‘She was so sweet, but now she’s raving mad.’
A sickly young woman on the wrong side of the tracks falls into the clutches of a confidence trickster when he discovers that she is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Telling the tycoon that she has died, he plans to swap her with her twin sister, who is the acknowledged heir to his fortune…
A contemporary adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ Victorian melodrama, The Woman in White, by director Léonce Perret. Mae Murray plays the twins, and Warner Oland brings the villainy.
Separated at birth, twins Daisy and Violet White (Murray) have grown up at opposite ends of the food chain. Violet has been raised in privilege and wealth by her father, industrialist Harry White (J W Johnston). On the other hand, Daisy is living in poverty with her mother (Edythe Chapman), whose health is failing and has no idea of her origins. Circumstances conspire so that Chapman’s dying words are heard only by confidence man, John Bent (Oland). She confesses the identity of Daisy’s father and guides him to the documents that prove it. A lucky bet at the track gives Oland the necessary capital to launch a sinister campaign, and he puts Daisy into Franklin College, an exclusive girl’s boarding school.
Oland goes to Johnston but tells him that Daisy is dead and hands over the documents he took from her mother. Impressed by the man’s apparent honesty, Johnston offers him a management position at his factory and accepts him as a friend. Meanwhile, Violet has fallen in love with engineer Bob Anderson (Henry G Sell), which throws a wrench into Oland’s plans. Fortunately for him, Johnston is fatally injured in an accidental explosion at the factory’s laboratory. On his deathbed, the tycoon extracts a promise from Violet to marry Oland. Afterwards, she refuses, but he is persistent and eventually drugs her so he can swap the sisters around and put Violet in an asylum.
Wilkie Collins’ famous novel has been adapted for both big and small screens on multiple occasions, with four versions already released before this one. Ernest C Warde’s more traditional version, ‘The Woman In White/The Unfortunate Marriage’ (1917), being the most noteworthy. Writer-director Perrett elects to bring the story into contemporary times instead, bringing it to America and setting it in the world of big business. However, the film never bothers to explain the nature of Johnston’s business. He just has a big factory with a lab attached, where he mixes chemicals with an insufficient regard for health & safety.
Without the Victorian trappings that usually come with this story, there’s inevitably a complete absence of the gothic atmosphere that’s one of its most enjoyable aspects. However, despite the lack of opportunities for outlandish flourishes and stylish visuals, Perrett does manage some creative shot framing. There’s also some cross-cutting between events happening simultaneously, a basic filmmaking technique by today’s standards but quite sophisticated for this era. His story adaptation is also quite neat, covering the novel’s major points, although some aspects do push the audience’s suspension of disbelief somewhat.
These issues mainly concern Johnston’s immediate trust in Oland’s sneaky fraudster. For ‘Uniontown’s biggest industrialist’, he’s a surprisingly easy mark, immediately handing Oland the job of running his factory when the man he has hired writes to refuse the post. In short order, Oland’s quickfire temper has made relations with the workforce so bad that they propose to strike after he tells one man off for smoking in a prohibited area. Worse still, Johnston’s so eager for Violet to marry the crook that he extracts that promise from her on his deathbed. Elsewhere, there’s also a heavy reliance on a lot of coincidence, with one event after another generating circumstances that assist in Oland’s skullduggery. It’s almost as if fate keeps intervening on his behalf because the idea that he’s planned everything from the start is beyond ridiculous. He’s certainly not that bright, changing the company name from ‘White, Otis & Co’ to ‘Bent’ in what is probably not the greatest rebranding in business history.
Performances are solid throughout, and it’s particularly interesting to see a slim, young Oland playing a thorough rotter. After working regularly for the next dozen years, he became an unlikely star as the rotund, amiable, Confucius-quoting Chinese detective Charlie Chan. Murray also does well in her dual assignment. Neither of the twins is a very nuanced character, but as Violet, she has to go from flighty and fun-loving to grief-stricken and distraught to feisty and defiant, and she manages the transitions convincingly. Both stars also display a minimum of the exaggerated gesturing that has defined silent movie acting to the uninitiated.
Murray was born Marie Adrienne Koenig in New York in 1885 and first found fame as a dancer on Broadway. After several assignments as a chorus girl, she joined the celebrated Ziegfeld Follies, eventually becoming a headliner in 1915. Subsequent work found her dancing with future film stars Rudolph Valentino and John Gilbert. Making a move into films in 1916, she was almost an instant hit in a series of romantic comedies and dramas for producer Jesse L Lasky. More success followed at Universal with hits such as ‘Modern Love’ (1918) and ‘Big Little Person’ (1919), which co-starred Valentino. After some freelancing, she landed at MGM, where she made her most famous film, ‘The Merry Widow’ (1925), for Erich Von Stroheim. Unfortunately, the arrival of talkies derailed her career, with her first sound film ‘Peacock Alley’ (1930), failing at the box office despite being a remake of her 1922 silent hit. Her husband at the time, Prince David Mdvani, advised her to leave the studio, and the decision effectively ended her career. In later life, Murray struggled with health issues and lived in poverty after being declared bankrupt. She passed away in the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills in 1965.
Acceptable retelling of a familiar story. It’s best to avoid comparing it to the 1917 version, though.
Mark David Welsh 