Manners Maketh the Woman: Lois Weber & the Blot
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Manners Maketh the Woman: Lois Weber & The Blot Lois Weber was, in her day, the most celebrated woman director in Hollywood and, according to one source, “the highest salaried woman director in the world”. Born in 1882, she first trained as a pianist and was touring widely as a concert prodigy before the turn of the century. She eventually became a stage actress, or a “soubrette”, and married the actor- manager, Phillips Smalley, of one touring company. With Smalley, she launched a new career acting in, producing and directing motion pictures. The following extracts from an article, “The Years Have Not Been Kind to Lois Weber”, by Richard Koszarski, reprinted in the critical anthology Women and the Cinema (1977), trace her fortunes – and her auteurship – in cinema. “In the early part of their career the creative chores had been split between the two, but by 1914 Weber seems to emerge as the dominant partner. Like all filmmakers in this period, she churned out footage at a feverish rate: between two hundred and four hundred titles according to her own estimates, although less than fifty have been positively identified today. By 1915, she had become a popular celebrity whose work was as characteristic to audiences as that of Griffith or De Mille. A Weber film could be expected to tell a story with a moral, and often in these years to swing from documentary-like realism to dream- induced allegory. Her films took themselves very seriously indeed, but Weber did not lack the showmanship to bring in the audience. Hypocrites! (1914) was a thinly disguised sermon on the corruption of modern society, but the film’s copious frontal nudity brought rioting crowds to New York’s Strand Theatre…” [Weber had a strongly religious background, and before entering show-biz had joined a Salvation Army-style organisation: “as a Church Home Missionary she sang hymns on street corners and worked in the industrial slums of Pittsburgh”.] “The Weber films of this period were closer to what Hollywood would soon label ‘women’s pictures’, soap operas with saccharine morals, the old Weber sermonizing now buried within a sugar pill. Yet they were still profitable; her new contract emphasized fewer and better pictures, with Weber earning $2,500 a week plus one third of the profits of her films, the most important of which were sold as ‘Universal Special Jewels’. Over 1 the next few years she devoted herself to turning out a smaller number of higher quality pictures. She no longer had the time for acting, since managing the studio took up so much of her attention. The success of these films must have been considerable, because in 1920 she signed a fabulous contract with Famous Players-Lasky (the parent organization of Paramount) calling for $50,000 a picture and half the profits. Reorganizing as ‘Lois Weber Productions’, she turned out five features in 1920 and 1921, all of which survive at least in part (her earlier work is quite rare today). These films bear the indelible stamp of their maker’s personality, but that personality was suddenly out of phase with public demands. There was an obsession with the details of middle-class life, with proper form and correct behaviour… But attention to commonplace details was no longer fashionable on postwar screens, and Weber’s types suddenly seemed very out of date, especially to sophisticated urban audiences. Unable or unwilling to be flexible on such issues, Weber found her pictures dying at the box office… Famous Players dropped Weber after only three titles had been released, and the remaining two completed features were handled by a small independent outfit. After this everything unravelled at once: the loss of her company, divorce from Smalley, complete nervous collapse. For some years Weber was out of sight, then returned to directing in the late 1920s. These last films express even more strongly a scarcely veiled contempt for jazz-age moral standards. Unable to find work as a director, she free-lanced for a while as a script doctor, then was given a charity job at Universal interviewing and screen-testing potential starlets. Finally, in 1934, she contracted with a poverty row outfit to direct White Heat, an exploitation film. Shot on location in Hawaii, it was quickly dismissed as ‘a humourless account of the amorous difficulties of a young sugar planter’. In the mid-1930s, she tried to promote an ambitious scheme for using film as an audio-visual aid in schools, but no- one was interested in the scripts she had prepared. On her death in 1939, burial expenses were paid by friends who remembered her as Hollywood’s great woman director”. __________________________________________ (The following essay on Lois Weber’s film The Blot has been adapted from an article which originally appeared in the Monthly Film Bulletin, May, 1982) 2 A lot is said about The Blot by the way in which we learn what the “blot” is exactly. At first, it seems to have to do with the guilt and shame of ‘genteel’ poverty (call this the psychological dimension), mainly expressed in Mrs. Griggs’ perpetual humiliation at not having proper tea and real cream to serve her guests. Then it seems it could have to do with the scandal of Mrs. Griggs being caught stealing a chicken when she finally buckles under the double pressure of witnessing the affluence of her neighbours while her daughter ails for want of “nourishing food” (the melodramatic element). Finally, it turns out to be a reference in an article decrying the shame of teachers’ starvation wages (the social or pamphleteering dimension). The last element is the easiest to account for in terms of what is known about Lois Weber’s life and career: her religious background, her Salvation Army- type experience, her decision to become an actress (“As I was convinced the theatrical profession needed a missionary…I went on the stage filled with a great desire to convert my fellowman”), and her reputation as a film-maker whose moralistic streak finally led to her rejection by the public (with remarkable suddenness, apparently, from her zenith in 1920, with a five-picture contract with Famous Players-Lasky, plummeting by 1921 when Famous Players decided the last two titles were unreleasable). Allied to this is the kind of evaluation of her work which – on the scant surviving evidence – has been repeated in most accounts: the naivety of her message equated with an assumed simplicity of storytelling and characterisation, a simplicity enlivened by a talent for ‘details’, whether or not this is explicitly deduced to be the ‘woman’s touch’ in her work. But the ambiguity which attaches to the title of The Blot (one of that last, ill-fated batch of films) in retrospect opens it up in all sorts of fascinating ways. Far from being basic or primitive in its storytelling, it sprawls and digresses, and in fact begins with what can only be described as a narrative trompe l’oeil by suggesting that the story will centrally be about the well-heeled college boy Phil West (who eventually courts the Griggses’ daughter Amelia) and his equally privileged friends. (Forget Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby: this is a true picture of an F. Scott Fitzgerald social set, one which Weber would certainly have scorned.) 3 The Blot is often so un-D.W. Griffith that it seems modernistically open-ended. Witness the courting of Amelia by no less than three suitors, and the fact that the film ends quite arbitrarily with a scene between her and the young minister (who one assumes finishes second in this contest) before she, now alone, gazes enigmatically heavenward in the final shot. It might, however, be more accurate to say that what is primitive about The Blot, its crusading spirit (which is by no means confined to the subject of teachers’ pay), creates these dislocations at other levels. The Blot is full of parallels and contrasts between individuals and sets of characters (the cut, for instance, between the shindig at the home of the Griggses’ go-getting immigrant neighbours, the Olsens, and the country-club equivalent attended by Phil West) which don’t so much lend structural cohesion as an overriding sarcasm about loose or indulgent living at either end of the social scale. The film more or less ignores its narrative or psychological dimension for what comes close to being a petit-bourgeois passion play, which in turn means that the subject is not so much poverty as the attempt to hide it, and the resulting mortification (Mrs. Griggs’s primarily) at the shabbiness of appearances. This prompts some predictable mockery of the bright young things smoking and swigging from hip flasks at the country club. Less expected is the almost vicious edge to the mockery of the Olsens, who have fulfilled the dream the New World holds out to the immigrant only to be portrayed as uniformly chubby monsters of conspicuous consumption. The contempt for the materialism of the Olsens is particularly significant – and disturbing – in the light of the way The Blot is so wrapped up in the material problems of the Griggses. In fact, while the narrative overall seems quite loose, individual sequences 4 are elaborately developed – with almost black-comedy overtones – around some obsession with food or social custom. This reaches an exquisitely painful pitch with Mrs. Griggs’s theft of the chicken from the Olsens’ window, witnessed by her horrified daughter Amelia, who doesn’t see her mother return the bird a moment later and thus is unable to eat the chicken fortuitously provided by Phil West soon after.