Rouben Mamoulian's We Live Again (1934), which I watched on TCM, and Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman (2013) have much in common, though the Mamoulian is beautifully photographed in black-and-white by Gregg Toland (who did Citizen Kane and The Grapes of Wrath) and the Fiennes is in wide-screen and color: they both demonstrate a complex understanding of class and gender in their respective societies, Czarist Russia and Victorian England. In these male-dominated societies relationships across class lines have to be concealed. In both films the women have illegitimate babies who die at birth and have to be buried secretly and the scenes are heart-breaking, though at least Charles Dickens, in the Fiennes film, is there to share the grief while the Czarist officer in the Mamoulian is not even aware of the birth.
Mamoulian had a long career but today is largely a forgotten director, though his Queen Christina has one of Garbo's best roles, while Fiennes has only directed two films thus far. What they each show is a respect for the intelligence of the viewer. Fiennes, for instance, makes no attempt to explain who Dickens's play collaborator Wilkie Collins is, expecting the viewer to know, while Mamoulian (of Armenian descent, born in Russia) effectively captures the mood of Tolstoy's Resurrection, the source for We Live Again.
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