Lionizing Lois Weber

Today we finally shine a spotlight on female cinema pioneer Lois Weber (1879-1939).

We do this in the interest of completeness, having long since done squibs on women like Alice Guy, Frances Marion, and Anita Loos, and an entire section on Mabel Normand. It hasn’t been lack of interest, it has much more to do with lack of availability. It is hard to evaluate Weber’s work. She may have been involved with as many as 400 films either as actor, writer, director or producer, of which perhaps 5% are available.

Of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, Weber began her productive life as a street corner evangelist, concert pianist, and operatic singer. Circa 1904 she pivoted to the theatre, performing with stock and musical comedy companies. There she met and married actor, company manager and former lawyer Phillips Smalley (1865-1939), son of New York Tribune correspondent George Washburn Smalley, and grandson by adoption of the famed abolitionist Wendell Phillips. In 1908, the pair began working for Gaumont, where Weber wrote, acted, directed, edited, and even created sets and costumes. Most interesting is the fact that she worked on phonoscenes, an early experimental sound film process. Weber and Smalley generally worked as a team, though it was widely acknowledged that Weber was the leading partner.

In 1911, the pair began to make silent films at Rex Studios, soon to be absorbed into Universal, and thus begins the trunk of the story in earnest. Weber is notable for bringing her early evangelistic aims to the screen, in films characterized by moralistic, sociological overlays, although she made all kinds of films. Notable motion pictures she had a hand in include the first screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1913); The Jew’s Christmas (1913), the first American film with a rabbi character; Suspense (1913), notable for its early use of split screen; The Merchant of Venice (1914), the first feature length American film directed by a woman; Hypocrites (1915), which featured the first non-porn female nudity; Hop, The Devil’s Brew (1916); Where Are My Children? (1916), which talked about birth control and abortion; the first screen version of Tarzan of the Apes (1918), which she wrote, but did not direct, and The Blot (1921), a flop at the time, but later discovered and restored by Kevin Brownlow, and now considered one of her great achievements.

In 1922, Weber divorced the drunken and abusive Smalley and the two, while remaining friends, now worked separately. Weber increasingly found herself out of step with the times as the 20s went on. Her Victorian orientation began to be regarded as old-fashioned by audiences, and her resistance to the industry’s assembly line methods put her at odds with studios. After A Chapter in Her Life (1923) she suffered a breakdown of sorts and retired for a couple of years. She returned to make two films with Billie Dove, The Marriage Clause (1926) and The Sensation Seekers (1927) and The Angel of Broadway (1927) with Leatrice Joy. She also worked both as a writer and director of some scenes of the 1927 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, taking over while credited director Harry Pollard was sidelined for health reasons. A year previously she had also worked on another version of the same story, which became Topsy and Eva starring the Duncan Sisters, directed by Del Lord and D.W. Griffith.

By now sound had come in of course and Weber (much like Griffith) was very much out of fashion and out of work. In 1926 she had married aviation pioneer Harry Gantz, but that had unraveled by the early 30s. Out of the business completely, she was reduced to working as a property manager for a time. In 1932, one of her old films Shoes (1916) was taken out of mothballs and released with humorous narration as The Unshod Maiden (this was the age when melodrama parody was surefire comedy material). On the positive side, her work was before the public again.

In 1934, Weber got her last directing assignment, an independent feature called White Heat, shot on location in Hawaii, and starring Virginia Cherrill. This was the second time Weber had worked with a Chaplin gal. The first had been Mildred Harris, who had appeared in several Weber films in the late teens. White Heat was Weber’s only talking film. Sadly, like most of her work, it is now considered lost.

For more on silent film please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.