Word: cortez
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...twenties. And Adolphe Menjou, as Satan, is the model of restraint. For him a grimace or devilish leer would be an unspeakable faux pas. But Griffith, far from leaving him a polished gentleman without depth of character, makes his slightest gestures personally significant. Menjou is eating dinner with Ricardo Cortez in the grandest of opulent restaurants. The conversation takes an odd tack. Menjou pivots his head slightly, and Griffith cuts away to a bevy of side-lit dancing girls, the floor show, advancing and twisting. This cut, inexplicable if one tries to find in it some definite comment on Menjou...
...characters are almost completely absent; Sorrows is simply about the emotional progress of two people. Nevertheless the rare actions of people other than the principals illuminate the situation of the principals without seeming to be bits of business Griffith picked to reveal the central relation of the film. After Cortez has bought his wife-to-be a cup and saucer they stand outside a pawnshop, facing the camera, admiring the cup. A woman comes up to them, takes a look at it, and passes off to one side. We never see her face: her action is ambiguous...
GRIFFITH'S restraint, simplicity, and economy of means pay off in increased dramatic force for every action. There's less detail, but it's all out front, working directly on us. His control of secondary incidents is complete: one gasps when a man with dark glasses simply appears at Cortez's wedding and stands in front of Dempster. Our terror increases when in close-ups, her face is partly blocked by the edge of his sleeve...
...complexity of Sorrows' sustained mood and action seems at first to be betrayed by its ending. Cortez, pursued by the shadow of Satan, flees to his true love. One thinks this is a cheap trick to get them back together and achieve a happy ending. It substitutes the crudest of cardboard religious symbolism for serious moral change. But the really cheap ending would have had Cortez repent and return of his own will. Force is required to return this malcontent to the women who loves...
Back Pay. If there was concern in Washington, there was joy in San Diego. The crewmen were installed in a four-story pink stucco building normally used by students at the Navy's Hospital Corps school; their families checked into the El Cortez Hotel atop a hill in the city's center, their bills to be paid with a $40,000 fund raised by the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. The men got some $200,000 in back pay and promptly unloaded some of it in the PX, opened for an hour despite the holiday. After a Christmas...