The Big Whatsit

The 1935 Fox Film Corporation production of Dante’s Inferno cost just under $750k to make. It featured two actors who were due to be among Hollywood’s biggest stars - Spencer Tracy and Rita Hayworth - along with future Oscar winner, Claire Trevor. Production values were high, the movie boasting some spectacular sets and special effects, and it also carried a relevant message for its Depression era audience. Yet the Inferno is largely forgotten, a footnote in the careers of people who went on to bigger and better things. It’s unavailable on DVD, with no plans for a release (I caught it on Sky Movies Classics), neither it seems any great demand. One for completists only, perhaps for Tracy fans who want to see what ‘Spence’ was up to before he moved to MGM and became a star, or maybe those fulfilling a wish to catch Hayworth’s debut performance, back when she was billed as Rita Cansino and put in a brief yet memorable cameo as a breezy dancer.

Actually, it isn’t at all difficult to work out the reasons for the Inferno’s obscurity. The film isn’t a very good one, with its ‘club you around the head’ moralising that soon becomes rather condescending. The action follows Jim Carter (Tracy), a down on his luck grifter who happens upon Pop McWade’s (Henry B Walthall) carnival concession, Dante’s Inferno. Despite the impressive interiors and artwork of the attraction, Pop can’t pay people to enter and it’s Carter’s natural showmanship that winds up putting bums on seats. Instead of mimicking Pop’s promotion of the Inferno as a lesson in how to be good, Carter emphasises its lurid, sensationalist aspects, which naturally works with the public. Soon, he’s made enough money to buy a larger plot and build a bigger inferno, but in doing so he screws over several of his ‘carnie’ colleagues and passes a blind eye over the health and safety concerns surrounding the attraction. The bigger, better Inferno is now all about profit, the bottom line. Carter has lost his way, and only Pop - who keeps his job as the Virgil-esque tour guide - can see it.

So far, so Selznick, and there’s plenty in the film to keep fans of cheap morality pieces happy. Things really tip over the edge for Carter when he plugs all his money into a pleasure liner, one that promises to be a voyage of endless decadence and pleasure seeking for its high-rolling guests. But the ship is highly unsafe, and he knows it. By this point, his wife Betty (Trevor) has left him, taking their son with her as a consequence of his unscrupulous nature, yet he hasn’t learned a thing, even after Pop shows him what Dante envisaged hell to be like for unrepentant sinners.

It’s this latter element that makes up the high point of the film, a nine-minute tour of the inferno that is described by Leslie Halliwell as ‘one of the most unexpected, imaginative and striking pieces of cinema in Hollywood’s history.’ Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s cantica from The Divine Comedy, the movie changes tone entirely for the duration of the vision, a wordless glimpse into various recesses of hell where the damned linger and are punished. These include scenes of near-naked people throwing themselves into the fiery abyss, suicides who now grope the air pathetically as branches of gnarled trees, the misers in life who are now forced to shift vast boulders for eternity, heretics being crushed by the weight of their own tombstones, fire and brimstone pouring over exposed blasphemers, and so on.

If these scenes appear utterly at odds with the rest of the movie, then it’s possibly because according to some sources the footage comes from an earlier piece, the 1924 edition of Dante’s Inferno directed by Henry Otto that until recently was considered to be lost. Gothic in nature and vast in scope, the grim despair and strange, otherworldly beauty of hell does appear to have been ripped from a different film, and it would be easy to believe this was the case. Aside from some lingering shots on Carter’s pleasure liner of revellers that cleverly mirror the hell scenes (though they’re being about something entirely different), the vision is completely inconsistent with the tone of the overall piece and somewhat superior in terms of its quality. It’s been suggested that the film’s terrible depiction of the afterlife was inspired by the German expressionism that could be found everywhere in the 1920s, yet there’s little of Metropolis’s jutting skyscrapers or the crazy, surreally angled buildings of Dr Cagliari on display here. Rather, it’s reminiscent of the woodcut artwork of Gustave Dore, who produced a series of works in the nineteenth century based on scenes from Dante’s poem.

The film’s director, Harry Lachman, started out as a painter, having emigrated to Paris in 1911 and gaining a reputation as part of the post-impressionist movement. After getting involved in film, first as a set designer within the French film industry, Lachman moved back to America as an established director and was eventually given the job of putting Dante’s Inferno onto the screen. A fan of Dore, it’s clear to see the engraver’s work in the movie’s hell scenes, while it’s also possible to detect the director letting his own artistic vision reign free over these sequences. According to the New York Times, the film employed 3,000 extras - all toned, muscular bodies, which perhaps wasn’t what Dante had in mind when he first put his image to paper but at least ensured that the damned looked good in their tiny loincloths - and an army of technicans to bring Lachman’s terrifying vision to life.

So who did create these scenes? Were they culled from an earlier production, slotted into an otherwise simple-minded yarn where the ‘good’ are those with the least selfish dreams? Or did they come from Lachman, who was allowed to make these visions as he wanted to whilst being saddled elsewhere with a pedestrian affair? Nobody seems to agree, and there are compelling arguments for either side. Neither does it really matter. Otto’s 1924 film survives on a few remaining prints at the film archive of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The 1935 version has been largely consigned to history, dusted off occasionally for a matinee screening on a backwater of the Sky Movie channels and unavailable for purchase.

Only, it does matter. Though much of the film is forgettable nonsense, the hell scenes are an incredible vision and live on in the inspiration they offered to later film makers. They’re present in the hellish chaos of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia, through to Vincent Ward’s romantic fable about the afterlife, What Dreams May Come, and Lars von Trier’s upcoming Antichrist, besides making their mark on just about every subsequent depiction of hell on screen. Perhaps this imaginative legacy means the film deserves better.