Lois Weber--Suspense (1913)

In 1909, D.W. Griffith made The Lonely Villa, which features perhaps the earliest effective use of cross-cutting (aka “parallel editing”) to generate suspense. In my film history course, I show several earlier films that use cross-cutting to some degree, but do not show an awareness of how it can be used to add suspense and dynamism to plots where it would be appropriate. For instance, in Porter’s Great Train Robbery from 1906, the action switches to different scenes but their length and the editing does not exploit the quick cuts that would generate greater anxiety in viewers by quickening the passage of time during simultaneous action. In 1911, Griffith would again use cross-cutting to heighten suspense in The Lonedale Operator.

Lois Weber
Wikimedia Commons

The foregoing information is given to provide the background for my astonishment in my recent viewing of Suspense, a one-reeler made in 1913 and co-directed by Lois Weber and her husband, Phillips Smalley. The plot is a knock-off of the concept of The Lonely Villa (which was itself a knock-off of a French original, but let us not digress*): a country house with a family inside is threatened by evil-doers while the man of the house is away. In the case of Suspense, a woman and infant are home alone when a tramp sneaks into the house. A phone call to the husband, just as in The Lonely Villa, starts his frantic trip home to try to save his family. Spoiler:  In both cases, he succeeds.

It’s interesting to consider the title of Weber’s film, Suspense. This points not to plot but to a promise of visceral thrills. There are some elements of plot that differ from Griffith’s and could be said to add suspense. For instance, while Griffith’s film features a mother and several children, both young and older, Weber’s scenario (she is credited with the writing) allows for only a woman and infant in the isolated home. Plus, Weber enhances the plot with an added layer of suspense.  The question is not just “will the husband get home in time to rescue his family?” but “will the husband, despite the fact that he is being pursued by police because he’s driving a stolen car, get home in time to rescue his family?” Where Griffith found suspense in the race to the destination, Weber, creates tension among different sources of suspense, through the rush toward the destination, an accident en route, and the attempt to elude pursuit. This last is heightened as the husband constantly looks in his rear-view mirror to judge how close his pursuers have come. These effects function as multiple sources of anxiety for viewers.

Weber’s more provocative achievement though, and the one that did (really!) startle this jaded viewer, is through camera work and the framing of images. Scattered throughout the 10:35 of the film are multiple images presented for maximum destabilizing, anxiety-producing effect (the film gives no photography credit). There is nothing like these shots in The Lonely Villa.

The film opens with the family’s housekeeper writing a note saying that she won’t work in this “lonesome place,” which reinforces the connection between the two films. Without a word to her employer, she picks up her suitcase and leaves. She closes the door and the next shot (1:48) is outside; it’s a high-angle shot through the open top of the porch as she steps away. The effect of this camera angle at first seems a mere curiosity. It seems unmotivated, a destabilizing move from the horizontal to the vertical, but just a camera trick. At 4:50-4:53, though, a shot from the same high angle but slightly closer shows the tramp stepping onto the porch and onto the mat, under which a key is hidden.

At 5:07, the woman, spooked by the presence of the stranger, has retreated to the second floor bedroom with the baby; she steps to the window and two seconds later the shot changes.

What happens next is particularly unsettling for several reasons. First, the viewer may expect an eyeline match, since the woman is at the window presumably looking down, but in that case the unshaven face looking up in a perfectly vertical angle implies that the bedroom window is directly above the porch. This is belied by how close the man’s face is, though. It is so close that the slats of the porch’s roof are not visible.  The shot is a medium close-up showing his threatening face, his foreshortened body and his clutching hands held near his abdomen.

While the implication is that she looks out the window and sees him as the viewer sees him, there is a jarring mismatch between what the diegesis demands and what is needed to produce the maximum startle effect in the viewer. It is also unsettling to realize that the high angle view of the porch has been reserved specifically for viewers. It originates neither in the upstairs window nor at the ground level. It’s a supremely unnatural point of view in limbo belonging only to the camera and the viewer. The angle, the degree of closeness and the detachment of the point of view from any known source work together to strengthen viewer anxiety.

As the woman steps away from the window, Weber reverts to a triple-split-screen matte shot showing three actions happening simultaneously: the tramp picks up the key, the woman phones her husband, and he speaks with her on the phone. Weber uses this unusual effect several times, though it did not originate with her according to a quote from Kevin Brownlow displayed before the narrative begins.

The final scene I want to examine in this kind of detail begins at 9:00. Weber makes good use of the stairway by positioning the camera at the top and filming as the tramp ascends. The man approaches step-by-step until his face—always in focus, eyes challenging the camera and the viewer--almost fills the frame, with an effect reminiscent of the famous close-up in Griffith’s Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). The view shifts briefly to the inside of the bedroom and the fearful woman; then, to the fist punching through the door, in front of which she has moved a chest. The extended arm punches the door and moves the chest. Back to the screaming woman, then outside to her husband arriving, pursued by cops and an angry car owner. Back to the hand reaching through the door to turn the key; back to the screaming woman. The tramp enters the room, clutching a big, shiny butcher knife. Outside, though, the officers begin to shoot at the husband as he runs to the house. Alarmed, the tramp tries to escape, threatening the husband with the knife at the foot of the stairs, but he is overpowered by the husband and police, and all ends well.

In many ways, this is a far richer film than The Lonely Villa and there is much more that could be said on that score (for instance, the fact that this film is strongly situated in the woman’s experience). Weber is not content to film the action as it takes place before a static camera. While it’s equally true that both directors rely on editing (basic shot/scene editing, as well as parallel editing) to increase the impact of their suspenseful films, Weber’s work is enriched with a wider range of shots, angles, distance and in-camera effects than is Griffith’s. While it’s also true that Weber’s film comes four years later and much changed in those years, this short film seems to demonstrate a unique sense of composition and of deliberately chosen image details (the upturned face, the fist through the door). They are manipulated with the specific aim of inducing in the viewer a very personal sense of uneasiness. Where Griffith is the master of narrative, telling his story but telling it at a distance, Weber shows her talent for narrative but also her strong awareness of how best to use the camera to transfer elements of suspense and destabilization from the screen to the viewer.

*To anyone who does wish to digress, I suggest reading Tom Gunning’s “Heard over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the De Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology,” Screen 32 (1991): 184-96. The article discusses the sources of The Lonely Villa and then focuses on the importance of telephone technology in the way it can be used to play with time and space and, thereby, add suspense. 

Notes:

The film is available here ( https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-lois-weber/ ) in a restored print. While you’re there, read Shelley Stamp’s profile of Lois Weber.

I want to give a special shout-out to Rick Kelley, whose blog, Luddite Robot, and article on Suspense and horror films started me thinking about what I saw in this film and its relationship to Carol Clover’s and Linda Williams’ discussion of “body genres.” 

Dorothy Davenport Reid--The Road to Ruin (1934)

This may be the last Dorothy Davenport Reid film I watch for this project, unless I locate another one that’s readily available. Let’s re-cap:

• ·         Red Kimona (1925, “Produced under the personal supervision…”)
• ·         Sucker Money (1933, co-directed with Melville Shyer)
• ·         The Woman Condemned (1934, dir. “Mrs. Wallace Reid”)

Yes, I do wish I’d watched them in chronological order.

“Mrs. Wallace Reid” co-directed 1934’s The Road to Ruin with Melville Shyer with whom she also paired for Sucker Money (1933). The film was produced under the auspices of Willis Kent and debuted in March 1934 only a month before The Woman Condemned, also a Willis Kent production. Like that film, this film does not bear any Code seal of approval.

This is an exploitation film. The Road to Ruin doesn’t suffer from the poorly-motivated action that characterized The Woman Condemned and made it very confusing to follow. It also doesn’t suffer from the hysteria of Reefer Madness, which came out in 1936. This is a conventional story of the naïve new-girl-in-town who gets in with the wrong crowd. Kissing, smoking, dancing and staying out late mix with alcohol, which leads to sex, which leads to illegal abortion that leads to death. Risqué jokes shared by bad parents are also implicated.

Parents who are poor role models or too trusting are at fault. The concrete suggestion about how to fix the problem comes from a social worker, who speaks with Ann (Helen Foster, the naïve girl) and Eve (Nell O’Day, the girl who knows a little too much about the seedy side of life) after they and a bunch of drunken friends have been picked up by the police.  The two girls have been labeled “sex delinquents” by the police and after both girls have been examined by the doctor, Eve has to be treated for a sexually-transmitted disease. When Mrs. Dixon, Ann’s mother, comes to pick her up, the social worker tells her what today’s young people need is knowledge, that is, honest, realistic instruction about sex.

This film does not have a frame of direct address to the audience that would put it squarely in the exploitation genre, nor does it end with a warning for the audience, but warning it is. There are no flashbacks to “where she went wrong” or to scenes of hypocritical parents. The structure is entirely linear and chronological. It struck me though that the film was quite remarkable in two ways.

I was surprised at the very open treatment of sex. This film was far more clear about what was happening than any film from the 1950s that I have seen. I imagine that since the film was presented as a lesson and warning, that may have made its straightforwardness more palatable. But 1934 is the year of tightened Code enforcement, so I am curious about how long this kind of realism lasted. The film is relatively low-key about all of these matters and manages to stay just this side of sensationalism. We are aware that these high schoolers’ road to hell is trodden with many a misstep, but it is also interesting to note how little blame or responsibility they are given for their behavior.

Of the parents we are shown, only Mrs. Dixon comes out clean. Eve’s mother, Mrs. Monroe, is separated from Eve’s father. She has a male friend and she is rarely at home.  When she is at home, she is entertaining guests who drink a lot and tell dirty jokes. When Eve is taken up by the police, it’s not immediately clear where her mother can be found. Ann’s mother, on the other hand, is a nice, conventional lady, who makes a mistake in trusting her daughter too much in a new town where the daughter lacks guidance about who the good and bad companions are in her school. Mr. Dixon, who seems like a concerned but busy and rather remote parent, leaves the house saying he is going to a conference, but gets into a taxi in which there is a companion and directs the cab to a hotel. The hypocrisy of adults is pointed out in other ways.  For instance, on the evening of the police raid, neighbors are watching the young people’s misbehavior, which involves the girls taking off most of their clothes and jumping into a pool, and while the watching woman is simply outraged at the behavior, the man expresses outrage but can’t pull himself away from the sight of so many nearly-naked young women. Adults, not high school kids, are obviously the addressees.

Dorothy Davenport Reid was set on the road to making films like this by the death of her husband Wallace Reid from morphine addiction in 1923 when he was only 31. Her first film along these lines, Human Wreckage, was made shortly after his death.  All prints of that film are assumed lost.

By 1934, though, such films had worn out their welcome and with stronger enforcement of the Code on the way, it is unlikely that these morality plays that verged on—or careened into--sensationalism would thrive. They survived the flappers of the 1920s (indeed, producer Willis Kent had made The Road to Ruin as a silent film in 1928, starring Helen Foster who would have been, at the age of 22, more convincing in her role as a high school girl than she is here, six years later, as Ann), but would not survive the changing tastes of Depression-Era moviegoers.

How History Is Lost

The more a thing gets repeated, the more it will be believed and accepted as true. This repetition works whether the information is factual or not. I was reminded of this last night while browsing Twitter.  I saw a post from AmyPoehlerSmartGirls (@smrtgrls) that celebrated the great American director, Dorothy Arzner, on what would have been her 120th birthday.

The tweet included a link to a short film about Arzner's work and life. I was overjoyed to see this recognition but the film itself perpetuated some misinformation that just goes to show how women's history is lost. Arzner's described as the "ONLY American film director working in the 1930s" and as the "First woman to join the Directors' Guild of America."

This is all perfectly well-intended, but these two statements are simply not true. Or, rather, the first is not true and the second is misleading.

In the early 1930s, Dorothy Davenport Reid (sometimes "Mrs. Wallace Reid") was still directing in a long career of acting, directing, writing and producing that started in 1910. I have recently watched three sound films that she directed or co-directed in the 1930s:

• Sucker Money (1933, co-directed with Melville Shyer)
• The Woman Condemned (1934, dir. “Mrs. Wallace Reid”)
• The Road to Ruin (1934, co-directed with Melville Shyer)

In regard to the second statement about Arzner's membership in the DGA, this is misleading. The Motion Picture Directors' Association was founded in 1915.  This organization was the predecessor of the Directors' Guild of America, which took over in 1936. The interesting story of how and why the transition occurred can be found here, http://www.dga.org/BeforeTheGuild.

Photoplay Oct. 1916
Source information

The point is, though, that in 1916, one year after its founding, Lois Weber was selected as a member. At the time, Weber was the mayor of Universal City, the "top director" at Universal Film Manufacturing Company, and "the first woman inducted into the Motion Picture Directors' Association" (Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, U of Cal P, 2015, 4).

So, notice how the laudable desire to celebrate the achievements of Dorothy Arzner can so easily become an eliding of history to overlook, and bury deeper, the achievements of other women, in this case Lois Weber and Dorothy Davenport Reid.

In fact, in the introduction to her book, as elsewhere in the text, Stamp demonstrates how "onliness" can backfire, particularly if social and industry changes work together to marginalize women. I won't recite that argument here--read the book, it is a wonderful exploration of early Hollywood--but in celebrating the uniqueness of one woman's achievements (that individualism has great appeal to Americans), we may send the message that such achievements are only possible for unique women or that they can achieve in certain areas (only) because they are women. 

Weber started as a director for everyone, but was gradually pressed farther into "women's pictures" and discovering and shaping female stars. From controlling the whole show, she became merely a handmaiden to talent, because she was the "only" one with the uniquely female status. Hollywood became more male (both in assumptions about the jobs involved and in its population) during the 1920s and, thus, the histories that were written were the histories of male achievements and if women are there at all they are not the main story, they remain at the margin, female, unique and "only." As Stamp says, "Before her career was even over, Weber was effectively written out of the story" (8).

I have not (yet) become that familiar with Dorothy Arzner's story.  I do know that it is quite different from Weber's and Davenport Reid's. I also know that she is one of very few early women directors featured in any film history texts I have used (there might be a sentence about Ida Lupino and a paragraph about Arzner). The work of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women in the early days of film is rarely given so much as a sidebar, and when it's in a sidebar, that is the visual representation of marginalization. It speaks to lost history, history that is there but for which we must dig in archives and old trade publications, and when we accept women's status as "only" then we tacitly accept the way history has been handed to us. We ourselves need to examine the language of these celebrations and what it implies and we must always examine the context in which these "only" achievements took place.  Otherwise, we bury the achievements of other women just a little deeper.