The Keaton and Lloyd films are very funny, but if you described the events happening onscreen to a blind man, he’d probably weep. Most silent comedy presented marriage as hell. What made it work was that although the movies were saying “marriage is a disaster,” they were also winking and adding, “but it’s our disaster.” The comedy was empathic. It touched on issues that plagued ordinary people—in-laws, money, infidelity, misunderstandings—and exaggerated them into comic excess. There was a jaunty quality to the horror, an almost jolly sense of shared entrapment, with an underlying agreement that it may have happened to you, but it’s happened to all of us. The slapstick marriage comedy of the silent era had camaraderie on sale, and audiences bought it happily.
The wonderful thing about such rollicking cartoons was that although they were about marriage, you didn’t have to be married to enjoy them. They were just funny, with a wide appeal. Inside the brief twenty minutes of comic chaos was a solid honesty: kitchens, sofas, rocking chairs, dining tables, and bedrooms. Ordinary things such as furniture and mealtimes were juxtaposed with exaggerated details and unexpected twists. Marriage was marriage, with its daily routines, but added to it would be a round of burglaries, a monstrous mother-in-law, a set of misunderstandings, a matched pair of incompatible desires (he wants to smoke and read, she wants some excitement), and hand-to-hand combat with rolling pins, humidors, and frying pans—and a monkey. It was the marriage film made both comic and active, a marriage on its feet, up and running.
The cautionary-tale approach became the most typical of the marriage-movie plots. It could warn about any sort of topical problem; it maintained current morality; and it provided an opportunity to get around censorship or prudery by punishing whatever sin it decided to depict. Best of all, it reassured audiences. It showed them their troubles, but put them to rights. Its canny pattern of establishing normalcy (and proper values), following with a visual depiction of sinful behavior (pushed as far as the movies dared to go), and concluding with a restoration of the original family values, became the golden mean of marriage movies.
An example of the cautionary tale as a high-stakes drama is Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 version of The Cheat, starring Fannie Ward and Sessue Hayakawa. The Cheat teaches audiences that there is passion out there, and danger, and delicious exotic “otherness”—but suggests they should experience it only at the movies, for the sake of their own flesh and the safety of their families. The Cheat’s social-butterfly wife is the treasurer of a charity, and when she wants to buy some expensive clothes she can’t afford, she uses the charity’s money to gamble on Wall Street. She loses. Unwilling to admit her indiscretion to her straitlaced husband, she accepts a loan from a “rich Oriental” (Hayakawa) in return for her “affections.” Her husband then unexpectedly (and conveniently) earns the same sum of money on his own, more successful speculations and gives it to his wife to spend as she wishes. When she happily takes the money to Hayakawa to cancel their arrangement, he calls her a “cheat.” To make his point, he spectacularly burns his brand on her naked shoulder, marking her as his property because he “bought” her. She then does what a silent-film woman is supposed to do: she shoots him. Unfortunately, her husband shows up and is arrested for the crime.
This tale of a cheating wife whose flesh gets burned is beyond cautionary. It is an outright warning, and it’s far more effective than it sounds. (A brief plot description cannot do full justice to the movie.) Hayakawa is exotic, and overtly presented as a sexually exciting Asian male. (He was reviewed in Variety as “the best Japanese heavy man that has been utilized in this fashion.”) The movie suggests that whereas the wife’s misuse of funds is unacceptably naughty indeed, her sexual excitement is thoroughly understandable. She’s a bored woman wed to a husband Variety describes as “one of the milk and water sop sort of husbands who really doesn’t know enough to assert himself as master of his own ménage.” Their marriage is correctly upper-class, but dull. The “loan” and the “arrangement” are alluring—hot stuff for the times—and anyone can understand why the wife falls under the almost hypnotic control of her exotic lover. DeMille’s use of editing to connect his lovers across time and space, as well as for the presentation of a sense of psychological space, is considered an important moment in his career as well as in the development of film language.
Audiences embraced The Cheat. It was a cautionary tale that struck close to home. Flesh branding they may not have experienced, but dull husbands they knew. The Cheat was so popular that it was remade twice, in 1923 with Pola Negri and in 1931 with Tallulah Bankhead.5 Since the audience knew what was required by the rules of marriage, the same basic story could be repeated with slight adjustments to reflect changing morality. In the 1923 version, Pola Negri’s would-be lover was no longer Asian, only a “fake Hindu prince.” The racial elements were totally abandoned. In 1931, Bankhead merely got a scoundrel, played by the lackluster Irving Pichel. Instead of being from an exotic culture, Pichel was “just back from the Orient,” a traveler to mysterious areas, rather than a mystery. What was directly connected to an audience’s sense of morality and racism in 1915 had been toned down in 1923. By 1931, the film openly treated the material as dated, as if women were branded weekly around the old small-town campfire. (Variety said, “Something of an ancient complexion clings to the story.”) The villain no longer has the power to hypnotize a naïve wife into submission—he just chases her around some cavernous sets as if he were trying to get a prom date. (With Bankhead playing her, who was to believe in her innocent inexperience?) And yet the film did well, because its fundamental excitement lay in a wife daring to be unfaithful but learning her lesson—which was a lesson for everyone. Some things went out of style, but caution was always smart.
The story of marital lies, potential infidelities, and disasters represented by The Cheat was so popular, the movie was made three times between 1915 and 1931. DeMille’s 1915 prototype, with Sessue Hayakawa and Fannie Ward … (Photo Credit 1.2)
… was remade in 1923 with Pola Negri and Charles de Roche …
… and resurrected for a sound version in 1932 with Tallulah Bankhead and Irving Pichel.
An excellent example of the silent era’s “cautionary tale”—a prototype both tragic and comic—is D. W. Griffith’s aptly named 1928 feature The Battle of the Sexes (a remake of his own earlier 1914 version). In this film (which carries the credit “personally directed by D. W. Griffith”), the opening title card warns the audience: “The Battle of the Sexes—always being fought—never being won.” Jean Hersholt plays a very successful businessman (he’s just made over $250,000 on a single deal). He has a loving family: a son, a daughter, and a loyal wife. They are rich, happy, and fully satisfied with their marital and familial existence. The first scene establishes their domestic harmony in detail. Hersholt arrives home as everyone prepares to celebrate his wife’s birthday. This good woman (Belle Bennett) is modest, softly lovely, somewhat stout, and frankly middle-aged. The son (William Bakewell) and daughter (Sally O’Neil) seem to have nothing to do except stand around and adore their mom while she unwraps a cornucopia of lavish gifts: a crystal candy dish, a leather manicure set, French perfume, an expensive silken shawl. Then Hersholt, a jolly man, pulls a little surprise. “Mama … my coat … hang it up,” he instructs. Without a moment’s hesitation, even though it’s her birthday celebration, Mom dutifully hops up and goes to get the coat. Out of it falls a stuffed rabbit, and inside the rabbit is her secret gift from her husband: a diamond bracelet.
Candy dishes! Stuffed rabbits! Diamond bracelets! This is marriage as everyone knows it should be or wants it to be or dreams it will be. Mom makes a wish as she bends down to blow out the candles on her cake: “I wish that life could go on like this forever.” But Mom fails to snuff all the candles, and audiences know a bad omen when they see one. Trouble is coming. The trouble actually lives in the same building, right down the hall: Phyllis Haver. She’s a bottle-blond jazz baby, and she read about the $250,000 deal
in the newspaper.
A story about infidelity unfolds, confirming an audience’s real-life knowledge about what might go wrong in a marriage, as well as giving them a glimpse of licentious freedom. When Hersholt lets loose after years of pent‑up good husbandship, he really lets loose. Happily drunk in a raucous nightclub, he playfully pulls on Haver’s tight blond curls, one at a time, slowly rolling up a fifty-dollar bill in each of them. His pleasure in this openly sexy behavior—and any audience’s understanding of its excitement—is used later when a hideous quarrel erupts between Bennett and Hersholt—in front of their children. Bennett confronts Hersholt with his infidelity, but he just doesn’t care: the sexual freedom (which viewers have seen) is too appealing to him after all these years. Mom weeps as she looks at a photo from their wedding day … and the kids stand around helpless, appalled, frightened, lost.
Although it actually is a movie about marriage, The Battle of the Sexes is labeled a “domestic drama” in the American Film Institute catalog of movies from 1920 to 1930. It might equally have been listed as a “domestic comedy,” as there is a great deal of humor throughout, well mixed into the tragedy. The finale becomes a bedroom farce. Hersholt’s daughter comes to Haver’s apartment to confront and, if necessary, shoot her (a popular solution in silent movies). Haver has to hide the girl when her other lover, Don Alvarado (playing a drunken lounge lizard), shows up, and then he has to be hidden in the same room when Hersholt arrives. The inevitable misunderstandings occur, the inevitable doors open and close, and Daddy thinks the lizard is his daughter’s lover. Daddy spanks her, while she cries out, “I have as much right to be here as you do!” Daddy presents the double standard of the day, saying, “That’s different. I’m a man.” But, reaching out to the full audience, both men and women, the next title card provides an unexpected response: “Yes … well … I’m a woman!” No one has any answer for this, and the film suddenly ends happily at next year’s birthday party for Mom, everyone reunited, Dad once again dull, Mom still plump, and the kids relieved to be feeling secure.
The Battle of the Sexes taught a straying man his lesson. A loyal wife was rewarded for her virtue and devotion. But there had also been some red-hot fun while Phyllis Haver shimmied around on the sidelines with fifty-dollar bills in her curls, and bonbons and Jean Hersholt in her lap. The movie used what the audience knew was real (infidelity happened), didn’t deny them some honest emotion about it (people got hurt), showed them a little escapist glamour (nightclubs and diamond bracelets), lifted them up to a final catharsis (shed a few tears over poor Mom and the kids and the wedding photo), and then brought it all home. It was a cautionary tale that sent audiences out the door happy and reassured—but suitably titillated.
These cautionary marriage tales were popular from the very beginning of the feature-length movie in the teens and throughout the heyday of silent films in the 1920s. In particular, marriage was a topic that movies used to showcase the great female stars of the era. In Panthea (1917), Norma Talmadge cemented her stardom by portraying a wife who sacrifices herself to exile in Siberia so her husband can get his opera produced. In 1920, in a film cleverly titled Yes or No, she played both a rich wife and a poor wife who are neglected and tempted by men who promise to pay them the attention they’re due. (The rich wife gives in to the adultery and is jilted, but the poor wife soldiers on and is rewarded when her husband invents the washing machine and she “gets everything.”) Norma Talmadge also played wives in The Wonderful Thing (1921), Secrets (1924), and The Lady (1925). Her sister Constance appeared successfully in 1922’s The Primitive Lover, in which she’s a wife dreaming of a caveman-type lover instead of her own meek husband. When she goes to Reno for a divorce, the husband is galvanized to follow and fight for her, turning himself into the man of her dreams. Gloria Swanson was My American Wife (1923), and Pola Negri’s American debut film, Bella Donna (1923), was the story of a woman who walks out on her British husband for an Egyptian tycoon. (Negri is later spurned by this lover and ends up staggering around in the sand, threatened by tigers and jackals.) In Flesh and the Devil (1927), Garbo played a faithless wife who pays for her sin by falling through the ice wearing a spectacular fur coat. Even male stars couldn’t escape marriage plots. Valentino was an adulterous husband in Blood and Sand (1922), and the victim of an aggressive female seducer (Nita Naldi) in Cobra (1925). (Before succumbing, he chokes out, “Aren’t you forgetting your husband is my best friend?”)
Eleanor Boardman, a major star of the silent era who is far lesser known today, starred in a classic example of the popular marriage movie: Wine of Youth (1924). Well directed by King Vidor (who was wed to Boardman from 1926 to 1932), the film tells the story of three generations of women: grandmother, mother, and daughter, each named Mary, each young and approaching marriage, and each played in turn by Boardman.6 The three episodes take place in 1870, 1897, and the early 1920s. The grandmother and the mother both desire marriage, and are depicted using their feminine wiles to achieve that goal. The third Mary, in contrast, is a flapper. She’s modern, and she’s not at all sure she wants to be tied down. She wonders why anyone would want to be a wife, but she has two ardent suitors (Ben Lyon and William Haines), so she decides to try them out on a camping trip. Like most flappers, she can’t live up to her own new morality. After an attempted seduction by Haines, she flees homeward, only to find her parents quarreling horribly when she’d always imagined them to be blissfully wed. She becomes hopelessly disillusioned and vows never to marry. However, her stressed-out mother faints; the husband erroneously believes she’s poisoned herself, and he suddenly realizes how much he loves her. The young Mary decides their love is real after all and accepts the quiet, more considerate suitor (Lyon) rather than the more aggressive and sexy one (Haines). The comfortable pattern of the plot was reassuring, but Vidor’s visual presentation was unafraid to put real teeth into the downside of marriage, to give the questions credibility.
Silent marriage movies were sometimes slightly silly in their concepts (tigers in the desert), but never in their conviction. They had the ability to reach out to audiences with offers of hope and escape, followed by the “punishment” and return to normalcy that marks the cautionary tale. They were successful; and as a result, so many were made that cynicism about the idea surfaced in critical reviews. Restless Wives (1924) was chided for having “hardworking husbands, bridge-playing wives, and other conventionalities.” Dismissive comments on Yesterday’s Wife (1924; “nothing new”) and Flapper Wives (1924; “nothing new in the story”) confirmed that the audience was being subjected to formula. Sometimes there were warnings (A Wife’s Romance [1923] was “not for the family”) and sometimes real praise (The Marriage Circle [1924] was “a master piece of direction by Lubitsch … a strikingly amusing comedy”), but on the whole, the reviewers were onto the game very early. Audiences, as usual, went to see what they wanted to see.
As the silent era moved forward and movies became a primary form of mass entertainment, comedy and caution endured as ways to use marriage. A new twist was added: spectacle (or the “clothes, sex, and furniture” development). Marriage was something audiences wanted in life, but too many of them already had it, so onscreen it needed a little perking up—some glamour, some pizzazz. Spectacle came in two forms: European sophistication (sex without consequence) and American consumerism (sex with cautionary consequence—and lots of fancy furniture). These types are well represented in the films of Ernst Lubitsch and Cecil B. DeMille.
Lubitsch was the master of sexy silent-movie marriages in the sophisticated European version, champagne to DeMille’s hearty ale. Lubitsch was clever at removing threat from marital problems; that is, he moved temptation off Main Street and over to Paris. Over there, his films seem to say, married couples allow temptation through the door, and you may watch it happen. Over there, you’re safe—forget about caution. There’s a kind of freedom from guilt in a Lubitsch marital comedy. Everyone is essentially too well mannered for chaos to occur. Lubi
tsch was sly (as was DeMille), and his movies typically showed reconciliation at the end. The Marriage Circle, one of his best, has a happy marriage threatened by a visit from the wife’s sexually predatory friend, who tempts the husband. The possibility of infidelity causes both the husband and wife to become more aware of their own sexuality, and in the end they become sexier together, wised up as they are, and even happier. Lubitsch’s films have great style and fashion. He put top hats on the men and jewels on the women. Everyone wore fur, rode in chauffeured cars, and sat on great furniture. Lubitsch linked marriage to European manners, clothing, and art deco glamour.
Cecil B. DeMille also brought glamour to the cautionary tale, especially in his four marriage masterpieces: Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), For Better, for Worse (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920).7 DeMille was very canny. With a title like Why Change Your Wife?, he didn’t waste any time putting up the safety net. He used a set of opening title cards to denounce divorce, in case anyone should misunderstand. And then he proceeded to interest everyone in the topic by having his leading man and woman do it—and divorce was a scandalous choice at that time.
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