This is an ongoing series, looking at a hundred years of feature films, from 1917 to today. This week, a film from 1918, Old Wives for New.
Not every film holds up after a century. Old Wives for New, Cecil B. DeMille’s tribute to divorcing your wife and marrying a much younger woman, would be fairly accused of being sexist today in 2017, given that it opens with a screen of text admonishing women to keep themselves appealing for their husbands. It also would not have held up a couple decades after it was produced, because the Hays Code demanded sensitivity when dealing with the institution of marriage, which was a way of saying that divorce was not to be depicted as a good thing. Old Wives for New celebrates divorce, the film’s happy ending hinges on divorce being the best thing possible for the lead characters.
We are introduced to oil baron Charles Murdock (Elliot Dexter), who laments that he has all the wealth in the world, but he’s unhappy because he lacks love. His wife, Sophy (Sylvia Ashton) is to blame for this, because she doesn’t clean her sink and also eats large breakfasts in bed. The dirty sink is given probably the most weight of any marital problem they have, as a great deal of time is spent illustrating Charles’ disappointment that there is a stray hair on his side of the bathroom, and her sink is a complete disaster.
We don’t really get much of an understanding of their marriage other than this, because Charles quickly goes off on a hunting trip with his son (J. Parks Jones), shaves off his mustache to look younger and meets the other woman of the story, Juliet Raeburn (Florence Vidor), owner of high end boutique Dangerfields, which surprisingly enough, gets a lot of respect. They meet when they both shoot the same bear while hunting. This is another element that might not stack up for modern audiences, who would likely come down as more sympathetic to the bear than either of the two leads.
Personally, I dislike a review which reads like a plot synopsis, because it doesn’t leave much to the viewer’s imagination. Part of the joy of a film, whether good or bad, is the surprise that comes from seeing the scenes play out. Old Wives for New is something that begs for a synopsis because it has a warped sense of logic that leads it down strange alleyways. For example, a big chunk of the story is dedicated to Charles’ business partner Tom Berkeley (Theodore Roberts) and his mistresses, which leads to the closest thing we have to a poignant scene – when one tells the other “men don’t introduce women like us to their daughters.” There is a party scene which has everyone in tuxedos, but also has a strange clown who gives all of the adults balloons and baby dolls, which they play with like children. The film features a murder, a cover-up of a murder, a tabloid scandal, a cover-up of an affair that looks like a different, even more scandalous affair, and eventually a happy ending, which is a divorce and remarriage for both partners, one of which seems to be marrying a man who is trying to get her money. That might be entirely because actor Gustav von Seyffertitz looks impossibly shady. He could potentially have genuine affection for her, but Seyffertitz’s whole look and demeanor in the role suggests that he does not, and is trying to do something nefarious.
It’s unclear what modern audiences would think of the main character overall, since he’s a wealthy man who trades in his wife for a younger model, covers up a murder because it’ll make his business partner look bad and generally acts like a heel for most of the running time even as the film seems to think he is a sympathetic lead. He seems like either someone people would openly despise, or that they would elect as President of the United States.
In spite of all the incident in the film, it’s a little over an hour, a great deal of that time being spent trying to establish who everyone is, and some of that time is spent rendering metaphors in literal images - a man literally reels in a wife after he hooks her dress while fishing, a woman is actually up a creek without a paddle.
DeMille is best known for his big, biblical epics, as well as films that overstay their welcome - like The Greatest Show on Earth, which was two and a half hours for no good reason - so it’s interesting to see him make a relatively short film that would, if anything, anger the devout. He’s also fairly skilled when dealing with the conventions of the day, the introduction to the cast of characters is significantly more effective than John Ford’s attempt at the same in Straight Shooting. The section effectively establishes the character traits of everyone in the film, and the shot of Marcia Manon as Viola Hastings, winking at the camera, is probably the best in the film, since it establishes how she could break up a marriage with little more than a look. It’s a technique which is incredibly strange to modern audiences, but it’s also the most effective part of this film, and trying to figure out how all of the characters connect is a reason to keep watching.
This does seem like a film which is ill-suited to the silent era, however, since most of the drama is contained in conversations you can’t hear and can only get snippets of in flowery title cards. Some scenes even feel designed for the ping pong dialogue of a good screwball comedy, at least if you watch what the actors are doing, even though there was no chance of it being a sound film.
Old Wives for New is a well made bad movie. Skilled technicians put their best effort forward and created a polished, well acted film out of a script that is not good, even accounting for the differences between today and the society of 1918.
