An American Tragedy (Paramount) is courtroom melodrama, more morbid than exciting, in which chief interest centres on the efforts of a district attorney to bully a young scapegrace into making the conflicting statements which cause him to be convicted of first-degree murder. The first part of the picture somewhat sketchily outlines early episodes in the career of the murderer, Clyde Griffiths. He is shown as a bellhop, a tramp, a dishwasher, then as a foreman in the collar factory of a rich uncle. He seduces a factory girl, Roberta Alden, and attempts to desert her when he is attracted by Sondra Finchley, richer and correspondingly more interesting. When Roberta Alden tells Clyde Griffiths that she is going to have a baby, he is provoked to kill her—by taking her on a picnic, tipping over their rowboat, swimming to shore while she drowns.
The picture is derived from the monster novel by Theodore Dreiser. In his two tomes, Dreiser impeached not so much a pipsqueak libertine as the social order which produced him. Dissatisfied because the cinema failed to impeach similarly, Dreiser tried and failed to secure an injunction against its showing. But there are other and more important qualities which Dreiser got into his book and which Adapter Samuel Hoffenstein, light-versifier and onetime theatrical pressagent, and Director Josef von Sternberg failed to get into the picture.
Director von Sternberg, neither creator nor translator, had the insoluble problem of duplicating a masterpiece in a medium which it was not meant to fit. The string of hasty sequences with which the picture replaces the first volume of the novel fails to make Clyde Griffiths excitingly alive, "unless the spectator remembers the novel well enough to fill in the gaps. Titles, gloomily printed on a background of waves, interrupt the action more than they elucidate it. Phillips Holmes plays Clyde Griffiths in perfunctory fashion. He experiences every human emotion without varying his expression except by a toothy smile. At moments the picture transcends this and other handicaps and really comes to life. Walking with another girl, Roberta Alden passes Clyde Griffiths and says, "Don't look back. Don't look back," and then looks back herself. The first time Roberta goes canoeing with Clyde, Actress Sylvia Sidney, whose performance is brilliant, puts just the right intonations in her tiny, memorable speech: "I can't swim." But most of the time the picture wanders about in a maze of poorly acted, disintegrated incident which lacks the cumulative effect of Dreiser's ponderous prose. Dull shots: Phillips Holmes jumping out of a poolroom window when police arrive; smirking at a dance to show how much he likes high life; making bewildered, wooden attempts to seem amorous.