August, 2024 Movie of the Month: Sadie Thompson (1928)
Co-stars and writers Gloria Swanson and Raoul Walsh teamed up to bring this controversial W. Somerset Maugham story of redemption and hypocrisy to the big screen.
“When Irving Thalberg reshoots a third of a picture, you call him a genius. When Sam Goldwyn does it, he’s maintaining his reputation for quality. But when I do it, you treat me like a silly female who can’t balance her checkbook after a shopping spree,” Gloria Swanson to Joe Schenck when confronted for going over budget on Sadie Thompson.
Gloria Swanson (best remembered by modern audiences for playing the washed-up and delulu Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard) makes one thing clear in her endlessly fascinating memoir, Swanson on Swanson: she was a badass. She produced, co-wrote, and starred in 1928’s Sadie Thompson, all while playing mental gymnastics with studios and censors to ensure the film’s production wouldn’t get shutdown for its scandalous source material. “Henri [Swanson’s then-husband] and Raoul [Walsh] and I sat around under the trees and conspired about how best to break the Hays code,” Swanson recounts at the beginning of pre-production for Sadie Thompson.
The film - based on the short story “Miss Thompson"” by W. Somerset Maugham and adapted from the subsequent stage adaptation, Rain - follows the former sex worker Sadie Thompson after she lands on the Samoan island, Pago Pago, hoping for a fresh start. The island’s Marines give her a hearty welcome, but Sadie’s charming, perpetual smile verges on a grimace, a people-pleasing defense mechanism akin to a caged animal baring its teeth. She meets and falls in love with a stationed Sergeant, played by the film’s director, Raoul Walsh. (The same year as Sadie Thompson, Walsh lost an eye in an automobile accident and donned an eye-patch for the rest of his life and illustrious directing career.)
A hypocritical missionary, Mr. Davidson - who complains the native islanders are “so depraved I actually have to teach them what sin is” - is portrayed with religious verve and repressed sexuality by Lionel Barrymore. He takes issue with Thompson’s lifestyle and begins a campaign of extortion to supposedly save her soul. Pago Pago’s steady downpour of rain gives the film’s set (shot on Catalina Island) a sense of claustrophobia, transforming an island hotel into an ideological powder keg. One man could lead Sadie towards salvation from her past in San Francisco, one could condemn her to a life defined by her alleged sins. “Alleged” because Miss Thompson claims the charges back home are false. As author Mick LaSalle notes in Complicated Women (20), Swanson tended to play women who were “assumed to be loose,” but by the end of a film, proved their innocence and proved the “prudes” wrong. Sadie Thompson leaves this point a bit more ambiguous than former Swanson vehicles - maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, but we love her either way.
While reading Swanson’s memoir - and the copious pages dedicated to her feisty production battles over Sadie Thompson - a couple years back, I feared for the worst. When I got done with reading and took to Google for answers, would I discover that the reels of Sadie Thompson were lost, damaged, or melted down for some war effort to recycle the celluloid, forever changing the future of film history?
Well, yes and no. The reels weren’t lost - Mary Pickford was a keen preservationist and, as a founding member of production company United Artists, had stored the reels for Sadie Thompson in her personal collection. Unfortunately, by the time of the film’s rediscovery by Swanson’s estate, the final reel had decomposed. However, Sadie Thompson’s last scenes have been reconstructed using “surviving footage with duplicates of shots from earlier in the film, still production photographs, the original scenario, intertitle records, and a clip from the sound remake Rain” and this version of the film is available to watch on Tubi and YouTube, as it has entered the public domain this year. While the ending feels rushed and lacks the charisma of Swanson and Walsh’s performances, the first eight reels make up for this loss.
Sadie Thompson earned Gloria Swanson a Best Actress nomination at the first Academy Awards, though she lost to the equally luminous - though much less seductive - Janet Gaynor, who won the one award for three performances. Cinematographer George Barnes (Footlight Parade, Dames) also received a nomination, though he could not finish work on Sadie Thompson and Oliver Marsh (The Great Ziegfeld, Rain) stepped in to save the production. Art director William Cameron Menzies also received a nomination that year, though not for his work on Sadie Thompson.
Sadie Thompson’s main themes of religious hypocrisy and paternalistic misogyny continue to resonate nearly one hundred years after the film’s premiere in 1928, as women’s bodily autonomy is regularly contested on a state level and private decisions that used to be made between a patient and their doctor are now the subject of senate hearings and many angry e-mails to my representatives. It should be noted that, when trying to appease censors, Swanson agreed to change Barrymore’s character from a clergyman to a layperson, thus not criticizing organized religion any more than necessary for the plot. But even with this attempt to soften the social commentary of the film, Swanson screaming at Barrymore and silently declaring him a “psalm-singing son-of-a-bitch” is no less satisfying in 2024, as I too let out a silent scream of profanities when I read my home state’s recent abortion ban.
In a year when a movie about a sex worker pursuing her own “Cinderella story” won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Sadie Thompson maintains its relevance today. By entering the public domain this year, I hope this critically acclaimed work made through Swanson and Walsh’s perseverance and clever subterfuge against censorship finds a new audience in 2024!
Thank you for tuning into this month’s Movie of the Month Club! Read on for how to watch Sadie Thompson, supplementary materials, a double feature recommendation, and spoiler-filled discussion questions! As the weather hopefully grows cooler and the seasons in the Midwest shift once again, I look forward to watching more spooky movies in the coming months. Let me know any horror films you’d like to see for a future Movie of the Month!
How to Watch:
Streaming free with ads on Tubi.
Also streaming on YouTube.
Supplementary Materials
To Read:
Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director by Raoul Walsh. (Pages 201-213 - or 248-260 of the Internet Archive’s copy - cover the production of Sadie Thompson.)
Sadie Thompson essay for San Francisco Silent Film Festival by Farran Smith Nehme.
Sadie Thompson home video review from SilentEra.com.
Swanson on Swanson by Gloria Swanson.
Who The Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovich. (Pages on Raoul Walsh: 139-185. Read this for Joan Crawford apologizing to Walsh for making Rain!)
To Watch:
(At the five minute mark, Swanson discusses whether she would do anything differently if they were to make Sadie Thompson in 1981.)
To Listen:
SassMouthDames - “Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson (1928).”
One Handshake Away - “Allison Anders & Raoul Walsh.”
Double Feature Recommendation:
Daisy Miller (1974), directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Recently critically reappraised, and Bogdanovich’s first film without the creative partnership of his ex-wife Polly Platt, Daisy Miller stars his new love, Cybill Shephard, as a young American woman living abroad, whose casual attitude towards men and disregard for societal expectations leads to her downfall.
Available on VOD for $3.99.
Discussion Questions: (Spoiler Warning)
How do you think modern audiences would react overall to a screening of this film? Would it still be considered scandalous or controversial? Or are there aspects that would be considered controversial today that weren’t as much in 1928?
Do you think Sadie is guilty of the crime she’s wanted for in San Francisco? Why or why not?
If Sadie Thompson were remade today, who would you cast in the three lead roles previously played by Raoul Walsh, Gloria Swanson, and Lionel Barrymore? Who would you choose to direct?
Do you think Lionel Barrymore’s character actually killed himself? Or did somebody else kill him?
If you’ve seen the 1932 adaptation Rain, or the 1953 musical Miss Sadie Thompson, how did the movies differ from this one? Is there a version of the story you prefer? A performance?