Uploaded 12 November 1999
In the representation of the female prostitute in the cinema, the earliest archetypal narratives to emerge are those of the fallen woman and the white slave. While the white slave films, tracing the fate of the innocent young woman lured into forced prostitution by unscrupulous procurers (or rescued in the nick of time), have received considerable critical attention, no doubt partly because of the highly controversial social phenomenon to which they refer, [1] the tale of the fallen woman prostitute in film has, apart from some pioneering work by Leslie Fishbein, been little documented or analysed. [2] Drawing on a popular motif of Victorian literature, [3] it carried a powerful appeal throughout the silent era but tailed off during the early years of sound and was virtually extinguished by World War II. In this article I intend to examine the patterns which emerged as the story was told and retold with growing complexity in the American and European cinema (principally) of this period, to suggest the functions which the figure of the fallen woman prostitute may have served in fulfilling male fantasy needs and reinforcing patriarchal ideology, and to look at several cases in which the familiar tale was twisted to subvert the dominant paradigm.
An early appearance of the story was in The Downward Path (USA, 1900), a five-part film with each scene listed separately in the Biograph catalogue. [4] This production (with a total running time of under 15 minutes) was intended, according to the catalogue, “to convey a moral lesson in the career of a young country girl who succumbs to temptations, and becomes involved with the wickedness of a big city”.[5] (5)The protagonist is a chubby lass (whose size initially suggests comedy rather than melodrama) who rejects the advances of a rustic lad in overalls and instead runs away to the city with a roguish book agent. There she becomes a streetwalker, with the book agent acting as her pimp. When her parents appear she runs to embrace them, but the agent knocks her father down and drags her away, while her mother faints (and a cop strolls past unconcerned). She is next seen as a “soubrette” singing and dancing a jig in a cafe. After a dispute with her pimp, she takes poison and kills herself, her distraught parents rushing in too late to save her.
Here are many of the key elements in what was to become the recurrent tale, depicting the woman who descends into prostitution – to which a negative sign is almost invariably attached – as a figure of pathos. In the first major version of this story, as exemplified in The Downward Path, an innocent young woman is seduced or raped, and runs away or is cast out by her family. On her own, abandoned by her lover (or, as here, discovering that he is a procurer), perhaps with a baby to care for, and without a legitimate source of income, she sooner or later begins to charge for her sexual services. Alternatively, seduction may not be involved. The protagonist, in this case often a mature woman, strays from the path of virtue from force of circumstance or as an act of self-sacrifice. The outcome is, in any event, the same. As a prostitute the woman is degraded and trapped, condemned to a miserable fate unless fortune intervenes in granting her an opportunity to atone for her sins. She is likely to die at the end of the film, through suicide, illness, accident, murder or execution (the conventions of Victorian art and literature, Nina Auerbach notes, ordained that “a woman’s fall ends in death”[6] ). Otherwise she may survive and save her soul through an act of redemption; frequently she is paired off with a good man whose upright character serves to cancel out the poor impression of the male sex given earlier in the film.
Such a narrative is predicated on (a) the belief that a single woman who is sexually active is morally corrupt (making her in the mind of many men ineligible for marriage, thus blocking off one avenue for her future), and (b) the barring of women from the vast majority of occupations in the workforce, including all well-paid jobs. In most industrial and post-industrial societies both these premises were well under way to obsolescence by mid-century. As a result, the concept of a loss of chastity leading inexorably to prostitution became no longer tenable. Most films with a fully-developed fallen woman pattern were in fact produced prior to 1940.
The version featuring a young woman protagonist is perhaps best exemplified by the many screen adaptations of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, first published in Russia in 1899 and adapted for the stage in Paris in 1902 and New York in 1903. [7] The well-known story, set in Russia in the 1870s, tells of an orphaned peasant girl seduced by an aristocrat, Prince Dmitri Nekhludov, on his vacation. Becoming pregnant, Katusha is disgraced and leaves her godmother’s service. After her child dies, she is reduced to prostitution. Following a trial in which she is convicted for a crime she did not commit, Katusha is sentenced to exile in Siberia. Dmitri, a juror in the case, feels remorse and offers to marry her. She, however, refuses him, accepts her lot as a prisoner and is spiritually regenerated.
D.W. Griffith’s one-reel adaptation, The Resurrection (USA, 1909), fragmented and without intertitles, is only minimally intelligible unless one knows the story beforehand, and probably operated as a series of illustrated scenes from Tolstoy rather than as a narrative in its own right. For example, Katusha is suddenly transformed from servant to bar girl, the whole episode of her pregnancy and disgrace being elided. The film is notable for its overt Christian emphasis, particularly in the scene in which Dmitri visits Katusha as a pitiful wretch of a prostitute in jail. She is bitterly derisive of his moralising when he takes out a Bible, belting him with it and ripping it up. After he has left, however, she grabs the Bible from some old crones and it falls open at the words, “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life….” In the last scene of the film, as Dmitri leaves her, there is a cross in the snow and a church in the background; Katusha declaims to the heavens and sinks to her knees.
Griffith steers a middle course in his representation of the seduction: Katusha, crying in her bedroom when the prince enters, indicates he should leave, but then relents when he takes her in his arms. Later versions appear either to stress Katusha’s complicity in the act and her subsequent dissolute tendencies – seduced, she “assumes the gay life and becomes known for her loose morals” (A Woman’s Resurrection, USA, 1915), she “secretly yields to his passion” (Resurrection, USA, 1927) – or on the other hand to portray her as a victim – “Military life has roughened Dmitri’s temperament, and that night he rapes Katusha…. Her child is stillborn, and out of desperation, Katusha turns to prostitution to survive” (Resurrection, USA, 1931). [8] The 1915 version, in line with its attribution of greater guilt to Katusha, significantly changes the ending of the story, having her killed while protecting Dmitri’s life in a duel. Much of the enduring appeal of Tolstoy’s tale, however, as in many fallen woman scenarios, must reside in the essential moral ambiguity of the events of Katusha’s life, inherent in the original novel, [9] and in the fascinating synthesis of virtue and vice in the one person. The story well exemplifies the “dual perspective” Auerbach writes of in analysing Victorian fiction: “an explicit narrative that abases the woman, an iconographic pattern that exalts her”.[10]
As with the differing versions of Resurrection, other films in this category vary in the way they allocate personal blame for the heroine’s fall. On the one hand there are those which locate the culpability in the young woman herself, sometimes coupled with her parents for failing to keep her under control. On the other hand, there are those which inculpate a malefactor, usually a seducer/rapist, as the author of her downfall.
Typical of the former is The Road to Ruin (USA, 1928), a low-budget exploitation picture which was both banned in a number of cities and shown in high schools as a warning about the dangers of juvenile delinquency. [11] Teenager Sally Canfield, daughter of indulgent pleasure-seeking parents, mixes with a fast crowd and goes on a moonlit jaunt in a jalopy, losing her virginity. Progressing to booze barns and strip poker, she discovers she is pregnant. The price of an abortion, which she undergoes, is spending a night as a choice new recruit in a brothel – where her first client turns out to be her father. The shock aggravates her poor medical condition following the backstreet operation, and she dies: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”, as a title informs us.
Other films which, to judge from the available synopses, emphasise the fault of the woman include: Protect Us (USA, 1914) (“Four young women who ignore their parents’ admonitions are corrupted by a procurer and become prostitutes”); The Painted Madonna (USA, 1917) (“Stella Dean, a simple country girl, flees to the city to hide her guilt” and there she “develops a reputation as a profligate member of the chorus line”); Primrose Path (USA, 1930) (an unscrupulous football hero involves a student “in a wild life of parties, and she is expelled from school”); Bondage (USA, 1933) (“Judy is affected by Earl, and when he drives her home and kisses her goodnight, she embraces him tenderly and allows him to pull her back into his car”); and Mad Youth (USA, 1939?) (“At Marian’s party, wild dancing and games of strip poker prevail”).
The second, contrasting tendency is for films to stress the element of coercion in the young woman’s downfall, depicting a situation in which she has been deprived of real choice and hence cannot be blamed. Rape as the initial step of the downward trajectory is the quintessential expression of the motif, and occurs in, for example, Trädgårdsmästaren/The Gardener (Sweden, 1912), The Jungle (USA, 1914), Damaged Goods (UK, 1919), and Anna Christie (USA, 1923 and 1930). (When rape occurs later on in the woman’s wayward career, it tends to take the form of punishment for guilt rather than destruction of innocence, as will be discussed below.) Other coercive situations include being auctioned in a “matrimonial’ agency (Sold at Auction, USA, 1917), being forced into white slavery (The Red Kimono, USA, 1925, and many other films of that genre), and being bartered to a brothel madam (Pitfalls of Passion, USA?, 1927).
Where adaptations of Resurrection typify the version of the fallen woman narrative featuring a young, initially virginal protagonist, the second version portraying a more mature heroine may be exemplified by another sob-story warhorse. Alexandre Bisson’s play La Femme X… (Paris, 1908), staged on Broadway in 1910, has been filmed at least seven times, mostly under the title Madame X. [12]
In the play, Jacqueline Floriot is driven from her home because of her rigid husband’s suspicions regarding her relationships with other men. He keeps custody of their infant son Raymond and refuses Jacqueline permission to see the boy even when he becomes dangerously ill. After a suicide attempt, Jacqueline in despair leaves the country, becomes a woman of the streets and over a period of years is destroyed by drink and drugs. When she eventually returns to Paris, Raymond has become a promising young attorney. To protect her husband and son from a blackmailer, she shoots the man and is put on trial for murder, with Raymond being assigned to defend her. Refusing to reveal her true identity, she confesses to the crime and dies happy in the knowledge that her son’s life has not been tarnished.
Psychological demoralisation, as here, often combined with loss of income, may provide the impetus for a formerly respectable woman to surrender her virtue. Like Jacqueline Floriot, a political candidate’s wife in The Governor’s Ghost (USA, 1914), caught in a compromising situation, is ejected from her home and forced to give up her baby; while Mary Howard in A Mother’s Ordeal (USA, 1917), deserted by her husband and with an infant daughter, becomes a prostitute after a failed attempt at suicide. Similarly, Anna Keremazoff in Once a Lady (USA, 1931) is divorced by her husband and loses custody of their daughter. Also abandoned are Mayda St. Maurice in The Courtesan (USA, 1916), Grace Vaughan in The Waiting Soul (USA, 1917), and Nasa Springer in Call her Savage (USA, 1932).
Poverty may be the primary factor in the decision to venture into prostitution, as in Out of the Night (USA, 1918), The Woman Thou Gavest Me (USA, 1919), The Painted Lady (USA, 1924), The Red Lily (USA, 1924), The Salvation Hunters (USA, 1925), and Die freudlose Gasse/The Joyless Street (Germany, 1925). A woman’s destitution is especially heart-rending when her child is on the verge of starvation or in need of expensive drugs, as is the case with Ona in The Jungle, Miriam in Outcast (USA, 1917), Luise in Der Mädchenhirt (Germany, 1919), Polly Pearl in The Lady (USA, 1925), Pauli Arndt in The Enemy (USA, 1927), and Nasa Springer in Call her Savage.
As some of these examples suggest, self-sacrifice for a loved one is a common theme in the mature-woman version of the fallen woman story. The Madame X motif of a prostitute mother keeping her identity secret from her offspring and enduring the consequent suffering is repeated in The Courtesan – Mayda supports her son (who believes her dead) through an intermediary; The Lady – Polly attempts to take the blame, incognito, for a shooting her son is guilty of; Once a Lady – Anna anonymously puts her grown daughter on the right path; The Sin of Madelon Claudet (USA, 1931) – unbeknown to her son, Madelon becomes a prostitute to put him through medical school and later visits him when she is old and destitute without revealing who she is; and The Secret of Madame Blanche (USA, 1933), a remake of The Lady, in which Sally Sanders St. John confesses to a killing her son committed and her true identity is only exposed under cross-questioning in court. In The Governor’s Ghost, the protagonist, who has become a member of a white slavery gang, shoots a man attempting to harm her kidnapped daughter, and is subsequently convicted of murder.
Making the sacrifice for the sake of a marital partner is the theme of The Scarlet Woman (USA, 1916), in which Thora Davis sells her honour to the district attorney to save her husband from the electric chair; Blonde Venus (USA, 1932), in which Helen Faraday’s dubious career commences when she raises the money for the expensive operation needed by her husband, suffering from radium poisoning; and Faithless (USA, 1932), the story of a down-on-her-luck society woman, Carol Morgan, who goes out on the streets to buy medicine to save her husband’s life after an accident.
Although the trajectories are similar, the emotions generated by the two versions of the archetypal narrative can be very different. As the examples illustrate, the young woman is often far from blameless herself, whereas the mature woman is much more frequently obeying a higher morality in surrendering her chastity; the young woman can enjoy her life of sin whereas the mature woman seldom does. Nevertheless, the stories can have much in common, and it is in daring to yoke together irreconcilable oppositions of guilt and innocence, of self-indulgence and self-sacrifice, that the films attain much of their appeal.
*
The fallen woman scenario is clearly an inheritor of the nineteenth century fictional and dramatic tradition of melodrama which, as Peter Brooks demonstrates, “suggests polarisation into moral absolutes”.[13] But the relationship is not a simple one. In few of the films is there the dramatic heightening, the conflict between extremes of good and evil, light and darkness, which characterises melodrama. Usually there is moral and psychological complexity. Even in a film as rudimentary as The Downward Path, the book agent is not simply an evil seducer, nor is the young woman an incarnation of innocence. The “cheeky” or “fresh” book agent (as he is variously described in the title to the first part of the film) has a likeable rapscallion quality: he fools with the country lad who is his rival in the woman’s affections, for example, kicking a chair out from under him. Similarly the woman’s actions in rejecting her rural suitor and eagerly eloping to the city indicate a less than total commitment to the life of virtue. Moreover the heroine’s supposedly degraded lifestyle in the city comes across at times as just good fun, e.g. when she dances a table-top jig and a woman customer in the cafe joins in, slapping her knees.
It is in fact in interrogating the notion of “innocence” and what value it may have for women, irrespective of the kudos which patriarchy attaches to it, that many fallen woman films begin to undermine the tenets of Victorian morality to which they pay lip service. Often it means in practice – as the films mischievously demonstrate – a cramped, narrow, subservient life, a submission to domestic chores or exploitative wage labour, a lack of fun or playfulness, an absence of intimate personal relationships outside the family, an inability to partake of entertainments such as dancing and drinking associated with urban night life, and of course a ban on sexual desire and its expression. In Der Mädchenhirt, for example, which is set in Prague, prostitution itself is never given a positive colouring but the frolicking hippy-like life of the prostitutes and pimps on Kampainsel, a rustic island retreat, is contrasted favourably with the grim attachment to discipline and order represented (hypocritically) by the police inspector Duschnitz, who wants to sweep the island clean of its riffraff.
The ironic twist which is given here to the traditional country (good)/city (bad) oppositional axis is indicative of the complexity with which the more accomplished fallen woman films can address the moral issues at stake. Amleto Palermi’s La peccatrice (Italy, 1940), for instance, the tale of Maria, a young country woman seduced and abandoned who subsequently finds herself working in a city brothel, predominantly follows the traditional pattern, as commentators have observed. Marcia Landy writes, “Everything in the country is light, spacious, and open in contrast to the sordidness, the cramped and hostile environment of the city,” [14] while Robin Buss refers to “the contrast between rural purity and the dangers of urban squalor”.[15] Indeed, there is a pastoral sequence featuring women singing as they work in the fields during haymaking which is shot with a realist lyricism very reminiscent of Dovzhenko’s Earth (USSR, 1930), while the city is characterised by the oppressive brothel (where Maria’s prostitute friend Anna dies of illness) and the shabby hotel to which the thuggish brothel keeper drags Maria after she has attempted to escape. And yet… It is a country youth who abandons Maria after getting her pregnant (the baby subsequently dies), and it is on a farm, where she has gone to work as nursemaid to a toddler, that she is sexually assaulted by a young man who starts ripping her dress off. In contrast, Maria’s happiest moments are in a city music hall where she dances with Pietro, the man she has fallen in love with, and it is Pietro who proves to be the faithful lover.
*
The pathos generated by the story of a woman of good character reduced to selling her body had an obvious appeal to female audiences, [16] and the fallen woman archetype possibly owed its existence as much to women in a creative capacity as to men. Nevertheless, it is its function in fulfilling male fantasy needs which I wish to concentrate on here.
The chief role of the fallen woman story in this respect is to achieve an admixture of sexual innocence and experience in the one person, a woman who as a fantasised object of desire can overcome for the male spectator the separating out of his affectionate and erotic feelings. [17] It is the ambiguity with which the “fall” is depicted, and the elusive, dynamic dialectic of purity and corruption, which preserve the woman’s mystery and thus her allure. (For men with the reasonably common psychological formation this applied to, a “good” woman lacks sexual appeal while a “bad” woman is unworthy of his serious attention: hence the need for a synthesis.)
There may be ambiguity as to whether the woman has actually become a prostitute or not. In The Wages of Sin (USA, 1914), Barbara Dale, a millhand who has been seduced and abandoned, is declared in a title to be “on the downward path” and is next seen wearing a colourful outfit in a crowded saloon, dancing and accepting drinks from men. Is one to conclude that she is now a prostitute? This could be a question of cinematic coding (reprised under the Hays Code regime), of middle-class patriarchal assumptions of the period (a woman who does that is as good as, is therefore a prostitute), or of historical fact (it might have been the case that the only women who would drink in saloons like this were actually prostitutes). There is, in any case, a suggestiveness about such lack of precision which may serve the needs of the narrative. Sternberg’s Blonde Venus, for example, is predicated on ambiguity all along the line. The money Helen (Marlene Dietrich) receives to pay for her husband’s medical treatment might be an above-the-board gift; her guise as a woman of the streets flirting with Detective Wilson might be a masquerade; finally the gossip about her in Paris, where she becomes a successful singer, that she “used man after man as a stepping stone” could be untrue, a malicious rumour, or could in fact imply that she wasn’t prostituting herself, despite her benefactors’ expectations – hence her “cold as the proverbial iceberg” reputation.
If there is no doubt as to how far a woman has fallen, there is often doubt as to the extent to which she has no other choice. Did she jump, or was she pushed? In G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street, Grete (Greta Garbo) consents to appear as a prime attraction in Frau Greifer’s bordello-cabaret only because her family is in dire financial straits; but earlier, when she tries on a fur coat and almost swoons at her appearance in the mirror, we are given a strong indication of her longing for luxury. In the same film, Maria (Asta Nielsen) also has a starving family, but her prime motivation in becoming one of Frau Greifer’s stable would appear to be to escape from her situation at home and further her love affair with a young businessman. In contrast, there is no doubt that a third young woman, Else (Hertha von Walther) prostitutes herself to a rapacious butcher solely because she is poverty-stricken, living in a stable with an unemployed husband and an underfed baby. [18]
It is common for a film to equivocate about the woman’s motivation. It is true that The Girl (Georgia Hale) in The Salvation Hunters is penniless, but is it destitution or a moral weakness (“her soul encrusted with contempt for life,” as a title puts it) which induces her give in to pressure to go out on the streets? There is similar doubt about Judith Andrews (Mary Astor) in Romance of the Underworld (USA, 1928): “once a sweet country girl, [she] falls upon hard times in the city and is reduced to soliciting in a dance hall”, the character being described by one critic as “corrupted”.[19] Edith (Sylvia Bataille), mistress of her unscrupulous employer Batala in Jean Renoir’s Le crime de Monsieur Lange (France, 1936), seems set for a life of prostitution when he abandons her – and yet this career move is not exactly forced. The well-worn scenario is predicated on the lack of job opportunities for women, but Edith is a secretary: if the film – one of the most leftwing to emerge from the Popular Front period of French cinema – wanted to make a point out of unemployment and/or low wages it could do so, but it chooses not to. There is, too, the counter-example of Valentine (Florelle), another former victim of Batala’s charm, now a successful laundress, resilient and cheerfully disabused, who proves that in this milieu Seduced and Abandoned is not inevitably followed by Ruined.
Both versions of Waterloo Bridge (USA, 1931 and 1940) show the heroine in World War I London supposedly forced to become a prostitute after she loses a dancing job, but as Carolyn Galerstein argues, “It’s pretty far-fetched…. Couldn’t she have joined the Red Cross?” [20] In the second version Myra (Vivien Leigh) holds out while thinking her soldier lover is still alive, so is it her demoralisation on receiving news of his death which allows her to fall? The actual moment of the fatal decision is teasingly ambiguous. One bitter evening she loiters on the bridge, staring out over the Thames: is she contemplating suicide, or getting up the courage to solicit?
Complicit to an indeterminate extent in her downfall, the fallen woman in the cinema often has a sense of fun which mitigates her newly acquired cynicism. In The Wages of Sin, Barbara throws a drink in her seducer Stephen’s face and drives him out of the saloon, then drinks to celebrate with other women. A hardening has taken place, along with a loss of naïvety. In the archetypal narrative, of which this is a good example, there is a double discourse at work:
1. the woman, having been done wrong by men and needing to survive (and sometimes care for a child) is an innocent victim, but
2. the woman having been initiated into illicit sex is corrupted by the experience and hence is morally guilty when she drifts into prostitution.
Because of the guilt, opportunities arise for the male spectator to experience sadistic satisfaction when the woman undergoes figurative punishment, especially when this takes the form of physical attack or (as noted above) rape. Nasa in Call her Savage, Rosario in La mujer del puerto (Mexico, 1933), and Lily in The Song of Songs (USA, 1933), like Maria in La peccatrice, are subjected to sexual assault. What these women may really be guilty of, in the patriarchal mind, is enjoying their sexuality.
If she has been purged of her guilt through undergoing punishment for her sins, the fallen woman becomes available for rehabilitation and heterosexual bonding, a worthy love object for the hero. The male spectator, in identifying with the woman’s partner, is able to enjoy imaginative union with such seductive stars as Greta Garbo (The Joyless Street, Anna Christie), Clara Bow (Call her Savage), and Marlene Dietrich (Blonde Venus, The Song of Songs). On the other hand the narrative process might expose the character as irredeemably corrupt, in which case the outcome is usually death, affording release for the male imagination from the troubling spectacle of an untamed alluring woman, and often a little additional sadistic pleasure as her extinction occurs.
*
Ideologically, the fallen woman film deals with the disturbance to the patriarchal order which occurs when a female is cast adrift from the family and, bereft of protection from father or husband, is forced to fend for herself. In its address to male audiences, the film will typically warn of the consequences of parental or marital failure; while for female spectators the story may serve as a cautionary tale, illustrating what is in store for the woman who permits herself to stray from the path of virtue. Ultimately the patriarchal pattern will be restored, whether through the straying lamb being brought back into the fold, or through her elimination.
The failure of the father, or of an adult acting in loco parentis, can take a variety of forms. It may be that a father neglects his daughter’s upbringing. Nan in Sold at Auction is brought up by a woman who treats her as a slave, and her father, who never visits, is unaware of the situation. The seafarer in both versions of Anna Christie ships his daughter off to cousins who maltreat and eventually rape her. Lax parenting leads to teenage girls running wild in The Road to Ruin, Primrose Path and Mad Youth.
The father’s dereliction may be brought home with melodramatic force in scenes in which he encounters his daughter in a setting of prostitution. [21] In Sold at Auction, Nan’s father bids for her against other millionaires and only at the last minute is apprised of her identity. In a brothel in The Road to Ruin, Sally faints on seeing that her first client, who has his arms round her, is her father, while he hides his face in shame. In Trial Marriage (USA, 1928), a prostitute whom a client is attracted to and assaults in a brothel is revealed by means of a birthmark to be the daughter he abandoned to a foundling asylum many years ago. Thymian in Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen/Diary of a Lost Girl (Germany, 1929) is being raffled off in a bordello when she catches sight of one of the clientele – her father, who simply looks on with an impotent gaze as she goes off with the winner.
Marital failing is the theme of those films, discussed above, in which the wife is abandoned or driven from her home, usually unjustly. The husband may also be to blame for such things as making speculative losses on the stock exchange and sinking into theft and murder (The Scarlet Woman), or gambling away his money (The Secret of Madame Blanche).
Such narrative punishment also serves as a moral lesson to women who may be tempted to join the oldest profession. In the cinema, life on the primrose path is seldom a bed of roses. Suicide attempts are frequent. The heroine may have to give up her baby, as in Damaged Goods; it may die, as in the many versions of Resurrection, The Jungle, The Enemy, and La peccatrice; or both may happen, as in Diary of a Lost Girl and Bondage. If she is unlucky enough to have contracted a venereal disease, her child may be born blind and crippled (And the Children Pay, USA, 1918), or she herself may end up in hospital (Pitfalls of Passion). The sinner is frequently disowned by her family; she may be imprisoned (The Sin of Madelon Claudet) or confined in a psychiatric ward (Bondage). Not infrequently, as mentioned above, she is the victim of sexual assault. She may have to endure a loveless marriage (The Song of Songs); or, in one of the cruelest twists of fate ever inflicted on a scarlet woman, she may enjoy the most passionate night of lovemaking in her life, only to discover the paragon of partners to be her brother (La mujer del puerto).
For the woman who repents there is the chance of being brought back once again under the wing of the patriarchy. Tolstoy’s Katusha finds the path to God in the snows of Siberia, and serves as the model for many another cinematic penitent. Stella in The Painted Madonna converts her mansion into a refuge for foundlings, while Grace in The Waiting Soul becomes a nurse. After her baby dies, Margery of And the Children Pay is taken to Jane Addams’s Coulter House for fallen women. Anitra (“The Flame”) of The Amazing Woman (USA, 1920) builds a free hospital for crippled children, though whether this counts as atonement is doubtful, since the money comes from her wealthy clientele. Gabrielle of The Red Kimono redeems herself by becoming a nursing volunteer during the wartime flu epidemic, as the man she is in love with goes overseas to fight.
Often, for the reformed prostitute, happiness is finally possible through a pairing up with the man she loves. But for others, death awaits. Many a fallen woman, having demonstrated female independence, an ability to survive alone despite the misfortune she has had to bear, offers too much of a threat to the patriarchal norm to be permitted to carry on living. Characters who, following in the footsteps of the soubrette in The Downward Path, succumb to suicide include the raped heroine of The Gardener, Thora in The Scarlet Woman, [22] Luise in Der Mädchenhirt, Rosario in La mujer del puerto, and Myra in Waterloo Bridge (1940; interestingly, in the earlier version she is only wounded in an air raid). The sinful woman may also be murdered. Annie in Roman d’amour/Annie’s Love Story (France, 1904), for example, refusing to take the final plunge into a life of prostitution, is stabbed in the breast by her would-be pimp who then, to quote the distributor’s synopsis, “throws her over the railing down in the deep, cold water”,[23] and she subsequently dies in hospital.
There are other alternatives. The self-sacrificial death of Katusha in A Woman’s Resurrection has been mentioned. The protagonist of The Governor’s Ghost dies after her conviction for murder, as does Madame X. In The Jungle, Ona dies in childbirth, worn out by ill-health and poverty; Mayda in The Courtesan suffers a fatal heart attack; while Sally in The Road to Ruin does not recover after her abortion.
Analysing the fallen woman of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, Eric Trudgill discerns a pattern in which the poorer heroines are more likely to survive:
A servant or a shopkeeper’s daughter may retrieve her virtue and make some honest man happy…. But all the Magdalens of gentle blood are tragic; …they languish in a settled melancholy and descend, elegantly penitent, to the family vault. [24]
Such class distinctions do live on in the cinema – Katusha, a serving girl of peasant stock, survives (usually), while Madame X, a flower of Parisian society, dies – but they are not rigid: Ona (The Jungle), and Luise (Der Mädchenhirt), for example, are both from very poor backgrounds, but go to their deaths, while among the women who are undefeated by their ordeal and go on to lead happy lives are initially wealthy heroines such as Mary MacNeill (The Woman thou Gavest Me) and Carol Morgan (Faithless). Outcomes for the twentieth century sinner are thus not always predictable, as the various alternative endings also illustrate. The ideological roulette wheel determines who shall live on, repentant, and who must be taken out of circulation like a badly minted coin. But one thing is certain: no fallen woman prostitute will be permitted to continue profitably plying her trade.
*
Girls in this way fall every day,
And have been falling for ages.
Who is to blame? You know his name,
It’s that boss that pays starvation wages. [25]
The predominantly conservative tenor of the fallen woman narratives is defied in a handful of films – often the butt of censorship – which take a socially critical stance by turning their attention to the environment in which the woman’s “fall” takes place. Locating culpability for her descent into prostitution not in the woman herself, nor in individual male wrongdoers, they indict the social system which has left her little other option.
In The Jungle, for example, based on Upton Sinclair’s famous muckraking novel of the Chicago stockyards, things come to a head during a strike against a wage reduction when the income of the worker Jurgis, his wife Ona and their family shrinks to nothing:
Ona’s stepfather, Antanas, becomes ill, the family is evicted, [and] her sister Katrina dies of industrial poisoning…. Ona then has sex with foreman Connor in exchange for money to feed her starving child, only to learn of the infant’s death. [26]
The capitalist system also comes under fire in The Joyless Street, which features a celebrated montage sequence intercutting the Viennese bourgeoisie revelling at Frau Greifer’s cabaret with poverty-stricken citizens, mostly women, queuing up for meat. In the queue – she faints – is Grete, whose father has lost his pension money owing to manipulation of share prices by speculators on the stock exchange. The political thrust of the film, in which three female characters are driven to the brink of prostitution or beyond because of societal economic collapse, was not lost on the German censorship authorities, who wrote:
The essential content of the film consists of showing how Viennese girls are forced to sell their moral honour and to earn their bread in brothels as a result of need and the misery of inflation.… Through this forced situation, in which the girls are brought without exception into depravity, the impression must emerge that the girls’ action is the necessary consequence of misery and need. [27]
The heavy cutting the film was subjected to attempted to rectify this unfortunate impression. [28]
In The Enemy, militarism is the target. Also set in Austria, this World War I story relates what happens to Pauli (Lillian Gish) when her husband is drafted:
Pauli and her baby nearly starve to death when her grandfather, a professor, loses his job for speaking out against the war.… [T]he baby dies in spite of Pauli’s resorting to prostitution to keep him alive. [29]
A critical perspective focused not on poverty but on the cruelty of a society which ostracises a single woman once her loss of virginity becomes public knowledge is implicit in a number of fallen woman films, but comes to the fore in movies such as The Gardener, in which the heroine’s life is ruined after she is raped by her boyfriend’s father, and Damaged Goods, in which Edith, sexually violated by the proprietor of the dress shop where she is working and then sacked by his wife (“Only respectable girls are wanted here”), spends months fruitlessly searching for a new job. “The great moral public neither forgives nor forgets,” a sarcastic title declares. Both films were banned in their country of origin. A similar point of view is evident in Tavaszi zápor/Marie, légende hongroise/Spring Shower (Hungary/France, 1932), in which the heroine, seduced, abandoned and hounded from her village, never herself becomes a prostitute but receives affectionate support from the women in the city brothel where she works as a maid while her child is born. The film’s “severe criticism of society” was not well received. [30]
*
It is hard to say which of the two factors brings the girl’s over-sexed condition to a climax, but it is certainly the most natural thing that a climax should result. That is the first step toward prostitution. Nor is the girl to be held responsible for it. On the contrary, it is altogether the fault of society, the fault of our lack of understanding, of our lack of appreciation of life in the making; especially it is the criminal fault of our moralists, who condemn a girl for all eternity, because she has gone from the “path of virtue”; that is, because her first sex experience has taken place without the sanction of the Church. [31]
So imbued with patriarchal values is the virtue/vice dichotomy that feminist subversion of the fallen woman narrative is difficult if not impossible. Two silent pictures which might be looked at in this light, however, are The Red Kimono, in which Gabrielle shoots her seducer/pimp dead, and Diary of a Lost Girl, in which Thymian’s experience as a prostitute is positive in comparison to the other trials she has to undergo.
The Red Kimono, based on real events, was produced by Mrs Wallace Reid and scripted by Dorothy Arzner from a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, who had covered the case as a reporter in 1917. [32] Mrs Reid appears on screen in opening and closing scenes consulting a newspaper file and speaking to camera, cautioning viewers – in titles – about the nature of the story (“If it contains bitter truths, remember that I only turn the pages of the past”) and finally averring:
You have seen the temptations and struggles of this modern Magdalen, and though she won her redemption and found love and happiness – there are others – countless others – and it is towards these, that we women must face our responsibility, if we would fulfil the duty of true womanhood.
Gabrielle Darley (Priscilla Bonner), from a country town, falls in love with a stranger, Howard, and is lured to New Orleans on the promise of marriage. There he puts her to work in a crib in the red light district, where she endures “years of bondage – sorrowful – sordid” (represented elliptically by an eloquent scene in which the bruised, world-weary woman bolts her door against two prospective clients and then, resignedly, powders her face and reaches for the latch). Hearing that Howard is intending to marry another woman, Gabrielle follows him to Los Angeles where, catching him in the act of buying a wedding ring (with the money she’s earnt in prostitution), she shoots him dead. Gabrielle is acquitted by a sympathetic jury. Taken up briefly as a notoriety by a society woman and becoming friendly with her chauffeur, she is subsequently unable to find work because of her past and, forlorn, returns to New Orleans to resume life on the streets (the money for her train fare comes from a prostitute friend, answering the call in the “tradition that comes wholeheartedly from the Sisterhood of Sorrow”). Run over in the act of escaping from a rapist, she is hospitalised and then becomes a nurse; meanwhile the chauffeur who has followed her to New Orleans declares his love. Gabrielle in joy and sorrow vows to wait for him as he ships off to war. [33]
While the suffering of the fallen woman is etched into Gabrielle’s face in virtually every scene of the film, and her redemption conforms to the familiar pattern, what is distinctive about The Red Kimono is that its authors allow the protagonist to kill her male oppressor, get away with it, and end happily in the arms of her lover. This signals a very significant twist to the old tale, opening up cracks in the patriarchal facade (is the film implying that all hard-done-by women have an escape route like Gabrielle’s?). As the film was not produced by a member of the MPPDA it bypassed industry censorship (the Hays Office had a policy of eliminating pictures which were “based on white slavery”[34] ), but it suffered at the hands of state censor boards. Kevin Brownlow reports that “it was subjected to no less than twenty-five cuts in Pennsylvania, where the censors changed the entire plot, for good measure, by ordering all the titles to be reshot”.[35]
Some measure of the consternation caused by The Red Kimono in the American establishment at the time may be gauged by the critical reception it received. The film was given an extraordinarily vituperative review by the male critic of the New York Times [36] (could it be the whiff of feminist subversiveness which upset him?); while Variety, conceding that the picture was “rather well directed”, argued that
Mrs Reid … may believe she is doing something for the fallen women in turning out a picture of this sort, but the chances are that she will do tremendous harm to the picture industry as a whole and to herself in particular because she sponsors it [white slavery?] by permitting it [the depiction of white slavery?] to continue. [37]
Diary of a Lost Girl, directed by G.W. Pabst, was based on a 1905 novel by Margarethe Böhme, previously filmed in 1918. The novel has been praised for allowing a prostitute to speak for herself, and there is some suggestion that the diary entries in the book were not fictional, but those of a real woman. [38]
In Pabst’s adaptation (the script was by Rudolf Leonhardt), Thymian Henning (Louise Brooks) is the daughter of a well-to-do pharmacist, celebrating at the start of the film, at the age of perhaps 17, her confirmation. On this eventful day the household governess is expelled from the house for being pregnant (to Thymian’s widowed father), and commits suicide; and Thymian, upset, is seduced by Henning’s sleazy assistant Meinert (whom we first see thumbing through pornographic postcards). Thymian gives birth to a baby daughter, and when Meinert refuses to marry her (she would in any case have turned him down), she is packed off to a reformatory while her baby is put out to care with a midwife. The reformatory is an appalling regimented institution (mercilessly satirised by Pabst), and Thymian manages to escape, with the help of the young ne’er-do-well Count Osdorff, a family acquaintance. She goes to the midwife, only to find that her baby is dead. Thymian then joins her friend Erika, who escaped with her, at a luxury nightclub cum brothel. Her first night is so enjoyable that she is bemused, the next morning, when the madam hands her her client’s payment, and refuses to take it. She nevertheless becomes installed at the brothel, and is enjoying raffling herself as a prize to the clientele when she has the encounter, mentioned above, with her father (now married to the new housekeeper). Several years later Thymian learns of her father’s death. Osdorff, a frequenter of the brothel, agrees to marry her, but kills himself on discovering that she has given her inheritance to her two young half-sisters, so they will not have to lead the life she has. Osdorff’s uncle, the elderly count, marries Thymian instead. As a countess she enters polite society and is courted by a reform association. Attending a meeting at her old correctional facility, at which Erika is being disciplined for repeated escapes, Thymian scandalises the good citizens by declaring that she knows exactly what sort of place this is as she was an inmate once herself. She then embraces Erika and the two women walk out enfolded in each other’s arms. (Pabst’s original ending, which he was forced to cut by the distributors, was even more provocative, with Thymian becoming the mistress of a brothel.)
Thymian’s revenge consists only in this small gesture of defiance and solidarity with the rebellious prostitute, but throughout the film, despite her vicissitudes, she never evokes pathos or bears the mark of the trapped victim. In Louise Brooks’s beautifully judged performance, Thymian emerges as a “fallen woman” whose will to life will not be crushed and whose morality lacks for nothing in comparison with the corrupt men who would judge her and bend all young women to their will. The exquisite disdain with which she eyes the repugnant director of the reform school in the final scene is testament to a bold modernist reworking of the old tale of seduction and abandonment, sin and redemption.
Unsurprisingly Diary of a Lost Girl created a censorship crisis on its release. The Prussian state government filed an application with the Higher Film Censor Board (Filmoberprüfstelle) for the approval which had been given by the lower censor authorities to be withdrawn. In granting the application, the Board objected especially to the brothel sequences in the film, which showed the heroine taking pleasure in her work as a prostitute. It observed that the inmates’ life was depicted as “easy, attractive, comfortable, and thus desirable”. It drew attention to the fact that there was camaraderie between the women and that the madam was shown as a soft-hearted personality, and criticised the impression given by the film that it was easy to move on from a life of prostitution: actually, the Board argued, the return of a prostitute to normal life was beset by enormous difficulties, so the film was a lure for the unwary young. The Board particularly objected to the dramatic structure of the narrative, in that brothel life was contrasted favourably with the morally poisoned atmosphere of the heroine’s home and with the sadistic routine of the reform school from which she escapes. The film was banned. [39] Diary of a Lost Girl was also heavily censored elsewhere in Europe: in France, for example, some 400 metres (about 18 minutes), probably the brothel sequences in particular, were cut. [40]
The Red Kimono and Diary of a Lost Girl take diametrically opposed stances towards prostitution, the first being imbued with the traditional feminist negative viewpoint (the concept of “sexual slavery”) and the second anticipating the neutral to positive line adopted by prostitutes’ rights organisations. But they are alike in depicting the fallen woman taking her destiny into her own hands, acting in solidarity with her sisters in misfortune and fighting back against her male oppressors. In so doing the films expose the patriarchal foundations on which the fallen woman narrative was based, and prefigure its demise.
*
In conducting this analysis I am conscious of the male gender bias I inevitably bring to it. Despite their appeal to male fantasy and their imbrication in patriarchal ideology, there is no doubt that many of the fallen woman films held a strong psychological attraction for female audiences, and further study of this aspect of the topic is necessary and would I believe be richly rewarded. [41]
Footnotes:
[1] See e.g. Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: The Origins of the Social Problem Film (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1988), 82-6; Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence (New York: Knopf, 1990), 70-93; Marguerite Engberg, “The erotic melodrama in Danish silent films 1910-1918,” Film History 5, no.1 (March 1993): 63-7; Richard Maltby, “The social evil, the moral order and the melodramatic imagination, 1890-1915,” in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: BFI, 1994), 214-30; and Shelley Stamp Lindsey, “Is any girl safe? Female spectators at the White Slave films,” Screen 37, no.1 (Spring 1996): 1-15.
[2] See Leslie Fishbein, “The harlot’s progress: myth and reality in European and American film, 1900-1934,” American Studies XXVII, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 5-17, and “The fallen woman as victim in early American film: soma versus psyche,” Film and History XVII, no. 3 (September 1987): 50-61. Although the fallen woman narrative paradigm also of course encompasses those who do not become prostitutes, and the term “fallen woman” often conflated prostitutes with women who transgressed sexual norms in other ways, this study is concerned only with prostitute characters (and hence does not deal, for example, with films such as Gervaise). The theatrical depiction of fallen woman characters in the United States at the turn of the century is interestingly discussed in Katie N. Johnson, “Censoring Sapho: regulating the fallen woman and the prostitute on the New York stage,” American Transcendental Quarterly X (September 1996): 167-86.
[3] The pattern in fact predates the Victorian era, as Eric Trudgill demonstrates in his excellent study Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (London: Heinemann, London, 1976). Trudgill draws particular attention to the work of clergyman William Dodd, especially his 1754 novel The Sisters . See pp. 277-8.
[4] See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 267-71. Musser gives the production date as May 1900, which is confirmed in Elias Savada, ed., The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States: Film Beginnings, 1893-1910. A work in progress. Film entries (Metuchen, N.J., & London: Scarecrow, 1995), 282. Kevin Brownlow, in Behind the Mask of Innocence , gives the film’s date as 1902, and asserts that it was “intended primarily for peep-show Mutoscope machines” (71, 518). A print of the film is held at the Library of Congress.
[5] Quoted in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema , 267.
[6] Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1982), 155.
[7] Screen versions include: Opstandelse (Denmark, 1907), The Resurrection (USA, 1909), Katusha (Japan, 1914), Vozrozhdennia (Russia, 1915), A Woman’s Resurrection (USA, 1915), Resurrection (USA, 1918), Resurrection (USA, 1927), Resurrection and a Spanish-language version, Resurrección (USA, 1931), We Live Again (USA, 1934), Aien kyo (Japan, 1937),Duniya kya hai (India, 1938), Resurrezione (Italy, 1944), Fukkatsu (Japan, 1950), Auferstehung (West Germany/France/Italy, 1958), Voskreseniye (2 parts, USSR, 1960/62). The list is undoubtedly incomplete, and versions of the story are known to have been produced in France, Mexico, and China. Marcel L’Herbier’s ambitious Résurrection, which began filming in France in 1923, was left incomplete when the director fell ill. There are also several TV adaptations.
[8] Patricia King Hanson, ed., The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States: feature films, 1911-1920 (Berkeley: University of California, 1988), 1065; Kenneth Munden, ed., The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States: feature films, 1921-1930 (New York: Bowker, 1971), 647; Patricia King Hanson, ed., The American Film Institute Catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States: feature films, 1931-1940. Film entries, M-Z (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), 1772.
[9] Tolstoy’s Katusha, while a victim of misfortune, is guilty of not knowing her place in class society. She turns down proposals of marriage – “She saw that the life she would be obliged to lead with the labouring men who offered marriage would be too hard for her” – and as a servant is not always obedient – “One day, before she knew what she was saying, she had spoken insolently to her mistresses”. See Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Vera Traill (New York: New American Library, 1961), 13.
[10] Auerbach, 168.
[11] See Brownlow, 175.
[12] Madame X (USA, 1909), Madame X (USA, 1916), Madame X (USA, 1920), Madame X (USA, 1929), Madame X (USA, 1937), A Woman is the Judge (USA, 1939), Madame X (USA, 1966). There is also a 1981 American TV version.
[13] Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University, 1985), 4.
[14] Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1986), 113.
[15] Robin Buss, Italian Films (London: Batsford, 1989), 155.
[16] Auerbach (150) writes: “…the fallen woman, heartbreaking and glamorous, flourished in the popular iconography of America and the Continent as well as England. Her stance as galvanic outcast, her piquant blend of innocence and experience, came to embody everything in womanhood that was dangerously, tragically, and triumphantly beyond social boundaries.”
[17] American feminist theorists Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein have argued that the roots of male attitudes towards women are to be traced to family structures, universal under patriarchy, which make childrearing an almost exclusively female responsibility. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), passim; Nancy J. Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University, 1989), Parts I and II; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), passim. Chodorow and Dinnerstein are cited by Barbara Ehrenreich in her foreword to Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), xvi.
[18] Die freudlose Gasse was subjected to heavy censorship on its original release, and was recut, virtually eliminating Asta Nielsen’s role, for distribution in the United States. See Jan-Christopher Horak, “Film History and Film Preservation: Reconstrucint the Text of The Joyless Street (1925)” ” Screening the Past 5 (Nov 1998 – Jan 1999). (This article also features relevant photographic sequences depicting Grete and Else.) My comments are based on the print held in the Bundesfilmarchiv, Berlin, and on the Enno Patalas reconstituted version released by the Munich Filmmuseum.
[19] Munden, 664; James Robert Parish, Prostitution in Hollywood Films: Plots, Critiques, Casts and Credits for 389 Theatrical and Made-For-Television Releases(Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1992), 369.
[20] Carolyn Galerstein, Working Women on the Hollywood Screen: A Filmography (New York and London: Garland, 1989), 281.
[21] This motif perhaps first appeared in a one-act play on prostitution, Tiger, by Witter Bynner, published in 1913. Margaret, a virgin victim of white slavers, is held against her will in a brothel. The client who asks for the privilege of breaking her in turns out to be her father. See Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law (New York and London: Garland, 1990), 114.
[22] According to Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, “Sex pictures”, in Gerald Mast, ed., The Movies in our Midst: Documents in the Cultural History of Film in America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 199, “she commits suicide by inhaling gas”; however the synopsis in Hanson (1988), 809, contends that her estranged lover “stops Thora from committing suicide and then is reconciled with her”.
[23] Savada, 32.
[24] Trudgill, 278.
[25] Joe Hill, “The White Slave” (1913) in Songs of the Workers to Fan the Flames of Discontent (Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1973), 47.
[26] Hanson (1988), 481. The film makes significant modifications to the novel, without altering its political stance. Upton Sinclair appears in a prologue, describing his methods of researching the subject.
[27] Filmoberprüfstelle report, Berlin, 29 March 1926, quoted in Patrice Petro, “Film censorship and the female spectator: The Joyless Street (1925)”, in Eric Rentschler, ed., The Films of G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University, 1990), 38.
[28] Siegfried Kracauer reports that the film was banned in Britain and mutilated in Italy, France, Austria and elsewhere. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University, 1947), 167.
[29] Munden, 215.
[30] Istvan Nemeskürty, Word and Image: History of the Hungarian Cinema (Budapest: Corvina, 1968), 83. See also Bryan Burns, World Cinema: Hungary (Trowbridge, Wilts.: Flicks Books, 1996), 8-9.
[31] Emma Goldman, “The traffic in women” (1911) in Alix Kates Shulman, ed., Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches by Emma Goldman (New York: Random House, 1972), 151.
[32] The director was Walter Lang, whose first film it was. Priscilla Bonner, the star of the film, reports that “he was very anxious, but she [Mrs Reid] was a great help to him.… She was always on the set, always.” Quoted in Anthony Slide, The Idols of Silence (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes, 1976), 72.
[33] Priscilla Bonner attests: “The truth was so dramatic it needed no changes. They told it as it happened. The only fiction was the chauffeur….” (quoted in Brownlow, 91). Names were not changed and Gabrielle Darley subsequently successfully sued Mrs Reid. See Anthony Slide, The Idols of Silence, 72, and Early Women Directors (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes, 1977), 78-9.
[34] See Russell Campbell, “Prostitution and Film Censorship in the USA.”,” Screening the Past 2 (December 1997).
[35] Brownlow, 92.
[36] “There have been a number of wretched pictures on Broadway during the last year, but none seemed to have quite reached the low level of The Red Kimono, a production evidently intended to cause weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Possibly it might accomplish its purpose if the theatre doors were locked, but so long as one knows one can get out of the building, it is another matter.” (Mordaunt Hall, New York Times, 3 February 1926)
[37] Fred., Variety, 3 February 1926. Both this review and Hall’s (note 36 above) are quoted by Brownlow.
[38] See Heide Schlüpmann, “The brothel as an Arcadian space? Diary of a Lost Girl (1929),” in Rentschler, 80.
[39] Filmoberprüfstelle report no. 596, dated Berlin, 5 December 1929, in the collection of the Deutsches Institut für Filmkunden, Wiesbaden. See also Hans-Michael Bock, “Georg Wilhelm Pabst: documenting a life and a career,” in Rentschler, 223.
[40] See René Prédal, La Société française (1914-1945) à travers le cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 102, 104-5, and R. Borde, F. Buache, and F. Courtade, Le cinéma réaliste allemand (Lyon: Serdoc, 1965), 125. See also Tom Dewe Mathews, Censored (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 46.
[41] Examples of fruitful analysis along these lines are to be found in Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, in relation to Victorian art and literature; and in relation to cinema, Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University, 1989), and Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).