I like to direct,” filmmaker Lois Weber told Photoplay in 1915, “because I believe a woman, more or less intuitively, brings out many of the emotions that are rarely expressed on the screen.” A hundred years later, Weber’s words still apply: nearly every movie I see by an exciting new female filmmaker—Ava DuVernay (Selma), Andrea Arnold (American Honey), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Elizabeth Wood (White Girl), Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) —takes me to emotional spaces I rarely encounter in movies. Yet Hollywood in its infancy was more open to women than it is now. As film scholar Cari Beauchamp has noted, from the 1910s through the early ’30s, nearly a quarter of the screenwriters in Hollywood were women; that same figure for the 500 top-grossing films of 2016, according to the Center for Study of Women in TV and Films, was only 14 percent.
Weber came into her own with a series of intimate dramas that powerfully connected the cinema with the real world and the present. Hypocrites, released by Bosworth in 1915, had impressed critics with its story of a minister frustrated by his parishioners’ lack of spiritual commitment, and its reputation figured heavily in the Smalleys’ new deal with Universal. “I’ll tell you what I’d like to be, and that is, the editorial page of the Universal Company,” Weber told the studio newsletter when the couple first arrived, and true to her word, she embarked on a string of dramas dealing with pressing social concerns. Shoes (1916), inspired by Jane Addams’s study of urban red-light districts, tells of an impoverished shop clerk so desperate for a new pair of shoes that she sells herself sexually. Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916) dealt with opium addiction, The People vs. John Doe (1916) with capital punishment. Where Are My Children? (1916), the most notorious of them all, openly traded in the taboo subjects of abortion and contraception, taking its cue from the arrest earlier that year of birth control activist Margaret Sanger.
The Blot may have been framed as another romance between Claire Windsor and Louis Calhern, but the key performance comes from McWade as Mrs. Griggs, an aging woman who was born into wealth but now bears the responsibility for running the professor’s household on his meager salary. McWade, who’d worked with Weber only once before, has a face made for sorrow, and Weber pulls you deep inside the character’s envy and shame. Even a visit from the minister is cause for embarrassment to Mrs. Griggs, who takes silent note of her own paltry tea tray, her husband’s damaged shoe, an armchair’s worn upholstery. Her kitchen window is right across from Mrs. Olsen’s, and the other woman delights in showing off her ample stock of groceries. At one point Mrs. Griggs gazes in disbelief as the youngest Olsen, still a toddler, hobbles around the neighbors’ backyard in a discarded pair of expensive silk pumps; by contrast, Mrs. Griggs is forced to steal scraps from the Olsens’ garbage can to feed Amelia’s cat.
Sat 4/8–Sat 4/29 Gene Siskel Film Center 164 N. State 312-846-2800siskelfilmcenter.org $11
