The Whispering Chorus

This very early film by Cecil B. DeMille presents quite a moral problem. A man, working a thankless job and having trouble providing for his wife and mother, decides to embezzle some money. Knowing he is going to be discovered, he takes off and hides in a makeshift shelter. As he goes fishing he discovers a dead man who is up against the shoreline. Basically, he uses the dead man as part of a plot to take pressure off himself. This is well crafted with the final act done as only it could be. The acting is pretty good for early silent era. The technique of using ghostly characters is hit an miss. It's like the old cartoons where an angel and a devil occupy two opposing shoulders. Not a bad silent film.

This release marks the end of the recent silent Cecil B. DeMille double features for the time being and in many ways is the best of the lot thanks to the study in contrasts it provide. It features two films made back to back by DeMille in 1918. One is a moody psychological drama with expressionistic overtones while the other marks the beginning of a series of films which would explore the changes in society brought about by World War I.

OLD WIVES FOR NEW takes a look at postwar mores and suggests that the status quo is no longer so. As the title implies this is a film about divorce and divorce as a solution to marital problems, a then unheard of idea which clearly sets the stage for what took place during the 1920's regarding public morality. Basically a domestic drama with moments of comedy, WIVES charts the course of six characters whose interactions propel the story along while making shrewd observations that are still with us today. The scene where the lead character remembers his wife as she once was is both poignant and honest in its emotions. The cast is uniformly fine with Theodore Roberts a standout as the philandering business partner who comes to a bad end.

Just before WIVES DeMille released his most startling and revolutionary film THE WHISPERING CHORUS which shows him following D. W. Griffith's lead in trying to expand the boundaries of contemporary cinema. The story of a poor bookkeeper who embezzles funds to provide for his wife only to fake his death to avoid detection sets the stage for the cruel twist of fate that resolves the film. Along the way DeMille uses a number of stylistic tricks to enhance the downbeat elements most notably the use of multiple exposures to signify "the whispering chorus", those voices we all have inside our heads that tell us what and what not to do. Raymond Hatton is marvelous as the lowly clerk who undergoes a number of transformations before facing up to the aforementioned cruel twist of fate that brings the movie to a stunning conclusion. It's a pity that he was primarily used in supporting roles throughout his career.

CHORUS is my favorite among the early DeMille titles currently available. Although this transfer looks really good for the most part, the color tints are oversaturated in some places but that can be corrected by adjusting the color intensity on your set downward. WIVES looks better overall as it has only a few wear and tear problems at the very beginning. As a silent film enthusiast if you were to get only one of the DeMille twin bills then this is the one. It shows him at the top of his game as a silent film director and shows the direction that he was headed in, becoming the unofficial harbinger of public taste, something which rarely failed him over the rest of his remarkable career...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

The Whispering Chorus is one of a number of standout films in Cecil B. DeMille's 1910s output, and for some marks the end of an era in his work. It is also perhaps the darkest and most noir-ish story he ever dealt with.

Dark stories call for bleak imagery, and visuals are particularly stark here – plenty of barren sets or large areas of darkness. Furthermore with the psychological conflict going on DeMille makes heavy use of superimpositions. DeMille had always used these a lot to literalise products of his characters' imaginations, but here he goes a bit overboard and occasionally they are unnecessary. The eponymous whispering chorus (which is pretty much superfluous to the story anyway) is shown as a cloud of floating heads – not really necessary when the actors alone competently convey the anguish that their characters feel.

Although he is not really known for it, DeMille was probably the best director of actors during this period (as opposed to his sound films which tend to be wall-to-wall ham). It is not only that he seems to have encouraged a satisfactory blend of realism and dramatism, it was also his use of long, unbroken takes and intelligent framing of actors. In The Whispering Chorus his handling of more emotional scenes is particularly sensitive, cutting to close-ups at key moments to highlight an actor's face. DeMille also tends to keep the sets Spartan and uncluttered for a poignant scene, allowing the audience to concentrate solely on the performers.

Let's take a closer look at the lead actor. The first thing that strikes you about Raymond Hatton is what a thin face he has, and how he seems to have a permanent disappointed expression. But look beyond that, and you can see he is actually a pretty good actor – certainly better than his co-star Kathlyn Williams. Hatton is one of a number of silent stars who drifted out of the spotlight only to turn up absolutely everywhere as a character actor in the sound era – he is quite memorable as the "murderous impulses" barber in Fritz Lang's Fury. He made dozens of appearances for DeMille, but The Whispering Chorus is his greatest moment, both in terms of the demands placed on him as an actor and the performance he turns in.

Some have labelled this as the last film in which DeMille kept his artistic integrity before giving way to commercialism. This is not really true, as pleasing the audience had always been top of his agenda, and his subsequent films do not differ a whole lot in style, although he would use superimpositions a lot less from here on, which is a good thing. It is true however that his next picture, Old Wives for New, marks the beginning of a series of rather lightweight marital comedies, after which his work would be full of the piety and sensationalism with which he is now associated.

Whatever the case, The Whispering Chorus stands as one of DeMille's greatest accomplishments. It does overuse those superimposed images, but this is really the only complaint. Underneath that is a strong and very grim drama. Noir-ish and dark, yes, but it has a poignant, bittersweet edge, hitting a lot of the same notes as George Stevens' A Place in The Sun.

This 82 minute silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille was somewhat ahead of its time, being a serious attempt to film a drama of conscience in all its harrowing complexities. The 'whispering chorus' of the title consists of the rival impulses of the anti-hero, John Tremble, who is played by Raymond Hatton. A filmic device was used which may seem corny to us today, but at the time was doubtless very effective and perhaps innovative, namely the appearance on screen of diaphanous heads of good and bad people whispering to Tremble in his ear things like 'go ahead and do it' or 'an honourable person would not do such a thing'. Tremble is a man who is a bit too narcissistic for his own good, which is all too familiar to us today with the rise of smart phones from which people cannot extract their noses. Preoccupation with 'self' to the exclusion of all else has possibly become today's main social psychological problem. But in 1918 this ailment was still in its traditional form, known as selfishness. Tremble gives way to the bad voices of his whispering choruses and because he feels so sorry for himself and his lack of a new overcoat, steals some money from his employer. He has previously gambled away his last few dollars and staged a petulant scene at home in front of the miniature Christmas tree and his long-suffering wife and mother, tossing aside their small presents as being insignificant. Such spoilt-brat behaviour is bound to lead to doom, and as doom is always eagerly waiting for people to fall into it (as it has an insatiable maw) the anti-hero duly sinks into hopeless moral compromise. He disdains what he has got, namely a devoted wife and happy home, and wants what he cannot readily have except by theft. But then his theft is discovered and, to avoid going to jail, he fakes his own death and absconds to Cincinnati. (All of the action takes place in cities along the river, though the only locations we see are waterside ones.) He lives the life of a labourer and vagabond, becomes maimed and disfigured, and has a very rough time. Meanwhile his wife (played by Kathlyn Williams) has obtained a well paid job and after some years remarries a man who becomes the Governor of his state (played by Elliot Dexter). Tremble, having 'killed himself', then ironically ends up being caught many years later and charged with his own murder, as he is assumed to be the other man (whose body he had fished out of the river dead, and had not killed). All the complications one can imagine result from this state of affairs. The film is thus a very early 'film noir'. It is certainly not cheerful viewing. This film was preserved and restored by my old friend Dave Shepard, who died earlier this year. I would like to pay tribute to him, as a genuine hero of the history of the cinema. We knew each other when we were young. By a strange coincidence, when I was seventeen I independently met and befriended the stage actor John Griggs, one of the most passionate early collectors and preservers of old movies. It was only afterwards that I met Dave. It turned out that John Griggs had been Dave's mentor from the time he was a boy, as they lived near each other in New Jersey. I may be the only person left alive now who knew John Griggs, who was himself such a delightful and amusing man and enthusiast for early cinema. He had amassed over the decades a gigantic collection of 35mm prints of silent films, and this collection passed to Dave, giving him a huge head start in his career as a film preservationist. I well remember a short documentary film which Dave directed in his early twenties about children's games. He shot it mostly in a playground on 16mm in black and white and made a serious effort to understand children's mentality. It was very charming. He was always basically a sentimentalist. That film is not listed at IMDb, and I have forgotten its title. I am certain it was never distributed, and Dave was n t satisfied with it; indeed, I liked it better than he did. This DeMille film is not included in the partial list of restorations by Dave in his Wikipedia entry, but then he restored so many, there is probably no complete list of them in existence. Who knows, maybe the original print came from John Griggs. Dave and I used to discuss Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, and D. W. Griffith endlessly, and also foreign films. It was René Clément's FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952), which we both so greatly admired, which inspired Dave to want to make his own little documentary about children's games. All true cinema lovers owe a debt to Dave Shepard which they can only repay by watching as many as possible of the films which Dave loved so much and to which he dedicated his life to save and preserve for others to enjoy. Here's to you, Dave.

Raymond Hatton who had a long and distinguished career since the very beginning of film is usually remembered for playing cantankerous old cusses as sidekicks in western films. But back in 1918 he was the protagonist/lead in Cecil B. DeMille's The Whispering Chorus, the story of a man tried and convicted for his own murder.

The character Hatton plays seems to be cursed. He embezzles from his boss and fearing discovery flees from his wife and mother. He gets what he considers a stroke of luck finding the body of a derelict. He mutilates the body and takes the dead man's identity. That would seem to guarantee success.

But here the cops get it backwards and declare Hatton under his real identity dead and the dead man wanted for the murder of Hatton. Quite a rude awakening when Hatton returns after 12 years.

Furthermore his wife marries a man who is now the governor of the state and he's played by DeMille silent regular Elliot Dexter. Quite the jackpot Hatton finds himself in.

The title The Whispering Chorus comes from the ghostly heads that appear to Hatton emphasizes every aspect of his nature. He has a genius for choosing the wrong path every time, listening to bad advice from his chorus of ghostly heads.

The special effects were state of the art for 1918, but DeMille also had a good story to work with and Hatton while such a loser does manage to obtain audience sympathy. In some ways this anticipates what Eugene O'Neill did on stage in Strange Interlude.