Adam's Rib (1923)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Adam's rib |
| Original title | Adam's Rib |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1923 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Cecil B. DeMille |
| script | Jeanie MacPherson |
| production | Cecil B. DeMille for Paramount Pictures |
| camera |
Alvin Wyckoff L. Guy Wilky |
| cut | Anne Bauchens |
| occupation | |
| |
Adam's Rib is a Hollywood silent film from 1923, one of director Cecil B. DeMille's rare forays into comedy and light-weight tabloid amusement with melodramatic additions.
action
At the center of the story are the relationships between some men and several women and of both sexes, amorous trials and tribulations. There is the businessman Michael Ramsay, who gradually threatens to neglect his wife over his work. Speculative business and the increase of money are more important to him than the tangible isolation of his wife. She, in turn, seeks other diversion and starts an affair with a certain Jaromir, in his native Moravia, a small Balkan state, deposed monarch in exile, who in America is only waiting for his return to his throne and is meanwhile with his court lets go well. To avoid a social scandal and divert suspicion of adultery from the mother, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's daughter Mathilda claims that Jaromir is in fact her lover.
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Mathilda Ramsay, however, is madly in love with the somewhat unworldly professor Nathan Reade, who prefers to deal with science than with the female, human gender. In spite of the daughter's intervention, things soon threaten to get out of hand. But then fate puts everything together so that everyone can benefit from it. Ramsay, who has speculated into bankruptcy with his business bubbles, takes one last risk and tries this time with a wheat transaction in which he speculates on the return of the king. And lo and behold: It succeeds and he suddenly becomes rich again. Mrs. Ramsay now returns ruefully to her husband, the king gets his throne back in distant Moravia, and Mathilda can finally embrace her professor.
Production notes
Adam's rib was made in the second half of 1922 and cost about $ 400,000. The US mass start was September 24, 1923. In Austria, the film ran in October 1924, almost at the same time as DeMille's later staging of Triumph , and was sold there under the second and third titles Der Mann der Tat and Die Schuld der Mutter . A German premiere is not known.
A. Arnold Gillespie was involved in the creation of the film structures, and Clare West designed the costumes .
In 1949, another film was made, also in Hollywood, under the original title Adam's Rib . The film, in the form of a drama , starred Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as a controversial couple and was released in Germany under the title Ehekrieg .
criticism
Vienna's Neue Freie Presse wrote: “There are films which, if they hadn't been made into films, could just as easily have become books on operettas. The play 'Adam's Rib' belongs to this category. (...) Unfortunately, the film lacks the music that skilfully mediates between such texts and the critical mind. In return, this film piece does not dispense with any of the props that have been tried and tested in the cinema, from the treacherous piece of jewelery that slipped to the ground to the captured letter and the revolver that was sawn in time for suicide purposes, and replaces the haunting effect of illustrative methods with an increased mimic-pantomimic activity of the actors. There is a lot of rolling eyes and wistful and distorted smiles in this piece. (...) Well, not every film has literary ambitions. "
"One of the director's 'Sin in High Life' melodramas that grabbed him from time to time and that has nothing to offer a modern audience but adornment."
Individual evidence
- ↑ "Adam's Rib". In: Neue Freie Presse , October 10, 1924, p. 25 (online at ANNO ).
Web links
- Adam's rib in the Internet Movie Database (English)