We Live Again (1934) – DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Anna Sten, Fredric March, Jane Baxter, C. Aubrey Smith
screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, Leonard Praskins and Preston Sturges, based on Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The wrong side of the tracks is a bad place to be, unless you're in Hollywood and see a way to make a buck: hence We Live Again, an adaptation of Tolstoy's Resurrection that looks past the niggling period details to go straight for the selfless-sacrifice weeper at its core. As melodrama, it has its qualities, including half a good Frederic March performance and stellar cinematography by the great Gregg Toland, but as anything other than a soaking-wet emotional sponge, it's largely ridiculous. It knows its audience wants to see rich boy/poor girl working things out, and how much you get out of the film depends on how much you can respond to that device–though anyone else will either be outraged or on the floor. Which is not to say that We Live Again is entirely without merit.

Unfortunately, you have to plough through a painfully false opening to get to that merit. When Prince Dmitri Nekhlyuldov (March) and peasant Katusha Maslova (Anna Sten) reunite after a long absence, it's hard to take either one seriously: March is so golly-gee-whiz in the role that he fails to convince as a haughty nobleman, while the slightly dazed Sten seems less like someone from the lower orders than something you squeeze to say "mama." She's of course more beautiful than she was before she left, and he's atypically enamoured of anti-monarchist theory. Until, that is, he goes off to school, becomes corrupted, and leaves poor Katusha stranded and pregnant–straight out of the wrong-side-of-the-tracks handbook.

Of course, it would be Greek tragedy instead of melodrama to leave it at that: Dmitri must be forced to redeem himself. Katusha, following her banishment, falls in with the wrong crowd, only to wind up on trial for theft and murder–and there's Dmitri on the jury, confronted with what he's done and shamed into renouncing his status. Which would be great, if it weren't for the cheap fakery of the milieu: this is a movie where political apathy is represented by a noble using the cover of Land and Freedom to light a cigarette, and everything is stamped "aristocracy" and "peasantry" so that you don't have to do any heavy-lifting on your own. The whole thing feels terribly abbreviated at 81 minutes, but the running time isn't the only thing rendered in shorthand.

Once you get past the sorry beginning, its star-crossed lovers element has some vulgar appeal. And while Sten never really convinces as anything other than a movie star with an accent, March eventually grows into his part and appears genuinely disturbed by his privilege and arrogance. But the film knows full well that we want to see the arbitrary transcendence of a rigid social line and that we don't care where it's drawn–thus it panders by downplaying the extraneous details of time and place. (The wrong side of the tracks may be everywhere, but the location of those tracks is highly specific.) And though there's tearjerking fun to be had from We Live Again, there's nothing that isn't dealt with just as if not more cogently in countless other melodramas from the period. Here the genre lives again, unaware that not all resurrections are created equal.

THE DVD
The full-frame image on MGM's DVD release of We Live Again is surprisingly crisp for a low-priority catalogue title. While the occasional flicker mars the transfer, this is generally a defect-free presentation. Lacking volume and potency, the Dolby 2.0 mono sound is, on the other hand, adequate at best. No extras, not even a trailer.

81 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; MGM