Dark Lady in love shock… Is Money Everything? (1923), Miriam Cooper

It was such a horror I’m glad I don’t remember anything more about it…

Four decades before Lennon and McCartney wrestled with the relationship between love and money, Miriam Cooper and Norman Kerry were involved in earnest consideration of the same issue under the guidance of Glen Lyons. The results are pretty conclusive and if the Scousers had been paying more attention they could have saved themselves hours of writing in Paul’s living room and the resultant two minutes and twelve seconds of pop glory but perhaps you can never have enough evidence?

I wasn’t really here for the answer just for the chance to see The Dark Lady of the Silents as Miss Cooper entitled herself in her autobiography, written “with” Bonnie Herndon and published in 1973 when she was – probably - 82. As I may have mentioned in the past, the star of Griffiths’ Intolerance and Birth of a Nation (not Oh, KKK…), has always stood out for me. There is indeed something about Miriam and if it’s not necessarily her acting, it’s certainly her look, at once striking and almost modern with big, soulful eyes that manage to be more knowing and yet less emotionally engaged than Lillian’s or Mae’s.

She is highly watchable and holds the attention on screen in spite of her honest assessment that she wasn’t a great actress and that her strong features and those dark eyes, described to her in the book as “sensual” and “liquescent” by two breathless academics after one screening of BoaN, touched many a watcher. She certainly did not lack the disciplined desperation of the poorer class nor the ability to transport herself into a role and suggested that an imagination born of necessity was key to her success.

Miriam Cooper

“… when Mr Griffith told me, ‘you’re a Southern girl watching your brother go off to war’, I didn’t have to act, I was that girl.”

She draws some fascinating parallels with her contemporaries – all of them young, pretty women, often without fathers and seizing the chance the pictures provided to support their families. These were also characteristics that appealed in inappropriate ways to DWG too and Mary Pickford wasn’t the only one who thumped the old racist. Cooper wonders how so many youngsters could write about the silent era and rightly points out that so much of the contemporary sources were PR guff: I’m not making anything up. I was there… Yet, she clearly is inventing some events and storylines throughout her story, not that this stops the book being entertaining. She tells all in a stylishly frank way, dishing dirt and opinion as freely as you’d expect from a grand dame but we’ll never really know if her first cinema make-up was applied by Mack Sennett or whether Lil and DW were closer than professionally required?

Only three of her forty shorts and five of her twenty one feature films survive, BoaN, Intolerance, The Woman and the Law – Griffiths’ director’s cut of her main story in Intolerance - husband Raoul Walsh’s Kindred of the Dust (1922) and Is Money Everything? So, unlike her hated love rival (?) Theda Bara, she at least has some major films extant and even this film allows us to see her in a run-of-the-mill feature in decent shape the Grapevine DVD being taken from a 35mm print.

Norman Kerry

Miriam took a pay cut down to $650 a week to make Is Money Everything? as times were still unsure for her and Walsh who was yet to breakthrough. She filmed in Detroit whilst he soon set off for Tahiti to make Lost and Found on a South Sea Island. They were also starting to drift in their marriage and she wonders whether she still loves him in her diary as quoted in the biography. Absence made the hearts fonder although they did eventually divorce in 1926.

 Cooper describes the film as apt because of their money worries but it’s also about a couple faced with a choice of success in business or with their marriage which might explain why I find her portrayal convincing enough! She plays Marion Brand, wife of John Kerry’s ambitious grocer, John. John’s a god-fearing man at the start of the film and one who eschews violence, much to the pleasure of his father-in-law, Reverend John Brooks (John Sylvester).

After marriage he buys into the town’s grocery business and starts to make a real success… which increasingly is at the expense of other local businesses. His ruthlessness impresses a rich city woman, Mrs. Justine Pelham (Martha Mansfield) travelling through town, and it won’t be the last time the two cross paths as John transposes his grocery acumen to Wall Street.

The pressures of earthly success drive the Brands apart...

The family moves to high society in New York and whilst Marion begins to get isolated, the city slickers flock to John’s new success yet some, notably Justine’s husband, Roy (William Bailey) and leading financier Phil Graham (Lawrence Brooke), clearly do not like his impact on their capital nor his aggression. Pelham sends his wife to extract as many secrets as she can but Justine has her own more romantic agenda and sets about tying to woo John away from Marion.

The films only around the hour mark, yet it’s light on the detail of the money making and heavier on the social life of the Brand’s new society. There’s a long sequence on a hunt during which Justine pretend to have fallen from her horse in order to entrap John but, corporate killer he may be, he does not lack in love or loyalty to his wife.

But, as the money keeps pouring in, the pressures on the Brands’ marriage only increase as the temptations of unchristian power and desire beckon… Marion is there suffering in almost every scene and if there’s to be a way out, she will have to be the one to take drastic measures.

Martha Mansfield plays The (One Who Would Be) Other Woman

So… not a classic but Glen Lyons directs well and creates a watchable morality tale that was no doubt a crowd pleaser across the mid-West. Throughout it Miriam Cooper draws the eye and for the reasons she and Bonnie Herndon articulate in the biography, quoting film historian Walter Coppedge, “Of dark liquescent eyes and a strangely still but magnetizing beauty, Miriam Cooper’s looks were oddly provocative: she had sex and breeding, and she moved with an inviting grace… Griffith’s ‘Dark Lady’… struck a contrast with the two other types he developed…” these being the “vivacious freckle-faced hoyden” (Constance Talmadge) and the “ethereal innocent” (Lillian Gish).

Further viewing: One of Cooper’s best-looking survivors is the sixteen minute The Confederate Ironclad (1912), directed by Kenean Buel and available to view in stunning quality at the National Film Preservation Society website – which is full of wonders!

It is also well-worth watching The Woman and the Law (1915) on the Eureka Intolerance set, you see more of Miriam and the narrative is naturally far more focused than the strands we see in the main film. Plus, there is just more of the dark eyes and the timeless connectivity of Ms Cooper!

Further reading: If you can find a copy, don’t hesitate to pick up The Dark Lady of the Silents – as Miriam says, she was there and even at a distance of sixty years, her recollections are invaluable especially when place in the context of the more forensic studies of those academics who weren’t.

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