Eyes of the Totem

Monte Wax announces he has sold his mine in the far north, and he, wife Wanda Hawley, and their toddler can go back south to a small house for just the three of them. But Wax is murdered on the passage and the money stolen, and Miss Hawley can only identify the murderer's piercing eyes to Chief of Police W. S. Van Dyke. She staggers out of the station and down to the park where there's a huge totem pole. There she is succored by fake-blind beggar Bert Woodruff. Convinced that her husband's murderer will pass by the totem pole, she soon is a fake-blind beggar herself. She sends her daughter to a girl's school. Fifteen years later....

I thought at first we were dealing with the sort of movie that Tod Browning liked to direct, but it soon turned into a more conventional sort of melodrama, with Anne Cornwall showing up as Miss Hawley's daughter, fallen under the lecherous gaze of nightclub owner Tom Santschi. Woody Van Dyke not only appeared in this movie, he directed it. After this, he moved over to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, first in charge of Tim McCoy westerns, and soon becoming a major director for the company, famed for his economical shoots. He committed suicide in 1943 at the age of 53.

A really interesting film, with many bright directorial features and happy moments for what concerns witly shots and lively cutting. All is biased, notwithstanding, with a big sharp unanswered question. Here it is: Why doesn't she (Mariam Hardy) tell sooner her daughter (Betty) that she is her mother? Ok, 15 years before Mariam was reduced to not properly begging on the streets, but more precisely to fraudolent begging, being part of a racket of criminals who deceived people into letting them think they were blind persons, or persons with other disabilities: she found no better way (why?), didn't want her daughter to know of her beggar mother, and assigned the little child as an orphan to a highly distinguished school, whose tuition fees - during the whole 15 years - were regularly paid by a "close-mouthed attorney" (with whose funds?).

But we soon see Mariam much better established in life, sharing a luxury home with her co-conman Toby, and we see Mariam now - far from the (fake) beggars times - as a leading figure of a much honourable "lady commitee for organized charities". Those kind of things are not made in a day. Why, then, not tell Betty, why doesn't Mariam eventually take back her daughter, now that everything is OK? We don't know. We aren't told. We can only guess. Maybe the inexplicabile fortune made by the false beggars' racket, with evidently fraudolent means, is - as it should be - a crime, and Mariam and co. Don't want the police to interfere.

If that is the case, why does the chief of police himself not only help Mariam in finding a murderer (yes, there has been a murder, at the start), but even wants, at the end, to make love to (and maybe) marry Mariam? Why Betty, at the end, welcomes her mother instead of accusing her to have abandoned her for so many years? We really cannot tell.

This long lost film shows many iconic Takoma landmarks, including the Totem of the title. The bulk of the film is a melodrama of a single mother surviving the best she can. Making the hardest decision of placing her young daughter in a private boarding school. Destitute, homeless, this woman lives by the only option available to her as a begger. Her predicament resonants today, as so many cross into poverty and homelessness through no fault of their own. Her daughter grows into a lively teen befriended by a wealthy family. The film villian is a predatory club owner who entices respectable young women into sex trafficking. One scene is very much like Ghislane Maxwell, as the daughter is tricked by one of these women into the predators office. As the teen attempts to fights off her rapist the wealthy son comes to her rescue. That begins one of the best shot fight scenes in films. This is no slapstick fight. This is a brutal, no hold barred fight. With stunning film shots and camera angles. This fight scene reminded me that the Directors of the Silents pushed the boundaries of composition and cinamatography. The film drags a bit in the middle of the melodrama, but stick it out. The last 15 minutes more than makes up for it.