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.

Manslaughter. 1922. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

(1/7/00)

I really enjoyed this picture most of the way through. It was a nice production (as one would expect from DeMille) and it kept moving. I think it lost its way in the last section, after Lydia gets out of prison.

Leatrice Joy was good as Lydia, but I kept thinking what a great role itwould have been for Clara Bow. I don't know if Bow could have been callous enough, but I kept thinking of her.

Thomas Meighan seemed a little bit stodgy. He's the respectble, upright, solid citizen--so what is the big attraction to Lydia? We are told that he loves her for what she could be rather than what she is, but we are never told why he picked her out to love. We really don't see much affection between the two before the last part of the film.

The comparisons of the decadence of the jazz age to ancient Rome are an excuse for DeMille spectacle. I personally think that the scenes in prison are more interesting. And I really don't think that a summation to a jury is the proper place to talk about the decadence of the time. (though maybe prosecutors do do that in reality.) The jury is there to decide the guilt of one woman concerning one crime.

I very much like how Lydia's rigidity about her maid's theft of the ring is turned around on her when she does something wrong and is put on trial. And the whole theme of forgiveness is well handled--even when the plaque falls down with the words "forgive us our trespasses..." You can call it a cliche, but it works. And the interaction between the two women is very effectively handled.

The real problem that leads to the theft of the ring is that the maid doesn't ask Lydia properly. She just asks, "Could I borrow some money?" when Lydia is in a bad mood. The first rule of asking for anything is to ask when the person you are asking is in a receptive mood. Furthermore, she did not convey to Lydia the importance of what she was asking. She should have sat down with her and said, "Look, I am in a desperate situation. My little boy is sick and is going to die unless I can send him to a warmer climate." Lydia is not hard-hearted and money basically means nothing to her. There is no question that she would have given her the money.

However, I am not criticizing the makers of this film about this, because this is just the way that problems happen in real life. It's a case of miscommunication which results in terrible consequences.

The change that comes over Lydia in prison, her maturation, is the conclusion of the story. Why does the Thomas Meighan character have to go to pieces, take to drink and hit the skids? Why do we need to see this? Just to prove that he didn't really want to send her to prison? The last part of the film doesn't seem to follow naturally and inevitably from what came before. However, it's a great moment when Joy and Meighan see each other again.

Then there is that ending in which he gives up his candidacy for governor for the woman he loves. It's not simply a choice of what he wants most. Being governor is a responsibility rather than a benefit. It is his rival who gleefully tells him that an ex-con (meaning Lydia) cannot reside in the governor's mansion. So the rival seems sleazy, which suggests corruption or dishonesty. By resigning, he leaves the state in that man's greedy hands. I totally agree that after doing the correct and proper thing by sending Lydia to prison her certainly doesn't owe the state the sacrifice of his personal happiness, but that ending is more ambiguous than a simple choice of what is really important.