The Cheat

I found this to be a very interesting film, despite Fannie Ward's over-the-top arm gestures and horrified eyes.

Ward plays a married woman who lives to be seen and admired; we first see her out shopping for clothes and arguing with her husband that she simply won't give up her way of life - which includes not only shopping for horrendously expensive clothes, but keeping company, as they used to say, with an ivory baron (played by Sessue Hayakawa).

This is one of the things that intrigued me - the movie was made in 1915, and a high-society woman is associating with a man of a different race. I'm sure she wouldn't do it if he weren't rich, of course, but the same can be said of many Caucasian men. Even more intriguing, the film was re-released in 1918, and the Hayakawa character was changed from Japanese (as he was in the original) to Burmese.

Why? Because Japanese-Americans objected to the way a Japanese man was portrayed in the film.

This was the same time The Birth of a Nation was raising hell due to its almost unbelievable racism, with a fledgling organization called the NAACP protesting mightily - and with the fullest justification - against the way the black characters were shown.

That's what interests me, apart from the technical aspects of both movies. They both showed non-Caucasian characters in an unfavorable light, and they both received criticism for it. In 1915. Long before the civil rights movement; when the States were still segregated. Even then, there were organizations setting the stage for reform.

Back to the movie, it had some fascinating lighting techniques that Griffith never used, but then, it's not Griffith; it's DeMille. The two leads are a bit much, especially Ward, but Hayakawa is perfect and perfectly cast. Ward and Jack Dean, who played her hard-working husband, were married offscreen the following year; they remained married until his death in 1950. Ward and Dean join the ranks of the Forever Silent, neither of them ever having made a talkie film.

Boring

I experience this problem occasionally. I'll watch a silent movie, looking forward to a great story and amazing acting, yet BORING comes along. There will be an actor or actress in a leading role who has all the depth of a paper napkin. Fortunately, this happens rarely in silent films (yet much of the time in modern films), but it does happen, and makes the experience painful.

This happened the other night with The Volga Boatman, part of my Cecil B. DeMille collection. It was one of the few I hadn't seen from the set. I was already wary, since the male star was William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd. I saw him in Lady of the Pavements last year at the silent film festival in Pordenone. "Hello," he seems to be saying, "I'm boring." Nice-looking man, but not an exciting presence. I think he tries, but he comes across better as part of the decoration rather than as an actor.

The Volga Boatman, though - that was a double whammy. First there was Boyd. Then there was Elinor Fair, whom Boyd later married. I can think of a couple of things they had in common; they were both film people, and neither of them had screen presence. Fair was even worse than Boyd, constantly striking Statue of Liberty poses - I expected her to pull out a torch at some point - and, in general, looking two-dimensional. The plot was interesting; the supporting cast was fine; the leads might just as well have taken off for an extended vacation, leaving cardboard cutouts of themselves to be used in shooting. It would have been more cost-effective, and the audiences would never have noticed.

I expect more of the silents, because they give more. There are far fewer incompetents in them; they have better stories, richer performances, and more memorable faces. When a film falls flat, it's all the more disappointing. The most interesting part of The Volga Boatman is the knowledge that Boyd proposed to Fair onscreen, towards the end. I was looking for it, but I must have blinked and missed it. I was too busy being irritated by Fair, with her hair hanging around her face, still thinking that standing still and looking stupid made her glamorous, to paraphrase Hedy Lamarr.