The Fountain: John Cromwell’s Wartime Triangle at 90
A man and a woman meet during wartime; their love creates a moment of stillness in a period of devastation, but she is married, and their love seems to be held entirely in one piece of music. This is not Casablanca.
The Fountain premiered on the 23rd of August in 1934 to much praise for its faithfulness to Charles Langbridge Morgan’s novel, but with concern for its slow and contemplative nature. Ann Harding, its star, said, “Maybe we should never have made it,” but she and director John Cromwell championed the film; it successfully articulated the contemplative nature of the book without compromising for a Hollywood spin: “We had to do the book and not a Hollywood version of it. Sam Hoffenstein wrote a poet’s script, and it was shot exactly as written.” The Fountain’s mixed reception upon release is reflective of the remarkable nature of this film blossoming in the Hollywood studio system. 90 years on, John Cromwell’s wartime triangle remains outstanding in its emotional elegance and intelligent introspection.
The Fountain opens in complete silence; only the score of Max Steiner (Little Women, Gone with the Wind) wisps through the carriage of a train. Cromwell’s camera feels unchained, an extension of emotions, as Lewis (Brian Aherne) looks around at his fellow sleeping British officers; his serene countenance feels incongruous to the atmosphere of a train leading him to his imprisonment at an internment fort. The film is set during WWI in neutral Holland, but it is not a war picture. The struggle of the human spirit to find stillness and love is the only war that The Fountain is concerned with. After a period at the internment fort, Ballater (Ralph Forbes) and the officers plan to dig a tunnel to escape. Lewis, as not being the least bit recalcitrant, sits alone to read. Lewis’s subdued obedience to the routine of internment is due to the fort appearing like a “heaven” to him, where “time ceases to exist.” The fort represents freedom from individual responsibility and consequence to Lewis, and his following assistance is due to respect for his fellow officers rather than the desire to escape. Lewis has resigned himself to living a desultory life – a pursuit of a contemplative life, as Morgan writes. Ballater asks Lewis what it is he wants, to which Lewis replies, a “stillness of spirit,” which shows the insistency of Cromwell constructing this scene with an air of futility, as the search for stillness is an endless expedition. Ballater and Lewis discover, once resurfacing from the tunnel to the Commandment, that a general parole has been announced. A change from the narrative structure of the novel. Cromwell’s delicately constructed film emphasises this struggle of the human soul, which is focused on from the outset with the inclusion of a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection” in the opening credits: “from outwards forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountain are within.” The fountains of passion and life within Lewis’s soul crack through his serene countenance upon receiving a letter from Julie (Ann Harding) and an invitation from her and the Baron and Baroness van Leyden (Jean Hersholt and Violet Kemble Cooper) to spend his parole at the castle of Enkendaal.
The film takes place mostly in the Baron’s home at Enkendaal, making the film’s first act in the internment fort feel like a distant dream with how much Lewis’s concerns have changed since Julie’s letter and his reunion with her. Julie’s letter causes a distinct change in Lewis. He becomes a man of action. The slow scroll of Julie’s letter does not feel like it is just for the audience’s benefit, as it emphasises how Lewis has reread the letter many times, tracing the ink until the words become flesh. Lewis has not seen Julie in several years and looks to her handwriting as a window into who she is as a woman. Julie omitting her surname from the letter emphasises the spiritual plane of intimacy that letters operate on in both novel and film. Cromwell translates the intimacy of letter-writing in the novel most beautifully to film, as Lewis fixates on her deliberate omittance of her married name, with Aherne writing her name repeatedly on a piece of paper later in the film. Her name appears like a chant for Lewis – a memory of his past and of the intimacy he is so starved for. The paper is not just paper; it is an evergreen, as Julie comments upon witnessing his doodling – a binding contract of their love that is as delicate as paper but as sempiternal as an evergreen in harsh winters.
The idea of Julie is what Cromwell wants to articulate. She is representative of Lewis’s past, life before wartime, and the uncertain future. Cromwell, cleverly, introduces Ann Harding in the film without the glamourous Hollywood entrance this period became known for. Aherne peeks through the open window of his cottage to see Harding and Forbes walking up the path and pulls back to hide behind the curtain. The assuredness of a man pursuing a life of detached contemplation is abandoned; he becomes lovestruck and smiles upon hearing her voice. Cromwell keeps the camera on Aherne as he pulls himself away from the window, which emphasises Harding’s voice. Her voice echoes around the frame, circling Aherne, as if vibrant enough to touch. The enchantment of Harding’s distinct voice is elevated by Cromwell staying on Aherne, displacing Harding’s voice from her body. Her voice is a gentle caress to him, floating around the frame but just out of reach, and when he calls out to her, she has already walked away back down the path. Cromwell introducing Harding in the film with just her voice is still impressive, as it perfectly expresses how Lewis and Julie connect beyond the physical body.
When Harding is first truly shown on screen, she is framed, quite literally, in the doorframe as she quickly descends a staircase to a dinner party. Julie is trapped in the ornateness of the castle, and her surprising candidness in her emotions to Lewis emphasises her difference and isolation from her politically and emotionally grey family-in-law.
The Fountain’s soft-focus photography creates this shimmering contrast in the divine glowing image of Harding and the impetuous Julie. She sharply admits her admiration to Lewis, but not love for her husband Rupert von Narwitz (Paul Lukas). Hoffenstein’s writing allows this outburst to feel natural; where one could lean into verbosity about why she doesn’t love him, Hoffenstein displays Julie as feeling as if she were “beating against a wall in the dark, trying to find a door that would let me out to something, somewhere.” Julie is interned too, and Cromwell’s framing of her complements Hoffenstein’s vision by creating this dichotomy with Julie’s passionate spirit and her expectations as the British wife of a Prussian officer in neutral, but pro-German, Holland. Julie’s forthrightness and Lewis’s gentle thoughtfulness create a dance in dialogue, which Cromwell’s circling camera movements emphasises when Julie and Lewis walk together. Cromwell films their interactions like a waltz. They reach out and embrace beyond physical touch; their souls connect with Cromwell’s direction and Hoffenstein’s poetics.
John Cromwell was a year into his contract with RKO at the time of The Fountain, establishing himself as a key figure in the making of operatic films and adapting controversial works such as The Silver Chord, Ann Vickers, and Of Human Bondage. By 1934, his films became synonymous with being vehicles for female stars, yet he wasn’t exactly a woman’s picture director, and RKO seemed to acknowledge that. Cromwell later reminisced about RKO in the 1930s, stating, “There was more freedom. RKO was rather well-known for that… it seemed to be full of free souls who felt that at least they were doing what they wanted to do.” From having previously worked at Paramount, Cromwell welcomed the individuality and independence seemingly given to RKO’s filmmakers. There was a significant trust in his vision, which was primarily concerned with freedom in storytelling, and Cromwell worked on scripts while valuing his writers’ visions. Samuel Hoffenstein was a poet first and foremost, and Cromwell’s directing style emphasised that. For Hoffenstein and Cromwell, it is impossible to express love simply through direct proclamation. In The Fountain, intimate conversations of love are interlaced with very purposeful citations from the works of Keats and Plato.
The literary nature of The Fountain’s romantic entanglements circles a crucial scene in the film. The scene, which is still one of the most concise depictions of the torment of love 90 years on, shows Julie leading Lewis to a hidden staircase that leads from the library, where he is working, to a music room, her “sanctuary.” The door being fused shut and needing both Harding and Aherne to pull it open is one of Cromwell’s many images of doors and windows representing the passage to love. All that is illuminated in Julie and Lewis’s accession to her room are their embraced hands and her hair. The moonlight seems to bend around her as she guides him, and the shadows of the spiral tower staircase transform it into an intimate space between dream and reality; Harding and Aherne almost disappear altogether into the darkness.
The soft-focus photography on Harding, along with Harding leading Aherne up the stairs, displays how Lewis sees Julie, her hair a shimming golden halo; she appears like heavenly salvation for the imprisoned British officer. The glowing nature of how Harding is photographed also creates a veil between them – she remains untouchable because of her marriage, despite her heart belonging to him. The design of Julie’s music room is small, in comparison to the ornate living quarters of the house, and some of the film’s most intimate moments occur in this room to show how the music room is an extension of Julie; it is her heart that, quite literally, leads to Lewis. Julie plays the piano for Lewis, and he tells her he’s thinking of “magic casements.” Lewis’s quotation from Keats’s “Nightingale” following his and Julie’s opening of the door to her hidden staircase emphasises how The Fountain’s magic casement is the library door leading directly to Julie’s music room, directly to her heart’s truth. They can speak freely in her room, and the love is tangible; it dances in the air with Julie’s music, yet their speech is truncated by silent glances and this marvellous inability to verbalise love. The quoting of Keats’s “magic casements,” therefore, shows the literary Lewis using the love of others to articulate his own feelings for Julie. The magic casements of Keats transform into the love’s casements of Cromwell, as Julie articulates her love for Lewis not through words but through performing a waltz – Max Steiner’s love theme for Julie and Lewis.
Harding playing the piano for Aherne is as explicit as making love to him, and this is implied in the scandalous nature of Cromwell’s camera movements. When Sophie (Sara Haden) walks into the study to find no one there, Cromwell rapidly pans up to the ceiling, where Harding and Aherne appear as if separate from reality in romantic heaven. The lighting and blocking of this scene are as if a framed portrait – a moment of love captured for eternity. The illicit nature of this piano performance lies in the serenity of their solitude. Cromwell concludes this scene with a lap dissolve, creating the feeling of a romantic dream; the last to remain is the flickering light from the candle. Cromwell follows with a bright, almost overexposed, tennis match between the British officers and Julie’s family, emphasising the intimacy of what we’ve just seen. Julie’s outcry for England to win the war during the tennis match is weaved with Cromwell’s reverse shots of the blank faces of her family-in-laws crowding the frame. She is still torn between two worlds: her responsibilities and affection for her husband, and her desire for her lover.
The arrival of the injured Paul Lukas in the film is shrouded in reverence, and him being a compassionate man exasperates the conflict in rooting for one lover over the other. The romantic triangle is tinged with melancholy yet with a great understanding and love that feels unexpected for a film made under the production code. Julie is not portrayed as being at fault, and Lewis and Rupert’s meeting in the garden articulates that only love and forgiveness matter. Rupert and Lewis meeting causes a realisation of the philosophical similarity between the two men. Rupert expresses the desire for a life of contemplation, reminding Lewis of the dreams he abandoned once he found Julie, and that the idleness of the internment fort sounds pleasant to Rupert for the chance to dream. Lewis responding with “between the dream and the reality,” and Lukas finishing with “falls the shadow,” shows their desire for the same thing: a place beyond suffering. Julie is the light that leads to it.
The place between dream and reality, the shadow, is where The Fountain is. The shadows are the reality of Lewis and Rupert’s love for Julie – she is the place beyond suffering, but to reach her could cause the destruction of an entire truth. The dream is love, and the reality is the consequences of giving into love. The understanding Rupert has of Lewis’s feelings for Julie reflects these sentiments. When Julie reads from Plato’s “Symposium”, the passage on beauty evokes a similar reaction to Aherne reciting from “Nightingale”; Rupert lives in the contemplation of absolute Beauty, and his devotion to her despairs her. Lukas reaches his hand out to Harding as she weeps, and his hand feels around in the air as she hides her face. The veil between Lewis and Julie has now fallen over her and Rupert. The film’s ending is particularly poignant because of its depiction of Harding and Aherne joining hands, rather than falling into a passionate embrace, as their union reflects the loss of her husband and the innocence of new beginnings.
Cromwell’s wartime triangle is haunted by more than one melody. When Julie and Rupert embrace in bed, a new musical score is introduced. Steiner’s score for Julie and Rupert is a sombre melody, in comparison to Julie and Lewis’s love theme, characterised by harps and wind instruments; Steiner emphasises the deathly reverence of their love and how their souls connect, if not their hearts. Steiner’s score focuses on the deathly nature of their reunion and the decline of Rupert’s health. The importance of music in film is found in the metatheatricality of Harding playing these themes on the piano, and this new love theme representing Julie and Rupert’s relationship serves as a beautiful contrast to the romantic waltz of her and Lewis.
The Fountain’s greatest scene occurs when Harding plays Julie and Rupert’s theme on the piano and, immediately following, plays the waltz of Julie and Lewis. Rupert ascends the tower to Julie’s music room, the brightly lit staircase a cold and isolating contrast to the intimacy of Julie and Lewis navigating the staircase in the dark, and in a mesmerising moment of complete stillness, he stays listening to Julie play the love theme of her and Lewis. Lukas’s complete silence reflects how Steiner’s music speaks for itself – in the unsaid, the deafening yearning for love can be heard. The saccharine musical score feels necessary for articulating the desire of the repressed and tormented souls of this wartime triangle, while Steiner creating a separate love theme for Harding and Lukas’s characters evokes an image of their love as one of salvation; as Rupert told Lewis that Julie is his place of serenity, and that love is one of great lonely affection. Harding hesitating before playing the waltz reflects not only her turmoil between her two loves, but also her fear of the consequences of her dream becoming reality.
The Fountain is one of the many films in danger of being completely lost to time, and by commemorating its 90th anniversary it is important to note the disheartening fact that The Fountain has been rarely screened since. In Kingsley Canham’s correspondence with John Cromwell in the early 1970s, Cromwell detailed how it was one of his favourite films, and deservedly so. It should be remembered for its tenderness and surprising thoughtfulness. The Fountain portrays a wartime triangle through an open window, a door slightly cracked open; you can only capture small bursts of conversations, but you understand that three souls are forever intertwined without bitterness. Cromwell, like he did with later films such as Caged (1950), worked with the production code quite well, and he managed to portray this illicit love triangle with compassion, not judgement. The Fountain is the soul’s endless pursuit of stillness in war and peacetime that finds solace in the fountains of love and passion. Coleridge’s view of love fits Cromwell’s portrayal of a wartime triangle best – in “life’s noisiest hour, there whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee.”
Written by Annabel Jessica Goldsmith
Sources:
W.E. Oliver, “Ann Harding to do Technicolor Versions of Sagas, Fables,” L.A. Evening Herald Express, 29/09/34.
Susan Dalton and John Davies, “An Interview with John Cromwell,” The Velvet Light Trap, Fall 1973, p. 23.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lines from a notebook – February 1807,’ The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, pp. 336-337.
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