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I've written at length about director/producer Cecil B. DeMille (here, for example), one of the best and most influential of the silent era directors.
If you know him only from his bloated Bible epics of the 1950s, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. But the fact is, beginning in 1918 with Old Wives For New, DeMille reeled off a series of "nervously brilliant, intimate melodramas" and "sly marital comedies" (Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams) centering on the notion that grown ups engage in sexual relations and are glad that they do.
Ah, sophisticated sex comedies—God bless 'em. Here are three by DeMille to bring you up to speed:
Old Wives for New (1918)—In the first of his sex comedies, DeMille dispense with karma and moral judgment, and puts the fun back into sex, sin and every kind of bad behavior. People drink, lie, carouse and generally defy social mores, and not only suffer no consequences, they prosper. Murder goes unpunished, adultery is rewarded and divorce is presented as a sane and sophisticated solution to an unhappy marriage. Starring Elliott Dexter, Florence Vidor and Theodore Roberts.
Male and Female (1919)—DeMille added a young Gloria Swanson to the mix and both of their careers really took off. Basically, the cast of Downton Abbey gets shipwrecked on a desert island, with Swanson as a upper crust nitwit and Thomas Meighan as her butler. Of course, only the servants possess any useful survival skills. Upstairs is down, downstairs is up, in this sophisticated satire of the British class system. Also featuring Theodore Roberts and Bebe Daniels.
The Affairs of Anatol (1921)—Maybe the most famous of DeMille's comedies. Here, a bored husband (All-American heartthrob Wallace Reid) looks to spice up his love life with a series of what turn out to be disastrous affairs. By the time he returns to his senses, his wife (Swanson again) has embarked on an affair of her own. With Bebe Daniels (as Satan Synne!), Elliott Dexter and Theodore Roberts.
Have fun!
As has been the case with nearly every technical innovation in the visual arts since the first man painted pictures on a cave wall, sex proved to be a key selling point in the marketing of the new motion picture technology to curious audiences. In 1896, just six years after Thomas Edison began his experiments with film, William Heise recorded May Irwin and John C. Rice recreating the kiss from their Broadway hit, The Widow Jones.
The resulting twenty second clip—called, appropriately enough, The Kiss—was the first such act ever recorded on film. The moralizing classes reacted with outraged spluttering; the paying public made it Edison's top grossing film of the year.
Other filmmakers quickly scrambled to sell their own take on this most important of human endeavors, as the resulting efforts serve as something of a Rorschach test for directors, writers, actors and the audiences themselves. Georges Méliès, for example, chose to titillate his audiences with suggestions of nudity. Russian, Italian, Swedish and Dutch directors offered up sex as a source of tragedy and misery. America's greatest director, D.W. Griffith, moralized, while his comic counterpart, Mack Sennett, guffawed. That Theda Bara—whose name was famously billed as an anagram of "Arab Death"—wound up representing both the allure and the danger of sex in the late 1910s tells you all you need to know about the state of the American psyche during the first world war.
But sex as something adults engage in without shame or embarrassment—well, not so much. We tend to assume, when think of it at all, that sophisticated sex in the cinema must have been the invention of Ernst Lubitsch. And while it's true Lubitsch was a master of the light touch when it came to the subject, he didn't really acquire that touch until 1924, with The Marriage Circle. Before that, he tended toward heavy costume dramas and broad farces.
Instead, the sophisticated sex movie was a creation from the most unlikely of sources—cinema's most famous purveyor of Bible epics and historical dramas, Cecil Blount DeMille.
Some of my readers—those reared on The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show On Earth—might guffaw to read his name in the same sentence with "sophisticated" and "sex," but the fact is, beginning in 1918 with Old Wives For New, DeMille reeled off a series of "nervously brilliant, intimate melodramas" and "sly marital comedies" (Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams) centering on the notion that grown ups engage in sexual relations and are glad that they do.
The son of a playwright and an acting teacher, DeMille began acting in New York at the age of nineteen and in little more than a decade became a successful Broadway director and producer. He also wrote several one-act operettas for producer Jesse L. Lasky and it was this association that led him into motion pictures. Lasky aspired to combine what he saw as the "high art" of theater with the money-making potential of mass-produced movies, and with the reluctant financial backing of his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), Lasky teamed up with DeMille to found the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Film Company.
It was a grandiose gesture considering that neither man had ever made so much as a one-reel short before, but the two set off for the western United States to film a feature-length version of The Squaw Man, a popular stage play of the era. The two stopped first in Flagstaff, Arizona, but DeMille pictured wide open spaces rather than mountains for the wild west storyline, so they continued west until they settled in a sleepy village north of Los Angeles called "Hollywood."
Legend has it that they set up shop in a barn, but legend neglects to mention that L.L. Burns and Harry Reiver, a couple of established filmmakers with American Gaumont, had converted the barn into a studio nine months earlier. No matter. The Squaw Man was the first feature film ever made in Hollywood, and when it grossed $244,000 on an investment of $15,000, DeMille's future was assured.
Although DeMille's education as a film director consisted of a day spent at the Edison studios to see how the cameras worked, and watching Oscar Apfel "co"-direct The Squaw Man, he quickly demonstrated a grasp of the film medium superior to all but a few of his peers. In his biography Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood, Robert S. Birchard notes that within a half-dozen movies of his first one, DeMille had moved the camera closer to his actors, "showing a greater reliance on personality and subtlety of performance," had picked up the pace of both individual scenes and his films as a whole, and, by using light and shadow in a groundbreaking way to accent (or obscure) aspects of the production, "set a much-imitated standard for visual excellence."
I
n all, DeMille directed thirty-seven movies between 1914 and early 1918, dipping into a variety of genres including Westerns, costume dramas and even a pair of Mary Pickford movies. The best of these early films was The Cheat, made in 1915 and featuring Sessue Hayakawa in a star-making role as an unscrupulous businessman who barters money for sex from a spoiled housewife and then brands her with an iron when she reneges on the deal.
As Simon Louvish notes in his biography Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art, The Cheat "electrified audiences, who were not accustomed to this degree of emotion in a tale dealing with rampant sexual desire ...."
These early films demonstrated DeMille's interest in melodrama, spectacle and lurid romance, which perhaps explains his interest in the subject of his thirty-eighth film, a popular novel called Old Wives For New (available free online here). Business partner Jesse Lasky pushed this story of a marriage that disintegrates in boredom, adultery and divorce to get DeMille "away from the spectacle stuff for one or two pictures and try to do modern stories of great human interest."
And since Lasky was the one footing the bill, DeMille chose to follow his advice. The studio bought the film rights for $6,500.
Although the novel's author, David Graham Phillips, was a pretty interesting character in his own right—a muckraking journalist who exposed the nexus between corporate money and the U.S. Senate, he was murdered by a man who believed Phillips had libeled his family—the novel itself was 495 pages of "clover" and "heaving bosoms," turning a tale that included adultery, murder, blackmail and skullduggery into something earnest and flowery and dull.
To adapt the novel, DeMille turned to his favorite writer—and favorite mistress—Jeanie Macpherson. During their long sexual and professional relationship, MacPherson worked on forty screenplays for DeMille, including such silent classics as The Cheat, Joan the Woman, Male and Female, The Affairs of Anatol, The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings.
To condense the sprawling tale, Macpherson reduced an episodic narrative spread out over decades into three tight acts with a single flashback to explain how the bored husband had ever fallen for his plump, drab, dowdy wife in the first place. She also added witty intertitles that transformed the melodrama into a sharp satire of upper-class manners.
As the film begins, oil baron Charles Murdock (Elliott Dexter) is on the verge of what we now call a mid-life crisis. While he's respected as a "genius" in the world of business, at home he's little more than a cipher—a human ATM machine to his kids, a nursemaid to his hypochondriac wife. He sits alone in his study, dejected, depressed, with only his dog for companionship.
Next, DeMille introduces us in shotgun fashion to the five supporting characters who will combine to remake Murdock's life—Sylvia Ashton as his not-so-pleasingly plump wife; Marcia Manon as a "painted lady;" Florence Vidor as Juliette Raeburn, a successful New York dressmaker, who, according to the intertitles, "was finally to cut the thread of his fate;" and two of the finest character actors of the silent era, Gustav von Seyffertitz as his "crafty" secretary; and Theodore Roberts as Murdock's dissolute business partner.
In each of these vignettes, DeMille shows a close-up of the character's hands—the wife picking through bon bons, the courtesan reaching for rouge—as if to say that a person is what he does not what he says, and no matter what he believes about himself or wants you to believe about him, his actions will always reveal his true character.
After following Murdock through his frustrating morning routine, DeMille treats us to the most cleverly edited sequence of the film, a flashback to Murdock's initial courtship of his wife that cuts back and forth between the young couple and his present-day wife bursting in on her husband's reverie, as if she's catching them in flagrante delicto—a remarkable show of faith on DeMille's part that, even though the classical Hollywood "style" had only become the industry standard the year before, his audience would understand what's going on.
Similarly, DeMille later uses lap dissolves and iris-shots-within-iris-shots to convey the content of Murdock's daydreams, trusting his audience to understand what he saying without spelling it out in clumsy intertitles or belabored scenes, a testament both to how quickly film had progressed in five years and how cutting edge DeMille really was. As a result, he's able to maintain a sprightly pace—and sweep past some of the story's more improbable twists.
Technical innovations aside, though, it was the substance of Old Wives For New that made the film so groundbreaking.
The married Murdock meets Juliette, fools her into believing he's a much younger—and unattached—man, and falls in love with her. Attempting to drown both the memory of Juliette and the misery of his domestic situation, Murdock follows his business partner into the champagne-soaked fleshpots of New York City, an excursion that leads to murder, scandal and divorce (a sequence of events that must have reminded audiences in 1918 of Stanford White's murder during a musical revue on the roof of Madison Square Garden).
In turning this set-up into a happy ending, DeMille essentially made a pre-Code film before there was a Code to subvert, dispensing with karma and moral judgment, and putting the fun back into sex, sin and every kind of bad behavior. People drink, lie, carouse and generally defy social mores, and not only suffer no consequences, they prosper. Murder goes unpunished, adultery is rewarded and divorce is presented as a sane and sophisticated solution to an unhappy marriage.
"In scene after scene," Birchard wrote, "Old Wives for New must have been startling for 1918 audiences." Photoplay condemned the film's "disgusting debauchery" and clucked that "Cecil B. DeMille, director, seemed to revel in the most immoral episodes."
Adolph Zukor was so shocked by the film's suggestion that divorce might be the appropriate end for some marriages that he held up its distribution, only relenting after positive reactions during audience testing.
Old Wives For New premiered on May 19, 1918, and Photoplay's sputtering outrage aside, the reviews were generally positive. "There are somewhat risqué situations in the story," The Motion Picture News wrote, "but these have been handled delicately. It is not a story that children will understand, and it is one that the prudes will consider a reflection on themselves. All in all, it is one of the most satisfactory pictures that has been shown on Broadway in months."
Variety praised DeMille's direction as "expert."
Financially, the picture did well, grossing nearly $300,000 on a budget of $66,000, but its impact on the culture was even greater, ushering in an era of adult-themed movies, including not only DeMille's own risque classics Male and Female and The Affairs of Anatol (adding Gloria Swanson to the mix), but also Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, Murnau's Sunrise and pretty much Lubitsch's entire oeuvre.
"Those who find it fashionable to denigrate [DeMille]," wrote Gene Ringgold and DeWitt Boden in The Films of Cecil B. DeMille, "ignore the high regard in which his work as a director was held by critics and film historians during those first years ... Among directors, only his name and those of D.W. Griffith and Alfred Hitchcock were really sufficient in themselves to attract top box-office trade."
Maybe in the long run, DeMille's primary contribution was in figuring out how to sell sex to American audiences that were both curious and squeamish. Here, he hit it directly; later he dressed it up in historical and Biblical epics that allowed his audiences to piously condemned the sin while lingering over every salacious detail. He let the public have its cake and eat it too, and was rewarded with forty-two years of unbroken commercial success—one of the longest and most profitable careers in Hollywood history.
His kind of films long ago went out of fashion, but don't kid yourself: DeMille was as instrumental during the silent era as Griffith and Chaplin in selling the habit of movie-going to American audiences, no small accomplishment.
To read Part One of this essay, click here.
Little Mary Takes Charge
Mary Pickford was already a star by 1917, of course—she'd been a star, in fact, before anyone even knew her name.
Known as "America's Sweetheart," Pickford was actually Canadian, born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto in 1892. Shortly after the death of her alcoholic father, the seven year old Gladys hit the stage, and along with her brother and sister, began to tour Canada and the United States regularly as part of a series of low-rent theater troupes.
Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York in 1906 and changed her name to Mary Pickford. While she did land a few parts, by 1909 she was desperate for work and auditioned for a role in a D.W. Griffith film, and although she didn't get the part, Griffith offered her a contract at $10 a day with a guarantee of $40 a week—double the going rate.
In keeping with the practice of the times, Pickford received no billing for her efforts—not even the director received a credit in those days—but audiences knew what they liked, and though they didn't know Pickford's name, they—and the theater owners who paid to exhibit her films—clamored for more of "The Girl with the Golden Curls."
While at Biograph Studios, Pickford made over 130 short films with Griffith. But despite that early success and their later partnership (along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks) in forming United Artists, Pickford didn't much care for the "lordly" Griffith, and when he elevated newcomer Mae Marsh over her, she departed for the employ of Adolph Zukor, head of Lasky's Famous Players (later Paramount).
One of her earliest feature-length films for Zukor, 1914's Tess of the Storm Country, was a smash hit and made Pickford an international star.
Although audiences may have thought of her as the perennially adolescent "Little Mary," by the beginning of 1917, Pickford was a very grown up twenty-four and knew better than anyone what her fans wanted to see—better, certainly, than the men who ran the studio. After starting the year with an adult role—the leader of a Scottish fishing village in The Pride of the Clan, worth tracking down for the scene where she drives errant parishioners to church with a bullwhip—Pickford, over the objections of Zukor, chose a popular stageplay of the day, The Poor Little Rich Girl as her next starring vehicle.
Looking back now, the story of a girl who nearly meets with a tragic end would seem to be right in Pickford's wheelhouse, but the man initially chosen to helm the production, Zukor's top director Cecil B. DeMille, wasn't so sure, and when Pickford insisted her friend Frances Marion write the screenplay, the autocratic DeMille attempted to put his foot down.
Instead, it was Pickford who won the ensuing battle of wills, and when she successfully lobbied to have DeMille replaced with Maurice Tourneur, who had directed The Pride of the Clan, she may have been the first star in movie history to fire a director. She wouldn't be the last.
The basic story of The Poor Little Rich Girl—Gwendolyn's parents neglect her, their wealth isolates her, the family servants prey upon her—could easily have become the cheap, sentimental claptrap Zukor feared it would be. It works, though, thanks to Marion's script, Tourneur's direction and above all, Pickford's performance.
Frances Marion you know, if you've been following this blog for a while. From 1915 to 1933, the two-time Oscar winner was the highest paid and most respected writer in Hollywood, shaping the screen images of some of Hollywood's greatest stars including Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler—and, of course, Mary Pickford, writing seventeen movies for the latter between 1915 and 1921. Along with Anita Loos, Marion revolutionized the art of intertitle writing, turning dull exposition into clever bon mots worth the price of admission in their own right. More importantly, she grasped that movies were primarily visual, and she suggested ways of showing character and action that were uniquely adapted to the new medium. (Read more about her here.)
Marion's screen adaptation boasted an unprecedented blend of comedy and melodrama that worried the studio but delighted Pickford—indeed, the two women added comedic bits throughout filming, exasperating the fastidious Tourneur. On closer inspection, the comedy that so puzzled Zukor and Tourneur was really the writer's happy choice to draw Gwendolyn not as a saint or as a symbol, but as a real girl—by turns, impetuous, flighty, bored, sullen, but also curious, kind, imaginative and fun. Gwen is so appealing that by the time catastrophe strikes, the audience is deeply invested in her fate.
To create the illusion that Pickford, already tiny at five feet, was young enough to pass for a child, director Tourneur surrounded her with oversize sets and furniture, and hired tall actors whom he stood on platforms or in the extreme foreground, making them look even taller. He also shot several scenes of Pickford lying down in a bed or sitting in an over-sized chair where it's impossible to judge the relative heights of the other actors.
Remembered now, if at all, as the father of Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past), Maurice Tourneur proves here and in his follow-up film, The Blue Bird, that he was one of the most adept visual stylists of the period. Aside from his technical skill in helping Pickford pass for a young girl, a couple of fantasy sequences—Gwen's literal interpretations of a two-faced woman and bears on Wall Street—are well done and typical of Tourneur's style. (Both The Poor Little Rich Girl and The Blue Bird are preserved in the National Film Registry.)
But even with Marion's screenplay and Tourneur's technical skill, the film wouldn't work without the best "trick" of all—Pickford's ability to behave like a young girl would, not overplaying her part as if in a broad farce or a Victorian melodrama, just playing it. She kicks, she yawns, she flings mud at little boys, but far from coming across as a spoiled brat, she's a spunky underdog fighting arbitrary authority even as she longs for a normal childhood (something Pickford herself never had).
As Daniel Eagan writes in America's Film Legacy, "[I]t's a measure of her talent and appeal that she could make a child of privilege appear deprived."
Studio executives were horrified when they saw the finished film (you can see it for yourself here) and, convinced he had a very expensive flop on his hands, Zukor sent a chastened Pickford out west to make two films with the aforementioned Cecil B. DeMille—what fun that must have been for both director and star!
Andre Soares of Alt Film Guide picks the first, A Romance of the Redwoods—the story of an outlaw who steals a dead man's identity only to fall in love with the deceased's niece—as the best picture of 1917, and it is a fine picture, but I see it primarily as a showcase for Elliott Dexter. The second film, a World War I propaganda piece called The Little American, is, frankly, a mess, at the end pairing a typically charming Pickford with a would-be rapist rather than with a brave, self-sacrificing suitor for no better reason than that the former is played by a better looking actor than the latter.
In any event, neither film did much at the box office and meanwhile, a strange thing was happening with The Poor Little Rich Girl, which Zukor had released only to fulfill a contractual obligation to theater owners—audiences loved it, finding it by turns funny and poignant. Indeed, The Poor Little Rich Girl was one of the biggest hits of Pickford's career.
After that, Zukor gave up trying to control his star and instead signed her to a new contract, giving her $10,000 a week, 50% of her films' profits, and complete creative control.
"She knew what she was worth," wrote biographer Eileen Whitfield, "and she didn't hesitate to ask for it. She was a woman in complete control."
As a follow-up to The Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford chose a similar subject, this time the Kate Douglas Wiggin novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The story of a poor girl sent to live with a pair of maiden aunts—sort of a cross between Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott—is maybe the most typical example of the kind of movies Pickford made during the remainder of the silent era.
To handle the adaptation of the novel, Pickford again chose her friend and closest collaborator, Frances Marion. To direct, she selected Marshall Neilan, a journeyman whose movie career began when he sold a car to director Allan Dwan. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was the beginning of a brief but productive partnership with Pickford that produced her best film, Stella Maris, as well as Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M'Liss, Daddy-Long-Legs and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
With the exception of her economic situation, Pickford plays the same sort of character as in The Poor Little Rich Girl—a feisty underdog who melts the stony hearts of everyone she meets. Her age here is a little ambiguous; the novel suggests Rebecca is "ten or eleven," but the film seems to indicate she's more like fourteen, still a stretch considering Pickford had celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday before filming began, but there are plenty of five foot tall fourteen year olds running around and in any event, her fans were more than willing to suspend disbelief.
After the unexpected success of The Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford and Marion were determined to follow the same formula, including plenty of comedy bits—poking the preacher's snooty daughter with an umbrella, fainting dead away when a handsome young man buys 350 bars of the soap she's selling for a contest, reciting a scandalous poem for a town gathering—with a soupçon of pathos in the final act.
As usual, Frances Marion takes the opportunity to poke fun at social conventions such as mix-and-match morality—when confronted with competing aphorisms, "Thou Shalt Not Steal" and "God Helps Those Who Help Themselves," Rebecca opts for the latter to justify eating a piece of pie—as well as the withered humanity underlying so much of religious fanaticism.
Viewed back-to-back with The Poor Little Rich Girl, it's clear Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is the inferior film. The story is more episodic, the emotions touched on less intense. Nor was Neilan the visual stylist that Tourneur was—he drank too much and often left the direction to Pickford herself—but overall, it's a fun picture, and maybe the best at highlighting Pickford's lighter side. (In 1933, Pickford hired the by-then unhireable Neilan to direct what would be her last film, Secrets, then wound up firing him when he was simply too drunk to work.)
The finished product was box office gold, an even bigger hit than The Poor Little Rich Girl. In fact, the two films finished second and third on the list of the year's biggest grossing films, behind only Theda Bara's Cleopatra.
The "little girl" films of Mary Pickford aren't for everybody. A modern audience has little practice at accepting an adult actor in the role of a child and the effort doesn't work in every picture—for example, in The Little Princess, also from 1917, Pickford looks more like a wizened gnome than a little girl.
Too, the stories Pickford chose to tell—innocent tales completely devoid of irony—seem to be out of fashion these days, even at a studio like Disney. Indeed, Pickford herself chafed at the constant parade of little girl roles—"I'm sick of Cinderella parts," she once said, "of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover."—while remaining determined to give her fans exactly what they wanted, which they did to the tune of millions of tickets sold.
But if you're willing to give yourself to it, Pickford's little girls are bright, kind, spunky, mischievous—a blueprint for the Shirley Temple movies that were so popular during the Depression—and provide a chance to re-experience simple pleasures undistilled.
"Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter," she said. "What do people want to go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that."
She won a competitive Oscar for acting in 1930 and an honorary one in 1976 "in recognition of her unique contributions to the film industry and the development of film as an artistic medium."
Pickford dominated the movie and cultural landscape for another decade, a superstar before there was such a word, with a string of box office hits, the financial acumen to found and run United Artists, and a celebrity that today's tabloid fodder can't begin to imagine, for example, drawing a crowd of 300,000 when she and Douglas Fairbanks honeymooned in Paris.
In fact, I'd say there's no equivalent to Pickford in today's Hollywood, and you'd have to combine three women—say, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Kate Middleton—to equal one Mary Pickford. And even then, you wouldn't come close to matching the lasting impact of her legacy on the art and business of film.
[To continue to Part Three, "The Chaplin Mutuals," click here.]
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