Redemption

Redemption is a 1930 American pre-Code drama film directed by Fred Niblo, produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and starring John Gilbert. This production is Gilbert's first talking film, but it was not released until months after the premiere of His Glorious Night, his second "talkie". Redemption is based on the 1918 Broadway play of the same title by Arthur Hopkins, who in turn based his work on the play The Living Corpse by Leo Tolstoy and first staged in Moscow in 1911. Plot Living in Russia in the early 1900s, Fedya Protasoff (John Gilbert) is a handsome, self-indulgent womanizer who continues to squander his family inheritance drinking and gambling. He meets and falls in love with Lisa (Eleanor Boardman), the fiancée of his friend Victor Karenin (Conrad Nagel). Soon he lures her away from Victor and marries her. After a year together, Lisa has their child, a boy; but after another year of marriage, Fedya tires of the monotony of home life and resumes his profligate ways. He is tortured by his conscience for mistreating Lisa, but he fails to reform his behavior. Finally, his reckless social life results in gambling debts so large that he is forced to sell his estate. Despite Fedya's deplorable actions, Victor displays an act of enduring friendship and helps him by purchasing the estate at auction for the greatly inflated price of 125,000 rubles. While his marriage to Lisa continues to crumble, Fedya becomes infatuated with a young "Gypsy" woman, Masha (Renée Adorée), and they begin living together in a "cheap boarding house". This leads him to make a final break with Lisa by sending her a suicide note and then faking his death. Masha assists him in the ruse by placing some of his clothes and his "pocketbook" on a riverbank. Fedya then goes into hiding, leaving family members and friends to conclude that he had deliberately drowned himself since they knew he could not swim. The deception is further enhanced by sheer coincidence when authorities a week later pull out of the river the body of another man who had actually drowned there. Lisa is brought in by police to identify the badly decomposed corpse. Terribly distressed and certain that Fedya had carried out his suicide note, she barely looks at the "horror" and hastily affirms that the remains are those of her husband. Long-suffering Lisa now marries Victor. Fedya's deceit, however, is eventually discovered, and he is arrested for fraud.