Apart from their impressive craft, the most striking common element I find in the early American talkies and ’40s fantasies by William Dieterle that I’ve seen is how literary they are. This adjective often has negative connotations in this North American neck of the woods, apparently because “literary” and “cinematic” are supposed to be antithetical—though clearly not for Orson Welles, nor for Godard, who devoted his first piece of film criticism to defending Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and virtually ended his 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema (1995) with his appreciative survey of literary texts that (for him) were an essential part of cinema, “from Diderot to Daney.”
It’s surely silly to fault a screenplay because its dialogue is witty, smart, and well-written, and this is part of what impresses me about Dieterle’s The Last Flight and Lawyer Man (1931), Man Wanted and Jewel Robbery (1932), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Blockade (1938), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), All That Money (1941), and (1948), among other examples from the director’s filmography. I don’t mean to suggest that Dieterle wrote any of these movies, as he wasn’t a writer like Godard or Mankiewicz or Welles; only that he knew how to make their literary virtues shine and shimmer. (The fact that some early talkies are so literate and literary in both their language and their overall orientation can obviously be traced to the influx of talented playwrights and novelists from the east coast that came with sound. “With talk came the Jew,” Frieda Grafe quotes the younger Mankiewicz saying, in her book about his [1947], but the goyim also seem pretty well-represented in terms of articulate screenwriters during this period.)
