Saw ONLY YESTERDAY last night - quite a striking film. I can't believe I
never noticed before that it's almost exactly the same story as LETTER
FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN. (With one huge difference...but I'll save it for
the end, because it's a spoiler.)

Despite the wonderful Margaret Sullavan, I continue to believe that Stahl
is not a great director of actors, that he often leaves them alone to do
actorish things. With some directors that's an insurmountable problem -
but there's something about Stahl's style that shifts the perspective to
the back of the room, so that the actors don't control the drama quite as
much.

The element of Stahl's style that I note most often is this tendency to
create what I'd call an environmental perspective. In other words, his
camera stands just far enough back, and his blocking of non-central
elements in the frame is just conspicuous enough, that the actor who
dominates the story is shown more as part of the environment and less as a
privileged being. Those serene, impassive tracking shots that Stahl loves
are almost always a bit wider than the norm - they are a way to keep part
of the focus on the world that the characters are moving through. This is
a matter of emphasis as well as visuals: the background activity often has
a strong presence, and is sustained across big story events. Sound plays
a big part in this distribution of emphasis, and Stahl seems to pay a lot
of attention to it, usually to smooth out transitions instead of to play
them up.

This description makes it sound as if Stahl is working against the
melodrama instead of working with it. But that's a tricky issue, and I
don't know if I have a handle on it yet. Certainly the films work as
melodrama, have big emotional scenes. Stahl doesn't shy away from the
emotions. But I tend to feel his presence in the way that he pulls back
to a more environmental viewpoint, and not in the way that the melodrama
convulses the story. Margaret's tearful conversation with her
ten-year-old son at the film's climax is clearly the "money shot," the
scene that the audience is supposed to remember, the one that delivers the
goods. And yet it doesn't feel like the heart of the film from a
directorial point of view. If I feel that Stahl has a limitation, it lies
here: that the "official" film and the director's film seem to pull apart
a little bit, have different high points.

There's another element of Stahl's style that I haven't discussed yet that
mitigates this problem. It's the "audacity" element, which Sarris talked
about, and which would seem to be at odds with the "environmental"
direction. But the audacity has to be figured in. In ONLY YESTERDAY, it
rears its head right in step with the melodrama: the first images of
Margaret in bed are startlingly corpse-like. Other Stahl films play up
the audacity more than ONLY YESTERDAY, but one usually feels this aspect
of the direction to some extent. And it goes some way toward justifying
the idea of Stahl as a melodramatist.

The "audacity" and the "environmental" angle don't seem to go together at
first glance, but if you put them together and permute them a little bit,
you come close to a general idea of what Stahl is doing.

And now the SPOILER about the difference between ONLY YESTERDAY and LETTER
FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN:




















In the earlier film, the letter stops a suicide in progress, and in the
latter it creates a suicide. A pretty big difference! Ah, Hollywood. -
Dan