Another interesting film yet scarred print from Lois Weber included on the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers set, "Scandal" is missing the fourth of its original five reels, some of the fifth reel is gone at the end, and there's frequent severe decomposition evident in what does remain, which is all from a 1918 re-issue print, re-titled "Scandal Mongers" and so may've been already cut down further from the original 1915 version. At least the presentation was able to fill in some of the blanks with plot synopses, and I'm happy to see a Weber feature in any condition. Even in the several fragmentary prints in the Pioneers set, there's some inspired filmmaking or intriguing subject matter that remains in all of them--even the four minutes left of "Lost by a Hair" (1914) demonstrates some good cinematography and crosscutting.
"Scandal" is about gossip ruining the lives of two characters, especially a stenographer (played by Weber) who is alleged to have had two affairs she didn't actually have. And, there's a symbolic scandal monster depicted with multiple-exposure photography here and there during the picture, which doesn't work as well as the nude woman in Weber's "Hypocrites" (1915). Indeed, the hairy costume looks silly. Moreover, it's ironic that Weber's Daisy character here is supposedly innocent of an affair with her boss, Mr. Wright, but he's played by Weber's real-life husband Phillips Smalley. Plus, Daisy being suspected for one affair may be easy to dismiss as gossip mongering, but two affairs--one wonders if Weber's point wasn't that Daisy was innocent, but that one should let her alone regardless. Not to spread rumors (well, OK, I am, but they're dead now, so...), but the Smalleys are said to have both been unfaithful themselves in their marriage, which eventually ended in divorce.
The other interesting reflection of real life here is a more artistic one, but which also involves the couples' public image, that Weber casts herself as a stenographer, with her husband and co-director providing the dictation. So although Weber is the writer both of and in the film and collaborating with her husband, their on-screen characters are powerless to control the narrative. She merely reacts to the words of others, including the crosscutting gossip and scandal-monster effects, tabloid journalism in the newspapers, and a letter motif. Otherwise, the narrative is quite melodramatic, if well photographed and edited. Yet, as Shelley Stamp has demonstrated in her essay "Presenting the Smalleys, 'Collaborators in Authorship and Direction,'" as well as in her book "Lois Weber in Early Hollywood," the pair and their studios were very much in charge of their image as a wife-and-husband professional partnership, which helped position Weber as a married, matronly and middle-class figure for cinematic uplift and lecturing on social issues--regardless of whether that image they presented was true or mere gossip.
