When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Films . . .

On a slumberous afternoon in the autumn of 1919, the shopkeepers along Weybosset Street in Providence, Rhode Island, were nonplused by a mysterious blinding flash. Simultaneously, they heard a sound like a gigantic champagne cork being sucked out of a bottle, and their windows bulged inward as though Dario Resta’s Peugeot had passed, traveling at incalculable speed. Erupting from their bazaars, they saw a puny figure streaking in the direction of the Victory, the town’s leading cinema. The first report, that anarchists had blown the cupola off the state capitol, swiftly yielded to a second, that a gopher mob had knocked over the vault of the Mercers’ & Pursers’ Trust Co. Before either rumor could be checked, a bystander appeared with a green baize bag dropped by the fugitive, establishing him as a sophomore at the Classical High School. Among its contents were a copy of Caesar’s Gallic commentaries, a half-­eaten jelly sandwich, and a newspaper advertisement announcing the première that afternoon at the Victory of Cecil B. De Mille’s newest epic, Male and Female, starring Thomas Meighan, Gloria Swanson, and Lila Lee.

By the time the foregoing had been pieced together, of course, the sophomore in question—whose measurements coincided exactly with my own—was hanging out of a balcony seat at the Victory in a catatonic state, impervious to everything but the photoplay dancing on the screen. My absorption was fortunate, for at regular intervals the ushers circulated through the aisles, spraying the audience with an orange scent that practically ate away the mucous membrane. Whether this was intended to stimulate the libido or inhibit it, I never found out, but twenty years later, when I met Mr. De Mille in Hollywood, I could have sworn he exuded the same fragrance. The fact that we met in an orange grove, while relevant, did not materially alter my conviction.

Male and Female, as moviegoers of that epoch will recall, was based on James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, a play that derided caste and sought to demonstrate how a family of hochgeboren snobs, marooned on a desert island, was salvaged physically and spiritually by its butler. That so special a problem could enthrall a youth living on a New England chicken farm might seem unlikely, but it did, and to such a degree that I saw the picture twice over again on the spot. The silken luxury of its settings, the worldliness and bon ton of the characters, and their harrowing privations held me spellbound. I was bewitched in particular by the butler as portrayed by Thomas Meighan. His devastating aplomb, the cool, quiet authority with which he administered his island kingdom and subdued the spitfire Lady Mary Lasenby, played by Miss Swanson, displaced every previous matinée idol from my heart. For weeks afterward, while toting mash to the hens or fumigating their perches, I would fall into noble attitudes and apostrophize the flock with lines like “One cannot tell what may be in a man, Milady. If all were to return to Nature tomorrow, the same man might not be master, nor the same man servant. Shall I serve the ices in the conservatory?” The consequences of this sort of lallygagging soon made themselves felt. There was a sharp decline in egg production, followed almost immediately by word from the Classical High School that I had achieved the lowest grade ever recorded in second-­year Latin.

Quite recently, through the good offices of the Museum of Modern Art, I was enabled to re-­examine the masterwork that gave me so profound a catharsis. It was a reassuring experience; I discovered that although the world is topsy-­turvy, De Mille still remains the same. His latest pictures display the same baroque pomp, the same good old five-­cent philosophy, and the same lofty disregard for sense. Male and Female could be remade today with equal success at the box office. All I ask in return for the suggestion is that prior to its release I be given twenty-­four hours’ head start.

The film begins with a pious explanation that its title is derived from the passage in Genesis “Male and female created He them,” and first introduces a scullery maid named Tweeny, in the person of Lila Lee. Tweeny is employed at fashionable Loam House, in London, where she nurses a violent, unreciprocated passion for its major-­domo, Crichton. We now meet, in a series of keyhole shots, the various members of the Loam family as they appear to an impudent pageboy delivering their boots. They are, respectively, the Earl (Theodore Roberts), his silly-­ass cousin Ernest (Raymond Hatton), and his daughters, Lady Mary and Lady Agatha. Miss Swanson, the former, reclines on a couch worthy of the Serpent of the Nile, having her nails and hair done by a pair of maids. This lovely sybarite is to learn, says an acid subtitle, that “hands are not only to be manicured but to work with, heads not only to dress but to think with, hearts not only to beat but to love with.” Her sister, a languid wraith engaged in scrutinizing her cosmetic mask, fares no more kindly: “Lady Agatha, who is to find like most beauties that the condition of her face is less important than to learn to face conditions.” There follows a piquant scene wherein Miss Swanson dons a peekaboo negligee, sinuously peels to enter a sunken marble tub, and sluices down in a shower containing a spigot marked “Toilet Water.” Emerging, she finds a box of long-­stemmed roses sent by an admirer named Lord Brocklehurst. The accompanying card read (as I thought), “My Lady of the Roses: I am coming over to show you something interesting for the slim white finger of your slim third hand,” but this seemed so Surrealist in mood that I had the projectionist run it again. The actual phrase, “slim third finger of your slim white hand,” is pretty humdrum by comparison.

Depicted next is the ritual of Lady Mary’s breakfast, served by three underlings and presided over by Crichton. “The toast is spoiled,” declares his mistress capriciously. “It’s entirely too soft.” Ever the flower of courtesy, Crichton pinks her neatly in the ego with a deadpan riposte: “Are you sure, Milady, that the toast is the only thing that is spoiled?” Leaving her to gnash her teeth on the soggy toast, he descends to the library, where Tweeny is dusting, and proceeds to read aloud, for no cogent reason, a dollop of poesy by William Ernest Henley beginning, “I was a King in Babylon and you were a Christian slave.” The scullery maid, eyes swimming with adoration, furtively strokes his instep. “I wouldn’t be nobody’s slave, I wouldn’t,” she murmurs. “Unless maybe your slave.” Lady Mary, who by a spooky coincidence has been reading the very same book earlier, now enters just in time to hear Crichton declaiming, “I saw, I took, I cast you by, I gently broke your pride.” The delicious spectacle of varlets pretending to understand poetry evokes her patrician mirth, and, imperiously requisitioning the book, she goes to greet Lord Brocklehurst, her suitor.

Brocklehurst, by and large, is an inconsequential character in the drama—merely a lay figure dragged in to spice the budding romance between Lady Mary and Crichton. The plot, which has been betraying definite symptoms of rigor mortis, comes alive about teatime, when the Loams, frantic with ennui, determine to cruise to the South Seas in their yacht. As they animatedly begin studying maps, a confidante of Lady Mary’s, Lady Eileen Duncraigie, drops in to consult her about a glandular dilemma. She is infatuated with her chauffeur—one of those typical crushes that followed in the wake of the internal-­combustion engine—and wonders whether she stands any chance of happiness. Lady Mary smiles commiseratingly. Indicating a bird cage nearby, she poses a searching zoological parallel: “Would you put a jackdaw and a bird of paradise in the same cage? It’s kind to kind, Eileen, and you and I can never change it.” Well, sir, you know what happens to people who run off at the mouth like that. It’s even money La Belle Swanson will be eating crow before the turn of the monsoon, and the cinematic bobbin shuttles madly back and forth as it starts weaving her comeuppance.

Dissolving to the Loam yacht at sea, we observe our principals leading the same unregenerate existence—squabbling endlessly and being coddled by Crichton, whose insteps, in turn, are being dogged by Tweeny. In a newspaper presumably flown to her by albatross, Lady Mary reads of her friend’s marriage to her chauffeur. “I suppose,” waggishly remarks Ernest, “that if one married a chauffeur, one would soon tire of him—get it?” Lady Mary haughtily rejoins that the whole affair is ridiculous—exactly as if she were to marry Crichton. The latter’s face freezes as he overhears the slur, and when Thomas Meighan’s face, already icy to begin with, froze, it looked like Christmas at Crawford Notch. “And there,” explains a crunchy caption, “it might have ended had they not been blown by the Winds of Chance into uncharted Tropic Seas with Destiny smiling at the wheel.” Which, draining away the schmaltz, is to say that the yacht runs aground, the crew obligingly perishes, and the Loams, plus their retinue, are washed up intact. The shot that gave one the old frisson in 1919, of course, was Meighan carrying Miss Swanson, more dead than alive and more naked than not, out of the surf. It is still gripping, and for those who are curious about its effect on Meighan—inasmuch as there is no clue to be found in his features—the succeeding title is helpful: “Suddenly, like mist melting before the sun, she was no longer a great lady to him, but just a woman, a very helpless and beautiful woman.” Brother, they don’t write subtitles like that any more. The fellows who dream up the scenarios nowadays are daffy enough, to be sure, but there’s no poetry in them.

It takes approximately a reel and a half of celluloid and some of the most cumbersome foolery since the retirement of Louise Fazenda to reunite the shipwrecked party. The Earl, who has landed in a dressing gown and yachting cap, chewing the celebrated Theodore Roberts cigar, becomes embroiled in various comic misadventures, such as nestling against a turtle he mistakes for a boulder and disputing possession of a coconut with some chimpanzees. The mishmash of fauna on the island, by the way, would confound any naturalist past the age of twelve; I doubt whether Alfred Russel Wallace, either in the depths of the Malay Archipelago or malarial fever, ever saw apes and mountain goats, wild boars and leopards, sharing a Pacific atoll. When noses are finally counted, the survivors number seven—the four Loams, Crichton and Tweeny, and an unidentified young minister whose presence is never quite explained but whom De Mille was doubtless limbering up for one of his later Biblical productions. Crichton borrows the padre’s watch crystal to light a fire, allots various chores to the group, and in short order manages to arouse Lady Mary’s anger. When he proposes to use her gold lace stole as a fish net, she rebels openly and talks the others into seceding, but the revolt soon collapses. One by one, the insurgents sneak back to Crichton’s fire and his kettle of seaweed broth, leaving her impenitent and alone. Then she too weakens, for, as the subtitle puts it, “You may resist hunger, you may resist cold, but the fear of the unseen can break the strongest will.” The unseen in this case takes the form of a moth-­eaten cheetah rented from Charlie Gay’s lion farm in El Monte. As he noses through the undergrowth, Lady Mary’s nerve cracks and she scurries to Crichton for protection. Ultimately, after much digging of her toe awkwardly in the hot sand, or what used to be known as the Charlie Ray school of acting, she knocks under and ponies up the gold lace stole. The sequence, or the round, or whatever it is, ends with both breathing hard but not the least bit winded—considerably more, goodness knows, than can be said for the spectator.

“Under the whiplash of necessity,” the narrative continues sonorously, “they come to find that the wilderness is cruel only to the drone, that her grassy slopes may clothe the ragged, her wild boar feed the hungry, her wild goats slake their thirst.” Two years, we discover, have wrought substantial changes in the castaways. They have fashioned themselves a nobby compound, domesticated everything in sight but the chiggers, and dwell contentedly under a benevolent despotism set up by Crichton. Lady Mary and Lady Agatha, in play suits of woven bark and in Robinson Crusoe hats, skip over the savannas hunting wild fowl with bow and arrow; the Earl, still chewing the same cigar stump, hauls lobster pots on the lagoon; Ernest and the anonymous divine milk goats in a corral; Tweeny, whose status nothing apparently can alter, stirs a caldron of poi in the kitchen; and Crichton, garbed in a tunic resembling a Roman centurion’s made of palm fronds, labors in his study on a Boob McNutt contraption designed to ignite a rescue flare on the cliffs. His new eminence is illustrated at mealtime that evening, when he is revealed dining in splendid isolation, fanned by a punkah that is operated by Lady Mary. Henley’s poems, providentially saved from the wreck, are propped up before him, and he is rereading “I was a King in Babylon,” the eternal references to which were beginning to give me a dull pain in the base of my scullery. It presently develops that the greedy old Earl has eaten some figs earmarked for Crichton’s dessert, and Lady Mary hurries to pick more. Learning she has gone to “the drinking place of the leopards,” Crichton hastens after her and transfixes one of the beasts as it attacks. She gratefully flings herself into his arms, and confesses her belief that he is the reincarnation of a king in Babylon. “Then you were a Christian slave,” he says with sudden understanding, turning her face up to his. The action thereupon pauses for what is unquestionably the snazziest flashback that has ever emerged from silver nitrate. Meighan, duked out as a Semitic tyrant on the order of Ashurbanipal, receives from a vassal a tigerish, scantily clad slave girl—i.e., Miss Swanson—who repays his tentative caresses by biting him in the wrist. With a cruel sneer, he promises to tame her, and she is borne off snarling defiance in the classic tradition. In due time, she re-­enters on a palanquin powered by Nubians, clothed in sequins and wearing on her head a triumph of the taxidermist’s art, a stuffed white peacock. “Bring forth the sacred lions of Ishtar,” Meighan commands, gesturing toward an arena installed meanwhile by the studio carpenters. “Choose thine own fate. Yield to me willingly or thou shalt know the fitting cage built for thee, O Tiger Woman.” Secure in her long-­term contract, Miss Swanson proudly elevates her chin. “Through lives and lives you shall pay, O King,” she predicts, and advances into the pit. As the episode concludes, we are back on the island, with Crichton telling Lady Mary, in mettlesome spondees, “I know I’ve paid through lives and lives, but I loved you then as I love you now.” A Zbyszko hammer lock, and at long last their lips, parched with rhetoric, meet in a lingering kiss.

The note of implied finality, however, is only a ruse; if the fable is to come full circle, its characters must show the effect of their sojourn away from civilization. Just as the pair are being united by the preacher, a ship appears on the horizon. Lady Mary tries to dissuade her chieftain from signaling for help, but he knows the code and gallantly bows to it. “Babylon has fallen and Crichton must play the game,” he announces, gently unyoking her arms and yoking the metaphors.

Transported back to England in an agile dissolve, master and servant promptly revert to type. Lady Mary agrees to wed Lord Brocklehurst, though she reveals her heartbreak to Lady Eileen, whose marriage to her chauffeur has spelled social obloquy. Crichton retaliates by proposing to Tweeny, and, in a penultimate scene, we see them between kisses, operating an Australian sheep farm. For the tag, or washup, De Mille chose a bittersweet dying fall. On the lawn of a vast country house, amid drifting petals, Lady Mary toys with her parasol and dreams of what might have been. The title reads, “You may break, you may shatter, the vase if you will, but the scent of the roses will hang around her still. Thus does the great sacrifice shed its fragrance over a lifetime.” Enter a beflanneled Brocklehurst, who stands regarding her with doglike devotion. “I understand, my dear, why you postponed our marriage,” he declares, manfully sweeping up the loose exposition. “You loved Crichton, the admirable Crichton. I’ll be waiting for you at the judgment day.” He raises her hand to his lips, Lady Mary’s eyes under her picture hat fill with tears, and, to use a very apt technical term, we squeeze.

I suspect that a lot of people in my generation, the kind of romantics who blubber at the sight of a Maxfield Parrish print or a Jordan roadster, would not have withstood my sentimental excursion as gracefully as I did, and would have wound up fractured at the Jumble Shop, harmonizing “The Japanese Sandman.” Matter of fact, I ran into a couple of these romantics at the Jumble Shop, strangely enough, right after seeing Male and Female. We got to talking, and darned if they hadn’t seen it too as kids. Well, we had a bite of supper, took in the ice show at the Hotel New Yorker, and then, armed with plenty of ratchets, started back to the Museum about midnight so I could screen the picture for them. Luckily, their car hit a hydrant en route and I managed to slip away unnoticed. If I hadn’t kept my wits about me, though, the whole day might have ended with much worse than eyestrain. As a middle-­aged movie fan, I’ve learned one lesson: Lay off that nostalgia, cousin. It’s lethal.