Elsie Jane Wilson | The Dream Lady / 1918

impulsive giving

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fred Myton (scenario and titles, based on a novel by Margaret Widdemer), Elsie Jane Wilson (director) The Dream Lady / 1918

 

Elsie Jane Wilson’s 1918 nearly hour-long (54 minutes) comedy The Dream Lady is a true find in the dwindling list of surviving silent films in that it is not only a truly feminist film which awards complete female agency to its stubborn heroine, Rosamond Gilbert (Carmel Myers), but expands that power beyond the more bourgeois desires of the young heroine—to live in a house in the forest as a soothsayer, to wear a Japanese housecoat, have a pet Livonian bloodhound, and marry a gentleman—by granting one of her guests her desire to change gender and live the free life of a man if only for a week. You might even describe this work as a truly American version of the more satirical feminist film of 1906 Les résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) by Alice Guy Blaché and Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man.

      As a child controlled by her mean-spirited ‘uncle” who adopted her, Rosamond is suddenly freed by his death and provided with an inheritance of $10,000, she now intends to grant herself all of her whims and fantasies. Tired of being told how to behave and what to want out of life, the young girl, against all rational male advice, buys her forest cottage from a nearby landowner John Squire (Thomas Holding), a confirmed bachelor cynical about marriage, who himself is appalled by her determination to live there alone and open a small fortunetelling station to help passing people achieve their wishes. But just as she has dismissed her cousin’s advice, passed on to her by her husband, so too does Rosamond ignore the kind suggestions of John.

      And almost immediately after she encounters a wild young orphan girl Allie (Elizabeth Janes) who breaks into the cottage that night and when discovered by its new owner, tells of her dreams, equally prosaic as Rosamond’s: to wear a lovely dress and live in a house with a loving mother. By spontaneously adopting her, the high-spirited “witch,” as her aunt has described her, grants the child’s wishes while certainly putting herself in some jeopardy—which fortunately the film does not bother to explore—of charges of kidnapping and possible child molestation.

     But the lovely thing about Rosamond is that she doesn’t listen to reason and is simply unable to think in the traditional manner about anything she does.

     The next “client” passing by, Sydney Brown (Kathleen Emerson) tells of her desire to escape sexual boundaries and go fishing as a boy for the week when her parents think she’s away visiting a female friend, a wish easily granted by Rosamond with the gift of a pair of male pants, an aviator jacket and cap, a haircut, and the suggestion that she slick her remaining locks back. In partial payment for her new-found freedom, the girl turned boy gives her the Japanese house coat Rosamond has discovered in her suitcase.

      The transformation is so successful that before the day has ended, Sydney the boy has found a male fishing companion, James Mattison (Harry von Meter), who suggests he join him with two females that night with whom he’s made a dinner date.

 

     So delighted is Sydney that when she returns by boat to Rosamond’s forest house she awards her “fairy” godmother with a wad of cash and a kiss on the lips.

     John, meanwhile, having become intrigued with the energetic believer, comes by for a visit at the same moment he catches her kissing Sydney, suddenly jealous and, given his fairly conservative nature, a bit shocked that she is so free with her kisses and so impulsive in behavior. As commentator Chris Robé observes: “Most remarkably, Rosamond’s love interest spies her exchanging hugs and kisses with Sydney dressed as a man. Even though Rosamond quickly becomes aware of the mix up, she doesn’t disabuse him of his confusion since she considers his petty-minded possession of her unbecoming.”

      If you might have thought that a fortuneteller station in the middle of the woods would not have many customers, you’d be mistaken. In Wilson’s world yet another young man, Jerrold (Philo McCullough) stops by to ask her advice about his future. He’s an inventor with wonderful ideas in which he can’t find anyone to invest. Might she pass his name on to some of her wealthy acquaintances? Rosamond quickly introduces him to John, who has returned yet again with a book about breeds of dogs which lists no such breed as a Livonian bloodhound. John invests in Jerrold’s inventions without realizing that there are also no true inventions represented in his several sketches.

     Meanwhile, Allie brings home a hound dog she’s bought with the five dollars Rosamond has given her to pay the milkman, having been assured that it was most definitely born in Livonia. Rosamond can hardly blame the girl for stealing the money to deliver one of her fantasy desires.

     James and Sydney spend an evidently rocky evening with his female friends, and after observes that given such a sensitive disposition that perhaps his buddy might have been better off having been born a woman, a view with which Sydney good-humoredly agrees, “Perhaps I should have.”

     Despite his displeasures with his vivacious neighbor, John is still willing, following his housekeeper’s advice, to shave off his mutton-chop sideburns. But at that very moment a police investigator arrives to tell him that the check he had written Jerrold has never been cashed and that Jerrold is part of a criminal syndicate, which includes a network of others working for him, which obviously must include Rosamond since she has introduced him.

     Observing a deep sadness having overcome her master, John’s housekeeper also pays a visit to the busy forest cottage, attempting to explain that her master apparently has some mistaken views of her actions. But before she can explain herself, she undergoes a fainting spell, and seems to be having something what today we would describe as a heart attack.

     Rosamond immediately puts her to bed and sends Allie off the doctors. Allie arrives of John’s door out of breath to explain what happens, he rushing off to the cottage as Allie and the butler speed off in John’s car to the doctors.

     John finds the girl nursing his housekeeper, who revives just enough to ask him to kiss Rosamond and make up. He obeys her possibly “dying wish,” but isn’t sure of things until the writers and director trot in all her other clients to reveal the truth about Rosamond’s good-hearted actions. 

   Sydney shows up to redress in her feminine attire and James shows up delighted by her transformation back to woman with whom, as a male companion, he grew to love. The evil Jerrold arrives, urging Rosamond to escape before the police come to arrest her for participating in his scheme, her involvement of which she rightfully denies any knowledge; Jerrold reveals his true self, however, in attempting to force her to join him since he too has in fallen in love. John steps in to send him away, realizing the true innocence of the fairy princess who has granted so many wishes to all. He grants Rosamond her final wish, his love; and at the very moment Allie shows up with her pet, wanting some attention from the people she is now sure will become the father and mother she always dreamed of.

      But they need time for themselves and sneak away, boating off to the middle of the lake where he proposes, with her answer of “why not?” the title of the book on which his gentle tale was based. Allie forces her dog to close his eyes for their final motion picture kiss.

      If it all ends far too conventionally, we are sure that both Sydney and Rosamond will give their husbands evidence of their continued independence, which is why, after all, the boys fell in love with them. These couples might possibly be the first of a new generation in which men and women equally made the decisions about their lives. Certainly, we saw throughout the 1920s plenty of evidence of female determination. But with the Great Depression which ended financial stability for men and women both, the 1930s once more narrowed the possibilities for women and LGBTQ figures who lost their voices for several of the following decades.

 

     It’s interesting that even in this film, Rosamond seems to believe strongly that the future she represented would include moving pictures, however one might define that. Early in the film when her warning cousin tells her that she once, when young, she desired a magic lantern. After their meeting, a package arrives containing a newer version of the old stereopticon that could project pictures upon the walls in several directions, a prototype of a home film projector. The “crazy” girl evidently dreamed, like her director, of a future in which film truly mattered. 

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).