Forbidden Fruit

Mary Maddock is a poor seamstress who works for the wealthy Mrs. Mallory. Mr. Mallory attempts to make a business deal with Nelson Rogers. To entice the young man, Mrs. Mallory invites him to a dinner party, promising him that his partner will be the prettiest girl in town. But when his partner us unable to attend, Mrs. Mallory enlists Mary in the role. Mrs. Mallory and her servants transform Mary into a desirable woman. Rogers falls for her, unaware that Mary is married to a louse. Mary's husband conspires with Giuseppe, the Mallory's butler, to steal some jewels from the Mallory home. During the theft, Mary's husband discovers Mary sleeping at the Mallory's home and assumes she is selling herself. Can Mary extricate herself from this mess?

This is an odd film. I'm sure DeMille was going for melodrama (the title cards are rife with morality). There are some references to Adam and Eve ("forbidden fruit" ... get it? Get it?), but also scenes with Cinderella fantasies (which were pretty bad). But several scenes are comic and the movie borders on farce. Theodore Roberts, as Mr. Mallory, plays his usual cigar-chomping character, and provides some of the comic relief. Rogers makes a pleasant leading man, although his outfit in the Cinderella scenes is way too much.

Ayres is quite beautiful, even before she is "transformed." In what might be an "in" joke, one scene involves the Mallorys, along with Mary and Rogers, watching a play in a theater. The actors onstage are Conrad Nagel and Margaret Loomis, and the play is entitled "Forbidden Fruit."

The 40 year old Cecil B. DeMille was obviously gearing this film towards a middle class female audience. He pays careful attention to the clothes that the leading lady wears and the shopping that she buys. She is presented as the trendy woman of the 1920's, and sort of isolates the male community.

With the exception of artsier fare like THE CHEAT and THE WHISPERING CHORUS, DeMille's silent output tends to be overlooked. A real shame, since his so-called high society films are a delight. FORBIDDEN FRUIT is my favorite to date: it's briskly paced and graced with jaw-dropping art deco aesthetics. The story is a simple Cinderella retelling, but a very effective one, inserting a bit of crime drama into the mix. For once, I was actually enamored with Agnes Ayres, an actress often dismissed by silent movie geeks as underwhelming and matronly. Here, she's the perfect fairy tale heroine.

May not have Gloria Swanson, but still not a movie to be missed.

Apart from admiring DeMille's attention to detail in this film, I felt absolutely nothing. He can't tell a story because he doesn't engage with his actors. He just hands them a script, expects them to know what they're doing, and then collaborates with the cinematographer. He is a painter rather than a director.

Forrest Stanley is in a hurry to get out west, but Theodore Roberts wants him to stick around to make a deal, so wife Kathlyn Williams promises him "the prettiest girl in New York" as his dinner companion. When the guest begs off, she substitutes seamstress Agnes Ayres, and they fall in love. Miss Ayres, however, has a failure of a husband who hears about a girl at the Roberts' house with some fabulous jewels he can steal....

FORBIDDEN FRUIT is a remake of DeMille's stunning THE GOLDEN CHANCE, with a lot of the absolute degradation of the original version missing -- while in the earlier period, DeMille was occasionally interested in showing the audience the dirt and despair of poverty, here it is attributed to greed and laziness on the part of Agnes Ayres' husband, Clarence Burton, and Theodore Kosloff's butler, who had served many of the best families in New York and two years in Sing-Sing.

Yet there is a careless greed among the wealthy: Theodore Roberts, who is only interested in keeping Forrest Stanley around so he can make a business deal, regardless of the truth, and Kathlyn Williams, who really doesn't care a fig for anyone or anything except that Miss Ayres doesn't leave with her jewels. Only Mr. Stanley and Miss Ayres seem touched by any emotion but greed, and this makes this, in many ways, a fairy tale. The sequences in which we see Miss Ayres as Cinderella and Mr. Stanley as Prince Charming seem not to be commentaries on the main body of the movie. If anything, the reverse is true, and the movie seems more an exegesis of the fairy tale for the modern (1921) audience.

The print on Youtube was in glorious condition, with many sections not only tinted, but toned, lending a sumptuous visual element quite alien to the modern view of silent movies. DeMille's movies were Famous Players-Lasky's (later Paramount) prestige movies, and they spared no expense in their presentation. DeMille made an effort to save his early films, and this is a very good one from this period.