Male and Female. 1919. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

(5/21/01/-5/24/01)

I saw this film a couple of years ago and liked it very much. I didn't like it so much this time around. It took a long time getting started and there were very lengthy titles which were a bit tiresome.

Thomas Meighan plays a butler in a wealthy and/or aristocratic English family. He secretly likes the daughter, although he looks down at her superficiality and shallowness. (Then why does he like her so much? I can't help wondering.) But he knows his place and keeps silent about his feelings. Then, when he accompanies the family on a yachting expedition they are shipwrecked and the whole picture changes. The butler, through his sheer competence at survival, becomes king of the hill and is about to marry the woman he desires. Just then they are rescued.

Back in England things revert to normal. People revert to their previous places in society. Except that the daughter can't forget her feelings for this man and decides that she wants to marry him. He overhears this and knows that it just won't work. So he marries the maid, who has loved him all along, in order to save the woman he really loves from making a big mistake.

I would have imagined this to be a pure indictment of the social structure. Nobody wins. But it doesn't end like that; there is a postscript in which we see the butler and maid, who have gone to America, as a happily married couple. So the film, which indeed criticizes the social order, ends by affirming the value of submitting to it, or of submitting to the natural order of things, or to the way things are.

I didn't find Gloria Swanson all that interesting, although this is an example of her work when she was a major star. I thought Thomas Meighan was too much of a sourpuss in the first part, although I suppose that was understandable given his situation.

The film does come to life when the family is shipwrecked and have to struggle to survive. (It's sort of like Robinson Crusoe.) It is particularly interesting to see the women falling all over Thomas Meighan and fighting over who gets to serve him.

There is one really bizarre sequence that is pure DeMille--or at least what we like to think of as pure DeMille. The butler keeps reading a poem which says something like "When I was a king in Babylon/And you were a Christian slave." When he rescues Gloria Swanson from a tiger or other animal there is a sort of flashback in which he is a king who throws a woman to a lion or tiger for refusing him sexually. She curses him. Is this a scene from a past life and is his current position a punishment for that act? It's probably more of a fantasy and what it really is is a chance for DeMille to throw in some ancient spectacle. It's fun to watch, though I got a little confused over which woman in Meighan's current life was the one he gave to the animal. That confusion was probably exacerbated by the fact that he had just saved a woman from an animal.

There is a sense of sadness when these people discover that they can be rescued. There is a feeling that they were really happier on that island and would have preferred to stay there, but just couldn't resist the seductions of "civilization." I kind of wish that Gloria Swanson had suggested to Thomas Meighan that they go back, but I suppose that wouldn't have worked so well if they had just gone by themselves. Of course, she had a friend who married her chauffeur who then couldn't get work, so maybe the two couples could have turned their backs on English society and formed a commune, but that just wasn't done.

I believe (my memory is a little rusty) that the butler and the maid went off and started a new life in America. That ending shows the popular idea of America as a land of promise, where people could turn their backs on their dictated places in society and strike out for a new beginning.