The Conquering Power

I've just watched the Alice Terry, Valentino movie The Conquering Power. While I enjoyed the movie, it didn't have the power and emotional scale of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The story is about the power of love over seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The focus here is on the director's wife, Alice Terry, and she's up for the challenge, her lovely face registering a myriad of emotions, but it seemed unrealistic that she fell in love with her own cousin played by Valentino so quickly, that she was willing to wait for him as years passed without word as she was subjected to so much abuse from her father.

The morality angle about the obsession of greed and the way it's depicted as a monster that eventually crushes the person obsessed, really reminded me very much of the movie Greed, but in a much smaller, more intimate little film.

You can tell that there must have been some falling out between the director Rex Ingram and Valentino, as his part is very small and secondary, as compared to the earlier film Horsemen. They never made another picture together, which was a shame. Valentino never got another director who was willing to take the same kinds of risks with him.

"The Conquering Power" is an amazing film starring Rudolph Valentino, Alice Terry, and Ralph Lewis. In the film, "the conquering power" is intended to be love, though in the original material, it's that root of all evil, money/gold. Here, Charles (Valentino's) father loses his fortune, and before he kills himself, he sends his son to his estranged brother. His brother, Grandet, is a wealthy, cruel miser who takes advantage of Valentino's bad luck. He has a lovely daughter, Eugenie (Terry) and she and Charles fall in love, in spite of the fact that they seem to be first cousins. Charles decides to seek his fortune, and Eugenie makes him a gift of her gold, given to her each year by her father on her birthday.

Well, the "Sunset Boulevard" phrase "We had faces then" certainly applies to this film. There were so many odd-looking, wizened up, elderly people in this film, it was astounding. They were all fascinating to look at and seemed to showcase the beauty of Terry and Valentino all the more. Valentino is excellent, ever elegant, and is particularly handsome in the beginning and toward the end of the film, when he sports casual clothes, a mustache, and 5 o'clock shadow. For the scenes at his uncle's, his makeup is somewhat exaggerated in the style often used in the '20s - and this is one actor who needed no accentuation. Terry is lovely and gives a wonderful performance.

The star of this film, however, is Ingram's direction, particularly at the end, where mysterious hands come out of a cradle filled with gold and from everywhere else, Gold itself makes a human-like appearance, spitting out coins, and walls literally close in. Fantastic effects done many, many years before the computer and requiring a lot of imagination.

Highly recommended - we are so fortunate to be able to see some of these films, even if they are not in pristine condition.

Conquering Power, The (1921)

*** (out of 4)

The impressive silent film starts off with one of the strangest titles cards I've ever read. The film, obviously meant to be played at least a hundred years before 1921, has a title card that tells us current movie goers don't care for costume dramas so they've updated the story to 1921 times. In the film, Rudolph Valentino plays a playboy who has everything he wants in life but his father comes home, obviously upset, and asks him to go stay with his uncle (Ralph Lewis) for a little while. When the playboy reaches his uncle's home he learns that his father has killed himself but his cousin (Alice Terry) is there to comfort him and soon the two fall in love. The problems are just starting because her father is an evil man that only cares about money and will stop at nothing to keep them apart even if one must die. This film is probably best remembered for having a big influence on Greed and that isn't the only reason people should seek this film out. Ingram does a great job in the direction even though the material isn't the strongest that it could have been. I think a little stronger screenplay would have helped the film but there's no doubt that this film contains one of the most memorable scenes in silent history. I wasn't overly thrilled with Terry who I feel somewhat weights the film down with her mediocre performance but Valentino comes off quite strong. The scene stealer is certainly Lewis who turns in a great performance as the wicked father. The evilness of his character certainly jumps off the screen and Lewis does a great job at playing it. The highlight of the film comes towards the end when Lewis is trapped in a room where ghosts of the people his greed as destroyed or killed come to haunt him. The way this scene is shot, with light coming in through a hole in the roof, is extremely well done but it also has a very creepy and eerie tone throughout. This certainly isn't a horror film but this sequence is among the greatest I've seen in any of the silent horrors I've watched.

Rex Ingram was one of the best "silent" directors, and he proves his skill yet again in this powerful, and often frightening film about love and greed. Evidently a strong influence on Von Stroheim's "Greed", "The Conquering Power" is about the love affair between cousins Valentino and Terry, and the actions of Terry's miserly father to prevent the affair. Ralph Lewis gives a commanding performance as the father, and the scene in which he is locked in a room with the ghosts of the people his greed destroyed, and even the ghost of gold itself, is utterly terrifying. Valentino convincingly moves from dandy to enlightened youth, and Terry is sublime as the suffering daughter. And through it all is Ingram's uncanny ability to catch the beauty in a face, the stream of light into a room, the thrill or the terror of a touch! Silent film-making at its very best.

As the immediate follow-up to his anti-war saga FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, Rex Ingram presented this rendition of Balzac's EUGENIE GRANDET. The story is nominally updated to the flapper era, but most of it takes place in a provincial town where everyone wears 19th century costumes anyway. As in the earlier film, Rudolph Valentino is a playboy [ with a poodle] who must prove himself, but he appears to somewhat less advantage here. Once again, Alice Terry sensitively plays his designated love object, but in a more traditional ingenue role. Ingram does not always stage scenes effectively, but his films are distinguished by appealingly natural acting: even the obsession of old miser Grandet is never overplayed. In fact, the most striking scene shows the old man hallucinating personifications of his beloved gold, a sequence which may have influenced Ingram's friend and colleague Erich von Stroheim when he filmed GREED. Ingram's celebrated visual talent and John Seitz's cinematography are hard to judge in the dim, unrestored print available. This film lacks the spectacle of FOUR HORSEMEN, but still manages to suggest Balzac's sweep in portraying the complexity of human relations. The "conquering power," according to an introductory title, is Love.