Why Change Your Wife? (1920)

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/7/2017

Why Change Your Wife? was our first film from 1920, and our fourth by Cecil B. DeMille. It re-united Gloria Swanson and Thomas Meighan from 1919’s Male and Female, and also starred Bebe Daniels, who had a bit part in Male and Female, and whom we just saw in the 1919 Harold Lloyd short Bumping Into Broadway. (According to IMDB she was in almost 40 shorts in 1919, quite a few of them with Lloyd.) This film was a follow-up to another 1919 Cecil B. DeMille / Gloria Swanson film called Don’t Change Your Husband. We didn’t watch that film, but this one wavered between being a romantic comedy and a moralistic cautionary tale. Thomas Meighan and Gloria Swanson start the film as a married couple who are not getting along. The blame is initially put rather squarely on Swanson’s shoulders, since she is continually nagging him, and not interested in wearing some ostensibly sexy lingerie that he buys for her. In one racist intertitle, she responds to the latter by saying, “Do you expect me to share your Oriental ideas?” But the racism was crowded out by the much more omnipresent sexism. Bebe Daniels plays a woman whom Meighan meets at the clothing store where he bought the lingerie, and he ends up spending a night with her after Swanson declines his invitation to see the Follies (at $3.50 a ticket.) The film doesn’t exactly absolve Meighan, but it strongly suggests that Swanson shares the blame. I won’t detail the rest of the film, but one partial spoiler I will share is that the film ends up having a very similar moral to Grease. Grease, though, had a much lighter tone. This film would have been much better, and much more palatable, if it had committed to consistently playing scenes for comedy -- without insisting on any kind of universal lesson. At times it adopts this approach, and it certainly has the form of a romantic comedy, but even conventional scenes from a movie of that type are sometimes weighed down with more solemnity than they can carry. The most dramatic and risible example of this is a scene late in the movie where Meighan slips on a banana peel -- really -- but then ends up lying on the ground with his head in a pool of blood while a crowd gathers. Our last film from 1919 -- True Heart Susie -- was also rather sexist, but in some ways its message was from the opposite side of the spectrum. It held up as an ideal a selfless non-paint-wearing martyr in the form of Lillian Gish, whereas this film blames Swanson for being reluctant to dance or wear perfume or lingerie. I guess you can’t win.

So, not exactly an auspicious start to the 1920s, but our next film is one of the canonical classics of the silent era: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The list for our upcoming films is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Male and Female (1919)

Originally posted to Facebook on 11/12/2016

Male and Female was the first film we watched from 1919, and the third film we’ve seen directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It is also the first we’ve seen starring Gloria Swanson, probably twenty years old at the time. She is probably most famous for her silent work, but continued appearing in movies and television well into the 1970s, including notably Sunset Boulevard, in which DeMille also appeared. This movie is based on the play The Admirable Crichton, written by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. It has been adapted a few times over the years, and is probably somewhere in the lineage of Swept Away and its remake as well. It concerns a group of upper-class Britons and their servants who are shipwrecked on an island, and find their social roles inverted as a result of their isolation and the need for survival. Crichton, the butler who takes control post-shipwreck, is played by Thomas Meighan, and the eldest daughter of the upper-class family is played by Swanson. The majority of the film takes place on the island, though there is a probably too-lengthy portion set at the family’s London estate prior to the shipwreck. There is also a strange fantasy sequence, during which Meighan and Swanson imagine themselves in Babylonian times, with Meighan the emperor and Swanson a Christian slave thrown to the lions for refusing to submit. As with several films we’ve seen from this period, the incredible effect of Swanson being in the same shot with an actual lion is achieved by disregarding civilized norms of workplace safety.

I haven’t read or seen the original play, so I don’t know how it compares, but from the changed title of this version, I suspected that the depiction of the new social structure of the island was going to be rather sexist, and that certainly turned out to be the case. I think there is a larger point to be made about how the influence of society inhibits or shapes how sexism manifests itself, but this movie doesn’t attempt anything that sophisticated. It basically collapses into a love triangle, with Swanson and Lila Lee, playing the scullery maid, vying for Crichton. Its commentary on the collapse of class is similarly shallow and essentially suggests that the class roles are inverted on the island because Crichton is competent and best able to aid everyone in survival. There is the briefest suggestion of the use of force to maintain order, but only in relation to a character who was refusing to do his fair share. Otherwise Crichton is portrayed as being of too noble a character to enforce his position by violence. This is essentially a romantic comedy, though, and is meant to be lightweight -- so I am not arguing that it should have explored sexism and class structure more deeply. By all appearances the filmmakers would have been poorly suited to take that route, and I suspect a better approach would have been to adopt an even lighter touch.

Our next film is our second from 1919, and the third we’ve seen starring Douglas Fairbanks: When the Clouds Roll By. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

A Romance of the Redwoods (1917)

Originally posted to Facebook on 9/9/2016

A Romance of the Redwoods was our first film from 1917. As I mentioned last week, it’s the first one we’ve seen starring Mary Pickford, and the second one, after Carmen, that we’ve seen directed by Cecil B. DeMille. In another prominent role is Charles Ogle, who played Frankenstein’s monster in the sixteen minute 1910 version we saw earlier this year. This film is ostensibly a melodrama, but it has a strangely light tone not completely in sync with its plot. The initial contrivance that sets the film in motion is that Mary Pickford’s character, living in Boston, is orphaned, and decides to follow her uncle out to California. However, in the meantime her uncle has been killed by a group of Native Americans (or “Injuns” as one character calls them in a title card), and his identity assumed by a stagecoach robber played by Elliot Dexter. Since this movie is titled “A Romance of the Redwoods,” you can probably guess where this setup leads -- though the leads don’t have a particularly strong chemistry, and the romance is more announced than truly shown. But the plot has enough twists and turns along the way to keep it interesting, if not essential.

Next week we’ll watch our second film from 1917, Tillie Wakes Up, a sequel to Tillie’s Punctured Romance from 1914, minus Chaplin and Mabel Normand. Marie Dressler is still in it though, playing the title role. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Carmen (1915)

Originally posted to Facebook on 5/24/2016

We had a busy weekend two weeks ago, so we didn’t get around to watching our second film from 1915 until this last weekend. The film we watched was Carmen, and it is the first movie we’ve seen directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Like Raoul Walsh from the previous week, DeMille had a long career in both the silent and sound era, including Cleopatra (1934), and The Ten Commandments -- both the silent version in 1923, and the 1956 version with Charlton Heston that used to be shown every year on TV. DeMille also had a memorable role as himself in Sunset Boulevard. However, unlike Raoul Walsh, he is probably more identified with his earlier, silent work than his later films.

There were two versions of Carmen released in 1915, as well as a parody (or “burlesque”) by Charlie Chaplin. The other non-parody was coincidentally directed by Raoul Walsh, but it is now lost. This film was based roughly on the opera, and its lead, Geraldine Farrar, was a famous opera singer. The backing music on our DVD was taken from the opera as well, and, although I know very little about opera, it is well-known enough that I recognized several pieces. The movie was fairly short, lasting about an hour, so the pacing was brisk. It is set in Spain approximately 200 years ago (i.e. 100 years before the movie was made) The plot concerns a group of gypsy smugglers (portrayed as always with nuanced sensitivity), including Carmen, and a town guard (played by Wallace Reid) that gets mixed up with them. Without spoiling anything, I will just say that it does not end well. Like our previous film from 1915, I don’t think I could really recommend this to a general audience, but we do seem to be in a run of films that are at least competently made and able to tell a coherent story.

Next week we will watch our third film from 1915, a version of Alice in Wonderland. We had previously seen a ten minute version from 1903, but films have totally changed in those twelve years, so I’m expecting a far more sophisticated version this time around.

Our list of upcoming films is shown here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT