Heaven Sent
A 1931 MELODRAMA ABOUT MARRIAGE AND ITS discontents, Seed is directed with characteristic restraint and simplicity by John M. Stahl. On its release, the film did well financially but met with faint praise, sniffed at by critic Creighton Peet as “a rather dull little movie of the God-how-wewomen-suffer school,” and criticized by Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times as “lethargic” with “unimaginative” direction. Seed subsequently disappeared from view, though in recent years it has occasionally surfaced for a screening at MoMA or the Pacific Film Archive. When the UCLA Film & Television Archive loaned their print to be screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna this past June, it emerged as one of the discoveries of the festival, a delicately unsparing drama that deserves comparison with the works of Mikio Naruse.
What is it about this genteel, understated weeper that knocks so many people powerfully demonstrates the way Stahl’s films, at their best, sneak up on you. His style is clean, direct, and self-effacing; it is the unforced tenderness for his characters and the accumulation of small but piercing moments of emotional truth that stealthily overpower you. More obviously striking is how often his films side with women, and how ruthlessly they expose male selfishness and entitlement. forms an unofficial trilogy with Stahl’s equally superb (1932) and (1933), and all three illustrate a common bargain in women’s pictures, which accept suffering inflicted by men as woman’s lot, but exact a kind of revenge by reducing male characters to dim ciphers with none of the complexity or passion of their female counterparts. John Boles, an actor possessing all the rich inner life of a store-window mannequin, was thus ideally cast in these three films, his dead-eyed handsomeness a perfect foil for the sensitivity and rueful intelligence of Lois Wilson, Irene Dunne, and Margaret Sullavan.
