Poor Lois. Even her name seems old and unhip, hardly the right sound for a woman once hailed as a daring filmmaker. The critics’ darling for a time around World War I, Lois Weber — “Lois the Wizard,” “the Wonder Girl” — met her end without any fanfare. It was 1939 when America’s first woman director — once as famous as Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith — died from a bleeding ulcer at the age of sixty. In a business with a short memory, her death caused barely a ripple, and the smallness of the obituary Variety granted her spoke to this film pioneer’s sad end.
For better or worse, Weber was an artist and moralist in one. Once a missionary, she saw silent films as a “blessing of a voiceless language.” “In moving pictures I have found my life work,” she said in her heyday. “I can preach to my heart’s content.” Her most famous and successful work was Where Are My Children? (1916). A high-moral melodrama about abortion, it earned Weber’s home studio, Universal, an astounding $ 3 million in a day in which a ticket cost less than fifty cents.
It was back in the 1970s that feminists began looking to film for cultural icons from decades past. Their revival of the “lost voices of women,” however, has largely passed Weber by — even while massively celebrating directors of lesser achievement, especially Dorothy Arzner, who has a film award named in her honor. (Arzner, whose best-known film is the 1933 Christopher Strong, was just beginning her film career as Weber’s was winding down.) Where Are My Children? was recently restored by the Library of Congress, with some funding from the New York Women in Film and Television. But as the critic Jennifer Parchesky puts it, “People tend to want to apologize for [the film’s antiabortion stance]. For most contemporary feminists, that’s not a public position you want to have connected to your feminist foremother.”
“She was very much a Christian and her filmmaking was very much didactic and moralistic. That was a bit of a problem for us as feminists,” says E. Ann Kaplan, author of Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Since her death, Weber has been the subject of no major retrospective. Only three of her feature films are on video, and there’s just one book on her, Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History. Its author, Anthony Slide, could interest no major publisher in the manuscript, which was ultimately printed in 1996 by an academic press. A pair of recent cable-TV documentaries on women filmmakers (one produced by Barbra Streisand) discuss her, but largely as a bit of trivia: America’s first native-born woman director.
It’s an astonishing circumstance in which to find the silent filmmaker who achieved more in her lifetime than any woman in Hollywood since. Not only did she own her own production company at one point, but — long before Streisand claimed the distinction — Weber actually was the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in her own film. She shaped most of her films from beginning to end, making her not just their director, but their creator.
Indeed, in the early 1900s, in a day when women commonly contributed to productions at major studios, Weber surpassed the nine other women directors at Universal to become the highest paid of the bunch. “I would trust Miss Weber with any sum of money that she needed to make any picture,” said studio founder, Carl Laemmle. “She knows the motion picture as few people do and can drive herself as hard as anyone I know.” Weber was routinely ranked with D. W. Griffith as the industry’s top filmmakers, and she was the first woman admitted to the forerunner to the Directors Guild of America.
An inveterate social commentator, she used her films to tackle some of the most pressing issues of the day. Where Are My Children? came at a time when Margaret Sanger was making news for illegally disseminating birth control information. Based on a story by writers Lucy Payton and Franklin Hall, Where Are My Children? tells of Richard Walton, a district attorney and “great believer in eugenics” played by Tyrone Power Sr., who sympathizes with a doctor on trial for dispensing birth-control information among the slum’s “wretched poor.” While unwanted children abound there, the same isn’t true of the attorney’s own home. Soon he learns a shocking truth: His wife — and her elite circle of friends — are childless because of their visits to a prominent doctor secretly doing abortions. In a heated encounter, he confronts his wife, calls her a “murderess.” He eventually forgives her, but “throughout the years with empty arms and guilty conscience she must face her husband’s unspoken question, ‘Where are my children?'”
Though Weber’s film contains no “feminist message” any modern feminist could embrace, a few have tried to find one. Kaplan has even argued that Where Are My Children? isn’t anti-abortion at all, but pro-choice. She bases her claim on the fact that the film includes a working-class subplot about a housekeeper’s daughter who dies from a botched abortion. Kaplan thus argues that the film makes the case for “legalized, and safe, abortion.” But it’s not what you’d call a convincing argument. In the film, the district attorney himself prosecutes the girl’s abortionist, making it clear that all abortion — whether among the working class or the elite — is murder.
Lavishly praised by critics of the day, the film was hugely successful for Universal. It was not the only attempt to make a movie on the subject. Shortly before and after its release, male directors (far less known than Weber) filmed such productions as The Question, The Miracle of Life, Faith, and The Valley of Decision. In The Question, for instance, a married woman, Grace, lavishes all her maternal instincts on her dog, while ignoring her husband’s pleas to start a family. When she does become pregnant, she has an abortion, and her distraught husband soon has an affair with his secretary. That woman, in turn, becomes pregnant, but later dies in childbirth. The film ends with Grace reuniting with her husband and adopting the child.
By the dawn of the Jazz Age in the 1920s, public taste had shifted. Moviegoers were increasingly tired of films that dealt with the weighty issues. They wanted a change, and many prominent directors, like Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim, obliged in frothy sex comedies with titles such as Why Change Your Wife? and Foolish Wives. This shift was hardly what Weber had intended when she entered film a few years back. “Pictures,” she once said, “must have some definite foundation in morality. For certainly those are the things that endure.”
Born in 1879 to an upholsterer and his wife, Weber was reared in a religious home near Pittsburgh. Her early training was musical, and at sixteen she became a concert pianist. Soon, she devoted her musical talents to helping the Church Army Workers, a missionary group for which she sang and played the organ at its rescue mission in a redlight district. “It gave life a bitter taste for a while,” she said later. With the death of her father, an uncle advised her to try the stage. “As I was convinced the theatrical profession needed a missionary, he suggested that the best way to reach them was to become one of them, so I went on the stage filled with great desire to convert my fellow man.” She tried comedy, but gravitated toward drama and joined a road company, where she married its actor-manager, Phillips Smalley. For a time, they continued their careers separately, but in 1906 — perhaps at his urging, no one knows — she quit to set up home in New York.
Life as a homemaker was unsatisfying, and in 1908 she decided to work for a movie production company, Gaumont. Smalley joined her in a writing-directing-acting partnership. Their surviving films show that as actors, both Weber and Smalley were more than competent. But as filmmakers, it’s unknown to what extent he contributed to their joint pictures, among which was The Jew’s Christmas (1913), about how a family’s love overcomes anti-Semitism.
By 1914 Weber was the dominant player in the partnership. In the allegorical drama Hypocrites, she showed her knack for being both moralistic and risque. Described by one critic as “a thinly veiled sermon,” it told of a monk, Gabriel, who works at sculpting the perfect image of Truth, in the form of a naked woman. When he shows the finished piece to the masses, they are shocked. Unwilling to gaze at Truth, they kill Gabriel. Many scenes in the hour-long film (which was recently restored when a copy was found in Australia) show a woman, “Truth,” in full frontal nudity.
The press, covering its New York debut, was enthusiastic; the New York Times, for its part, called it “daring and artistic.” Hypocrites caused its own stir — for different reasons. As Slide notes, the mayor of Boston sat through less than two reels before branding the film “indecent and sacrilegious.” And in Ohio, the film was banned by the state censorship board. Today, viewers could find Weber’s use of nudity blatantly obvious, even hokey, but that would be unfairly dismissive. It’s a masterful film, with some compelling allegorical scenes. (In one, the crowd takes the easy road, rather than climb a steep hill with Gabriel.) The monk even seems to embody Weber’s own view of art’s purpose; on the surface he’s like a Greek sculptor who seeks — and glorifies — beauty. But like Weber herself, Gabriel never does so for its own sake.
“To the greatest woman producer in the world — Lois Weber,” was Anna Pavlova’s toast to her in 1916, after the famed Russian ballerina made her first of only two screen appearances in Weber’s The Dumb Girl of Portici. Amid such applause there soon came Weber’s Where Are My Children?, the success of which she followed with a film called Shoes. The piece told of a working girl too poor to buy new footwear. In one breathtaking shot, the camera pans on her lone figure walking through the rain, then zooms in on her feet. Despairing, the girl later submits herself to a wealthy man, only to return to her mother’s home the next day, defeated. There’s no exchange of words. The camera simply focuses on her tearsmeared face, her vapid stare, then moves to her feet — with their shiny new twelve-button shoes. Its young star, Mary MacLaren, later recalled that Weber was a moralist off the set, too. “She took me outside one day and said, ‘Mary, listen. Don’t ever dare let a man kiss you.’ She had very strict ideas about morality and everything, and she wanted to preserve me as I was.”
With a string of films devoted to controversial topics behind her, Weber entered the 1920s a critical surveyor of the loosening moral standards she saw around her. Rather than bend to the whims of shifting public tastes, she had left Universal and set up her own company, Lois Weber Productions. More fully at the helm than ever before, she soon devoted her talents to writing and directing a series of dramas about the challenges of modern marriage. Perhaps this was her way of compromising: If moviegoers were interested in sex comedies, she’d give them scenes of marriage.
Not only was Weber, as one modern critic has said, “obsessed with the details of middle-class life, with proper form and correct behavior,” but her views on what makes a good marriage would largely be regarded today as primitive. Among one of her later dramas was What Do Men Want?, which takes its title from George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House and tells of a married man whose “vague unrest” leads him to another woman. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t survive in its entirety. But others from the period do: Too Wise Wives, a drama about a wife overly concerned with pleasing her husband, and The Blot, a story about class divisions and the low pay of clergy and professors. (Slide, most notably, regards The Blot as Weber’s masterpiece.)
But the critics were less than kind in the 1920s than they had been the decade before. (“Typical Weber exaggeration,” went one review, “and rather tiresome.”) One piece of bad press followed another, and her company folded. For reasons not fully known, her marriage to Smalley also ended. Though she directed a few more pictures, and even returned to Universal for a time, she never recaptured her former glory. But even at this low point in her career, she declined to direct a film version of the successful play Topsy and Eva because she thought it was insulting to blacks. She was wise to reject the offer; the film includes such racist humor as a stork dropping a black baby into a trash bin.
Poor Lois. Her memory has suffered one misfortune after another. Most of the 127 films on which she is known to have worked — of which she both wrote and directed the majority — have perished. She left behind no letters, and the people with whom she worked are long dead. The manuscript of her unpublished autobiography, End of the Circle, was stolen and never recovered. Her sister gave the prints of six Weber films to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the 1940s for safekeeping, but the academy did nothing to preserve them until the early 1970s, when the Library of Congress was able to borrow and copy what was left. By then, one film, Jewel, was gone, as were parts of What Do Men Want? and The Hypocrites. Lois the Wizard, the Wonder Girl, the filmmaker who could once claim Where Are My Children? as a grand achievement, is largely gone from film consciousness.
Her colleague Cecil B. DeMille once said that he was no believer in women directors — but “Lois Weber is an exception.” When her career stalled, she almost lost herself. There were rumors that she even had a breakdown. But Weber kept working until the end. Whatever her artistic legacy may now be, at least one thing is clear: The world of fashionable film scholarship is in no hurry to remember a woman who believed that one could make art for morality’s sake.
Lisa Singh is a writer in Dallas, Texas.
