I watched a genuine rarity last night which, I must admit, I was drawn to originally by the title alone, "Silk Husbands and Calico Wives". The film was made and released in 1920, so let's start there. 1920 was the year women's suffrage was finally passed in the United States. With women getting the vote, many considered themselves finally free and equal to men. However, it's also the year after Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise and the year itself of Flappers and Philosophers, the book of short stories that heralded The Jazz Age - for some women, and some men, too, the age that said - finally - the end of bonded relationships and, therefore, "bondage" in that respect, too. That's what this film is about. It's very "daring" in that respect, and Alfred E. Green, a director many know from several sound films later, directed it.
The star of the film, first and foremost, is House Peters, not a household (sorry for the pun) name today, but at one time a rather well known actor. Later in the decade he essayed Raffles, making the film only eight years after John Barrymore had done it, and doing it equally well, if not better. Peters' version still survives and can be found on a current Grapevine release of both versions. Also in "Silk Husbands and Calico Wives" are Mary Alden and Eva Novak. Mary Alden was another who had a fine reputation as an actress when this film was released. She began with D. W. Griffith (she was the mulatto Stoneman's housekeeper in "Birth of a Nation") and worked with both Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in their films, too, among other great silent actors and actresses, besides headlining her own starring films. She plays the wife of House Peters in this film, and it's interesting to note that she marries Peters early on in the film, but she's playing a fairly young woman, though in real life she was close to forty! This kind of role playing for an older woman was not standard practice in the silent era when forty-year-olds were sometimes playing great-grandmothers! Eva Novak and her sister Jane were both good looking actresses who worked with the likes of William S. Hart and other notable silent actors and actresses. Eva here in this film plays the "liberated" Georgia Wilson who has eyes on the married House Peters.
Another interesting actor in this film is Edward Kimball, the father of Clara Kimball Young, an actress who was considered in 1920 one of the best in the business, and one of the most popular. He was in several of his daughter's films, too. Here he plays the lawyer with whom House Peters goes into partnership in the middle of the film.
The film is only about an hour long, and I'm only going to say that House Peters and Mary Alden come from the country community of Harmony, a fictional location that represents the old fashioned traditions and expectations of most people in 1920. They move to the "big city" where anything can happen and evidently does, including not being faithful to husbands and wives. I won't give the story away. As short as it is, watch it and find out. Understand a couple of things: (1) The working title of this film when it was being made was "Love, Honor, and Obey", which tells you a lot, and (2) I liked the film because it gave me a short insight into 1920 and what was pot-boiling at the movies! Just remember what the last title says: "Where there's love and honor, there needs to be no obeisance!"
