Orphans of the Storm (1921) - Part 2

Like the villainous Jacque-Forget-Not, we see that the commoners, like the rapacious aristocracy, are not all that great either, and have their own nests to feather. One of the nice ones is Pierre Frochard, who peddles a knife sharpening and scissor repairing trade in the streets, but not very successfully. His hag of a mother, played by veteran stage actress Lucille La Verne, and his bullying brother Jacques, played by Sheldon Lewis, would rather steal and beg. You can’t pick your relatives, unless you happen to be Lillian and Dorothy Gish, who remain devoted to each other throughout the several ongoing tribulations of this film. They are separated and spend many months trying to find each other, while the blind Dorothy is held prisoner by Mother Frochard and made to beg in the streets. Their underground hideout is a foul sewer of rotten wood, dripping stone and dirty straw. And some strategically placed rats.

Lillian, meanwhile, escapes a fate worse than death at the Marquis’ fete, where the debauched aristocrats bathe in wine fountains and a dandy drinks wine from a glass clenched between the ankles of a woman of apparently questionable virtue. The Chevalier saves Lillian, they fall in love, but cannot be together until they find Dorothy, and his uncle and aunt, the Count and Countess, relent and give their permission. We learn that the Countess is actually Dorothy’s long-lost mother, and so things turn out right at the end and we have our happy ending. Dorothy becomes not only sighted, but rich and aristocratic. Not a bad deal. However, now she is too good for the decent fellow Pierre Frochard, who finally becomes a man by defying his rotten mother and knifing his bullying, lecherous, brother, saving Dorothy from a fate worse than death. Frochard also knifes the executioner about to guillotine Lillian. Apparently a man who sharpens knives for a living knows how to stab pretty well.

Danton, echoing the ferment of the rebellious people mutters, “Damned Aristocrats!” long before Clark Gable ever got to say the naughty word in “Gone With the Wind.” Danton has troubles of his own. Royalist spies are after him, and he hides after being wounded in Lillian’s room, compromising her respectability. But, she’s a feisty thing and insists he stay, cares for him, and he pays her back by rushing to the scaffold with her official pardon just as Madame Guillotine is about to have her for lunch.

Griffith keeps shifting the action from one plot element to another, never letting us get bored, keeping us on edge, making us wonder what will happen next. One wonders what efforts it took to get hundreds of extras in the appropriate costumes, appropriate weapons, cannon, and a horse cavalry filmed at a racing gallop. In the scene where Dorothy and Lillian, reunited as Lillian is in the cart being taken to the guillotine, embrace for the last time and kiss, they are stone still, a vision of complete stillness while the wild crowd behind them of peasants and revolutionaries wave sticks and guns and various sharp things in a constant frenzy. It looks almost like a contrived special effect.

But Lillian need not fear, as Danton makes a speech before the revolutionary tribunal to save her life. We can tell he is eloquent by the way he flails his arms around as he speaks.

The French Revolution, its backwash noted for the horror it created, is not the only revolution to exhibit a dark side. Most revolutions begin with a mixture of high ideals and terrible violence, and end not always with justice and peace, but with a confusing new set of rules to adjust to, and justice is sometimes delayed for months or years. The Russian Revolution had its aftermath of injustice, and even the American Revolution, lauded for creating the first Republic the world had ever known, suffered Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion in its wake. These two limited, but enormously politically important events were limited perhaps because they were regional, and we had no aristocracy upon which to take vengeance once the British army was defeated and could no longer be blamed for our troubles, and no guillotine to make execution a public entertainment of our wrath.

Still if “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” as Thomas Jefferson expressed, it can easily slip through our fingers to unspeakable and bestial anarchy. This is not just the stuff of history. Present day perspectives we might have aside, Mr. Griffith was seemingly echoing Hollywood's uneasiness over the Red Scare in America at the time, with his references in the film to bolshevism. How much of the film is really about the Red Scare in the guise of examining the Reign of Terror would be an interesting discussion.

Orphans of the Storm (1921) - Part 1

Since Bastille Day rolls around this Saturday the 14th, today and tomorrow we’ll have a look at Hollywood’s view of the French Revolution with “Orphans of the Storm” (1921). Hollywood’s view by way of Long Island, where the movie was shot, though the look is credibly 18th century France, and this was one of director D. W. Griffith’s best films.

Real life sisters and silent film icons Lillian and Dorothy Gish play adopted sisters who travel to Paris for a doctor to treat Dorothy’s blindness. On the road, they meet a lecherous Marquis with designs on Lillian, who paints his lips with lipstick before engaging her in flirtation, and who inappropriately touches both the flowers on her bodice and one of her sausage curls. We see he has nefarious designs on her. In Paris, he arranges his henchmen to kidnap Lillian for an evening of debauchery.

We are introduced to a number of characters and plot lines, and how Mr. Griffith (as Lillian used to call him) intersperses this is nothing short of masterful. We meet the handsome young Chevalier, played by Austrian actor Josef Schildkraut in his first American film. His uncle and aunt, the Count and Countess, played by Frank Losee and Katherine Emmet represent the aristocratic class soon to fall prey to the vengeful starving masses, represented by the glowering Jacques-Forget-Not, played by Leslie King.

There is a huge scope of political and social history being diced up for our easy digestion here. A huge swath of time is telescoped in the individual stories of these people whose lives become linked through misfortune, coincidence, and the swift march of historical events.

Mr. Griffith tells us in the prologue that all this French Revolution soured into murderous anarchy by “otherwise highly moral men except that they saw evil in all who did not THINK AS THEY DID.” He even uses the anachronistic term of bolshevism to describe their dissent, and Robespierre is deemed a “pussy-footer” for blowing with the wind politically. Another fun term of days gone by. His use of the term bolshevism, and perhaps the film itself, is a reaction to the “red scare” in the U.S. in the early 1920s.

The Court of King Louis XVI is lavishly presented, with enormous interiors of great halls and salons, and palace exteriors huge in scale. In one scene, courtiers are moving in procession in the great hall, and floor is so polished we can see the reflections of the actors.

The village streets are paved with cobblestones, and the filthy hovels of the poor peasants are shown in stark contrast to the grand environment of the aristocrats. The detail is exceptional.

Danton, played by Monte Blue, is introduced to us as “The Abraham Lincoln of France,” in a scene where he confers with the visiting Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette. When Danton sees the young Chevalier distributing bread to a flock of starving peasants whose desperate looks he cannot escape, Danton remarks, “If more aristocrats were like you, things would be different.”

But they’re not, at least not in this film. Even the Chevalier’s family is known to have committed terrible atrocities in punishing its estate tenants, including the father of Jacques-Forget-Not, who had boiling lead poured into his veins. In this flashback scene, the Chevalier, still a boy, looks on. As boy he is played by Kenny Delmar, who you will remember as the voice of Senator Claghorn on Fred Allen’s radio show. The cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn was based on this Senator Claghorn character of Delmar’s. You can take a moment to play Six Degrees of Foghorn Leghorn. Tomorrow we’ll get back to the film.

Sponsored Link:
Orphans Of The Storm [DVD](1921) DVD