Man-Woman-Marriage (1921) Online

In reviewing his earlier film The Right to Happiness (1919), I suggested that Holubar was a relatively rare case at this time of a US film-maker attempting to make what might be described as fully adult films but that the endeavour was made extremely difficult by the fact that US cinema, in contrast to its European counterpart, was failing to develop a visual style capable of expressing ideas., which remained the province of the "verbal" and therefore in the mature silent cinema, not a reduction of the use of intertitles as in European films but an extremely tiresome increase in their use.

Here again the intention to make a film that goes beyond the sentimental melodrama is clear (it is even typically stated in a verbal prologue to the film) but the result falls, if anything, even more sadly short of its ambition than in the earlier film. The problem remains the lack of a co-ordination between mise en scene and camera movement to create a genuine dynamic and the usual over-reliance on the cross-cut. Despite (or more probably because of) the fact that the film had the services of one of Hollywood's most prominent salaried editors - Valerie Lawrence - there are some appalling examples of crass use of cross-editing - a bunch of roses, a sunset...... Editors are sometimes considerd the unsung heroes and heroines of US cinema but in practice they are often responsible, in combination with the growing influence on US cinematographers of "glamour" photography", amongst the principal villains and villainesses responsible for its general mediocrity.

Between 1919 and 1921 Holubar ahd also clearly fallen under the spell of Cecil B DeMille and quite evidently the injection of DeMillism does not really advance the project of trying to make a serious adult film (not that DeMille was incapable of making such films and there are examples; he just, alas, chose increasingly not to). So the female character reviews her situation from the perspective of a Stone Age woman, an Amazon, a Roman slave and so on in a mode of complete caricature. All quite fun - the Amazon scenes are particularly splendid - but really rather silly. Add to which a rather unfortunate religious element - christploitation - also, seemingly influenced by the examples of Griffith and DeMille.

The dilemma is clear. To create a film that works visually, within the US grammar, it was necessary to abandon seriousness. So here, compared with the earlier, we are spared the continual tedious intertitles but...the seriousness has gone.... There is a serious theme and, whenever it emerges, so too do the tiresome intertitles.

This false dichotomy - serious = dull v entertaining = infantile - was a function of self-imposed stylstic restraints but had already firmly established itself in the US by this time to such an extent that the rare film that tried to break free of that and make a film that was both serious and entertaining (eg Vidor's The Crowd of the films of Paul Fejos) were regarded, by producers at least, with deep suspicion. Vidor, in the end a deferential "studio" man whose little rebellions were always on the sly, spent the rest of his life, mildly apologetic for what was one of his very best films.

Sound would bring a change certainly - it was possible to be verbally adult in the US where it was not possible to be visually adult - but only in practice a rather limited one. To this day it remains a general premise of the Hollywood system that a film to be successful must either be grossly sentimental or patently infantile in its content. Preferably both.