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 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.

Dorothy Davenport Reid--The Woman Condemned (1934)

Watching Dorothy Davenport Reid’s The Woman Condemned (Progressive Pictures, 1934) reminded me of my experiences a few years ago watching Oscar Micheaux’s early sound films. The production values aren’t good, the acting ranges from bad, to serviceable, to nearly exceptional, and the character psychology and the plot itself are under-motivated. I wasn’t necessarily expecting great entertainment and the mystery, when it is revealed, is, yes, hokey, but I have some thoughts on that and more. Many things about the movie proved interesting.

Davenport Reid, who directs this film as “Mrs. Wallace Reid,” had already been a silent film actress and a producer, and then the owner of her own short-lived production company, “Mrs. Wallace Reid Productions.” Her choice to identify herself as “Mrs. Wallace Reid” professionally was apt to have been influenced by the scandal of her actor-husband Wallace’s death from morphine addiction in 1923. He was a well-known actor and it was not unlikely that putting this professional name forward was a tribute to him. Additionally, the identification of her with his name strengthened her in co-producing and in speaking for and promoting the social issues film, Human Wreckage (1923), about the dangers of drug addiction, in which she plays the addict’s wife.

The Condemned Woman is a murder mystery in which a successful radio performer, Jane Merrick (Lola Lane), is seemingly murdered and an enigmatic woman, Barbara Hammond (Claudia Dell), is arrested for the crime. There are also two romantic subplots (one fulfilled; the other seemingly on its way), some misdirection involving a doctor, and—spoiler!—it turns out Jane was not murdered but…well, you’ll have to watch it.

While the viewer must suspend disbelief to accept much of what happens, there are some discoveries to be made as well. First, this is a film from a Poverty Row studio, Progressive, so I’m sure that the director was doing the best she could with what she was offered. Looking beyond the plot, something that struck me is that had the two actresses exchanged roles, this would have been a much better film. In the role of Jane, Lola Lane doesn’t get much screen time, but her poise and naturalness are a wonder. Her looks and style immediately bring Norma Shearer to mind.  In the role of Barbara, Claudia Dell has a lot more to do, but she is not a pleasure to watch. Of course, she is, as it turns out, both acting a role in the movie and acting a role within the plot, so she had quite a challenge, but natural and poised she is not.  There are also long periods where the camera is on her but she has no dialogue, which was quite strange. She, by the way, is the heroine.

Within the film, continuous concern is voiced by the radio station manager (Jim is played by Jason Robards, Sr.) that when the star whose popularity supports the whole studio is on “vacation,” they are going to lose their audience. This is proven true but it doesn’t do a thing to move the action forward. After all, the manager is the man who is in love with Jane, but his worries about studio finances seem to exceed his interest in her mystery vacation, at least for a while. The issue continues to crop up in a way that could be construed as a comment upon under-financed filmmaking itself. What can a guy (or a gal) do without any talent on hand?

Finally, I would like to engage in some speculation about the issue that motivates Jane’s disappearance. We learn late in the film that she has disappeared because she wants to have a birthmark removed. She wants to keep this private. Now, I ask you, a birthmark?  She’s a radio star!  Maybe she has big dreams of breaking into Hollywood films, though.  In any case, this is why she has gone into hiding. 

Here is my purely speculative notion: I’m wondering if it was something more serious, say, a pregnancy, that might have been the originally scripted reason for her “vacation.” The film was released in 1934, the year that the Code really started being enforced. The print I watched did not bear the seal of approval of the Hays Office, but it was released at a time when it would have been just about impossible to bring to the screen a film that featured an unanticipated and troublesome pregnancy. While directors of “B” pictures may have had a freer hand in some ways than directors at big studios, it would probably not have extended this far, though Davenport Reid’s background was in so-called “exploitation” films (see Human Wreckage above).

I’m not planning to go in search of the original script, but if anyone else would like to, let me know what you find out.

At the end of the film, we learn that Jane had been involved previously with a mobster, Dan, and that much of what we have seen was a performance designed to entrap Dan and get him to admit to the murder. Dan appeared earlier, in Jane’s apartment on the night she was killed, and was a threatening presence. He killed her when he returned after five years in prison, or so they say. It’s hard to give credence to that when viewers saw Barbara fire a gun at Jane, saw Jane fall and be declared dead.  Oh, but wait, that was Jane’s sister, who took Jane’s place while she was in the hospital. And the sister…never mind.

I don’t want to forget to mention some brief but impressive night photography, during a car chase, showing a city’s flashing neon lights at what appears to be Christmas-time and I can’t leave without noting that in this film the fine Louise Beavers gets to slam a door in a man’s face because he offers her money to spill the beans on Jane.

The film is available here: https://archive.org/details/TheWomanCondemned

For more details on Dorothy Davenport Reid’s life and work and the continuing challenges of accounting for her contributions in film, these points are highlighted in Mark Lynn Anderson’s profile at the Women Film Pioneers Project. The site also provides a filmography and additional resources.