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.

Dorothy Davenport Reid--The Red Kimona (1925)

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.