This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of Song at SFSFF 2025
FOOLS FOR LOVE
There’s one born every minute and in 1911’s Across the Mexican Line, Romaine Fielding plays an American Army telegraphist who is seduced by Frances Gibson, a spy for the Mexican forces. She has a change of heart after their wires get crossed a few times and uses the telegraphy skills he taught her to rescue him when he falls into enemy hands. The anti-heroine of 1929’s Asphalt, Betty Amann, has a similar change of heart after her policeman patsy genuinely falls for her.
Midnight Madness (1928) follows the exploits of a gold digger (Jacqueline Logan) who figures she has landed the biggest of fish in Clive Brook, a wealthy mine owner who marries her in a fit of, well, midnight madness. He discovers her real motives and pretends to be penniless; she returns the favor by calling on her old friend for help, a sleazy businessman who wouldn’t mind having a piece of Brook’s concealed fortune.
Lloyd Hughes plays a deep sea diver in 1920’s Below the Surface and is targeted by a grifter (Grace Darmond) hoping to coax him into diving for treasure. He doesn’t believe that she is bad news, even after she leaves him in the lurch and subsequently dies in a shipwreck. It’s only when he dives to find her body floating in the submerged cabin with another man that he realizes he has been duped.
FLIPPING THE SCRIPT
Texas Guinan flouted gender rules in a series of films that advertised her as “the Female Bill Hart” and it is she who plays the patsy in The Gun Woman (1918). She’s the Tigress, gun-toting saloon owner. When the man she loves runs off with her cash and opens his own place on her dime, she confronts him in a rage, reduces the place to a fiery inferno, killing him in the process.
A man once again uses a woman as an unwitting dupe in The Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama, 1916), the oft-filmed Pushkin novella about an officer who ingratiates himself romantically with the poor relation of a wealthy noblewoman in order to gain access to the home and learn her supernatural method for unfailingly winning at cards.
In 1915’s The Doll-House Mystery, ex-convict Charles Gorman is blamed for the theft of valuable bonds that were actually purloined by the owner’s daughter, Baby Carmen De Rue, who thought they were pretty wallpaper for her dollhouse. Her innocent motives make no difference as Gorman is hunted down.
THE SELF-OWN
Some schemers are too clever by half and end up being their own fall guy. Cecil B. DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus (1918) features Raymond Hatton as an embezzler who flees before his crimes have been exposed in a seemingly perfect escape: he discovers a dead body and swaps identities with the corpse. When he nostalgically returns home to his abandoned wife, played by Kathlyn Williams, he is arrested for his own murder and sentenced to the electric chair.
Heinrich George is just a boy who can’t say no in 1928’s Song, violently in love with Mary Kid to the exclusion of honor, dignity, and Anna May Wong. Kid both fears him and revels in her hold over him but throws him over in the end, choosing financial security with a doting millionaire, while George severs every lifeline tossed his way. Wong proves to be a fool for love herself, lying and stealing to spare George’s feelings, ego, and eyesight as he pines away for Kid.
Richard Barthelmess had it coming in Ranson’s Folly (1926). He plays a combat veteran who is bored with his peaceful post in the not-so-wild Wild West and gets his kicks by pretending to hold up stage coaches. It’s no wonder that when the stage is robbed for real, he’s the prime suspect.
Le Fantôme du Moulin Rouge (1925) adds an uncanny twist to the plot device, with a hypnotist separating a man’s spirit from his body—but the man enjoys his supernatural powers and refuses to return, finding it humorous when the hypnotist is arrested after the police discover a lifeless body and assume foul play. The spirit mocks him in his prison cell and has a jolly time until he realizes that an autopsy is about to be performed on his body and, if that happens, he will be stuck in limbo forever.
THE FUNNY FALL GUY
The most famous fall guy in opera, Carmen’s Don Jose, made it into movies multiple times, played by stars like Wallace Reid, Harry Liedtke, and even Charlie Chaplin (as “Darn Hosiery”). In 1915’s Burlesque on Carmen, Chaplin insists on modesty from Edna Purviance’s Carmen, covering her brazenly bare arms. But he finally falls for her, gets jilted, and, keeping to the opera, stabs her to death at the bullfight. The pair break character to have a giggle over the retractable prop knife, so not too much harm done.
In 1926’s The Strong Man, Harry Langdon plays a naïve French soldier looking for his lost American pen-pal gal but accidentally ends up with a criminal gang’s loot. Statuesque Gertrude Astor lures him into a trap by pretending to faint, forcing him to carry her up a flight of stairs on his lap before chasing him around the room with a knife and reclaiming the cash.
In Exit Smiling, also from 1926, Jack Pickford’s predicament is not funny but his rescuer is. He’s a naïve bank clerk whose signature has been forged and he flees town ahead of arrest. But Beatrice Lillie, a smitten gofer employed by a barnstorming melodrama troupe, uses her secondhand acting skills and a borrowed vamp costume to expose the villains and clear Pickford’s name.