Destinies of Manon

Written by Ben Hecht and directed by Jack Conway, Lady of the Tropics (1939) tells the story of Manon DeVargnes (Hedy Lamarr), a young woman of mixed-race who dreams of a life in Paris, and Bill Carey (Robert Taylor), an American bon vivant who falls in love with her. They marry in Saigon in the 1930s, but their return to New York, where Bill resides, is thwarted by Pierre Delaroch (Joseph Schildkraut), an influential local official and businessman who refuses to let her go. The film is loosely based on Antoine François Prévost’s novel Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731) and features a pivotal scene at the opera, where Manon and Delaroch attend Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. This scene underscores a significant parallel between the cinematic Manon and her operatic counterpart. Examining the film through the lenses of intertextuality, intermediality, gender, race, and stardom, this article argues that the cinematic portrayal of Manon prompts a reinterpretation of her operatic predecessor’s character and destiny, thereby complicating and enriching the debate on the intersection of opera and film. In dialogue with Stanley Cavell, whose claim that cinema inherits opera has greatly influenced this debate, the article positions Lady of the Tropics within a category of films, including Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck (1987) or Istbán Szabó’s Meeting Venus (1991), where a specific opera “enters the substance of a film.” However, unlike Cavell, this article contends that cinema has the potential to dismantle rather than perpetuate the fantasies that connect opera and film via notions of inheritance and destiny. No destiny, I maintain, is preordained—neither Manon’s nor opera’s.