David Hast: Scott, have you seen Peter Ibbotson?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen it. I actually saw it on your recommendation recently. So it's a new movie for me and quite an interesting film.
DH: It is. It is an obscure movie from 1935 from Paramount Pictures starring Gary Cooper and Anne Harding. And so it's a mainstream Hollywood movie from the golden age of Hollywood studio movies, but it is one of the strangest movies to come out of that system.
This movie depicts an alternate reality based in a shared dream world between two people. It already sounds like Inception or something, right? It basically flopped with American audiences, but when the surrealists over in France discovered it, they were completely taken with it because it stood for everything they believed in. You know, the sort of...subconscious and dream reality as more important than everyday reality.
It's amazing that it came out of Hollywood and it's very, very hard to find. It's impossible for us to really discuss this movie without giving spoilers, but I think in this case we have to because it's going to be, you can't find this movie streaming.
So basically let's talk about it because it's such an interesting movie and anyone who's listening will tell the whole story but it's worth seeing so then you can go out and try and find it. It is on Blu-ray, but other than that, it's really hard to find.
SVW: It's very, very hard to find currently not streaming. And it's a pretty simple story. It begins with the two characters as eight year olds, Go-Go played by Dickie Moore and Mimsy played by Virginia Wydler. And at first they seem to hate each other, but soon the viewer realizes that they're actually in love. When Go-Go's mother dies and he's taken away by his uncle from Paris, France to England, their sadness is so deep that you can tell that it's as if life is over for them.
And then we cut to Gogo, whose adult name is Peter Ibbotson. He's working as an architect, but he shows little interest in any kind of social life. Even when he goes on a date with a nice young woman who's played by a 17 year old Ida Lupino in one of her early roles, he can't seem to enjoy himself. And as a character, he's always distracted about something or other and you quickly realize that he's stuck in the memory of that love that was taken from him as a child. And very quickly, Peter is assigned a job to redesign a horse stable on the estate of the Duke of Towers.
And when he meets the Duchess of Towers to discuss the project, the viewer, the audience quickly realizes that this is actually a grown-up mimsy, the love of Peter's childhood, and so the viewer realizes before Peter does, and once it becomes clear to both of them, it also becomes clear in the movie that they are soulmates. And as adults, they are still in love. And one of the interesting things I thought in the plot was that fairly quickly, the Duke realizes his wife's feelings and that it's impossible for them to deny, even though they have not touched, they've not kissed, they've been good adults, but the Duke is enraged. He pulls a gun on Peter and in defending himself, Peter kills the Duke. Now this is after he catches them embracing when they finally embrace and kiss.
DH: No, oh yeah, that's right. But at first, when he first sort of confronts him and says you're in love, they haven't even kissed yet.
SVW: No, and in fact, he basically sort of, it's like the idea is that Peter's gonna leave and his wife is gonna remain his wife.
DH: Right.
SVW: And, but that's when Peter basically takes control of the situation and.
DH: Right, and he kills the Duke. So basically, you've just described the first two thirds of the movie, and this could be a conventional, regular Hollywood movie. You know, kind of predictable, oh, we can tell it's Mimsy, even though Peter can't yet. The only weird thing that's happened so far, to this point, was they're talking about a, one of them starts talking about a dream, and the other one, Mimsy does, and then Peter just starts finishing her sentences, and then you realize they had the same dream last night.
SVW: They had the same dream last night, and this is right before they realize, not just that they're in love, but that they have to be together.
DH: Right, so Peter kills the Duke in self-defense, and now you can give away the rest.
SVW: Well, he's sentenced to life in prison, and here the movie crosses over into a realm that's truly unlike anything else produced in Hollywood's golden age, even though the couple can never be together physically in the world. They spend the rest of the movie experiencing a shared dream world every night where they live together in bliss. And they do this for decades, the rest of their lives until they're both old and dying.
DH: They're never together again. He serves out the rest of his life in like this horrible prison where he's chained up like a dungeon. And she's just alone on her estate sad, and it's like all they can do is, each night, is wait to fall asleep to go into this dream world where they're young again and can sort of do anything. It's, it's an audacious story. And the story itself is, is, you know, usually there's things like ghost stories where people are in other realms or stories with that are more overtly religious, where you're seeing characters go to heaven or something. There's a lot of those kinds of things in Hollywood.
SVW: Or where there are dreams and you understand it's just a dream. It's not real.
DH: But these people, I mean, because there's this moment, it reminded me literally of like the movie Inception, like with the top that he spins, right? To see if he's in reality or in the dream world.
The first time she meets him in this dream world, he can't believe her, he can't believe that he can walk through the bars of the prison and go out into the world and be with her. And she says, this ring, this ring. And she shows him the ring on her finger and he looks at it really carefully and they talk about all the details of it. And she says, tomorrow, someone will bring you this ring. And then when she wakes up, she gives the ring to someone to go see him in prison and shows her the ring. And he's like, he says these really strange lines like this ring is the portal to another world and the eighth sea and all this, these just really strange stuff. This is why the surrealists went nuts for this movie.
So, and part of it, so it's a great story, but for me, what really sells it is the visual look of the dreams.
SVW: Yes, the film looks gorgeous.
DH: Yeah, the cinematographer was Charles Lang, who's one of the great Hollywood Golden Age cinematographers. And apparently Paramount was known for having really great cinematographers, one of whom was Carl Struess, who made, who shot F.W. Murnau's silent classic Sunrise, which was awarded all kinds of awards, partly because no one had ever seen anything like it before visually. And this is just about six, I don't know, about eight years before this movie. So I think that Lang was getting a lot of ideas that way. And so it's just this sort of gauzy layered look, this really interesting visuals for, especially for a movie in 1935.
SVW: And it's interesting that this movie accepts the idea that dreams can be more real than everyday life in a better place to live than ordinary reality.
DH: Yeah, she's the, the Mimsy character. I guess her name is Mary when she's an adult. She says things like who's to say what is really true. It's like this is pretty subjective stuff for Hollywood.
SVW: And the movie found a special place in cinema and art history, not just with the surrealist, but with critics, scholars and fans of the movies. Although now it's difficult to find.
DH: It's still difficult to find. Like I said, if you want to buy it on Blu-ray, you can. You can dig it up. You found it in the library, didn't you?
SVW: They do have it at the Grand Rapids Public Library. It's in a box set, so you have to get the Gary Cooper collection.
DH: But there you go. So you can get it from the library. Yay for libraries. But yeah, this movie, and it's funny because you look at who was involved in the movie. Other than Charles Lang, who had an idea, you know. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall and go back and listen to how they decided to make this movie because everybody in it were mainstream people. Henry Hathaway was known for westerns. He made True Grit and The Sons of Katie Elder. He made normal movies, you know, and Gary Cooper you don't think of him as doing something avant-garde, but somehow it came together.
