The Conquest of Canaan

I have never watched many lynching events portrayed taking place in the 20th century in films. Just staged pre 20th century films. I watched a online video about lost films that were rediscovered and they talked about this and the video showed color world war 2 movies. I said to myself how can that be? So I was happy to find someone posted it online and watched. This is not a straight review on my part, I did not watch it all the way through. I was very bored watching, so I skipped around. The lynching part really attracted my attention and I would check it out just for that. Not to give away spoilers but in my opinion its too exaggerated. I'm happy they discovered it though, cool lost stuff re-found.

Thomas Meighan is a layabout in the town of Canaan in Indiana, despised by the people who run the town, and they are an unsavory, snobby lot. His only friend in town is Doris Kenyon. When her poor artist father inherits money, they go to Paris, and Meighan leaves town to study law. When he returns, he becomes a defense attorney, which arouses the ire of the newspaper's editor, who advocates lynching.

Eventually Miss Kenyon returns, and there's a murder, and it's up to Meighan to defend the accused man. It's rather an abbreviated and odd sort of trial. I suspect it's gone into in greater and better detail in the Booth Tarkington novel it's based on. As it currently exists, it's very odd, and I suspect it's due to cropping in the copy that was repatriated from Gosfilmfond in 2010. Other films have been abbreviated to make propaganda points, like the Mabel Normand comedy MOLLY O', which had all its jokes and gags removed. Here, there's a sequence in which Meighan gets drunk, and there's no point to it.

Although only five minutes seem to be missing from this movie, I suspect the loss is greater, and it's difficult to form any clear, positive attitude to it. Neither, considering the apparent butchering, will I suggest it's a bad movie. In its current form, so far as I can tell, it doesn't really exist.

I caught this recently-rediscovered silent film, "The Conquest of Canaan," via the live stream from the Cinecon Classic Film Festival. A digital copy of the print found in the Russian Gosfilmofond archive was gifted to the Library of Congress in 2010. I'm unsure of the details of the print, but the Cinecon introduction suggested it's missing footage from the original 1921 Paramount release, as well as the intertitles having to have been translated back into English. The quality, although certainly watchable, suggests it may be a 16mm or so reduction print. Maybe it was originally struck for the non-theatrical market, which is how many silents solely exist now, such as originally for the Kodascope, I don't know. That it's based on a book is said to not be of much help on the matter, either, as the adaptation is reportedly (I haven't read it) a loose one.

As it is, "The Conquest of Canaan" doesn't seem as biblical as its title would suggest. Nothing here about the Israelite holy war against the seafaring Phoenicians and their fertility god that somehow has come to be conflated with the devil in some Abrahamic religions. No, this picture is set in Canaan, Indiana, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the actual, unincorporated area by that name today. This prohibition-era town, after all, has its own speakeasy, hotel, courthouse, and rigid social structures. It's townsfolk are also ready to form a lynch mob at the drop of a hat.

There's an otherwise narratively-irrelevant and racially-horrific article in their local "Daily Tocsin" newspaper about a black man being lynched for stealing a chicken. Later, much of the town chases after a thieving dog, to only, soon thereafter, set their sights on lynching a man arrested for shooting another man in self defense. The courts be damned, this mob is even led by the town's former judge, who speaks of taking the law into their own hands. And, the most gossiped and hated man in town is their local defense lawyer, the protagonist of the melodrama as played by star Thomas Meighan.

I think "The Conquest of Canaan" may be most interesting then if interpreted in a similar fashion as suggested by Shelley Stamp in her writings on Lois Weber in regards to another prohibition-era drama, "Sensation Seekers" (1927). That is, with even nominally white characters narratively coded as black. Indeed, there are few actual African-American characters or actors in this picture, all of who appear early on and as extras as either drivers, servants or gamblers. Meighan's would-be-lawyer is first introduced as a gambler and general ne'er-do-well playing dice with fellow gamblers who include African Americans and who ends up being harassed by the corrupt judge. This same judge literally canes him, as in with his cane, when he discovers him on his property during his daughter's birthday party. Later, as a practicing attorney, Meighan's office features a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. This is our same hero defense lawyer who will protect, by paraphrasing Jesus as to the casting of stones, a man, who in the film is also white, from being lynched, a practice that otherwise recalls the history--or the present when this film was made--of white mobs lynching African Americans. Unfortunately, the picture doesn't seem to do much with this potential reading, including with the entire lynch mob and courtroom drama revolving around ownership of the speakeasy and a love triangle subplot.

I also wonder whether co-star Doris Kenyon had more screen time originally, as her character is rather superfluous as is--but another prize for the story's male hero. The deaths of her uncle and father are only mentioned in the title cards, as is her sudden newfound wealth and consequent rise in the ranks of Canaan's social hierarchy. Her pops was a painter, too, but nothing artistic is done with this in the remining print. Perhaps, more could've been done with characters-as-writers for the newspaper, too, in controlling the narrative of the film. I do like the joke that one of the town's gossips, though, is deaf. Indeed, the picture's focus on the ills of gossip and class prejudices is somewhat in the vein of a Lois Weber melodrama, but Weber often did integrate art into these narratives, but that's lacking here. A nice mirror shot of Meighan aside, including revealing him otherwise out of frame through the reflection, it's not a visually impressive picture, either, and is a bit choppy in its present condition.

Still, it's nice to see an obscure silent film and add to the number of pictures I've seen featuring stars Kenyon and Meighan, even though they're better elsewhere--see Kenyon in the cinematically-reflexive "A Girl's Folly" (1917), for instance, and Meighan would be in films of more interest regarding both crime, such as "The Racket" (1928), and hateful mobs, as in the outrageous "The Mating Call" (1928), as well as appearing in some Cecil B. DeMille films.