Got my Kino-Lorber edition of two late Lois Weber silents the other day, "A Chapter in Her Life" (1923), which I saw years ago but on VHS, and "Sensation Seekers," which has circulated on bargain-bin home video and the internet in condensed and probably pictorially-inferior form for a while, but for which this was my first viewing. It's the last and, to put it oddly, most recent film of hers that I've seen and was made during the Jazz Age and near the end of the silent era. It's also the last film that Weber-expert Shelley Stamp lists among the filmmaker's extant titles, although the filmography remains incomplete regarding the whereabouts or lost status of some works. Reading Stamp's book and essays on Weber, I'd love to compare this to two other related films she made around the same time, "The Marriage Clause" (1926), which also exists and stars Billie Dove, in addition to Francis X. Bushman and Warner Oland, but appears to be locked away at the Library of Congress for the time being, and "The Angel of Broadway" (1927), which starred Leatrice Joy and is listed as lost. Based on Stamp's writing, the other two films seem to be more reflexively about show business in their social commentary on flapper culture.
"Sensation Seekers," nonetheless, is an interesting reflection of how Weber's moralistic and sentimental filmmaking style carried over from the 1910s in its adaptation to the Roaring Twenties. Technically, just fine (although some of the longer shots here appear a bit out of focus, but I'm not sure if that's not just a result of the surviving 16mm footage), but I can see how contemporary New York reviewers would've chafed against Weber's preaching on the dangers for the soul of the party girl--what with the violation on the prohibition of the devil's drink, the dancing and the nice clothes when what women should be doing, or so it seems Weber argued, is sipping on lemonade in between bible study and Sunday church. Oh, Weber has it out for the hypocritical church-goers, too, mind you, as "Sensation Seekers" recalls her earlier photoplay, "Scandal" (1915), in its condemnation of gossip, including tabloid newspaper journalism. After Dove's flapper is arrested in a prohibition raid, the other guy in the film's love triangle even mockingly wears the newspaper reporting the event to a party--a costume he describes as "Scandal" personified, which is better than the silly and symbolic scandal monster from the 1915 film.
The central romance, however, regards the flapper's regeneration through her love for the preacher. Mostly, this just leads to a bunch of vacant staring at nothing, and the minister saying such ridiculous things as, "it is disconcerting to watch the young woman of today grow into -- manhood," and "We shall save her in spite of herself." Thing's would've been more fun had they followed Dove's words regarding, "You Puritans are just a bunch of 'Thou-shalt-nots' -- I want freedom!" The plot convenience of a sinking yacht ultimately solves the melodramatic dilemmas, but it's a well-done climax--a no drowning atheists version of a foxhole aside, so I'm not complaining.
Stamp brings up another intriguing point in her commentary on the Kino-Lorber home video, which compliments the preacher's gendered comments regarding the manliness of partying and the film's relative allowance for the father (as played by Weber's ex Phillips Smalley) of Dove's character to also leave the house--but without the consequences. Or, as Stamp wrote, "an impulse to redomesticate its heroine in the end, to remove her from the work force and place her out of the public eye, and to contain female sexuality in a marital and familial sphere." In addition to that, there's the suggestion that the errant ways of Dove's flapper, provocatively named "Egypt," which we're told means "darkness," are coded racially as non-white, as "other." Hence, I suppose, the African-American band (as well as a neat silhouette dance number behind a screen) and servants that appear to run the "Black and Tan" jazz club for the white patrons. It's interesting to note, too, that around the same time, Weber ultimately turned down what would've been probably a much less complicated and even more offensive portrayal of African Americans in the United Artists production of "Topsy and Eva" (1927)--basically a minstrel show made out of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the book being what attracted Weber to that ill-begotten project in the first place.
I believe I've seen every Weber picture available on home video or the web now, and while she was surely a moralistic party pooper and a product of the class and racial views of the Progressive politics of her era (see her pro-eugenics message in "Where Are My Children?" (1916) for more on that), she was a clever and sophisticated filmmaker, too, and turning down "Topsy and Eva" is a point of integrity in her favor. As Stamp and others have made clear, too, it wasn't so much that Weber's preaching falling out of favor in the Jazz Age was the reason for her decline in work as the talkies approached as it was the studio standardization and Hays Code of the "re-masculinization" of Hollywood--pushing out female directors and individualistic filmmakers like Weber--during the period. One of the most intelligent screenwriters, directors and producers of the 1910s was reduced by the 1920s to supposedly a handler of emerging star actresses--like Dove here, or elsewhere the likes of Mildred Harris, Leatrice Joy, Anita Stewart, and Claire Windsor--and never mind the multi-layered roles she offered them. Hopefully, more of Weber's films, including the later ones, will continue to be made available in the future. At least a couple of Anita Stewart productions exist, along with the aforementioned "The Marriage Clause," and I'm not sure about the fate of Weber's first-and-only talkie, "White Heat" (1934).
