Hanging On
Honoré de Balzac's 1833 novel Eugenie Grandet was adapted into a pretty good 1921 film, The Conquering Power, directed by Rex Ingram and starring Rudolph Valentino. I've become fascinated with Valentino's screen presence, which explains why this is the third film I've reviewed starring "the Latin Lover."
Made before The Sheik, the film doesn't feature Valentino as the main character; rather, he's tertiary behind Eugenie Grandet (Alice Terry) and her father, Pere Grandet (Ralph Lewis). As Pere Grandet's nephew, Charles, Valentino plays the privileged son of a wealthy businessman who loses his fortune "speculating" on the stock market. The father sends Charles to live with his uncle, a rich man who hoards his wealth in the form of gold coins. Pere Grandet has a chateau where he could live with his wife and daughter, but he prefers to inhabit a spacious but shabby house, with just one clumsy middle-aged female servant.
Pere Grandet puts Charles up in his home. Charles is shocked by his drab surroundings, but soon falls in love with his first cousin, Eugenie, and she with him. Pere Grandet, not wanting Charles for a son-in-law, sends the young man to Martinique, hides the letters Charles writes to Eugenie, accumulates and hoards gold, becomes more and more of a crazy dragon in human form.
What stands out in this film isn't Valentino or Alice Terry, but the great performance by Ralph Lewis, who looks like a cross between Thomas Edison and Spencer Tracy. As a portrait of a miser, the film is quite strong, overpowering the romantic subplot. Pere Grandet is a violent, mean-spirited, greedy old man. He uses his family to get what he wants, denies happiness to his daughter, inadvertently kills his wife--getting away with it because he's rich.
He becomes more and more crazy, placing some of his gold in a cradle, rocking it like it's his baby. He pours coins over himself, hallucinates gold hands with long sharp nails coming from a gold pile. The scene showing his hopeless lapse into madness features moving walls, dead relatives, and a human personification of gold with coins dribbling from its mouth.
Since Valentino plays a normal person, his presence in the film doesn't burst forth like it does in The Sheik or even as it does, in a more subdued way, in the melodramatic Cobra. Ralph Lewis, though, is amazing in this film. A scenery-chewing performance, but one in keeping with the needs of a story about someone always taking it in without ever giving it out, the conquering power of the title being either greed or love, depending on which character one is focused on.
Vic Neptune
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