Wombatz wrote:I don't think that the fact you're just part of the crowd after all is such a bitter thought during that pullback at the end. To me it says: We all laugh at the same things, we're equal, don't fight your humanity.
Yes, that's certainly part of it - you put it very well. The question, perhaps, is how you see the film defining that 'humanity', and I see it as quite a cynical definition. But as Tommaso's post also shows, my reading of the ending is over-determinedly bleak...
Tommaso wrote:Perhaps, but while I could see a pragmatic aspect if it comes to John, I can't see it for Mary. I mean, what is her advantage when she stays with him? When she tries to leave him, she already has tears in her eyes, and she makes sure that he has everything he needs (the meal is in the oven, and the clothes are ironed). Even when she has already left the house, she cannot leave with the bullies from her family, and she returns to the house saying that John has always so much depended on her. She simply wants to see him again, even though she uses the pretext of telling him that he can see his son anytime he wants. And then he wins her over with the theatre tickets and most of all that little, unassuming bunch of flowers, which she first presses against her face and then puts it on her dress, a symbolic act of reconciliation, and in my view of love. And then it's her who starts to dance once John has put the record on the grammophone. Perhaps that's not 'love' in the narrow sense of the word, but she does care for him, perhaps like a mother would. But I can't see pragmatism in any of this, I'm afraid...
Well, the film surely shows lovers' quarrels and disillusions. But as to the end, note that the laughing and cheering between the two does not start with the clown act, but that it already begins in the scene before, at the end of the dance, the two of them together with their child on the sofa, and that this laughter then simply segues with a cut to the clown scene. It's not the clown act that reunites them, or makes them laugh together again, then.
My memory of the details you mention was quite vague - in all honesty, I hadn't seen the film for a while, though I used to watch it obsessively when I was first getting into silent films. Having dug out my old VHS just now and watched it again... Yes, it was definitely too dismissive to say that it's 'not love' that brings them together at the end. John certainly says he loves Mary, and her concern for him is obviously more profound than mere habit. It is, looked at from one angle, quite a happy ending. The dancing child especially contributes to this effect, and of course the moments you mention where Mary puts the flowers on, and they dance and start laughing.
What I meant by 'something more pragmatic' was not so much the economic reasons for being together - indeed Mary would be better off, materially speaking, being looked after by her awful brothers. It's more the sense I get that this couple stays together, not because they make each other happy (which on the whole they don't), but because they are bound together whether they like it or not, by marriage, by their child, and by a not entirely healthy mutual dependence. Their laughter at the end of the dance might seem, on one level, like their happiness at being reunited, but that segue to the clown act casts a different light on it, turning it (I think) into a more mindless, less meaningful kind of laughter. It makes it seem as though they laugh because there's nothing else to do - because, as the intertitle says, the crowd will laugh with you always, but cry with you only for a day; so it's a choice between laughter and the wheels of the freight train.
The beauty of the ending is in its ambiguity - as myrnaloy says, the tenuous, ambiguous quality of it, and the fact that you can read it in several different ways. The story I heard about the multiple endings was that there were more than two, but whatever the choices were I love that they plumped for an ending which is not one-sidedly bleak or happy. I like to take a bleak view of it because that's my temperament, but there's a lot of laughter, love, and maybe the promise of some happiness there as well.
I was relieved to find I enjoyed the film as much as ever. One nice detail I'd forgotten was the way John plays with Mary's hair: when they first meet, he tucks it into her hat, does so again on the subway, and then later during their quarrel he nags her about what a mess it is; all part of his desire to mould her into an ideal dream wife, frozen as she appears beside Niagara Falls.
And what a score by Carl Davis. I'm seeing him live next Friday, accompanying
The Iron Mask in Birmingham's Symphony Hall. Can't wait...
