MoMA’s Silent Movie Week

Belle Bennett plays Stella, a young working-class woman who marries “above her station,” and as Monica Nolan notes in an essay for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Barbara Stanwyck, who played Stella in King Vidor’s 1937 remake, once remarked that she was “spurred by the memory of [Bennett’s] magnificent performance.” Stella’s marriage to Steven Dallas (Ronald Colman) sours, and it carries on souring even after she gives birth to a baby girl. Stella “adores her daughter,” writes Nolan, “but is unwittingly damaging her, exhaling a cloud of bad taste that poisons her daughter’s future like second-hand smoke. In the twisted logic of the movie’s day, Stella is the problem, not the snobbery of the upper class. Stella must give up her only child to save her.”

Frances Marion based her screenplay for Stella Dallas on Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel, and that same year, she adapted Martin Brown’s Broadway play The Lady for Frank Borzage. Norma Talmadge plays Polly Pearl, a London music-hall singer who marries an aristocrat who abandons her once she’s pregnant. When her absent husband’s father comes for the child, she gives her son to a minister and his wife. Reviews were “almost hyperbolic,” as Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs put it in their program notes for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

The Lady screens on Thursday, and Friday’s program is a short and a feature, Charlie Chaplin’s The Adventurer (1917) and William A. Seiter’s What Happened to Jones (1926). Chaplin plays an escaped convict who saves the life of a woman of means and is whisked into a world of wealth. In his brief but terrific piece for the New Yorker on Chaplin, Richard Brody writes that, just as the lowly convict “passes as a member of high society by being treated like one, so, Chaplin suggests, one also becomes a convict not by committing a crime but by being convicted of one, regardless of the truth of the matter. This horrific arbitrariness—by highlighting the law’s rampant prejudice against the poor, the willingness of the police to assume depravity in the deprived—confers a desperate legitimacy on the convict’s escape.”

MoMA calls What Happened to Jones, the third adaptation of George Broadhurst’s 1897 Broadway play, “a sort of Roaring ’20s After Hours.” The night before he’s to marry Lucille Bigbee (Marion Nixon), Tom Jones (Reginald Denny) heads out for a night of poker with an old friend. “Comic complications ensue, as you would fervently hope!” writes Pamela Hutchinson, who notes that the Los Angeles Times called the film “the ‘greatest comedy success of the season,’ with critic Grace Kingsley enthusing: ‘If you don’t laugh until you cry . . . you will be different from the gang including myself which yesterday simply howled with laughter all through the comedy’s unrolling.’”

The weekend brings La dixième symphonie (1918), which Cinémathèque française cofounder Henri Langlois considered to be the first masterpiece from Abel Gance (J’accuse, La roue, Napoléon), and Three Weeks (1924), directed by Alan Crosland and written by Elinor Glyn, who adapted her 1907 erotic romance novel. Crosland’s version was the third film based on the sensational bestseller, but the first with the full cooperation of Glyn, who three years later created the “It girl” in a novella serialized in Cosmopolitan, which almost immediately became a movie, It (1927), starring Clara Bow.

Thomas Gladysz, the founder of the Louise Brooks Society and the author of a good handful of books on the screen legend, spoke last year for PopMatters with Robert Byrne of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Byrne led a team that restored Herbert Brenon’s The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), which screens next Monday. The story centers on a gang of professional beggars, and in her first on-screen performance, Brooks arrives, as MoMA puts it, “unbilled but unmistakable as a gangster’s moll whose sudden appearance enlivens the film’s final reel.” Byrne tells Gladysz that it would have been “one thing to restore a lousy film that just happened to have a brief appearance by Louise Brooks,” but “it is quite another to restore a film that is quite interesting and enjoyable in its own right.”

Silent Movie Week wraps on Tuesday with Allan Dwan’s Padlocked (1926), starring Lois Moran, who made her film debut playing the grownup daughter in Stella Dallas. Moran plays another daughter in Padlocked, Edith Gilbert, whose self-righteous father, a minister, sends her off to a reformatory. Edith escapes and runs off to the big city to become a cabaret performer. MoMA notes that Dwan “beautifully exploits the moving-camera techniques he played a large part in inventing, with the sublime collaboration of cinematographer James Wong Howe.”