Cecil B. DeMille | Manslaughter / 1922

flaming creatures on a match stick

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeanie MacPherson (screenplay, based on the novel by Alice Duer Miller), Cecil B. DeMille (director) Manslaughter / 1922

 

Almost no character from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1922 film Manslaughter is in any manner likeable. Heiress Lydia Thorne (Leatrice Joy) is a spoiled, selfish, and self-destructive rich girl who speeds around the neighborhood and attends wild parties like one early in the film at the local roadhouse, filled with the same kind of people who she represents, the drunken children of the rich and famous which 1920s cinema loved to portray as symbols of American decadence. The kind of “careless people” like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy, who smash up things and then retreat “back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

 

    Rather inexplicably, the county District Attorney, Daniel J. O’Bannon loves Lydia, more, an intertitle tells us, for who she might become than for whom she currently is. Why he would attend such a wretched event, particularly given his puritanical values and his tendency to sermonize like someone of the girl’s father’s generation, is beyond me. Besides, Lydia seems to be making out just fine with the corrupt State Governor Stephan Albee (John Miltern) who even is willing to gamble with a drunken girl (Lydia) in order to marry her. She loses, but O’Bannon intercedes.

      Indeed, O’Bannon is a true spoil-sport even if the party is rather disgusting, including as it does a boxing match for women, an obvious T&A treat for the males in which the girls compete in an old-fashioned peg-stick race (these are not the little sticks with which youngsters play nor the computer game, but real life-size peg sticks upon which you place your feet and move by jumping up and down in balance).

  

     The only reason that this film is included in these pages is because, observing the mass of youthful moving flesh at the party, O’Bannon conjures up his vision of a Roman orgy in which masses writhe on the floor not terribly unlike what Jack Smith shows us in his 1963 experimental flick Flaming Creatures, although DeMille casts hundreds rather than a mere couple of dozen. And in the midst of this heaving mass of flesh imagined by good boy O’Bannon are two women, perhaps with bared breasts—it’s hard to see, but certainly, suggested to the imagination—who keep kissing one another, described by many film commentators to this day as “the first lesbian kiss” on screen.

       Accordingly, it’s not really in the film itself, but simply presented as a figment of the District Attorney’s prurient vision—which, incidentally, allows the barbarian conquer her to order up rape, plunder, and murder, the camera showing several nubile women be carried off. Clearly the decadents were created to be raped and slaughtered in the good old traditions of the USA.

        Nothing else in Manslaughter has anything to do with LGBTQ behavior except perhaps when Lydia, by this time imprisoned for having attempted to outrace a motorcycle cop, whose death she has caused, kisses her former maid, Evans (Lois Wilson), who has been earlier imprisoned for having attempted to steal some of Lydia’s jewels in order to pay for her young son to travel to California since he is certain to die, probably of consumption, if he remains in New York.

       It is, of course, O’Bannon, who despite his love for her—or as the movie would have it, because of his love for Lydia—serves as the prosecuting attorney, winning his case as always with bombast and remonstration.

       Actually, the on-screen trial is not half bad, with all of the figures, including a court artist, the testifying witness, the bereaved wife, and a constantly objecting defense attorney who we have come to expect from watching years of courtroom drama in films like 12 Angry Men, and TV series like Perry Mason. The jury finds her guilty and the judge delivers his usual 3–5-year sentence, the same he previously handed down to Evans, who was forced the leave her beloved, dying son in the hands of his elderly and penniless mother.

     As one might expect, Lydia is unable to do anything in prison, from washing clothes to scrubbing floors, or even carrying the prison slop, and almost immediately falls into a swoon where she dreams of killing the District Attorney and the Judge. Evans, at first, is perfectly ready to gloat over her former employer’s impossible position, but gradually comes to see that hate will destroy her, and attempts to help Lydia come back to active life in her imprisonment.

       By the time she and Evans are freed, Lydia has learned her “lesson” and is ready to spend her wealth in helping others with Evans at her side. Perhaps it is, after all, a kind of lesbian relationship.

      But meanwhile, if you care, O’Bannon—realizing the old adage “You always kill the one you love”—has become an alcoholic, having quit his position as a lawyer long ago. He now stumbles through the New York City streets as a drunkard, happening upon a coffee and donut hand-out trailer set up and manned by Lydia and Evans on New Year’s Eve. 

      Encountering his old flame once again, he attempts to hide, she determined now to help save him. But he rejects her help, insistent on his own punishment for a three-year isolation in which he hopes overcome his alcoholism and return to society.

      He succeeds, of course, despite a series of severe temptations. And is now running against the corrupt Albee for governor. On the very night before the election which he is slated by all the polls to win, Lydia returns to him and he is ready finally to join forces with the woman he has loved all along. Albee, however, slithers in to remind him that it would be impossible for an ex-convict to become the mistress of the governor’s mansion.

       Lydia is ready to give him up for his own good, but O’Bannon, suddenly speaking over the radio announces he is pulling out of the race: nothing is worth losing Lydia all over again.

       If you like that plot, welcome to hetero-heaven, where men and women get together simply because they deserve to and are blessed with normal loves and desires. Hollywood would certainly never have permitted a queer man or woman to arrive at such a felicitous end, had they even been interested in presenting their story. Both have fought their demons, represented in DeMille’s phantasmagoria as an orgy where everybody loves everybody else. Damn hippies! Damn Commies! Damn Democrats! Damn liberals! Damn whatever you to damn.

       Now that I’ve told you the story you needn’t bother with the numerous bad prints that are readily available of this film on the internet. Interestingly, I suspect DeMille paid more for the Roman Orgy scene than he did for the filming of the rest of this melodrama.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).