Madame X

Dir. Lionel Barrymore 95 Minutes

USA 1929

Starring: Ruth Chatterton, Lewis Stone, Raymond Hackett, Holmes Herbert, Eugenie Besserer

**/***** Painfully awkward early talking film that retains some mild interest as a curio for the era and a directorial effort from Lionel Barrymore (Oscar nominated alongside Ruth Chatterton for Best Actress). Chatterton plays a woman who abandons her son at a young age, is barred from her husband from every seeing him again, and then is defended by him years later when she commits a murder. The film feels like an epic at 95 minutes, with much of that time a slog as the actors clearly grapple with the new technology with long pauses between dialogue that is already stilted in its delivery anyway (it did not help that the sound quality of this print is awful from time, with some of this dialogue virtually impossible to make out clearly). And Barrymore is basically directing a stage play, reliant on a constantly static camera that can hardly handle with a new character enters the scene. Chatterton is very stiff in her early scenes, though finds a bit more personality to the characters as the drama progresses (she plays a pretty good drunk in the middle portion), and when the narratives shifts to a courtroom setting it somehow becomes even more tiresome than it had been previously. An intriguing artifact for completists of the period, but a far cry from a worthwhile introduction to the era. September 16th, 2019