Ever In My Heart (1933)

Dir.: Archie Mayo
Plot: A German-American family is torn apart by xenophobia during the First World War, with harrowing consequences.

One of the more unusual early Stanwyck B-pictures, Ever In My Heart is a breathless 68-minute melodrama with a strong first act, an excellent second one and an astoundingly dumb third one. But let’s start from the start.

Stanwyck, somewhat incongruously, is cast as a high society New England belle who, in 1909, is awaiting the return of her cousin/semi-fiancé Jeff (Ralph Bellamy) from Europe. Upon his arrival, however, she finds herself more attracted to the German friend he has brought back with him (the quietly adaptable Otto Kruger). Such is always the way with Ralph Bellamy, he gamely surrenders Mary to his pal and agree to just stay blood relatives. Mary’s family, particularly her brother, disapprove of any marriage to an outsider - and even worse, a foreigner - but soon come to accept the union.

The film moves swiftly on from here in a series of vignettes showing the domestic bliss which follows. They set up house, Hugo gets a job teaching chemistry at a college and they have a son. As an aside here, I really adored the scene between Stanwyck and Kruger after the baby is born - it’s really funny and cute as all hell. This sequence culminates with Hugo receiving his US citizenship and celebrating with their friends, who give him an engraved trophy to commemorate his becoming American.

Can't help but notice the foreshadowing of It's A Wonderful Life going on here.

Anyhow, it all goes swiftly downhill from here. The sinking of the Lusitania causes outrage in hitherto neutral America and the family soon feels the effects. Some are small, like Mary’s brother snapping at her bilingual son to “speak English”, but increasingly they are large. Hugo loses his job, their friends start to abandon them, and their son is taken fatally ill. The death scene, I have to say, is phenomenally well shot and acted, especially by Kruger. I admit I was sceptical about his aptitude for playing a leading man, havi

ng only ever seen him in sinister character parts, but he really is extremely engaging. He has a sort of gentle, Leslie Howard quality. His accent holds up very well, too (despite the name, Kruger was a born and bred American - and grand-nephew of South African statesman Paul Kruger. Although he generally played people who seemed like they ought to have a German accent anyway).

Okay, I’m just going to briefly narrate what happens in the third act, because it’s too fucking stupid to waste time on. Hugo sends Mary up to her family, promising to join her a week later, but instead sends her a letter explaining that he is going back to Germany. They divorce. Mary goes off to France to help the war effort and who should she happen to bump into posing as a Yankee soldier? Yep, it’s Hugo all-fucking-right. And coincidentally, just as Jeff has told her there is a spy in the unit threatening their mission (yeah, Jeff is somehow also there. I don’t even know why they called it the Great War when there’re all apparently running into each other all the time). They both still love each other, but she can’t let him betray the American troops, so she poisons them both with cyanide. Ugh. Let’s just forget that that happened. The only saving grace is Stanwyck, who tries so hard to sell this schlock. My reluctant sniffles pay tribute to the sheer acting talent momentarily overpowering the innate silliness of the situation.

The central theme - the poisonous effects of American xenophobia - makes this a surprisingly acute and self-critical Hollywood production for the time. A few commentators have accused the film of trying to have its cake and eat it by having Hugo turn out to by a spy, thus undermining the earlier message that the prejudice against him was unjustified and devastating. But I have to say, I think it’s a bit cleverer than that.

Much as I hate to defend the melty mess of improbable occurrences which constitute the third act, I think Hugo’s decision to return to his homeland and fight against his adopted country is better read as a condemnation of how American xenophobia has turned him from enthusiastic new citizen to an embittered cynic. Recall that even in the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Pre-Code Hollywood no studio was going to come right out and accuse US society of creating its own enemies (a theme still painfully relevant in our time). But the film definitely presents Hugo as broken by what American patriotism really looks like, rather than as a duplicitous outsider biding his time to strike. Daringly, he betrays America and yet you are supposed to feel sorry for him. The words in the letter he sends Mary before leaving her express the film’s message as plainly as it could afford to: “They let me be a citizen, but they won’t let me be an American.”

7/10. Without the central pairing, it would struggle to scrape a 6.