King Vidor | The Other Half / 1919

 without feelings

by Douglas Messerli

 

King Vidor (screenwriter and director) The Other Half / 1919

 

King Vidor’s 1919 film, The Other Half, shares the theme of World War I soldiers returning home and the “buddy” themes of Harry Lorraine’s The Lads of the Village of the same year and the later William A. Wellman masterwork Wings of 1927. The returning hometown friends turned corporal, Jimmy Davis (David Butler) and office Donald Trent (Charles Meredith) are very similar, in fact, to the hometown pairing of Air Force partners in Wellman’s Wings.

      Beginning with the return home, one might almost argue that Trent has through his military experience been converted to socialism or even possibly an early form of US communism in his new commitment to the elimination of class distinctions and his determination to work alongside the everyday men in his rich father’s mill, built through ruthless Capitalism based on Martin Trent’s (Alfred Allen’s) philosophy of keeping all personal feelings out of business, interrupted later by his son’s fellow feelings for the human race.

      Arguing against his father, who wants him to immediately become President of his factory, Donald insists on working alongside the likes of Johnnie and his girlfriend, Jennie Jones (Zasu Pitts) who also works in the plant.

      One can imagine that if Vidor had been only a little more daring and inclined to social and sexual issues, he might have shored up the male bonding between Jimmy and Donald as the two share lunches and Jimmy’s homelife, but the differences between the two in this film are so different than when Donald returns to the Trent mansion and interacts with his equally wealthy girlfriend, Katherine Boone (played by Vidor’s wife Florence) we can only imagine, what we soon realize as that Donald’s new ethic as merely an experiment.

     While it lasts, it does appear that that something truly interesting might occur in this film, particularly when Jennie faints in the factory laundry and is brought in the hovel in which she and Jimmy share by Donald and his friend. Donald calls up Katherine to come and look after Jennie. At first it appears that she will never be able to make the transformation, as dressed in a proper outfit and furs she arrives at the worker’s quarters and nearly faints at the sight.

      Yet she soon gets over her aversion, wanting to know more people like Jimmy and Jennie, not for charity’s sake, but just to expand her personal vision of the world. She brings flowers and chocolates to Jennie and, even more importantly, when she discovers that the worker’s newspaper The Beacon—one of the few pleasures of the workers’ lives—which is about the cease publishing; Katherine seeks out the editor and offers financial support and her own writing skills.

       As Jennie’s health improves, Donald’s father dies, forcing his son to take over the company. And from that moment on we realize that the ideals Donald has seemingly brought back from his military training are immediately abandoned. Even when Jimmy appears on a list of possible candidates for foreman, Donald, heeding his father’s words, refuses to be the one to make the final decision, suggesting his male secretary select someone for the position; by accident he chooses Jimmy, which leads Donald’s old friend to believe that the relationship between them still exists. But when, as foreman, he argues for plant improvements, Donald himself turns down any new financial investments.

       Katherine, moreover, who has been converted to a more egalitarian approach to life, demonstrates her uncertainly when Donald asks her to marry him, demanding more time to decide.

       In the meantime, a wall collapses on the workers, hospitalizing Jimmie who temporarily loses his sight. When Katherine brings up the issue, first reported by The Beacon, Donald doesn’t even appear to be aware that it was Jimmy who was the hurt statistic, and he never even bothers to visit him. Katherine refuses his marriage proposal. And when the workers threaten to go on strike she encourages Jimmy to seek out a meeting with Donald to explain to him what is about to happen if changes are not made.

      The final scenes of this film have been lost, but evidently Jimmy succeeds, Donald repents his industrialist behavior, Katherine and Donald are married, and Jimmy regains his eyesight. It would have been interesting to see how that all came about, how the meeting with Jimmy and Donald was treated, and whether their old friendship truly played a role or was only a recognized reiteration of Katherine’s criticisms of him. But we cannot imagine, given the vastly different worlds in which they both live, that there might be any permanent friendship on a personal level, despite Donald’s return to his former ideals.

       In the end this film seems to be primarily about social change, the personal being only an expression of values instead of body and blood as they are in Wellman’s love story or even Harry Lorraine’s deeply felt “buddy” fantasy. Often described as one of quartet of films influenced by Vidor’s embracement of Christian Scientism, this film represents a moral position moral rather than matters of the heart.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).