Miss Lulu Bett

Lois Wilson stars in the title role of Miss Lulu Bett a rather mousy and shy young woman who lives with the Deacon family who basically treat her like a doormat. She just takes it and takes it, think Peggy Cass as Gooch in Auntie Mame or Shelley Winters as Alice Trippe in A Place In The Sun. She has no salary for her domestic work, she's simply given room and board with the Deacon Family run by the tyrannical Theodore Roberts as the father.

When Roberts black sheep brother Clarence Burton comes for a visit he's taken with her and she sees a chance for happiness and takes it. But he may or may not be slightly married and Wilson finds that out after she's run away.

Miss Lulu Bett is directed by William C. DeMille the older brother of Cecil who actually was at one time considered to be a leading Broadway playwright in the Victorian/Edwardian theater era. His kind of morality dramas were going out of style so he like his brother moved to Hollywood and the new motion picture industry. Unlike his brother Bill DeMille was given to more homespun and intimate style films with no gaudy spectacle or emphasis on sex dramas in flashback sequences in decadent times.

Theodore Roberts who was a member in good standing in Cecil B. DeMille's stock company steals the film as the arrogant pompous head of the Deacon family. At all costs preserve appearances for the family name. A far cry from his most famous part as Moses in the silent version of The Ten Commandments.

Miss Lulu Bett is an interesting study of family life on the cusp of Roaring Twenties America.