As in 1933’s Sucker
Money, The Red Kimona (1925) illustrates
the complexities of determining Dorothy Davenport Reid’s precise contribution
to many of the films with which she is associated. In The
Red Kimona (also to be found as The
Red Kimono), Walter Lang is credited as director and “Mrs. Wallace Reid” is
credited prominently as the producer: “Produced under the personal supervision
of Mrs. Walter Reid.”
In his article on Davenport Reid for the Women
Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University, Mark Lynn Anderson attempts
to sort out this question. He notes that when Gabrielle Darley brought a
lawsuit seeking damages for the use of her life story without her permission,
it was Davenport Reid, not Lang, as well as her director of photography, James
Diamond, and production manager, Cliff Houghton, who were sued. This does seem
to point to Davenport Reid as having a great deal of responsibility for the
production. It may be that, as Anderson suggests, further study will determine
the reasons for her lack of a directing credit here. However, her role in
bringing the movie to the screen seems to have been central since pains were
taken to highlight it.
The film has more than one major female artist attached to
it. The story came originally from the reporting of Adela Rogers St. John and
the scenario is credited to Dorothy Arzner. Davenport Reid’s own production
company brought out the film.
This is a stronger film in most ways than Sucker Money or The Woman Condemned and that’s not just because of the fine
restoration of this print by the Library of Congress and the Motion Picture
Preservation Center. The print is sharp
and without any intrusive breaks. This far older film has the visual clarity
and coherence of narrative that raise it above both of those later films. And
while the narrative structure is admirably complex, it has no lapses into
incoherence. It does operate with a reliance on coincidence that marks the
melodrama, but it isn’t distractingly reliant on coincidence in a way that
weakens the plot. Character motivation is strong here and the dialogue carried
by intertitles is well above average. The acting by most principals is good. Priscilla
Bonner as Gabrielle is a little too reminiscent of Lillian Gish in some of her
gestures, though she is never guilty of raising her hand to push the corners of
her mouth into a rictus grin.
This is the story of a young woman lured from her rural home
by a man who promises her marriage if she will only come with him to his home
in New Orleans. When they arrive though, he pawns her off on a pimp, while
stringing her along. When he leaves for Los Angeles without a word, she follows
him and finds him in H.E. Reid Jewelers buying a wedding ring, but not for her.
He looks upon her with contempt and she shoots him. She’s tried for his murder
but is, to everyone’s surprise, found not guilty.
A publicity-seeking society
matron takes her in, as Gabrielle has no family, friends or money. There follow
many uncomfortable scenes of social hypocrisy and self-interested philanthropy.
She and the matron’s chauffeur, Freddy, fall in love, but
when he leaves on a trip with his employer, Gabrielle is dropped by the matron
with only a letter of recommendation to a local hospital superintendent,
because the young woman has often expressed an interest in doing useful work to
make up for her errors. In her interview, it’s made clear that there is no
place for a fallen woman in hospital work. Job opportunities are few and she is
always dogged by the notoriety that her association with the matron has given
her. Unable to contact Freddy, she finally decides to return to New Orleans and
the fate that awaits her there, though she is still very resistant to the idea.
Freddy arrives at the L.A. depot after a high-speed, careening drive through
the city (too late!) and eventually pursues her to New Orleans. He misses her again (too late!) because,
trying to escape from a pimp who is attempting to take her back into
prostitution, she is hit by a car and hospitalized.
Finally, because of the
increased need for hospital help (the story is set in 1917-18 just as the USA
enters the war and the influenza epidemic is underway) she’s taken on as a
cleaner. Meanwhile, Freddy has joined the troops waiting to be shipped to the
front. Escorting an ambulance to the hospital one day, he sees Gabrielle and
they’re reunited. He immediately asks her to marry him and simultaneously he is
notified that his unit is getting ready to leave (too late!). Surprisingly, she
says “’Not now. Maybe when you come back. First I have to earn my right to
happiness. I’ll be waiting’” (too soon!).
He accepts this and we are left to hope that he eventually returns.
In this summary, it’s clear that this is a melodrama. It is also a social problem film because the
melodrama is wrapped, beginning and end, in a narrative of social concern that
makes a direct appeal to women to “face our responsibility” to assist women
such as Gabrielle to get back on their feet and to not be the ones to cast the
first stone. The film is not at all reticent in exposing the hypocrisy of the
well-to-do, especially idle women of the higher classes, but even the lawyer
who obtains freedom for Gabrielle takes her rings in payment and then Gabrielle
sees his high-society wife, who is getting ready to dismiss Gabrielle, her maid,
because her past has come to light, wearing one of those rings. The hypocrisy
is carried even in sanctioned legal services and legal tender. Freddy has
already been allowed to point out to the society matron who employed him that
her “’two-bit philanthropy’” in which she took up Gabrielle’s cause for her own
publicity, has forced Gabrielle back onto the streets. He says to her, with
shocking clarity: “’You just happen to be lucky—you got a wedding ring,” a
statement that seems to condemn not only her hypocrisy but also the status of
marriage as a kind of legal prostitution.
Though there are many fascinating points to be made about
this film, I’ll highlight just three more.
The narrative is very successful in using its multiple
frames in an unobtrusive manner. An allegorical scene (presumably enacting the
struggles of fallen women) begins and ends the film. Within this allegorical frame we find the
confirmation that this story is ripped from the headlines: A beautiful and
somber woman enters a room and sits to examine a newspaper archive from 1917. This
establishes not only the date of the story we will see, but we are also shown a
close-up of the headlines reporting the Gabrielle Darley story and, around it,
we see articles about the build-up to war. The somber woman (this
dark-eyed beauty is Davenport Reid herself) speaks directly to the audience at
the beginning and the end of the narrative, with her final words a plea. Within
this narrative framework that grants truth-status to the story we’re about to watch, is
the story itself. And it contains
flashbacks. These complicated narrative
layers are handled seamlessly.
While much of the credit for the visual sophistication of
this film must lie with James Diamond, whose work was also seen in Sucker Money, I hope that Dorothy
Davenport Reid’s refined eye is also responsible for much of what we are shown.
There are so many scenes of visual interest and sophistication that I can only
mention a few here. At about 12:20, when Gabrielle is in jail, she is shown in
a high angle shot through bars, but there are also shadows of bars and there
are bars behind her. The cinematography is worthy of Fritz Lang. In another
scene, after Gabrielle has been in New Orleans for a while, we see her from the
waist up in a bridal veil carrying in flowers; then the perspective switches
and we realize that she is clothed in everyday wear and is seeing this bridal
fantasy in the mirror. It’s a powerful reminder that she still loves the man
who has put her in the brothel and that she still has hope. Another scene at
41:21 shows the view through a window into the matron’s house as Gabrielle passes by,
glancing out the window, then turning away from it to show her hands clutched
behind her back. The shot makes the point that Gabrielle is as much a prisoner
in this mansion as she was in jail. In fact, she later returns to the jail
looking for the wardress who was kind to her, only to be told that the woman is
gone. Her luck is so bad she can’t even find shelter in the jail.
Finally, the film shows a fairly refined sense of “upstairs/downstairs”
social tensions and a perhaps too sentimental sense of the empathy of the lower
classes for a woman of Gabrielle’s status. In the mansion, an upstairs maid (a
fine, uncredited performance in a small role) looks on with knowing disapproval
of how Gabrielle is being used by her employer, while the housekeeper, a
budding Mrs. Danvers, is cruel and haughty to everyone else on the staff and to
Gabrielle as well. Just in case Gabrielle somehow feels that the matron has
singled her out, the housekeeper notes that at least Gabrielle lasted longer
than some of her employer’s other social projects, such as the burglar. The
film at several points presses home the notion that the poor and lower classes feel empathy with
other sufferers more than do the hypocritical rich (the ragged woman wiping her
tears in the courtroom scene, the wardress in the jail, Freddy's friend at Western Union). While that
sentimentality may seem a step too far for the modern viewer, the
closely-observed portrait of oppression within the serving class itself is
marvelous.
This is a rich film that conveys a social message but still
feels natural and unforced. It never flags and it surprises (check out the
scene on the rollercoaster) at many turns. I can recommend not only Anderson’s article that treats the film in some detail, but also an insightful review
by blogger Kathleen Rooney that examines some “proto-feminist values”
conveyed by the film.
