GROSS, PART EIGHT - Sanctimonious moralising, awkward storytelling, glimpses of something grand to come

Gloria Swanson in an abrasive, teeth-grindingly awful film made by one of the most famous Hollywood conservatives

Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT, CECIL B. DEMILLE, FAMOUS PLAYERS-LASKY/ARTCRAFT, 1920, 78 MINUTES.

We’ve got to 1920, the dawn of the golden age. I’m going to try to keep this one short. When I started watching the top-grossing movies from each year I was, I think, expecting the early part of the journey to be a bit tiresome. I expected to meet a lot of fairly primitive storytelling - flat scenes, static cameras, theatrical mugging. This did not happen. Almost everything I’ve watched so far has been in some way impressive or interesting or beautiful - ambitious works, full of love for the form. Even the cheesy melodramas have won me over with their charm, their humanity, their imagination.

Something to Think About is different. It’s DeMille - who was busy inventing Hollywood at the time - so it ought to be interesting, but it’s from a run of films he made with Gloria Swanson with all the period’s prurient scandal-sheet themes. David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary, calls these films “hypocritical and calculated offerings of postwar sexual adventure under the guise of moralizing.”

The pop histories will tell you that the 1920s was an era of uncontained hedonism - and not just in the movies - of post-war freedom, sex, drugs and lakes of prohibited booze. This movie is the bleak mirror-image of all that pre-code naughtiness. It’s part of the backlash that produced the Hays Code, the formalised prohibition on transgression that disfigured cinema for decades, in fact. Here’s a morbid interest in sexual transgression, broken marriages, illegitimacy. The moral weakness of young women and the corrective righteousness of the men who rescue them.

Gloria Swanson, as Ruth, is just back from her fancy school, all grown-up and ready to close off her options and devote her life to one idiot or another. The men around her, including her blacksmith dad (nobility of labour in primal form - a Wagnerian figure whose self-righteousness literally blinds him), all seem to want the most miserable possible outcome for her. When she dutifully opts to bury herself in this small town and marry the sanctimonious, middle-aged ‘philosopher’ David Markely - the man who paid for the fancy education - everyone celebrates.

Her offence, though, is to have fallen in love with two men and to have run off with the interesting one, Jim Dirk (classic two-syllable hunk). Dirk wears plus-fours, which is always a bad sign. In the code of the era, upright men wear worsted suits, virile chancers corduroy plus-fours (where is the monograph on plus-fours in the movies?). Dirk runs around in the fields, jumping over walls and so on. Markely the philosopher sits glumly at his big desk contemplating pagan artefacts and disdaining his devout mother’s earnest Christianity. Richard Dawkins vibe.

Ruth’s downfall is predictable. The interesting one, with whom she now cohabits in a cold-water flat in the big city, buckles down, takes a job digging a tunnel under said city and is killed in an implausible - but realistically-staged - flood. By the time of this nasty workplace accident Ruth is, of course, already pregnant. Life-long union buster DeMille offers no compensation. There’s no life insurance. Ruth struggles on in the big city but she meets a tramp/pickpocket in the park who lifts a baby’s bonnet from her pocket that tells him all he needs to know. Did pregnant women routinely carry bonnets around with them in this period? Was it a kind of code? He persuades her to go home to the country.

In the film DeMille offers us glimpses of the scale of his ambition and the content of his imagination. The flood scene must have been a big production (did it require a special soundstage with a tank?) and at the County Fair (Dirk takes Ruth there with the promise of seeing some prize-winning hens) there’s a big crowd, stretching off into the out-of-focus distance - suggesting those future casts of thousands. At the fair a troupe of circus performers turns the narrative in an authentically exotic direction. It’s not Freaks but these are evidently real people from this society’s margins - the fire breather is excellent - and they contrast strongly with the two-dimensional characters that Jeanie MacPherson’s screenplay gives us.

The troupe’s clown, in fact, sticks around to become a kind of Shakespearean fool and shows up again later, as a vision, in the redemption sequence. Three young women - Ruth’s gossipy childhood friends - form a kind of chorus. They offer a giggly, prudish commentary on Ruth’s moral journey. These classical devices tell us something about DeMille’s background in the straight theatre. It would be interesting to look at the later work to see if the theatrical stuff survives in the epics.

Ultimately, of course, the story circles back to the entirely pedestrian resolution you were probably expecting. Philosopher, blacksmith, wayward daughter, pious mother-in-law and charming toddler are reunited in the sunshine. The atheist philosopher’s return to God is rendered, mechanically, in a single shot - an awkward gesture involving looking up to heaven and closing his hands in prayer. Boom. The pagan figures are put in storage and faith is restored. Rigid bourgeois domestic norms too.

Gloria

I can’t finish this without coming back to Gloria Swanson, the actor who, I’m learning, more than anyone else surely, stood for the complicated moral tensions of the pre-code twenties and for the awkward and traumatic transition to sound and to the equally complicated production context of the new Hollywood. She was a big star by the time of the deal with DeMille’s company that obliged her to make this sequence of six petty pot-boilers but, by the time she’d finished making them, she really only had seven or eight years of career left before she was ruined and expelled from the industry - by various tinseltown shysters and by technological progress.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Swanson is the archetype for the silent actor who can’t quieten down and ease off on the mime enough to make it in the talkies. Her toned-down style was popular enough but directors couldn’t use her. Her peremptory, declamatory style made modern dramatic roles and all the subtler categories that emerged with sound - whispered weepies, screwballs, women’s pictures and psychological thrillers - impossible for her. Hitchcock, Wyler, Sirk had nothing for her. By the time Billy Wilder cast her in Sunset Boulevard, playing essentially herself, in 1949, she’d already had two or three failed come-backs. She claimed it was only the Wilder film that enabled her to finally settle her debts and live comfortably in retirement.

I said at the beginning that I’d keep this short. I failed, of course, as I always seem to with these 100 year-old movies. This is not DeMille’s best film. It might be his worst. It’s not Swanson’s best either but I think it marks an important moment, at the end of the exploratory phase and the beginning of the consolidation - of stories, technique and ideas - that would lead to the great, final phase of silent cinema.

• There’s a connection here with a famous poem by New England romantic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called The Village Blacksmith - it’s quoted in some intertitles and Ruth’s father is obviously modelled on the poem’s noble blacksmith.

• I watched the film on YouTube. It’s a pretty crappy version and it’s got no soundtrack. There must be a nice restoration out there but I can’t find it.

• I notice there’s a new edition of David Thomson’s brilliant Biographical Dictionary of Film in the catalogue - although it seems to be four years from publication!

• Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list.

• And here’s another top-grossing list.