Famous Players-Lasky for Paramount release. A Cecil B. DeMille Production. Director: Cecil B. DeMille. Scenario by Beulah Marie Dix and Bertram Milhauser, from the novel by Margaretta Tuttle and the one-act play Across the Border by Beulah Marie Dix. Art director: Paul Iribe. Technical director: Roy Pomeroy. Assistant director: Frank Urson. Photography: J. Peverell Marley and Archie Stout. Film editor: Anne Bauchens
Picture started: May 12,1924. Picture finished: July 12,1924. Length: 9,665 feet (ten reels). Cost: $513,636.27. Released: September22, 1924. Gross: $904,383.90
Cast: Vera Reynolds (Amy Loring), Rod LaRocque (Kerry Harlan), Julia Faye (Bertha Lansell), Ricardo Cortez (Tony Channing), Robert Edeson (Dr. Lansell), Theodore Kosloff (Bendix), Victor Varconi (The Keeper), and William Boyd
For the second picture under DeMille’s new contract, Famous Players-Lasky suggested a magazine serial called “Feet of Clay.” The director showed no interest in the project and suggested that Lasky purchase Sutton Vane’s then-current hit play, Outward Bound, a stylized drama about a ship full of passengers who have no idea where they are going, only to discover that they are all dead and being transported to the “other side.” It was the director’s idea to combine elements of Vane’s play with Beulah Marie Dix’s one-act play Across the Border (1914), which had a similar theme. Lasky made little effort to acquire Outward Bound and suggested:
ADVISE YOU STRONGLY YOU DO COMBINATION OF FEET OF CLAY AND ACROSS THE BORDER SO THAT WE DO NOT GET INTO TROUBLE LATER BECAUSE OF ANY SIMILARITY WITH OUTWARD BOUND.1
Margaretta Tuttle’s “Feet of Clay” is about a soldier who loses the toes of one foot in battle. Dix’s play is about a soldier who has an out-of-body experience after being mortally wounded. Under DeMille’s guidance the final screen story emerged as a tale about a young millionaire whose foot is ravaged in a shark attack while he attempts to rescue Amy Loring from a boating accident.
The injured Kerry Harlan marries Amy; but her sister, who is also the wife of Kerry’s doctor, tries to force herself on Kerry. Hiding on the ledge outside Kerry’s apartment when her own husband arrives, the sister falls to her death, and in the resulting scandal Kerry and Amy attempt suicide by turning on the gas. Ultimately, their spirits are cast out by “The Keeper,” and they return to the world to be rescued and resume their lives.
Feet of Clay gained some notoriety from Charles Higham’s assertion that it represented the most vivid on-screen example of DeMille’s pen-chant for foot fetishism.2 Well, maybe, maybe not. Although DeMille ordered a print of Feet of Clay for his personal collection in 1925, the print was lost many years before Higham began his biography on the filmmaker.3, Other examples of “foot fetishism” in DeMille’s work— Mary Pickford cleaning the boots of the hated Hun in The Little American’, or Forrest Stanley slipping a shoe onto the foot of Agnes Ayres in the Cinderella-themed Forbidden Fruit; or the maid painting Gloria Swanson’s toes in The Affairs of Anatol, for instance—seem more symbolic devices than expressions of any latent perversion. The fact that Feet of Clay was imposed on the director by the studio further suggests that he had little enthusiasm for the underlying material.
What did interest DeMille was the supernatural element of Dix’s play because it corresponded to the picture he really wanted to make— Outward Bound.4 In fact, DeMille and his screenwriters tried to hew as closely to the basic premise of Outward Bound as they could, while relying on the similar situation in Across the Border to protect their newly fabricated property. Sutton Vane was not impressed with DeMille’s literary carpentry. He felt that Feet of Clay clearly borrowed elements from Outward Bound, and he sued Famous Players-Lasky for plagiarism. Despite a carefully prepared defense, Paramount attorneys entered into an out-of-court settlement with Vane.5
As DeMille completed Feet of Clay, Famous Players-Lasky signed D.W. Griffith to a three-picture contract. DeMille’s fear of 1918 was returning to haunt him. Zukor was still outraged over the cost of The Ten Commandments and the expense of maintaining DeMille’s separate unit between pictures. The success of DeMille’s pictures was also an issue. The director’s contract called for an advance of production costs against a sliding percentage of gross box-office receipts. Zukor felt this arrangement put too much of Paramount’s money in DeMille’s pocket, and he proposed that the director receive 50 percent of the net profits from his films in his next Paramount contract, and he used D.W. Griffith as a bargaining chip. If DeMille didn’t buckle under to the studio’s demand, Zukor was prepared to have Griffith direct all future Paramount spe-cials.6
DeMille was rankled because, despite its cost, The Ten Commandments was proving extremely popular and, with the exceptions of Joan the Woman and Adam’s Rib, his box-office track record was outstanding. He felt that Zukor’s position in the industry was due in no small part to the Lasky-DeMille pictures that cemented the Paramount program in the early days of the Famous Players-Lasky merger, and he resented Zukor’s efforts to alter his standing within the company.