La Bohème

I have a love for Lillian Gish’s work so strong it approaches prejudice. She’s my favorite actor, and the promise of seeing one of her performances is enough to make me watch anything she’s in. But, when I do, I often find the actors around her, the sets—the whole movie, even—blurring into the background. Gish did not work in a vacuum, but sometimes, that’s how I remember it.

La Bohème is, surprisingly, the first filmed adaptation of Puccini’s opera. It is not the best film Gish ever starred in, but its cast and director were game, and deserve their props, just like her. It has moments that are sublime, though those moments are few, and mostly confined to the first half.

King Vidor, whose interest in poor and hopeless souls reached an apocalyptic peak with The Crowd (1928), here delivers something intermittently light. John Gilbert is perfectly cast as Rodolphe, a playwright who has barely a franc to his name, and seems exhilarated by it. Gilbert, an actor with real charm, seems almost balletic in his big scenes: standing well-poised and straight; his form tapering to a thin waist, and his footsteps light. He is Carelessness.

Gish, as Mimi, is Concern. She’s an embroiderer; as dirt-poor as Rodolphe, but more preoccupied with the consequences of it. It’s a typical Gish role, in the sense that she plays a woman who suffers greatly, but persists, thanks to the strong spirit inhabiting her weak body.

Oh, the things she does. I’ll describe just two. First, Mimi’s trip to the pawn shop, where she spills a bundle of goods on the proprietor’s table—an amazing piece of pantomime, as Gish manages to attach a split-second’s worth of meaning to each object as the man casually flicks them aside. The pace of this bit makes it comic, but the intensity—and range—of different reactions Gish delivers, using her eyes and mouth, shoulders, arms and hands, makes it moving too. To achieve both is genius.

The second example, also ostensibly comic, occurs soon after Mimi and Rodolphe meet. Mimi arrives at her neighbour’s apartment badly chilled, and so he offers to let her warm herself by his stove-pipe. There’s a fairly obvious joke here (one Vidor intended, I think, since he gives a lot of screen time to a packing tube and loaf of French bread later on); but that’s not the point of the scene. The point is to sexualize Mimi without compromising her character. Even covered neck to foot, wearing a shawl, she must still envelope the stove pipe to get all of its heat, and then, turn around to warm her rear. And when she does that, arching her back and turning up her face, there’s something a little Garbo-esque about Mimi right then.

This is all great silent acting, of course. But what’s more interesting to me is that both scenes have a beat to them I’d call musical. The first, Gish composes of short notes; the second, of long draws of the bowstring. We are adapting opera here, after all. The music has to come out somehow. Combine these scenes with the totality of Gilbert’s performance and you see how Vidor proposed to do it.

Other elements, though, just feel stagey. The bohemians’ living space is gigantic, or at least it looks that way, as though theatrical width was needed for a film with no dance numbers or otherwise complex choreography. Rodolphe’s friends are painted a bit too broad for a film from the mid-20s. And the costumes, especially for the women, are outsized and garish. This looks wrong on Gish.

Actually, joy looks wrong on Gish. And maybe that’s why, as La Bohème wore on, I cared less. If you know the plot of the opera, you know joy is fleeting for Mimi, but there is a point, about in the middle, where she has a lot of it. And damn it, seeing poor, sweet, suffering Gish waltz through a grove with Gilbert, in swoon, seemed cheap. A cynic would say she had no gift for light comedy. Being prejudiced, I prefer to think of Gish as having created a character too full, too nuanced in her fears and goals, to be as air-headed as the rest. Maybe I should believe in love instead. But frankly, I couldn’t believe that Mimi believed in love, and that’s the trouble.

Though Mimi is pursued by a drooling Viscount, who manipulates opera glasses like a probe, she remains above reproach—a more virginal character than I understand her operatic counterpart to have been. The sexual politics thus simplified, the film can only concern itself with whether Rodolphe and Mimi will find happiness; which, in a film like this, really boils down to whether or not Mimi will die. I haven’t seen Gish die very often, but, it should be noted, she can collapse like nobody’s business.

Where to find La Bohème:
I saw La Bohème live, as part of Revue Cinema’s Silent Sundays series, organized by Eric Veillette. Accompaniment was provided by William O’Meara.

***Can't get enough King Vidor? No, of course you can't. Read my posts on The Crowd and his super-rare 1920 film, The Jack-Knife Man.