THE POWER AND THE GLORY (64)

Directed by: William K. Howard (1933)

Starring: Spencer Tracy, Colleen Moore, Ralph Morgan

The Pitch: The rise and fall of a big tycoon, shown in jumbled fragments.

Theo Sez: Famous as an (alleged) forerunner of, maybe even influence on CITIZEN KANE - which is nonsense really, seeing as there's only one narrator and he's not particularly unreliable, telling his wife the story in a framing device and generally acting as a straightforward voice-over (only the fractured chronology, and the fact that it starts with its subject's much-lamented death, are remotely relevant). Famous also as the script Preston Sturges made his name with - which makes a lot more sense, seeing as it presages the way his great 40s films work as collections of high-points, roaming freely without getting bogged down in detail, as well as hinting at his talent for accommodating a wide range of tones, humorous to serious, within a single story (memo to writers trying to contrast love-in-bloom with love-departed : don't make the happy years gushing and lovey-dovey, that never works - make them funny instead). Clearly intended as arthouse-fodder, intricately done - light often louvred or streamed into rays - and studded with neat touches (like the way it starts to pan away from a scene just before a dissolve, giving an impression of a chapter closing, Time moving on) ; but the protagonist, despite Tracy's considerable best, isn't very interesting - a likeable lug who turns into a tyrant - and it loses its grip completely in the melodramatic final section (which, unforgivably, shows us something the narrator couldn't possibly have known about). Worth a look, anyway.