Lorna Doone (1922)
Directed by Maurice Tourneur

Film Review

Maurice Tourneur's visually enticing Lorna Doone was the first screen adaptation of R.D. Blackmore's popular 19th century novel to do justice to the original work but it lacks the depth and coherence of subsequent versions made for film and television.  As with his previous literary adaptations - Joseph Conrad's Victory (1919), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1920) and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1920) - Tourneur dispenses with virtually all of the original narrative and homes in on its essential core.  In the case of Lorna Doone, an epic tale of love and criminal intrigue set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Britain of the 1680s, the story is reduced to a personal feud between a simple farmer and a conniving outlaw in which man's nobler instincts are seen to triumph over his base animal savagery.  It is a feature of Tourneur's films of this era that none of the characters is fully developed - indeed all are reduced to fairly basic archetypes, with the central heroine Lorna serving no other function than to act as the catalyst driving a familiar good versus evil conflict on to its inevitable conclusion.

Depth of characterisation may be lacking but the handsome principals Madge Bellamy and John Bowers quickly gain our sympathies as the eponymous heroine and her 'gentle giant' lover.  Both actors enjoyed a high profile in the silent era but they soon fell out of favour with the advent of sound cinema.  Her career failing, Bellamy disgraced herself when she was arrested for armed assault on a former lover in the early 1940s; Bowers committed suicide by drowning in 1936 when he was turned down for a part in a film directed by his friend Henry Hathaway.  The great Shakespearean actor Frank Keenan has an imposing presence as Sir Ensor Doone, the most fully developed and believable character in the film, and, playing the main villain of the piece, Donald McDonald also deserves a special mention - his Carver Doone is as vivid and vile as the one we find in Blackmore's original novel.  As well as being a prolific character actor, McDonald also directed around fifty films prior to this, mostly shorts.

There is a great deal of Blackmore's celebrated tome that is patently lacking in Tourneur's film and yet the latter captures enough of the essence of the novel to make it a worthy and satisfying adaptation.  Tourneur apparently had next to no interest in the story (which he considered childish) and was content to reduce it to a series of dazzling tableaux that he constructs with the sublime artistry of an experienced landscape painter.  (Throughout his filmmaking career, Tourneur was always far more adept at composing pictures than telling stories, his one notable flaw as a film director.)  Whilst the individual episodes that make up the film only just hold together as a coherent narrative, they are each constructed with exceptional artistic flair, and some are so achingly beautiful you wish you could frame them and hang them on your wall.

There are few sequences more memorable in Tourneur's oeuvre than the one near the start of this film in which Lorna and her mother fall foul of a swarm of conscienceless outlaws.  Crisply photographed in diffuse light with bold silhouettes against a forbidding coastal landscape, Tourneur presents a harrowing and yet hauntingly poetic succession of stark images which, sadly, the rest of the film fails to measure up to.  There are some striking compositions to follow - the baptism of the infant prince in Westminster Abbey, the climactic raid on the Doones' sinister hideout, the fierce tussle that ends in the gruesome death of the central villain.  Impressive as these are, none of them quite matches up to the shocking spectacle that Tourneur first lobs in our direction - a merciless gang of bandits swooping down on a stagecoach stranded on a stretch of beach, seizing a terrified young girl and then leaving her wretched mother for dead, a solitary wreck in a scene of abject desolation.  Here we have a grim preview of the darker places Maurice Tourneur would take us to in the mature phase of his career, in tenebrous crime dramas like Au nom de la loi (1932) and his demonic fantasy La Main du diable (1943).

Film Synopsis

In the late 1600s, a region of rural Devonshire in England is menaced by a lawless gang of highwaymen and cut-throats, the Doones.  In childhood, Lorna, the daughter of a noblewoman and heiress to a large estate, is kidnapped by the outlaws and taken to their stronghold in a secluded valley, where she grows up and forgets her noble heritage.  One day, Lorna's childhood sweetheart, a simple but virtuous farmer named John Kidd, finds himself in the Doones' valley and, on meeting Lorna, discovers he still loves her.  To save himself from the murderous Doones, John flees the valley and Lorna remains a prisoner, with the black-hearted Carver Doone resolved to take her as his bride.  Over the years, Sir Ensor Doone, a disgraced nobleman and head of the family, has grown to love Lorna as his own daughter.  To atone for his past crimes, he sends a message to London that will ensure Lorna can claim her inheritance and resume her life amongst the nobility.  Wealth and status mean nothing to Lorna, however, and she renounces both so that she can marry John, her one true love.  In a fit of jealous spite, John's cousin betrays him to the Doones and Lorna is shot by Carver during the wedding ceremony.  For the good folk of Devon this final outrage is enough to goad them into banding together to rid the district of the Doone menace once and for all.  Believing his beloved Lorna is dead, John leads the attack on the Doones' stronghold and will be satisfied with nothing less than the death of Carver Doone...