Sensation Seekers

Sensation Seekers (1927) was one of Lois Weber's final directorial efforts, and her last for Universal. Billie Dove is a rich, young adult who is alienated from her parents. Her mother rarely leaves the house, and her father never comes home, as he has a mistress. Billie's character enjoys partying with her friends, until she is arrested in a raid on a speakeasy, and has to spend some time in jail. Raymond Bloomer plays a new minister in town, and he bails Billie out of jail, and tries to help her get her life straightened out.

Miss Dove really turns in a great performance here. She is trapped in a town where the "good Christian" townsfolk judge her (and the new minister), and her friends don't really care about her either. She's also torn because she is attracted to the minister, yet she has no interest in being a preacher's wife. Of course the minister is attracted to her also (who wouldn't be!), and this puts his career in jeopardy. Bloomer is also conflicted, but his performance isn't in the same league as Billie's.

When it looks like all is lost, Dove agrees to run off with her former boyfriend on a yacht and get married, but it is sunk in a terrible storm and Billie and the boyfriend are abandoned by the yacht's crew. Miss Dove is pounded by thousands of gallons of water in the terrific climax -- proving that she wasn't just an good-looking actress that wore a lot of pretty clothes. I've only seen a few of her films, but this is definitely one of her best performances.

Got my Kino-Lorber edition of two late Lois Weber silents the other day, "A Chapter in Her Life" (1923), which I saw years ago but on VHS, and "Sensation Seekers," which has circulated on bargain-bin home video and the internet in condensed and probably pictorially-inferior form for a while, but for which this was my first viewing. It's the last and, to put it oddly, most recent film of hers that I've seen and was made during the Jazz Age and near the end of the silent era. It's also the last film that Weber-expert Shelley Stamp lists among the filmmaker's extant titles, although the filmography remains incomplete regarding the whereabouts or lost status of some works. Reading Stamp's book and essays on Weber, I'd love to compare this to two other related films she made around the same time, "The Marriage Clause" (1926), which also exists and stars Billie Dove, in addition to Francis X. Bushman and Warner Oland, but appears to be locked away at the Library of Congress for the time being, and "The Angel of Broadway" (1927), which starred Leatrice Joy and is listed as lost. Based on Stamp's writing, the other two films seem to be more reflexively about show business in their social commentary on flapper culture.

"Sensation Seekers," nonetheless, is an interesting reflection of how Weber's moralistic and sentimental filmmaking style carried over from the 1910s in its adaptation to the Roaring Twenties. Technically, just fine (although some of the longer shots here appear a bit out of focus, but I'm not sure if that's not just a result of the surviving 16mm footage), but I can see how contemporary New York reviewers would've chafed against Weber's preaching on the dangers for the soul of the party girl--what with the violation on the prohibition of the devil's drink, the dancing and the nice clothes when what women should be doing, or so it seems Weber argued, is sipping on lemonade in between bible study and Sunday church. Oh, Weber has it out for the hypocritical church-goers, too, mind you, as "Sensation Seekers" recalls her earlier photoplay, "Scandal" (1915), in its condemnation of gossip, including tabloid newspaper journalism. After Dove's flapper is arrested in a prohibition raid, the other guy in the film's love triangle even mockingly wears the newspaper reporting the event to a party--a costume he describes as "Scandal" personified, which is better than the silly and symbolic scandal monster from the 1915 film.

The central romance, however, regards the flapper's regeneration through her love for the preacher. Mostly, this just leads to a bunch of vacant staring at nothing, and the minister saying such ridiculous things as, "it is disconcerting to watch the young woman of today grow into -- manhood," and "We shall save her in spite of herself." Thing's would've been more fun had they followed Dove's words regarding, "You Puritans are just a bunch of 'Thou-shalt-nots' -- I want freedom!" The plot convenience of a sinking yacht ultimately solves the melodramatic dilemmas, but it's a well-done climax--a no drowning atheists version of a foxhole aside, so I'm not complaining.

Stamp brings up another intriguing point in her commentary on the Kino-Lorber home video, which compliments the preacher's gendered comments regarding the manliness of partying and the film's relative allowance for the father (as played by Weber's ex Phillips Smalley) of Dove's character to also leave the house--but without the consequences. Or, as Stamp wrote, "an impulse to redomesticate its heroine in the end, to remove her from the work force and place her out of the public eye, and to contain female sexuality in a marital and familial sphere." In addition to that, there's the suggestion that the errant ways of Dove's flapper, provocatively named "Egypt," which we're told means "darkness," are coded racially as non-white, as "other." Hence, I suppose, the African-American band (as well as a neat silhouette dance number behind a screen) and servants that appear to run the "Black and Tan" jazz club for the white patrons. It's interesting to note, too, that around the same time, Weber ultimately turned down what would've been probably a much less complicated and even more offensive portrayal of African Americans in the United Artists production of "Topsy and Eva" (1927)--basically a minstrel show made out of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the book being what attracted Weber to that ill-begotten project in the first place.

I believe I've seen every Weber picture available on home video or the web now, and while she was surely a moralistic party pooper and a product of the class and racial views of the Progressive politics of her era (see her pro-eugenics message in "Where Are My Children?" (1916) for more on that), she was a clever and sophisticated filmmaker, too, and turning down "Topsy and Eva" is a point of integrity in her favor. As Stamp and others have made clear, too, it wasn't so much that Weber's preaching falling out of favor in the Jazz Age was the reason for her decline in work as the talkies approached as it was the studio standardization and Hays Code of the "re-masculinization" of Hollywood--pushing out female directors and individualistic filmmakers like Weber--during the period. One of the most intelligent screenwriters, directors and producers of the 1910s was reduced by the 1920s to supposedly a handler of emerging star actresses--like Dove here, or elsewhere the likes of Mildred Harris, Leatrice Joy, Anita Stewart, and Claire Windsor--and never mind the multi-layered roles she offered them. Hopefully, more of Weber's films, including the later ones, will continue to be made available in the future. At least a couple of Anita Stewart productions exist, along with the aforementioned "The Marriage Clause," and I'm not sure about the fate of Weber's first-and-only talkie, "White Heat" (1934).

"Sensation Seekers" (1927) is, frankly, a genuine potboiler, but...it's a great potboiler! Starring absolutely gorgeous Billie Dove who gives an outstanding performance and is someone the viewer cannot takes eyes off of while she's on screen, her co-stars are Raymond Bloomer, Huntley Gordon, Peggy Montgomery (no, not the child star), Will Gregory, Edith Yorke, Helen Gilmore, Phillips Smalley (director Lois Weber's ex-husband!), and others. Near the end, look for a hammy looking, mustachioed, young Walter Brennan as a yacht hand. One last person in the film needs to be recognized. He's not mentioned in the credits, but he plays a major part near the end, and that's Tom Ricketts as the new minister's bishop.

Newly released by Kino-Lorber on Blu-Ray, this is one of the last films directed by Lois Weber, and it was her last for Universal Studios where she'd been a top director, if not their top director, since the early and middle 1910s. Weber's works nearly always spun a moral of some sort. Here we see a twenties flapper, Dove, become infatuated with the new minister. We also see the new minister become infatuated with - Dove. Dove is seen early on going to a local jazz club (where a jazz band number is played out behind a screen in silhouette!!) and finding her father there with a woman not his wife - evidently a nightly habit - and then a raid occurring where Dove and the rest of the place, minus a couple of those in her crew whom she saves by taking their illegal flasks of booze, are carted off to jail. She's bailed out none the less by the new minister! Here begins the moral story. Rather than going through the shenanigans of the middle of the film - some of which is stretched just a tad too long...

The ending is a wowzer! Dove and her supposed fiancé, Huntley Gordon - a fiancé who is verily soused - are on a yacht going to another town to elope. They're on the yacht during a tremendous storm, one where any right minded individual would not attempt to weather in any small yacht. One of the crew who is captaining the wheel takes his eyes off of what he's doing for about twenty seconds and collides the yacht with a boat. It damages the yacht beyond repair. Meanwhile, the minister is in pursuit of Dove. A magnificent scene plays out with the weather, the sinking yacht, the imperiled Dove and crew, and the pursuing minister and the crew driving his "rescue" boat. Superb ending. And the film, for the record, ends rather abruptly, but it's a perfect ending for what has preceded it.

Highly recommended. Yes, it's a potboiler, and if you're offended with the patter of moral feet chasing the story you may not like all that you see, but it's done with some genuine talent and spiritual feeling. Weber definitely had her eye on the box office as well, and because of that, this still plays with lots of entertainment value. Dove is glorious to watch.

One last note: I've seen Huntley Gordon in several films over the years, and he always reminds me of a combination of William Boyd (Hopalong) and Reginald Denny. He looks exactly as if they'd collided and become a new individual!

"Sensation Seekers" could have been a good film. Instead, it looks a bit like a Sunday School lesson written by someone on drugs! It's highly moralistic and filled with folks running amok in a little town...while a few decent people go to church and act pious. One of the wild ones is Egypt and she's played by Billie Dove and the nice new preacher tries to help her...but ultimately she runs off with a weasel and they pay the price for their not niceness and nearly die to prove that goodness is swell and skankiness isn't.

The film seemed preachy but confusing in its message. Plus the minister's relationship with Egypt never really made a lot of sense. What DID work was the finale...which was grand. The film features a harrowing shipwreck and Dove apparently gave it her all and looked almost like she was being drowned for real! Not a great film...but a great ending.

The first thing I should note about this movie is that I saw it in the largest Museum of Modern Art's movie auditorium, which was full. Vincent Giordano and the Nighthawks were there to play an original score. That makes a big difference in how a movie affects me -- to see it as it was meant to be presented, instead of on my TV screen off a recording from TCM, with perhaps a piano score; it's the difference between being at Woodstock when Joe Cocker is performing "I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends" or hearing the tune off a hurdy-gurdy. We may know that as a fact, but it's a good idea to renew the experience occasionally.

In the movie, the luscious Billie Dove is the rich daughter of estranged parents: good-time-Charley father Phillips Smalley (director Weber's ex for two years at this point; I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when she made suggestions on how to play his part) and Church-going, suffering Edith Yorke (I'm sure Smalley had some thoughts on how she should play her part). Billie is wild but not a bad girl -- when the roadhouse she is drinking at is raided, she says she never lies about who she is. When her mother's handsome parson, Raymond Bloomer, does her the favor of bailing her out, there is instant attraction, and he spends the rest of the film trying to save her and she gives him every opportunity.

There are some very nice points about the gossip of small towns and unwillingness to forgive making things harder for a pastor, but the whole thing has a couple of major flaws: why is it always the beautiful girls who can be saved? If Zasu Pitts is at risk of eternal damnation, will hordes of clergy strive for her soul? If the minister looks like Billy Gilbert, will the girls come to him for instruction? Or is physical beauty a spiritual virtue? In any case, during the moments when these distracting thoughts occurred to me, the Nighthawks were there to draw my attention back, just like a good score is supposed to; and the sequence where the yacht Billie is on sinks and Bloomer rushes to save her is a real wow. I think if you get a chance to see it as I did, you'll enjoy it.