Sunshine Molly

Lois Weber enters Oilfield, which consists of a big dining hall, a few shacks, and a zillion oil derricks. She goes to work in the dining hall, where Phillips Smalley tries to goose her. She breaks a plate over his head.

This feature by Weber & Smalley is in poor shape: a couple of reels are missing, and there's extensive bubbling in the beginning and near the end. However, it's clear that this movie is about a couple of things: the power of a helpful, pleasant personality and about single women trying to deal with young men. The ending is a bit awkward and unsatisfactory, imposed by the strictures of convention, but a lot of what comes earlier is interesting.

Of note is that this feature has a credited cinematographer, Dal Clawson, and that Weber & Smalley are no longer playing with the screen shape to make their cinematic points. Instead, they're using setting and camera placement. There are several shots of people in narrow doorways, and one lovely composition of Miss Weber on the left of a doorway, a vertical post in the middle, and Mr Smalley trudging away in the distance on the right.

This was shot for Bosworth, releasing through Paramount, away from the Smalleys' home base at Universal. Was it a loan-out or were they leaving, only to go back after negotiating a better deal?

The last of Lois Weber's Bosworth productions, the surviving print of "Sunshine Molly" is missing reels three and four and some of what remains in the originally five-reel feature contains severe decomposition. A significant, if all too common, loss, although from what's extant, I think I may say that, while it's an evidently well-composed picture, it likely wasn't one of her best. The reflexivity this time is rather self-aggrandizing and literary instead of cinematic, with the first shot being of a book of the same title and "by Lois Weber," with non-dialogue title cards and chapter breaks subsequently showing pages from this supposed book. Reportedly, "Sunshine Molly" was an original scenario and not an adaptation from any such published prose. It does, however, firmly establish Weber as the story's creator, a fact reflected in her also playing the titular protagonist, and Weber would go on to promote her authorship of films such as for the controversial and, thus, highly-successful "Hypocrites" (1915).

What's left after that is a well-photographed picture and a narrative on sexual harassment that recalls the memories of my humanities-classes lecturers proclaiming things "problematic." And, indeed, Weber's Molly in the end marrying the creep, "Bull" (played by Weber's real husband Phillips Smalley), who repeatedly groped her against her will, only to dismiss his admitted inability to keep his hands to himself by her quipping, "I reckon it don't matter if a man puts his hands on his wife." As uncomfortably antiquated as that notion of a love story made out of sexual harassment may be, it's on top of Molly's resistance to Bull's advances being explained as a consequence--perhaps an over-reaction even seems to be the suggestion--of her having been the victim of a more-violent sexual assault or rape in the past. As the patriarch of the oil field where they all work unfortunately says, "Bull ain't so bad, I used to pinch pretty girls myself when I was young." Quite the muddled mess of a message here, then, after starting with Molly breaking a plate over Bull's head for the goosing. Overall, a good example of why not every film needs a romance. Even the secondary coupling in the picture involves the man criticizing the woman for being "sloppy" and not looking "neat like Molly."

Besides what Shelley Stamp (author of the book "Lois Weber in Early Hollywood") claimed "signaled a shift in Weber's scripts toward more contemporary social issues and a greater emphasis on realism," "Sunshine Molly" is also notable for the characteristic beauty of Weber's films. It begins well with overhead views of the oil field and a pan to Molly, and the use of depth of field in the shots through doorways are effective. Unfortunately, the print's deterioration obscures the reported use of miniatures to enact the explosion of the oil field. Stamp also points out the tendency to frame Weber centrally as she is likewise the focus of the gazes of her majority-male co-workers.

Also of interest is how these old films depicted the extraction of oil as admirably entrepreneurial and not something ugly or polluting. Another incomplete film I saw recently, Oscar Micheaux's "The Symbol of the Unconquered" (1920), ended on the happy note of views of oil wells and smoke in the air.