[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Union Pacific (1939) with Barbara Stanwyck: reading out the love letter to the dying man.

Conflicts in DeMille’s work sometimes evoke Cornellian dilemmas and conjure all their power.

For instance, John Tremble, the hero of The Whispering Chorus must make a choice: either manage to prove that he didn’t commit the murder he is accused of—which now seems possible—and return to his wife, or accept going to the electric chair to avoid ruining the life of his wife, now remarried to the governor, on the eve of her delivery.

Jim Brett (Northwest Mounted Police) loves young April, but he must arrest her brother, guilty of desertion and threatened with a firing squad. And he knows well that if he arrests him, April will never forgive him…

There are several conflicts of this kind in The Greatest Show on Earth: Brad (Charlton Heston), the injured circus director, can only be saved if he agrees to receive the blood of Sebastian the acrobat, his rival in love who has almost compromised the survival of the circus with his misdemeanours. He begins by refusing this gift, but he has no choice. His friends tease him: if Brad marries the woman he loves, their children will have Sebastian’s blood.

The film’s credits mention that James Stewart plays the role of Buttons, the sad clown with his face permanently covered by a mask. The film’s viewers recognize James Stewart by his characteristic way of speaking. Stewart’s work is magnificent, playing solely on his voice and movements.

But Buttons was once a doctor who euthanized his wife. Pursued by the police, he found refuge in the circus with the help of this mask.

The policeman who tracks him down shows Brad a photo of the man he is looking for. And we see a photo of James Stewart. It’s the only time in the film that we see his face. The audience is thus one step ahead of the film’s protagonists, which it appreciates.

Brad needs a doctor for his blood transfusion. And his sweetheart is chasing Buttons, who smells trouble and prepares to leave the place. She convinces him to stay and perform the operation, under the supervision of the policeman, who even assists him and who realizes that Buttons is the doctor he is looking for. He arrests him after shaking his hand, congratulating him for his conduct and sacrifice. I could have just as well mentioned these sequences in the chapter on mistakes.

We are quite close to Corneille territory in Union Pacific: a dying, wounded man wants his fiancée’s letter, which he has just received, read out to him. Barbara Stanwyck has no time to look for the letter and takes out a piece of paper from a neighbour’s pocket. It’s an ordinary advertisement, and she begins to read it out as if it were a love letter, improvising with verve and lyricism. There are some variations of this principle in Wassell, with the love letter dictated to the nurse, but in fact inspired by her, while it is theoretically addressed to the fiancée, and with the blind man showing the photo of his younger sister. But we see that it is, in reality, that of his old grandfather.