ithankyou: The Griffith Cut… The Mother and the Law (1919), more Miriam Cooper

Sunday, 20 September 2020

The Griffith Cut… The Mother and the Law (1919), more Miriam Cooper

“I bit my lip and drew blood. The camera stayed on my face and you can see the blood run down my chin, I didn’t even feel the pain so intent was I on what I was doing…”*

As unreliable and opinionated a witness as she was in her biography, Miriam Cooper truly was the Dark Lady of the Silents and the scene she is referring to was one I almost dismissed as too over the top. Miriam plays The Friendless One, is a woman wronged spying on her gangster lover as he tries to force Mae Murray’s innocent into sex; it’s horrible on both those levels and Miriam is carrying a gun that she is terrified of using and yet so compelled with anger she really wants to.

By coincidence she is in the same position as Vincent Cassel in La Haine (currently on re-release !) who really wants to kill a fascist skinhead and yet struggles to hold himself back from the fateful moment. As Cassel goes through all manner of moral torments his face is contorted in much the same way as Cooper’s as she bites her lip and the blood flows. Is she trying to shock herself away from this course of action or is her hate so intense she no longer cares who she hurts, even herself? Either way, you can sense Griffith’s prompting as Cooper reacted with Gish-like method and Billy Bitzer’s camera kept on rolling… just as it did for her co-star Mae Marsh.

Marsh said in 1917, “I have seen Intolerance twenty times, I suppose, and it never occurs to me that ‘The Girl’ in the modern epic is myself. It is all Mr. Griffith…In his pictures everything - scenery and players- is just so many instruments in his orchestra.” Stuck as he was between radically different moral and political views, Griffith felt that 'motion pictures must be true to life saying that "the truer they are the greater they are.'" His view of “truth” was, of course, as subjective as yours and mine but we can all agree on a bloodied lip.

Robert Harron and Mae Marsh

The Mother and the Law has one of the most complex gestations in silent film having originally been filmed just after Birth of a Nation as a small budget drama concerning a couple down and out in the big city. Before BoaN was even released though, Griffith was plotting his next move and the result would be the epic Intolerance of which the film would form just one of the four strands. Intolerance unachieved at the box office and in 1919 the director re-cut this film along with the Babylonian sequence with the effervescent Constance Talmadge.

Both are on the Masters of Cinema Intolerance Blu-ray and Mother is especially worth viewing as a separate film as Griffith included more footage and rounded out parts of his story and some of the characters, not least Cooper’s Friendless One (honestly DW, why not just call her Francine or something?).

Arthur Lennig, has written about the film in Film History , 2005, Vol. 17, No. 4, Unfashionable, Overlooked or Under Estimated (2005, Indiana University Press)* and establishes that: “Once Griffith decided to make Intolerance, The Mother and the Law would be changed from a simple story into an audacious indictment of how large social, economic, and moral pressures affect the lives of the principal characters.”

Miss Jenkins at a society ball, realising people have too much fun...

Griffith’s target for intolerance seems an odd one for modern viewers in that he decided that some charitable organisations, “up-lifters”, were in it for their own glory. In the film their commitment to the expense of too much charity leads to lay-offs, as the factory owner needs to pay for his barren sister’s indulgences. This triggers a violent strike and the main characters’ fall into poverty and further intolerance, yet it does seem more than a little convoluted: which industrialist is seriously going to cut salaries in order to fund his sibling’s pet charity? This, of course, did not go unnoticed at the time and in the 1919 cut, the director is at pains to explain that he doesn’t mean all charities only those run by bored, sexually frustrated women and not the Salvation Army, the church and the majority of "charitable" charities. DW was however inspired by contemporary government reports and, according to Lenning, “…had in mind John D. Rockefeller, who by this time was managing much of his father's fortune… a pious and sheltered young man opposed to whatever he considered licentious, including drinking and dancing…”

For Griffith, mankind’s moral weakness could only be changed by appealing to people’s good conscience and not by legislation and force. It is an argument for the ages from the country that was to prohibit the sale of alcohol in 1920 and which, even today, is reluctant to force its citizens to wear face masks or not own automatic rifles.

These “intolerables” who don’t tolerate poverty and unchristian behaviour from the undeserving poor are not DGW’s only target in the film and, as Lennig argues, he was concerned with the inequalities created by “indifferent capitalism”, criminality and the death penalty. So, to give him his due, The Mother and the Law is if nothing else a damning inditement of the latter. Lenning quotes assistant cameraman Karl Brown on the impact a visit to San Quentin – “an actual prison inhabited by living dead men” – had on his director who then made sure that the film’s execution sequence was as accurate as possible. The three men standing ready with razors ready to cut the ribbons that drop the panel between the doomed man’s feet is particularly unsettling; as with a firing squad, they would never know which cut was the quickest.

Griffith's meticulous gallows

Griffith is also critical of “indifferent capitalism” and not just in its preference to indulge “self-proclaimed do-gooders” rather than pay a living wage. Uncaring industrial cost-cutting leads all three of our main characters to the slums and criminality and whilst DW would have recoiled at socialist solutions he was strangely on the same page with regards to the plight of Marx’s “industrial reserve army”, the under-employed.

“Bitter mistakes” unbalance society with Cooper’s Friendless One and “her first love”, The Boy (Robert Harron, who doesn’t get enough press!) and The Dear One (Mae Marsh) all displaced from Jenkins Mill and semi-rural idyll, and forced to fend for themselves in the city where they “flounder helplessly in the nets of fate”.

Miriam’s good looks get her the attention of a Musketeer of the Slums (Walter Long who played a black-faced villain in BoaN) and work as a hostess in his bar. It is unclear if she becomes a prostitute but she becomes the Musketeer’s girl – possibly wife – tough choices with no one else to turn to.

Robert Harron, Walter Long and Miriam Cooper

Bobby Harron gets work as a small-time crook whilst Mae ekes out a living with her father in the slums. Marsh’s character is the most nuanced, the moral heart of the film who retains the child-like innocence her director was so fond of. She and Harron start a relationship but she refuses his advances, believing in spit of everything around her, in Christian values. The Boy marries her and they form a new family when their child is born and he informs the Musketeer that he no longer wants to work in the business of crime.

But it is not so easy to disentangle himself from the underground and he’s set up for a crime he didn’t commit and ends up doing time. Meanwhile the “do-gooders” end up taking their baby away from The Dear One, refusing to believe that the wife of a criminal is capable of bringing up a child. Then the Musketeer notices The Dear One and the scene is set for the breakneck injustices of the final half and hour when murder, circumstantial evidence and conscience all come into play.

Lenning has The Mother and the Law as the last time Griffith would examine the world around him in a naturalistic manner and with a critical, crusading spirit. It’s a film that, in a simpler way than Intolerance, gives some balance to our view of his problematic views on race and social order, both of which were challenged at the time and which we must continue to contextualise.

Griffith/Bitzer deliberately allow this close up of Mae Marsh to drift out of focus: she's lost...

Harron, Marsh and Cooper are all good and the latter gives probably her most distinguished performance. Miriam is strikingly modern, dark eyes so worldly and fierce whereas Marsh is Victorian, child-like and under-nourished, running through the Griffith range with almost equal skill to Lillian and Mary. But Cooper is an outlier of a more sophisticated age even if she lacked the other’s raw skill. Harron is also a fine player and inhabits this sunken world with naturalistic ease, he too carrying the shallow frame of a poorer age.

Walter Long also shows what a fine performer he was without BoaN’s “make up”, he kept on reminding me of the original Musketeer, Snapper Kelly from Griffith’s Pig Alley (1912), Elmer Booth who died in a car crash in 1915. Harron, who also died a tragic death in 1920, was in that film too, which was co-written by Anita Loos who also worked on The Mother and the Law… Griffith at his best with a largely settled team?

Harron behind bars...

The Masters of Cinema Blu-ray is available at a ridiculously reasonable price from Amazon. You probably already have it but you may not have watched The Mother and the Law… in which case please give it a go for DW’s sake and for Miriam Cooper’s lip!

*Miriam Cooper, The Dark Lady of the Silents

**Arthur Lennig, The Mother and the Law Author(s): Source: Film History, 2005, Vol. 17, No. 4, Unfashionable, Overlooked or Under Estimated (2005), Indiana University Press

Bonus screen shots!