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Dante's Inferno

1935, Movie, NR, 88 mins

Dante's Inferno: Review

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Ambitious to the point of ruthlessness, Tracy is a ship's stoker who is fired for insulting a drunken female passenger (not unlike O'Neill's "Hairy Ape"). He gets a job as a carnival barker, touting a sideshow owned by Walthall, who played The Little Colonel in Griffith's classic silent film THE BIRTH OF A NATION. The sideshow depicts scenes of Hell as originally envisioned by Dante in his Inferno. Through huckstering methods, Tracy puts the show on a paying basis, marrying Walthall's daughter, Trevor. They have a son, but Tracy ignores his family and goes pell-mell after wealth, packing an unsafe amusement pier with customers and bribing an inspector to look the other way. The pier collapses and scores are killed and injured. Walthall lectures Tracy about the lower depths of fire awaiting evil-doers. His lecture is accompanied by a truly frightening 10-minute insertion which depicts a roaring, terrible Hell taken from Fox's 1924 DANTE'S INFERNO, dressed up with some added frames to work into the talkie version, a little masterpiece of special effects. Tracy is not moved, despite the gruesome fact that the inspector commits suicide upon learning of the disaster he could have prevented. Tracy is brought to trial but lies his way to freedom with the help of his wife's testimony. The sham is too much for Trevor, so she leaves Tracy, taking her son with her. Tracy next invests his money in a gambling ship, hiring an inexperienced crew which leads to a fire while the packed ship is at sea. Following his compassion instead of his mercenary streak, Tracy beaches the boat to save lives and loses his fortune. At the end, however, Trevor and son rejoin him in seeking an honest future. The story is overlong and most of the cast move about like zombies, except for the magnificent Tracy who brings the kind of intensity to his performance that typified his memorable career; the actor was simply incapable of turning in a bad performance. Walthall is intriguing as the sideshow owner, but he is a tired old man as he was in real life, dying a year after this film's completion. The fire scene on board Tracy's gambling ship was almost as spectacular as the borrowed segment of Hell, and was started by a pair of twirling dancers entertaining shipboard guests in a lavish dining room. One of the dancers, Leon, sprained his ankle severely during a wild dance that did little for an obscure film career. His partner, however, appearing in her first feature-length film under the name Rita Cansino, later became one of Hollywood's great sex symbols and stars, Rita Hayworth. Even though she appeared only briefly in DANTE'S INFERNO, Fox reissued this film in the mid-1940s, giving her star billing. Tracy never liked the film, despite his terrific portrayal of a ne'er-do-well, undoubtedly disliking the uncharacteristic role itself. He stated in the late 1940s that "Rita Hayworth's first film was DANTE'S INFERNO, the last one I made at Fox under my old contract and one of the worst pictures ever made anywhere, anytime. The fact that she survived in films after that screen debut is testament enough that she deserves all the recognition she's getting right now." leave a comment
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