Lydia (1941)
Directed by Julien Duvivier

Film Review

Julien Duvivier's invitation by producer Alexander Korda to direct a remake of his earlier success Un carnet de bal (1938) in Hollywood came at an opportune moment.  With the outbreak of WWII and France's capitulation to Nazi Germany not long afterwards, Duvivier was fortuitous in having a safe haven in which to continue his career.  The fact that Lydia impressed neither the critics nor audiences and was one of Korda's bitterest failures did not persuade the French director of Pépé-le-Moko he should curtail his stay in America.  Instead, he persevered and made three further films before he finally gave up and returned to France.  Lydia was not Duvivier's first Hollywood feature.  In 1938, he had lent his talents to MGM's period extravaganza The Great Waltz, the most successful of his American offerings.

An admirer of the director's work, Korda gave Duvivier a mostly free hand on Lydia, so whilst the film has the familiar trappings that we associate with Hollywood melodramas of this era, there is a noticeable sour underbelly to the film that is unmistakably Duvivier's signature.  In reworking the marvellously well-constructed Un carnet de bal screenwriter Ben Hecht greatly diminishes the story's poignancy and it ends up like a lachrymose version of Citizen Kane, borrowing that earlier film's flashback structure and some if its visual flair without achieving anything of its narrative power and irony.  Duvivier manages to incorporate some of the more successful elements of his earlier film - notably the memorable ball sequence which, filmed in slow-motion, has a haunting dream-like quality - but his efforts are mostly undermined by a script that is too wordy for its own good and too reliant on the excessive sentimentality that Hollywood was prone to in the 1940s.

Lee Garmes, one of the most gifted cinematographers working in America at the time, comes to Duvivier's rescue and makes it a visual tour de force.  Beautifully photographed as the film is, there is an abject bleakness beneath the schmaltzy fairytale surface, razor-sharp shards of bitterness and regret that not even the treacly dialogue (worsened by Merle Oberon's flat delivery) can take the edge off.  In her last screen performance before her untimely demise, Edna May Oliver practically steals the film as Oberon's stiff but loveable grandmother.  The only other cast members to leave a lasting impression are Joseph Cotten and Hans Jaray, who, as the more admirable of the rejected lovers, engage our sympathies in a way that the lead actress singularly fails to do.  Korda's insistence on casting his wife (Merle Oberon) in the lead role was to be the film's downfall.  Critics were merciless in their assault on her acting and, inevitably, the film struggled to find an audience.  Imperfect though it is, Lydia does have considerable artistic merit - although, verbose and simpering, it can't help feeling slight compared with the doom-laden poetic masterpieces that Julien Duvivier had routinely put his name to in the 1930s.

Film Synopsis

In old age, the American benefactress Lydia Macmillan is visited by one of her former suitors Dr Michael Fitzpatrick and invited to take tea with him.  When she arrives, Lydia is surprised to meet up with two other men who had once hoped to marry her - footballer Bob Willard and blind musician Frank Audry.  As they reminisce, Lydia and her three former beaux recall how they first met, and how the stunning Boston socialite passed over these three charmers, any one of whom would have made a fine husband, for a self-centred adventurer named Richard Mason.  It was the heartbreak that Lydia suffered in falling for Richard that made her give up any notion of marriage and instead devote herself to good causes.  As she rakes over past memories, Lydia begins to wonder if she has made the right choices in her life.  A surprise visitor will set her mind at rest...