Unearthed Treasures – episode #6 : A Midnight Romance

After the comedy Out for the Coin, let’s stay in the U.S.A. a little longer and turn our attention to A Midnight Romance, written and directed by Lois Weber in 1919. Nicknamed the “Belasco of the screen,”¹ once the highest-paid director in Hollywood and regarded as the equal of David W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber was one of the great filmmakers of the silent era — a pioneer whose immense success was followed by an equally profound and unjust disappearance from film history for fifty years.

To discuss this now-unavoidable figure of early cinema, we reached out to Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, curator of silent films at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and co-founder of the project Cinema’s First Nasty Women. The project’s mission is to bring women of the silent era back to the center of film history through research, restoration, publication, and screenings of films featuring rebellious, funny, daring, or subversive women, made between 1898 and 1926 around the world.

But before that, let’s take a closer look at what we currently know about A Midnight Romance, a partially lost romantic comedy…

1 – Love at First Sight on the Beach at Midnight

By the time Lois Weber directed A Midnight Romance in 1919, she already had more than ten years of experience in the film industry — and it had been five years since she made The Merchant of Venice, the first feature-length Hollywood film directed by a woman. After working for the American branch of Gaumont, then for Rex Motion Picture Company and Universal, the director founded her own company, Lois Weber Productions, in 1917. Its first project, Idle Wives, co-directed with her husband Phillips Smalley, was a bold reflection on marriage, motherhood, and the moral dilemmas faced by middle-class women. A Midnight Romance was the fourth film produced by Lois Weber Productions, which went on to make around 10 to 12 films before closing in 1921.

 

 

Although Lois Weber also wrote the screenplay, the original story of A Midnight Romance was by Marion Orth, a playwright and author whom Weber introduced to the film industry after purchasing the rights to two of her stories: The Price of a Good Time and Borrowed Clothes. The collaboration between the two women proved highly productive, resulting in about ten projects, including the masterpiece of social realism The Blot (1921). After writing the screenplay for Ford’s beautiful Hangman’s House (1928), and later two scripts for Murnau — 4 Devils and City Girl — Marion Orth continued writing for the screen for about fifteen years, ending her career at Monogram.

 

A Midnight Romance stands somewhat apart from the other films made by the duo, most of which were social and moral dramas, and is closer to what we would now call a rom-com :

“The young son of fashionable parents meets a pretty girl deporting herself on the beach at midnight and falls in love with her. The girl is working as a maid at the hotel where he is stopping, but evades him and does not tell who he is. He searches for her without success, believing her to be a guest of the hotel, and has her so persistently on his mind that he fails to fall for the clever maneuvering of a trio of crooks who are desirous of having an excuse to blackmail him.”²

In short, it’s a case of « Love at First Sight on the Beach at Midnight ». And instead of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, the cast features Anita Stewart and Jack Holt – their first and only appearance together on screen.

Anita  Stewart began her career in 1911 at Vitagraph, where she became a protégé of writer-director Marguerite Bertsch, who wrote several roles for her in short films and directed her in The Glory of Yolanda (1917). Like Lois Weber, Anita Stewart sought artistic independence and founded Anita Stewart Productions in 1918, in partnership with Louis B. Mayer, with her films distributed by First National. After Virtuous Wives, directed by George Loane Tucker in 1918, A Midnight Romance was the second production of the actress’s new company. Between 1918 and 1922, Anita Stewart produced nearly twenty films before marrying Harris Thorpe and gradually retiring from the screen prior to the arrival of sound.

Opposite her is actor Jack Holt, who plays Roger Sloan, the millionaire’s son. Famous for his roles as rugged heroes and adventurers, Holt began his career in 1914 and crossed paths with Lois Weber as early as 1916, landing a supporting role in The Dumb Girl of Portici. He later shared the screen with Mary Pickford in The Little American, portrayed Michael Lanyard — a.k.a. The Lone Wolf — and worked under directors such as Allan Dwan, Cecil B. De Mille, Frank Capra, and William Wellman. He ended his career starring in B-westerns produced by Columbia and Republic.

 

 

2 – A simple little thing

 

If Lois Weber was described as the “Belasco of the screen” upon the film’s release — a reference to playwright and stage director David Belasco, renowned for his extremely realistic sets — it is because she « leaves nothing to the imagination in staging a play for registration upon celluloid through the lens of a camera. »³ For the production, rather than shooting in studios, the director rented one of Los Angeles’s most refined hotels « from midnight until morning every night  »⁴ in order to film several « lavish ballroom scenes ».⁵

 

In January 1919, an article in Moving Picture World announced that the shooting of A Midnight Romance was completed and that the film was in the process of being edited. A first print of the film arrived in New York at the end of February, for a « probable release three weeks later »⁶ The film was indeed released in the U.S. on March 10, 1919, initially announced as a five-reel feature running 65 minutes, then described in an Exhibitors Herald article the following April as a « seven-part comedy drama »⁷ The reviews were generally positive — one called it « a pretty romance [with] an excellent production »⁸, while another described it as « a simple little thing, light enough to put no great strain upon the emotions yet sufficient to bear the weight of the incidents strung upon it. »⁹

The film also seems to have been a public success, thanks both to the popularity of its leading actress and to Lois Weber’s work, « typical of her past performances »¹⁰, she being “the maker of moneymakers,” known for her box-office records. However, the explanations given for these successes were deeply misogynistic: “goes over big because it’s a woman’s picture and women will talk when they like a film”; “The Reason : It’s a Woman’s Picture”; and the cherry on top — a journalist who claimed Lois Weber’s success was not due to her talent but to her « intuition, because she’s a woman »¹¹

3 – The Unknown Bather

 

As mentioned earlier, A Midnight Romance is a partially lost film. The Library of Congress holds reels two through five, meaning that only the first reel of the film is currently considered lost.

What about the print from the “Calais lot”?

Unfortunately, it is not the missing first reel, which would have allowed the film to be fully reconstructed. It is instead a 4-minute fragment running at 18 fps, approximately 270 feet in length, corresponding to the end of reel two and the beginning of reel three. We chose to scan this fragment nonetheless because it has a unique feature — it is entirely blue-tinted, capturing the moment of the lovers’ midnight encounter on the beach.

Moreover, while the Library of Congress print is the original camera negative — and therefore free from the wear caused by projection — it still shows signs of chemical deterioration, particularly in this sequence.

The film was released in France on January 23, 1920, under the title La baigneuse inconnue (which could be translated as The Unknown Bather), and this “Calais print” is a French release by Pathé Frères, containing French intertitles.

4 – An interview with Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi about Lois Weber

Let us now turn to Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, curator at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, who kindly and generously agreed to answer a few of our questions about Lois Weber. We would like to sincerely thank her here.

Classicinema : How can we explain Lois Weber’s invisibility in film history for 50 years ? When and how did she come back into the spotlight ?

Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi : I think Lois Weber’s case is a good one to show that films and people get forgotten when no one talks about them because they cannot watch the films. This is also a case when the archives and the film historians and DVD producers and festivals worked together well to bring back Weber back into the picture. Obviously the amazing work by Prof. Shelley Clarke was at the center of all this. Her great research and contributions to scholarly books, DVD booklets, festival catalogues helped to draw continuous attention to Weber. Also many other academics, such as Prof. Jane Gaines continued to stress Weber’s relevance and expressed the wish to include her work in their teaching.

Classicinema : The EYE Filmmuseum restored Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916) in 1990, then in 2010. Could you tell us more about that project ?

Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi : This was a good impetus for Eye to restore Shoes back in 1990. Once the restoration started screening in festivals, more attention was garnered. Eye re-restored Shoes in 2010, this time using digital technology to remove the bacterial damage. Since 2010 the film has been issued by Milestone/Kino, who also incorporated the original script into the restoration. The attention since 2010 has not faded, as the film got onto the National Film Registry and is part of many university courses teaching silent cinema.

Classicinema : Do you have other prints of Lois Weber’s films ? Are there any other restoration projects planned?

Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi : Since 2010 we’ve been constantly focused on Lois Weber, and were able to identify a few short films that were in our collection, with Shelley Stamp’s help. One of these ais also included in Milestone’s DVD: The Price (1911). As we started to recognize Weber as an actress as well, we also rediscovered The Twins (1911) within the Desmet Collection. This also shows why it is important to create better filmographies and to work on the credits. This film was in our collection for decades, but it wasn’t attributed to Weber in our database. Also, in 2019 we received an almost complete nitrate print (with Dutch intertitles) of Where Are My Children? (1916). As this film has rather recently been restored and released from another source, there is no current plan to do anything with it. However, clearly if there comes another round of restoration for this title, our print should also be compared to other existing versions.

Check out my Youtube channel to (re)discover this excerpt from A Midnight Romance.

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Special thanks to George Willeman, Nitrate Film Vault Leader at The Library of Congress !

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