, even silly, is of course hardly a sign of tampering -- Stroheim's stories (especially Queen Kelly) often tended to be both wild and absurd, and it is what he did with them that mattered. There are too many dramatic and pictorial echoes of other Stroheim films, and particularly Greed, for one to reject this as a Stroheim film. Both this film and Greed play out their strongest dramatic moments against the background of Christmas tinsel; at the opposite level of importance, both films use a sewer episode as a background for early courting scenes. The detail in so many scenes is unquestionably Stroheim: the grotesque dwarfs at Coney Island, the cripple entering the medical building, the detailed listing of medical names on a directory used only for a brief establishing shot. The sequence in the doctor’s office, with the long tracking shot up to the painting of the Last Supper, combines the religious sincerity and moralistic tolerance which Stroheim had exhibited on many occasions. And Zasu Pitts in particular…while obviously she suffers most from the re-editing, and her psychopathic role has been distorted and watered-down, at the same time she dominates every scene she is in. The framing of the shots, the fadeout on her deliberate fingering of the iron, the subtlety of scenes in which slight nuances of expression belie the words she is speaking – all of these are things that no director, re-shooting those scenes, would have done. Remember that no-one took Zasu Pitts seriously as an actress at that time, and that she was totally removed from All Quiet on the Western Front and her role re-shot, even though her performance was reportedly outstanding, merely because she was so type-cast as a comedienne. Look too at the typical Stroheim scene in the rain - the parting of the lovers against an extremely "busy" background, a large set filled with activity - extras, streetcars, etc. If for any reason such a scene were to have been re-shot, it would surely have been done far less elaborately, probably on a simple sidewalk set. After all, the extra money spent on the film was a mere $60,000 - a probably much inflated figure anyway, since it would include a proportionate share of the studio overhead for the period of shooting. In any case, Walking Down Broadway was not an important picture; it would have been economically more feasible to scrap the film entirely than to re-shoot totally and STILL come up with a film so decidedly off-beat and uncommercial by 1933 standards. The additions are sometimes obvious (the drunk, the serial-like agitato music in a climax now played for melodrama instead of tragedy), the deletions equally obvious. But MOST of the scenes and sets in the film are represented in the original book of master stills, bearing the VS codenumber. At a rough guess, and I stress the word guess, I would estimate that 60% of the footage is Stroheim’s, even if not just as he shot it; but since the original 6-reel release version represents only about half of what Stroheim originally shot, and three-quarters of what he considered to be an acceptable release length, that 60% is obviously over-generous in some ways. But still, I think it is much more of a Stroheim film than we had been led to expect over the years; also I think it must be pretty plain than even in its totally untouched form, it would have been one of his lesser works. But only the more unreasoning Stroheim fanatics can totally reject it as a Stroheim work. Stroheim's own contemporary comments are, as always, a most unreliable guide to what happened. Cameramen seem to be among the most honest and unbiased documentarians of fact, and happily James Wong Howe is still with us, and a man of perception and retentive memory. Hopefully, I can show him the film this coming Summer and pin down from him just how much of the film Stroheim did make. Until then, at least it's good to have the film back with us. If we didn't know that Stroheim had anything to do with it, we'd be praising its many inventive touches and applauding the restraint placed on Jimmy Dunn (who so often got out of hand in that period through lax direction) instead of trying to pick holes in it and blame it for not being a masterpiece. Or conversely, if we knew for a fact that Stroheim directed every foot, many of us would be lauding it to the skies and explaining that it was a "misunderstood" masterwork. Film criticism can never be objective perhaps; but film history should be.

Camera: Lee Garmes; screenplay by Dan Totheroh, Louise Long and Rowland V. Lee from a story by Melville Baker and John Kirkland; edited by Harold Schuster; 8 reels.

With Loretta Young, Gene Raymond, O.P. Heggie, Wally Albright, Paul Fix, Ruth Warren, Russ Powell, Roy Stewart, Murray Kinnell, Frances Rich, Lucille Ward, Niles Welch, Tom Ricketts.

What a pleasure to confirm that this long lost "classic" is in fact just that, and every bit as good as we hoped. However, I deliberately don't want to wax too enthusiastic about it in advance - like Broken Blossoms, it is a very fragile film, a kind of fairy story that can really exist only in the now far-away Europe of the early 30’s. Like Shangri-La, one has to want to believe in it. There are clear distinctions between good and evil, and the "bad" Paul Fix is even given Wagnerian musical motifs and a physical makeup that, oddly, is rather like Hans von Twardowski's in Caligari. It is over-scored, but that too is quite justified in stressing its fairy-tale quality. The camerawork by Lee Garmes likewise has a mystical quality to it, while many individual shots look for all the world like illustrations from children's books. The shots of the troop of orphans trotting over a little bridge even seems to articulate the lovely scene from Disney's Snow White of the seven dwarfs marching homeward over a rock bridge. The print is copied from a lovely 35mm toned original which had many deep amber and blue scenes; this has made it a little difficult to time, and some shots are a shade too dark, but this is a minor complaint and one that can be rectified in future printings. The cast is uniformly fine, with Gene Raymond surprisingly effective, and P.P. Heggie almost as perfect as Henry B. Walthall would have been. Unquestionably, it is Lee's finest film. Adept and expert at imitating the style of others, he wrought most of his films in the image of Lubitsch, Pommer or Whale, and perhaps because of that has been much under-rated. Here, he has nobody to imitate - not even Borzage - and the result makes one wish that he hadn't so often been content just to copy others. My only and purely personal complaint with the film is that it doesn't really need its exciting end admittedly showman-like climax. For me, the whimsy and sentiment would have been quite enough. But Fox had a rather consistent policy of slapping sure-fire hoke and/or action climaxes to films which otherwise might seem a bit slow, so that the customers always went home happy. Most of the time they were probably right, and they're not necessarily wrong here. The climax is good, vivid, spectacular stuff…but I can't help wishing that they'd reverted to form with a final "And they all lived happily ever after" farewell title.