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I'm impressed that 'Hail the Woman' was made at all; released just one year after American women got the vote, this turgid drama makes an earnest plea against the sexual double standard which judges women's sexual behaviour more harshly than men's.
SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD. A prologue, set in the Plymouth colony in 1621, shows a Pilgrim girl sentenced to the ducking stool for flirting with a boy; the boy is not penalised. Now we come to Flint Hill, New Hampshire in the present (1921). Oliver Beresford (Theodore Roberts) is a bombastic bible-thumper: what we call in Britain and Australia 'a God-botherer'. Beresford is determined that his son David (Lloyd Hughes) become a preacher, regardless of how David feels about it. As for Beresford's daughter Judith ... well, Beresford is confident that women aren't important enough to be anything more than wives and mothers. Apparently, God told him this personally.
David's evangelical career is compromised when he impregnates Nan Higgins, the stepdaughter of the local odd-jobs man. (Tully Marshall's character is identified in the credits solely as the 'Odd Jobs Man', but a close-up of a cheque reveals his name to be Jake Higgins. The prejudices of 1921 require that he be merely Nan's stepfather, not her biological parent.) To save his son from scandal, Beresford buys off Nan's stepfather with a cheque. Nan goes off to the big city, to melt into oblivion as one more unwed mother.
Judith is naturally dismayed by the limitations imposed upon her by her gender. (Or rather, by other people's perceptions of it.) She meets Wyndham Gray (excellent performance by Edward Martindel), an author who encourages her to transcend sexist stereotypes. But Judith is informally engaged to local lout Joe Hurd, who won't put up with such nonsense. Hurd is played by Vernon Dent, a burly performer now remembered solely for comedy roles (as a second banana to Harry Langdon, and as a villain in Three Stooges movies). He gives an excellent performance here, in a role outside his usual range. Sadly, in real life Dent spent his final years in poverty and total blindness due to diabetic retinopathy.
Eventually, Judith ends up working at an orphanage. This being 1921, I expected the orphanage to be whites-only, so I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to include one Chinese boy. (And unpleasantly surprised when he's used as the butt for a racial joke.) The movie makes one odd error here. In a Christmas sequence, we see the orphanage mistress reciting 'A Visit from Saint Nicholas' ... but (in a dialogue title) she credits Santa Claus with SIX reindeer rather than eight. This is followed by a brief animation sequence, showing Santa with six reindeer hitched to his sleigh. I assume that the animators (either by accident, or to save money) left out two reindeer, and the title card revised the poem to match the error.
Lloyd Hughes was generally a bland and unimpressive actor. His most famous performance is his role in 'The Lost World', where he's easily upstaged by a rampaging brontosaurus. For his climactic scene in 'Hail the Woman', Hughes gives a memorable performance as he finally rebels against his father's tyranny. In his performance as the gospel-shouting father, Theodore Roberts has been accused of overacting to the point of making his role a caricature. I disagree: sadly, decades after this film was made, I continue to encounter 'holy' fools exactly like this man ... willing to destroy the lives of everyone around them, and firmly convinced they have God's authority to do so.
In the central role of Judith Beresford, Florence Vidor gives a sensitive, realistic and intelligent performance. I normally dislike Vidor, who tended to be cast in glamour roles but wasn't pretty enough to justify them. Here, her character's physical appearance is less relevant than usual.
This entire film is impressively directed by John Griffith Wray, a director who deserves to be much better known. Sadly, Wray died at the onset of the talkies era, in his mid-thirties: had he lived another ten years, he would surely have helmed several early sound classics. In 'Hail the Woman' there are several extremely beautiful screen compositions: I was especially impressed by a scene in the New England forest, when Vidor and Dent have a quarrel in front of an enormous uprooted tree. (I wonder where this was actually filmed.) 'Hail the Woman' deals with unpleasant subject matter, but it deserves to be much better known, and I'll rate this ambitious drama 9 out of 10.


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