|
The battle, "always fought and never won," is between a doughy, married industrialist (Jean Hersholt) and a gold-digger (Phyllis Haver) who reads Little Women for giggles. He's a lumbering family man, sturdy yet susceptible to Napoleonic flattery, the flapper gives him a sample of her undulations and soon he's adorning her curls with rolled-up dollar bills—a breath of fresh air for him but for her merely a transaction, "he's fat and dumb but he gives me diamonds." D.W. Griffith looks at the Jazz Age and sees a dazzling void: He has too much feeling for the characters to play caprices fast and loose like Lubitsch, so that, when the wife (Belle Bennett) spots the illicit couple at a nightclub, the machinations of The Marriage Circle turn harrowing. Comedy is a serious business, a note of Death in Venice is adduced as the husband attempts to squeeze into a corset and is nearly strangled by an exercise machine's vibrating belt. The mother recalls their courtship as a gauzy pastoral and wanders the rooftops in a daze. (Griffith cuts to an overhead shot of the edge of the urban precipice, then lets the camera plunge.) The vamp vacillates between the sugar daddy and the rakish scoundrel (Don Alvarado as "perfumed ice"), it's up to the feisty daughter (Sally O'Neill) to grab a gun and invade the hussy's lair. Hersholt's indignation at discovering O'Neill in the boudoir ("You're disgracing the family!") illustrates what Adela Rogers St. Johns that same year would dub The Single Standard. The end of the affair makes for "a bitter, bitter lesson," colored by the emotional toll of sudden desire and the melancholy of an artist who could never adapt to changing times. With William Bakewell and John Batten. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |