Paris, the middle of the nineteenth century. Pierre, of English extraction, nicknamed Gogo (Dickie Moore), is eight years old. He meets and befriends Mimsey (Virginia Weidler), the six-year-old girl next door. Then his mother dies and the two children are forcibly separated as Pierre is taken to England by his uncle, who anglicises his name to Peter. Peter chooses to take his mother’s maiden name of Ibbetson. Years later, Peter (now played by Gary Cooper) is working on a restoration job in Yorkshire where he meets Mary (Ann Harding), the wife of the Duke (John Halliday) who is the landowner where he is working. Peter falls in love with Mary and realises that she is in fact Mimsey, his childhood love...

Peter Ibbetson was the third film director Henry Hathaway had made with star Gary Cooper in the space of a year and a quarter, after Now and Forever and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. The star had made The Wedding Night for King Vidor between the latter and the present film. It’s a measure of how versatile many directors were, or maybe had to be, in the Hollywood studio system. Hathaway began his directing career making westerns, and was often associated with that genre throughout his career with such as How the West Was Won (1962) and True Grit (1969) on his CV. He was certainly adept at action, and is generally seen as more masculine director than most. Yet three more diverse films in such a short space of time would be hard to find. Peter Ibbetson is a love story with the lovers separated for much of the running time and the majority of the last third literally takes place inside their heads. It’s a very singular film to have come out of a Hollywood major studio (Paramount). You can see how it became a favourite of the surrealists, André Breton and Luis Buñuel especially, with its emphasis on dream and the force of love overcoming time, space and no doubt mortality as well.

The origins of the story was a novel by George du Maurier (grandfather of Daphne), published in 1891. He is probably best known now for his novel of three years later, Trilby, whose villain Svengali introduced his own name into the English language, and for being the grandfather of Daphne du Maurier. He died in 1896 so did not live to see Peter Ibbetson adapted for the stage by John Nathaniel Raphael in 1915 and given one performance for charity for the war effort in London that year. It opened in New York in 1917. In its cast was Constance Collier as Mary, and she later adapted the play as an opera with Deems Taylor in 1931. Meanwhile, in 1921, Paramount adapted the novel as Forever, directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Wallace Reid and Elsie Ferguson. This silent film is lost so it’s anyone’s guess if it is as strange as the present film, made fourteen years later. This credits the novel, the stage play and Collier’s adaptation with the screenplay written by Vincent Lawrence and Waldemar Young and additional scenes by John Meehan and Edwin Justus Mayer. (There were also uncredited contributions from Fred Zinnemann, John L. Balderston – one of the credited writers of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer – Kathryn Scola and Tiffany Thayer.) As well as Hathaway and Cooper and, further down the cast, Douglass Dumbrille, Peter Ibbetson shares with Bengal Lancer the services of co-writer Young, cinematographer Charles Lang and editor Stuart Heisler (who was later to become a director in his own right). Robert Donat and Fredric March were originally considered for Peter, but it was the second film in a row where Cooper took the role from the latter. Miriam Hopkins was the original Mary before Ann Harding was cast. Her stage training and resulting diction stood her in good stead when she began to make films at the start of the talkie era. Her career was short-lived, working only occasionally in the cinema and later on television after marrying the conductor Werner Janssen, her second husband. She was Oscar-nominated for Holiday (1930) and played the leading role in the Best Picture nominee East Lynne (1931), but Peter Ibbetson is the film she is best remembered for.

After the very male-skewing Bengal Lancer, Peter Ibbetson gives Mary equal time and attention, with the roots of her and Peter’s love being laid down in childhood. Hathaway and the screenwriters set up a lot of dualities and recurring motifs – gates and metal fences and later prison bars act as barriers. While separated from Mary and not expecting ever to meet her again, Peter has a dalliance with another woman in his life, Agnes (Ida Lupino with a Cockney accent). For such a character played by a usually masculine leading man, Peter could be said to be feminised and spends much of the running time immobilised, at least in this world if not in dreamtime. His career as an architect is an interesting foreshadowing of Cooper’s role in the 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, directed by King Vidor. Hathaway’s direction and Charles Lang’s cinematography keep the film down to earth, eschewing the fog filters that they might have used for the dream sequences and keeping them as “realistic” as possible. They aren’t on the level of the Salvador Dalí-designed sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) but they aren’t far off.

Peter Ibbetson is the very definition of a cult film, generally seen as a somewhat “specialised” item on its first release, to its championing by the audience it acquired, not just those surrealists.  Released in the US on 8 November 1935, it was a critical success more than a commercial one. It rather bypassed the Oscars, picking up the one nomination for its score (Ernst Toch, with head of department Irvin Talbot also cited).

Peter Ibbetson is spine number 473 in the Indicator series, a Blu-ray encoded for Region B only. The film was passed with an A certificate for British cinemas in 1935, cut by the BBFC though no doubt details of what was removed have long since been lost. It is now a PG.

The film was shot in 35mm black and white, nitrate stock, and the transfer, sourced from Universal’s HD remaster, is in the correct ratio of 1.37:1, or Academy Ratio. The results are soft and certainly grainy, but that’s par for the course for films of this vintage before an upgrade in the black and white stocks available around the end of the decade.

The soundtrack is the original mono, rendered as LCPM 2.0, and a product of major-studio expertise from ninety years ago – clear and well-balanced in its dialogue, sound effects and music.  English subtitles are available for the hard of hearing. I didn’t spot any errors in them.

Commentary by Adrian Martin
Adrian Martin begins by saying that he has been obsessed with Peter Ibbetson since the age of fifteen, so that’s fifty years now. He places it in a genre of “unsynchronised lovers”, those separated more or less forcibly by time, space or even different realities, and the first quarter-hour (with Peter and Mary as children) being the whole film in microcosm. As usual with a Martin commentary, he pays much attention to the director’s mise-en-scène, pointing out that the two children move in opposite directions across the screen (Mary left to right, Peter right to left) and so Hathaway establishes that they interlock, as they will do over the film. There is a lot about the various iterations of the story (novel, stage play, opera, this film version if not its lost predecessor). Also characteristic of a Martin commentary are his drawing on previous writings, including such fans of the film as André Breton, the critic Hélène Cixous, and also an article by Cristina Álvarez López, his partner. A dense commentary which packs a lot in to its relatively short running time.

Together in Dreams (17:20)
Geoff Andrew goes to bat for what he calls a distinctly strange film, particularly one to have come out of Hollywood in the mid-1930s. As there is highly unlikely to be anyone left alive who saw Forever, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the earlier silent film is as odd. Andrew talks about the film’s use of foreshadowing and repeated motifs and dualities, and highlights the contributions of the Stuart Heisler and the Ernst Toch. The latter was an Austrian classical composer with seven symphonies and thirteen string quartets to his name but who also worked in cinema between 1933 and 1945, being Oscar-nominated three times.

Campbell Playhouse: Peter Ibbetson (53:45)
Brought to you by the soup company immortalised in Andy Warhol paintings, this radio adaptation of Peter Ibbetson was first broadcast on 10 September 1939 and not only stars but was also produced and introduced by none other than Orson Welles. This was at a time when Welles had made quite a name for himself on the wireless – the notorious adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds had been eleven months earlier – and on stage, but before he went to Hollywood. Two years before Citizen Kane, it’s remarkable how many of the personnel were already on board, such as the actors Ray Collins, Agnes Moorehead and Erskine Sanford and, arranging and conducting the music, Bernard Herrmann. (Add to these Eustace Wyatt and Edgar Barrier, who had worked with Welles the previous year on Too Much Johnson and who would both later act in Journey Into Fear.) Welles may have played Peter but the biggest name in the cast, he is proud to say, is Helen Hayes, who had won one Oscar seven years earlier and would go on to win a second one in 1970. Possibly to highlight her contribution, this version of Peter Ibbetson is structured differently to the film, with much of it related in flashback by Mary (Hayes). The play is performed without a break and Welles then returns with Hayes on board to say a few words. Tune in next week for Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (not actually a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, despite what Welles says) and after that, more Helen Hayes, as Cathy in Wuthering Heights.

Trailer (1:54)
Larry Karaszewski trailer commentary (2:21)
You can see the trailer on its own (in a rather battered copy) or with Karaszewski’s contribution to Trailers from Hell. The film is really trippy, he says – David Lynch trippy. On the other hand, he thinks the trailer is “godawful” and gives a summary of the film’s plot (spoiler warning) in under two minutes, concluding with “How do you explain all that in a trailer?” Well, indeed.

Image gallery
Forty-four stills (all black and white), front-of-house cards and posters (colour). As usual, you navigate this via the forward and back buttons on your remote.

Booklet
Indicator’s booklet, available with this limited edition of 3000, runs to thirty-six pages.  After the cast and crew listing, it begins with “The Strange Enchantment of Peter Ibbetson” by Frank Krutnik. He starts by addressing the film’s strange place in 1930s Hollywood as something of a major-studio art film. Krutnik details the various versions of the story before this film, as a novel, play, opera, and earlier silent film, and the theme of masculine impairment the story shares with other romantic dramas (for example Jane Eyre and the Oscar-winning Frank Borzage-directed film of 1927, 7th Heaven). Gary Cooper was wary of taking on a role out of his usual comfort zone and agreed to do it as long as a “pansy director” wasn’t at the helm – and Hathaway was certainly not that. Paramount hired Ann Harding, who was then in contract with RKO, though this was not an easy process and at one point Irene Dunne was considered for the role of Mary. Krutnik also discusses changes in the story compared to earlier versions. He goes on to discuss the film’s release and reception, and it’s debatable how much of a commercial flop it was, given the lack of box office records from the time. However, the film did have a successful afterlife, including being one of a series of Paramount films reissued in 1949. Krutnik ends by quoting critic Georges Sadoul who in 1965 described the film as “one of the most beautiful films about love ever mad, a lyrical humn to l’amour fou”.

Next is a piece from the Liverpool Evening Express from 9 March 1935 profiling Ida Lupino. Then just seventeen, Lupino was “one of the youngest stars” and was earning £120 a week (over £7000 in today’s money) and was born into a showbusiness family begun by her great-grandfather George Lupino (né Hook). Her first film was at age thirteen, directed by her cousin Lupino Lane (Henry Lupino). This article is mostly about proud father Stanley, back in Liverpool while his daughter was in Hollywood.

For the third time in these Indicator releases, we have an extract from Polly Platt’s career interview with Henry Hathaway, conducted in 1973 and published in book form in 2001. Here he talks about Peter Ibbetson. He was due to make Annapolis Farewell and Richard Wallace to make Peter Ibbetson, but due to Gary Cooper’s urging (no doubt to do with his concerns about “pansy directors”), the directors swapped, though Annapolis Farewell ended up being directed by Alexander Hall due to Wallace being injured in a plane crash. (Hathaway reflects that he would have been on that plane if he had continued to make the film.) He has good memories of the film but not of Ann Harding, who he calls “an absolute bitch”. The film’s lighting drew on Rembrandt paintings. The booklet also includes plenty of stills.

One of the most singular films to come out of Hollywood that decade, Peter Ibbetson was a critical success if not especially a commercial one, but soon gathered its devoted fans. It’s also a measure of the versatility of its director and star. Indicator’s release is very welcome.