The story of Lois Weber is one of the saddest in all of American cinema and one of the least known. One of two prominent women producer-directors to emerge the silent era(the other was the French born Alice Guy-Blache’ who has a similar story), Weber was, in her time, considered to be the equal of silent film legend D.W. Griffith.
In 1916 she was the highest paid film director in the world. She earned an astonishing $5,000 a week and had total control over the content of her movies. She tackled such controversial subject matter as religious materialism (HYPOCRITES-1915), drug addiction (HOP, THE DEVIL’S BREW-1916), abortion and birth control (WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?-1916), and capital punishment (THE PEOPLE -VS- JOHN DOE-1917).
Weber believed that movies should educate as well as entertain but knew that you can’t do one without the other. Most of her films are an interesting mix of both although today’s audiences will find her early films heavy-handed and her later films uneventful as they concentrate on story and character instead of action or spectacle.
By 1921 when TOO WISE WIVES and THE BLOT (one of her most highly regarded movies) were released, Weber’s career was already in decline. Within a few years she would lose her studio, her husband, and the opportunity to direct. Lois Weber died in 1939 at the age of 60 and within a few years she was completely forgotten along with most of her films.
Why did this happen? The primary reason was the rise of the Hollywood studio system and the men who ran it. They were almost all Eastern European immigrants who brought an Old World patriarchal attitude with them. Woman could be stars (which made the studios big money) or writers (who could be controlled) but little else.
Another reason can be summed up in the famous quote by producer Samuel Goldwyn… “If you want to send a message, call Western Union”. Jazz Age audiences of the 1920s, dealing with the social transformations in the aftermath of World War I, wanted entertainment, not enlightenment. Depression Era audiences of the 1930s wanted escapism not social realism and it has basically been the same ever since.
Only in the past few years has a proper reevaluation of Lois Weber begun to take place, as four of her feature films (HYPOCRITES, WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?, TOO WISE WIVES, THE BLOT) are now available on home video. Seek them out and discover for yourself why she was once known as “the female D.W. Griffith”. To find out more about Lois Weber, read Anthony Slide’s informative biography, LOIS WEBER: THE DIRECTOR WHO LOST HER WAY IN HISTORY.
The Capsule Critic 