User Reviews

This is a typical story of temptation to adultery. A man with an irritatingly over-uxorious wife has a certain nostalgia for his more easy-going former girlfriend. She had thrown him over in order to marry money and herself plays the "good wife" in an entirely cynical manner to manipulate her husband and obtain whatever she wants. But she is irritated that her former lover should have, as she puts it, been "so easily consoled" and plans with equal cynicism to make him unfaithful to his goose of a wife.

It is rare to have such a story told almost exclusively from the feminine side. The two husbands are portrayed as having little notion of what is going on and to be merely reacting, positively or negatively, to the activities of their wives.

Of female solidarity there is no sign whatsoever and a senes showing a woman's suffrage meeting if used by Weber to satirise the political activities of women. Of the three women we see, one is simply there to show off socially, the second is there to keep an eye on er rival and the third hs no notion of what the meeting is about. The speaker at the meeting is a man. Women had obtained the vote by the time the film appeared in 1921 but Weber seems to have held a very dim view of the long political battle that had preceded it. The fact that Weber introduced this scene (which is in itself quite unnecessary to the plot of the film) indicates a deliberate satirical intention.

She seems to take an equally dim view of the cchracters of both the "too wise wives" she portrays. The one certainly is formally presented as "unselfish" and "good" but she is actually portrayed as exceptionally irritating. When, at point, she concedes self-deprecatingly that no one could love such a foolish woman as herself, the spectator can only really agree with her. As for her rival, she is vain, manipulative and selfish while the only other woman shown in the film is quite simply stupid. Nevertheless it is these women who have characetrs - the men are portrayed as almost entirely characterless - and whose chaarcetrs determine the action.

So Weber has here very deliberately set out to make a female-entered that is anything but feminist. Weber is often accused of being over-moralistic but this is sometimes to ignore the way in which she deliberately undercuts her own ostensible moral position. This film is in the end a rather amoral one and has more in common than at first meets the eye with the male-centred films on a similar theme made at this time by Erich von Stroheim (Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives) to which the title of the Weber film is itself an allusion.

It is a common Weber strategy to take a conventional point of view and reverse it - she uses a frame story in Idle Wives to undercut the message of the popular novel on which it is based and in the short comedy Discontent she deliberately reverses the sentimental view of civil war veterans that had been presented in the films of Thomas Ince. Here she is performing several such reversals. The women's movement is portrayed as kind of pious fraud,. It is not women who are at risk from men but men who are at risk from women since it is women not men who are the active social agent. Finally the opposition between the good and the bad woman is a false one (a male myth in fact) since the two types of women are equally "too wise", each in their own way and equally concerned to pursue their appearently quite different. - but in the end not so different as all that - strategies of manipulation.

I was expecting to see something interesting by an early woman director, but unfortunately the lack of artistic merit and craftsmanship in this film is a real disappointment. This is not the film I would choose to show to represent a woman's skill at film making. The film is not up to the best films of its era. The pacing is slow, the plot is predictable, and the acting is stiff. The exception is Mona Lisa who gives a convincing performance as a "dangerous" woman." It is true that the characters were difficult to being alive. The characters for the most part are ordinary middle to upper middle class couples. It is easy to make a dangerous woman interesting, but to make ordinary people interesting takes a very talented director, writer and actors. This film did not have the talent needed for the job.

Another drawback to the film is that it is not very visual. Change a few outdoor scenes, and it could easily have been a film of a stage play. The director did not use the unique aspects of film to enhance the story.

On the other hand, the film is interesting to the social scientist, because it shows 20's homes, furnishing, clothing and manners. It is interesting to woman's rights activists because it shows an early female director. It is interesting to people who follow the morals of the time for the female view of marriage and how woman should manage it. I disagree with another writer here who felt it showed husbands teaching their wives how to behave. The husbands are generally clueless here. The wives are the ones who make mistakes and learn from each other how to manage their marriages. It is all about them. The moral lessons basically are good ones, although expressed in a dated way. The lessons the film teaches are that both men and women can learn from not being selfish in a relationship, both should try to do things that the other person likes instead of what you want them to like, and appreciate the mate you have.

I have only seen this film by Lois Webber, and unless she improved in other films, I don't see why she is considered a filmmaker of any significance.

I don't think this film would have been restored if it had been directed by a man. Perhaps it was restored because it showed some of the sociological issues mentioned above. If it were restored because it represents an early female artist, then there are many better films where women played an important that are still languishing and deteriorating in vaults without the finances to be saved. "A Kiss for Cinderella," for example, or "Annie Laurie," for another example. Both have strong and important female leads and in the case of "Annie Laurie," a major female influence creating the film. It would have been better to use the money to restore one of these instead.