The latest in Pleasures, Passions and the Price to Pay is Dynamite. I enjoyed this film but I would not happily see it twice. De Mille is so good a craftsman that he is always worth watching, and his slightly Hebraic sense of splendour is always inclined to be vivid. There is no bathroom like a Cecil de Mille bathroom. His plumbing, as a New York newspaperman once reported of the new seventeen million dollar Paramount Theatre, is palatial. All technicians of the ball and plug trade will please note.
This Dynamite film covers a heap of territory. It has (1) a prison with prisoner awaiting execution, (2) a high society lady in her high society world with (a) a swimming-pool and bathing belles, (b) a battalion of female archers, (c) a regiment of Aero Wheel racers, (d) a bemillioned interior with cocktail bar, cocktail party, petting party, bathroom and other offices complete. The society lady married the murderer to get the cash on grandpapa’s will. Last-minute confession scene. Murderer (incidentally miner) gets off. Story spreads via super-chromo’d tencylinder to mining town. Three shots to do justice to the proletarian world of coal, all three of them b a d ; but for makeweight a speech by hero about coal turning to diamonds in so many million years. Cecil B. de Mille records the fact proudly. It brings him closer to his subject so to speak, and the tale proceeds, as you guessed, to a grand old explosion among the future diamonds. The third party to be eliminated (Conrad Nagel as the Price to Pay) is thereby eliminated, the high society lady loves her labourer, and capital and the proletariat go into a personal fade-out.
The crazy thing about all this is that it takes you everywhere and gets you nowhere. You have a great deal of life under observation but see nothing graciously and nothing well. De Mille is careful to make his miner despise the social luxury, but the terms are not real. Nothing is real, not even the miners. They have explosions, they disappear on impressive rescuing expeditions, but not a brass scuttleful of coal is heaved during the entire proceedings. Nothing ordinary is worth a foot of film for de Mille—only the murders and the confessions and the cocktail parties and the dying children and the explosions among future diamonds. And let him do these things ever so well, as he often does, unreality is in their bones from the beginning.
> 我来回应