The 1920s was a time of great upheaval with people shaken and shattered by the Great War trying to forget and move on. Excess was the byword of the day, and women especially were experimenting with free love, free-flowing booze, and more economic freedom as the workforce absorbed them in large numbers. At the same time, an older generation raised with Victorian values continued to find comfort in the virtues of the past. The film industry, then as now, tried to please both audiences with films that spoke to their attitudes and concerns. Alongside movies with bobbed-haired flappers dancing the Charleston were self-sacrificing mothers willing to compromise their own happiness for the sake of their children.
The most famous of the maternal melodramas of the silent era was 1925’s Stella Dallas, in which a lower-class woman hoping for better things for her child steps out of her daughter’s life. That film was adapted from the endlessly adapted Olive Higgins Prouty 1923 novel of the same name by screenwriter Frances Marion, whose script for The Lady tackles essentially the same storyline but was based on Martin Brown’s 1923 Broadway play. Marion was well versed in creating challenged, but sympathetic female characters from her long collaboration with “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford. As perhaps the most famous, well-regarded, and prolific woman in screenwriting at the time, Marion was the natural choice to write The Lady, a star vehicle for Norma Talmadge.
Talmadge, whose younger sisters Constance and Natalie also made their mark in motion pictures, was one of the shining lights of the silent era. She started her career in 1910 with the Vitagraph Company in Flatbush, New York, moving quickly from bit parts to leading roles. Following a brief, unhappy flirtation with Hollywood in 1915–1916, she returned to New York, where she met and married Joseph M. Schenck, a partner in the movie theater chain owned by Marcus Loew, who later founded the studio that became Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer.
In 1917, the couple founded the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation on East 48th Street in Manhattan with the express purpose of making Norma the greatest star in motion pictures. Schenck spared no expense to showcase his actress wife, from employing the best casts and crews to building the most lavish sets and choosing the most distinguished directors to work with her. Schenck’s ambition for her only grew when he closed the New York studio and re-established it in the warmer climes of southern California in 1922. The buildup worked. By 1923, movie exhibitors voted Norma Talmadge as their number one box office star.
When the studio decided to take on The Lady, they were dealing with a melodramatic and somewhat formulaic story. A popular show girl named Polly Pearl marries a British aristocrat and is discarded by him when he grows impatient with her working-
class friends and ways. Penniless and with a baby on the way, she finds refuge as a waitress in a brothel. When her former father-in-law comes to claim the baby, Polly gives her son to a kindly pastor and his wife to prevent him being “ruined” like his faithless father. After fruitless searches to find the boy, she gives up, but never stops wondering what kind of man he has become.
Such a plot could become mawkish in the wrong hands, but Talmadge and Schenck chose the perfect director for the task: Frank Borzage. The American director, popular in his time, is revered today as a supreme crafter of humanist, emotional dramas that often focused on society’s demimonde. His 1927 love story 7th Heaven, starring the magnetic acting team of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, earned Borzage the first Academy Award for Best Director ever presented. His touch, as unique and special as Ernst Lubitsch’s comic portrayals of café society, is evident throughout The Lady. He is especially good with his cast, perhaps as a result of the five years he spent as an actor while simultaneously earning his chops as a director.
The film’s opening says so much with so little. The first intertitle reads, “The lady,” followed by the first image—a woman’s hand wiping beer off a bar with a rag. We don’t see her face, careworn and framed in a loose coif of gray, until it has been splattered with soda water by a drunken British officer who has been making a nuisance of himself. “That’s a ’ell of a way to treat a lady,” she scolds. At the time, “lady” was a title reserved for aristocratic women, and people in the pub jeer her. Polly wanted to be a lady, she tells a sympathetic patron, but fate was against her. From that point, the film unfolds largely in flashback as Polly tells him the story of her life.
The scenario and the way Borzage films Talmadge lend dignity to an ordinary working woman. The director captures a certain glow in her unadorned face that hints at her past as a vivacious London performer who attracted a flock of stage-door Johnnies and captured the heart of handsome, ardent gentleman Leonard St. Aubyns, played by Wallace MacDonald. As might be expected, Borzage encourages a display of love from both actors that feels wholly genuine and that accentuates the misery of their parting. So, too, does Borzage help the supporting cast to full-bodied performances. Bit players, like the young usher who guards Polly from her stage-door admirers, make small, but indelible impressions with their gestures and actions.
The lively backstage world of the dance hall where Polly works, the posh casino of Monte Carlo where Leonard rejects Polly, and the brothel in Marseille where the abandoned and pregnant Polly throws herself on the mercy of the hard-nosed Madame Blanche, played by Emily Fitzroy, showcase the talents of art director William Cameron Menzies. From the sign outside Polly’s pub (“Brixton Bar Café Franco-Anglais”) to the foggy London street where Polly scrapes together a living as a flower seller while she searches for her son, Menzies’s carefully crafted sets greatly enhance the atmosphere in which the audience is immersed. Menzies continued a partnership with Schenck into the talkie era and eventually won an honorary Oscar for his production design, including for his re-creation of the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.
Borzage and his cinematographer Antonio Gaudio also know how to structure a complex sequence. A particular standout is the scene in which Polly tries to stall St. Aubyns Sr. and his lawyer as the pastor’s wife escapes with her baby. Madame Blanche watches the street through a narrow window as Polly distracts the men with a rousing song. The camera cuts back and forth, revealing the impatience of the men and Polly’s barely masked anxiety and sorrow. A simple nod from Madame Blanche confirms that the baby is gone. The emotions that play across Talmadge’s face attest to her skill as an actor.
The film provides Polly with a grace note at the end, when she sees her son once more. He has become an honorable young man, giving the audience the satisfaction of knowing that his mother was a lady after all.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne