East Lynne is a 1931 film directed by Frank Lloyd.
It is a loose adaptation of an 1861 novel by Ellen Wood. The film starts with the marriage of Lady Isabella Mount Severn (Ann Harding) to the equally wealthy Robert Carlyle (Conrad Nagel), possessor of a giant estate called East Lynne. Isabella and Robert have a baby, but she soon finds life in an English country house not to her liking, mainly due to the presence of Robert's bitchy older sister Cecelia. Cecelia, an old maid who has managed East Lynne for many years, hates Isabella, and especially hates her cheerful vivaciousness and love of fun. Robert for his part is a spineless prig who lets Cecelia continue to run the house.
Three years after Robert and Isabella's marriage, Robert's old friend Captain Levinson (Clive Brook), a charming but slightly disreputable diplomat, comes calling. Capt. Levinson winds up escorting Isabella to a dance and, captivated by her, proclaims his love. In fact, he enters her bedroom. She chucks him out but Cecelia, who saw Levinson go in, seizes on her chance. Robert, who in the end trusts his bitchy sister far more than his loving wife, throws her out of the house—and forbids her from ever seeing her son again.
That's followed by a series of traumas which include social shunning, poverty, getting stuck in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War, and blindness.
Tropes:
- Adaptational Name Change: Isabella's husband gets his name changed from Archibald to Robert, possibly because "Archibald" sounds a little weird to American movie viewers.
- Chick Flick: A noble, virtuous woman is victimized and buffeted by a heartless prig of a husband and an irresponsible, shiftless lover, is separated from her child, and goes through a series of traumas while dreaming only of seeing the baby again.
- Dances and Balls: Isabella, bored out of her mind in her sister-in-law's stuffy household, goes to a lavish dance with Capt. Levinson. This leads to disaster.
- Downer Ending: The tragic ending has Isabella, who has just gone completely blind, wandering off a cliff on the East Lynne estate to her death.
- Driving a Desk: Very badly done in an early scene where Robert is supposedly driving Levison in a carriage, one which is oddly stable while the road jerks around behind them.
- Grande Dame: Haughty, mean Cecelia Carlyle, who holds fun-loving and bubbly Isabella in contempt and sets out from the beginning to make her marriage miserable.
- Idiot Ball: So what does Isabella do, after walking out the front steps of East Lynne, having just gone completely blind? Does she wait for someone to guide her to a carriage? Nope, she wanders around literally blindly, on an estate that she knows has a cliff! She falls off the cliff to her death.
- Impairment Shot: The camera shows Isabella's blurred vision after she comes out of surgery. This demonstrates what the doctors tell her next, that her optic nerve is damaged and she is doomed to soon go blind.
- Jerkass: Robert. Even before the dramatic end to his marriage, he's shown to be a selfish prig, who lets his sister run roughshod over his wife, neglects his wife, and throws a tantrum when she messes up her dress while playing with their son. Then when his sister tells him that Isabella spent the night with a man, he refuses to believe his wife's explanations, throwing her out of the house and forbidding her to ever see or even communicate with the boy again.
- Lohengrin and Mendelssohn: The Mendelssohn recessional is heard at the end of Robert and Isabella's lavish wedding.
- Longing Look: The look that Capt. Levison gives Isabella as she walks away at the wedding reveals that he still wants her.
- Melodrama: A big tear-jerking melodrama, involving a sympathetic wife, a cruel husband, a rakish lover, and lots of crying and heartfelt dramatic speeches.
- Ms. Red Ink: Towards the end, this is Levison's explanation for becoming a spy, claiming that he did it to keep Isabella in the furs and jewels she was accustomed to. It's ambiguous but it comes off as a phony excuse.
- Ominous Fog: Lampshaded when Isabella takes the boat for France, in the company of Capt. Levison, after the humiliating end to her marriage. The dock is very fog-bound, causing Isabella to look out and say "Fog, fog...getting into our lives...our hearts...our souls."
- The Place: East Lynne, one of those English noble estates that's so big and fancy it gets a name.
- The Stateless: Things go from bad to worse for Isabella when Capt. Levison is exposed as a French spy. He's deported from Vienna and sent to Paris, and the British government revokes his passport and refuses to allow him to come home.
- Time Skip: Three years from the giddy happiness of newlyweds Robert and Isabella coming home, to Isabella bored and discontent with life under her awful sister-in-law's thumb.
- Trauma Conga Line: Well, ok, you're stuck in a stale marriage that's dominated by your monstrous bitch of a sister-in-law. How about getting thrown out of your house and forbidden to ever see your toddler son again? If that's bad, then how about being humiliated when the lover you've taken up with is revealed to be a French spy? Oh, is that bad? Then what about being stuck during the siege of Paris, starving? Or then going blind after being caught in an artillery bombardment? Or how about falling off a cliff to your death?
- Two-Act Structure: The instant collapse of Robert and Isabella's marriage comes almost exactly halfway through the movie, with the second half being Isabella's long series of traumas.
