The Golden Chance

Having worked as an actress with D.W. Griffith, Jeanie Macpherson joined forces with Cecil B. DeMille to write screenplays for his films. She learned her writing skills from Griffith who also started out as an actor and began to write his own material. It seems that via Macpherson, DeMille was tutored by Griffith to write this film.

In watching this early DeMille work, it was once again reinforced to me that early DeMille is far superior to late DeMille. His attention to use of light within scenes is remarkable. His pacing is very good, enabling much to be told in the space of an hour or so. It is a pity that he wasn't as intuitive about the style of his later sound films as he seemed to be in his silent films.

This was the first film in which I had seen Cleo Ridgely. She was remarkable, quite restrained and yet conveyed a broad spectrum of emotions.

The ending is wonderful.

Mary Denby (Cleo Ridgely), a seamstress from the slums, gets a chance at a better life when she is employed by a couple that hopes to woo a young millionaire (Wallace Reid) into a lucrative contract. However, unbeknownst to her employers and would-be-suitor, she has a thieving drunkard husband (Horace B Carpenter) who complicates things. Directed by Cecil B DeMille.

The story is generally engaging, although at times somewhat implausible, and with a rather rushed ending. Cleo Ridgely is quite appealing and sympathetic as the heroine, and Wallace Reid smolders and charms very effectively as the debonair millionaire. The acting by all is generally quite restrained and naturalistic, showing that even in the early days of feature films actors were capable of nuanced performances.

Director Cecil B DeMille and cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff make a very talented team, imbuing the film with distinctive lighting and shadow effects, as well as intriguing compositions (note the shot where Reid and Ridgeley kiss, which is done with the camera looking down briefly from above). By now they had emerged with a distinctive style, consolidating the successful elements at work in CARMEN and THE CHEAT (which also came out in 1915). A nice film, worth watching for silent movie enthusiasts as well as those who may be new to silent film. SCORE: 8/10.

While agreeing entirely with those who have expressed the opinion that "silent" DeMille is very much better than "talkie" DeMille, this particular film provides a very rare chance to also very directly compare EARLY silent DeMille with LATE silent DeMille. DeMille remade two of his silent films before the advent of talkies but in the othr case )The Indian Squaw) the second film is lost (although the third version, the talkie, survives). In this case, however, both silent versions survive, this film of 1919 and Forbidden Fruit, the 1921 remake.

Now neither is, I think, especially wonderful. The weaknesses of the melodramatic plot are the same in both cases. This film also suffers, as do many US films of around 1914-1915 from an overuse of close-up and lose medium shots (the recrudescence of the "facial"). The Cheat of the same year is, I think, a much better film. But it does have its good points and other reviewers have described these very well and it is, to my mind, a better film than the much gaudier and less believable Forbidden Fruit.

So why did DeMille's films decline in quality while he steadily became more famous and more acclaimed. It is not an absolutely straight line (there are some other good films throughout the silent period) but by and large DeMille films get worse as they go along and the reason I think is very clear to see. Throughout his career two elements characterise DeMille films - a great natural talent and a great and seemingly an equally naturally vulgarity and taste for whimsy, along with an understandable desire to please (very much indeed to develop a kind of "cinema of attractions" that is so falsely supposed to characterise earlier films. And as his career progressed, it was this natural vulgarity that increasingly got the upper hand. It made him in the end a popular film-maker (popular too with the studios) but not a good one and certainly not as good a one as, given the natural talent, he might have been.

In Forbidden Fruit for instance he inserts a "Cinderella fantasy" scene (a gimmick he had started to use in Male and Female and which became a sort of trademark). Yes, it is in a way effective as spectacle but it totally undermines any seriousness the film might otherwise have had. In the same way all the gritty elements of the film (particularly the marital violence) is all softened in the later film.

Golden Chance, The (1915)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Early DeMille melodrama centers on an abused wife (Cleo Ridgely) who takes a job working for a rich couple so that she can make money for her drunk husband (Horace B. Carpenter). The rich couple eventually ask her to join a party where she meets a nice millionaire (Wallace Reid) and the two quickly fall in love, although he doesn't know she's married. This is yet another silent film from DeMille, which has pretty much been forgotten but once again that's a shame because this has quite a few good things to offer. I think the film's biggest weakness is its slow pacing, which hampers the film some, especially in the middle. The movie runs a short 73-minutes so the pacing isn't a huge problem but it doesn't help either. What really stands out were the performances with Ridgely doing a great job as the abused wife who gets her Cinderella chance but doesn't know if she should take it or not. She handles the role with a lot of flare and really makes her character quite memorable. Carpenter is also very good as the snake husband as is Raymond Hatton, a DeMille regular, who plays the sidekick. The real standout here, and the one I was most interested in seeing, was Reid. For those who don't know, Reid was involved in a train wreck in 1919 and being a big money maker, the studio forced a doctor to get him high on morphine so that he could continue to work. Reid eventually lost his mind and ended up dying in a mental hospital a couple years later. This was my first chance seeing him in a leading role, although he did have a brief scene in The Birth of a Nation. I was very impressed with both his acting and physical presence here as he manages to fit the romantic lead very well but he also delivers something a bit deeper. He does a lot of acting with his face, which really makes him stand out and deliver. The film ends in a rather bizarre way but I respect what DeMille did at the very end, although I won't ruin it here. There's also a big fight sequence at the end, which looks very realistic and manges to be quite exciting. While the film isn't a complete success it's still worthy of a viewing.