WHY CHANGE YOU WIFE is the latest Cecil B. DeMille silent film to be released on DVD. It is the last of his marital trilogy and the second to be issued so far (DON”T CHANGE YOUR HUSBAND (1919) and OLD WIVES FOR NEW (1918) are the others). WIFE with Gloria Swanson and Thomas Meighan was filmed in 1920 and follows up on HUSBAND by showing the consequences of rashly discarding your mate (a rather shocking idea back then). As in HUSBAND it takes a divorce for the partners to realize that they were better off together and the rest of the film is spent trying to get back to square one. The fun comes in the transformation of Gloria Swanson from a frumpy intellectual housewife who loses her husband to another woman (Bebe Daniels) into…Gloria Swanson. Her transition occurs so suddenly that you wonder why she didn’t do it while she was still married but then you’d have no film. Along the way there are several witty observations on the battle of the sexes indicating that little has changed since 1920. These are punctuated by original title cards that are as priceless for their artwork as for what they have to say. Sales of “Forbidden Fruit”, the perfume featured in the film, went through the roof after WIFE’s release.
The second half of this double-bill features one of the very few surviving films of Cecil’s older brother William de Mille (he kept the original family spelling) who started his career as a successful Broadway playwright. One of his plays THE WARRENS OF VIRGINIA from 1907 featured Cecil as an actor and a 15 year old performer named Mary Pickford. MISS LULU BETT was based on the stage version of a then famous book which examined the lonely life of a maiden aunt and her attempts to break free from the stifling enviornment of her sister’s family. This is a silent example of what was then called a “woman’s picture” which we know today as a “chick flick”. It concentrates on plot and slow development of character rather than fast pacing and lots of action. In style it is very similar to the films of Lois Weber especially THE BLOT (also reviewed by me) which came out the same year, 1921, just one year after women received the right to vote. The ensemble performances by the family are all solid with Lois Wilson a standout as the title character. Wilson was a big star for Paramount in the early 1920’s later appearing in 1923’s THE COVERED WAGON. Although LULU is dated by today’s standards, it’s fascinating to see just how dated and just how far single women have come since 1921. While I enjoyed WIFE, I have to give the nod here to brother William as I got more out of his film than I expected. Hopefully more of them will become available for us to see.
The Capsule Critic 