The Sentimental Heroine Versus the "New Woman": the Heart of Nora Flynn

After filming two more adaptations, Temptation (1916) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1916), DeMille again collaborated with Hector Turnbull and Jeanie Macpherson on The Heart of Nora Flynn (1916). The New York Times , interestingly, praised the feature as "an excellent example of the modern photodrama as opposed to the film founded on a story or stage play." DeMille, however, expressed the contradictions involved in the studio's transition from adaptating intertexts in genteel culture to filming original screenplays for a broader audience. Since he was in the habit of personally inspecting exhibition venues, the director called attention to the need to update film titles as marquee attractions. As he wrote to Lasky, "we are inclined to be a little too high-brow. I have noted two pictures . . . playing opposite each other. . . . Going Straight has been jammed all week and A Gutter Magdalene has been starving to death. The Heart of Nora Flynn proved to be an awful lemon as have the titles of many of our recent productions."^[74] Whatever the merits of its title, which was indeed sentimental, the film marks a transition in the director's body of work during the Progressive Era. As such, it may be read as a sequel to The Cheat in its representation of gender, class, and ethnicity as these intersect in a consumer culture.

The screen in The Heart of Nora Flynn , as in The Cheat , simulates a display window for the well-to-do whose conspicuous consumption conflicts with personal ethics. During the credits, all the characters, with the exception of playboy Jack Murray (Charles West), are lit against black drops in medium shots as they fantasize about desired objects in a mood of reverie. Mrs. Brantley Stone (Lola May), obviously a lady of leisure, reclines on a chaise longue with a lap dog and takes tea from a silver service. A cut to an extreme close-up shows the details of her lustrous pearls and lace-trimmed negligee as she stares at an image of Jack inside her teacup. By contrast, Brantley Stone, described as "A Man of Means" (Ernest Joy), is introduced in a shot similar to that of Richard Hardy in the credits of The Cheat . Seated at his desk, he is busily poring over ticker tape and correspondence, but he smiles when miniature figures of his wife and children appear on his desk. Unfortunately, his happiness evaporates when his wife sends the toddlers away and greets

her friend Jack. Appearing next in the credits are the two Stone children, Anne (Peggy George) and Tommy ("Little Billie" Jacobs), seated on a wicker chair and looking at an album. Nolan, a hot-tempered chauffeur (stage and vaudeville actor Elliott Dexter), is working behind the hood of a stately and well-polished limousine. Finally, Marie Doro, a comedienne whose theatrical career was promoted by Charles Frohman, appears in the role of Nora, the "Irish Nurse Maid." Preparing the children's bath, she appears rather wistful. A cut to a medium close-up shows her holding a child's outfit while the superimposed image of the man she hopes to marry, Nolan, appears to her left. (In fact, Doro and Dexter were married for a brief period in real life.) Since the lady of leisure and the Irish maid are the only characters privileged with close-ups, the film announces itself not only as a morality tale about the ethics of the domestic sphere but also as a drama about female desire.

A film that may be construed as The Cheat narrated from the viewpoint of the maid standing in for the wife, The Heart of Nora Flynn contrasts the self-absorbed "new woman" with the sentimental heroine. At the beginning, Nora instructs Anne, who preys on goldfish, "Have all the fun ye want, darlin' but don't get it by hurtin' someone else"—a lesson the child's self-indulgent mother must learn as well. While Mr. Stone devotes long hours to business deals, Mrs. Stone neglects the children and engages in a dangerous flirtation with Jack. An obliging "man about town" who has just acquired a luxurious, cream-colored roadster, he sends her notes that read, "I've a perfect peach of a new car . . . take a little spin with me. It's the color you like." Unhappily, this situation escalates into a sensational turn of events one evening when Mrs. Stone decides to abandon her husband and children and to abscond with her lover. As in The Golden Chance and The Cheat , DeMille uses dramatic low-key lighting to construct a tableau that dramatizes the moral dilemma of the characters. Indeed, he specified lighting effects in the script for some of the film's most impressive scenes.^[75] A medium long shot of the living room, for example, is lit only by the glow of a table lamp illuminating the lower half of the screen as the couple secretly meet and prepare to depart. A cut to an exterior long shot shows the headlights of Mr. Stone's chauffeured limousine as it speeds toward the house. A cut back to the interior shows the headlights flash through the window and briefly illuminate the surprised guilty couple. Startled, Jack turns off the table lamp to plunge the room into darkness.

Practically exposed with her lover, Mrs. Stone appeals to Nora to hide Jack: "The future of my home—my babies—everything is in your hands!" Unfortunately, Jack takes refuge in Nora's room in the back region upstairs while Nolan, infuriated by what he construes as a betrayal, breaks down the door and shoots the scoundrel. As in The Cheat , a jealous man spends the night in jail, but the scene is pedestrian compared to the dramatic use of

low-key lighting and shadows of despondent figures in the earlier film. DeMille appears in this instance to be quite uninterested in quoting from his own work. Upon his release, Nolan is tailed by reporters who ask, "Did it ever occur to you that your sweetheart has been used as a 'Cat's-paw'?" Despite the chauffeur's entreaties that she reveal the truth to newsmen, Nora appears willing to sacrifice not only her reputation but her employment for the sake of the children. Discharged by an employer who tells his wife, "I won't have her kind of woman contaminating you and the children," Nora at first pleads with Mrs. Stone, "You've got to tell Nolan it's you and not me that's bad." Confronted with Mrs. Stone's own desperation at being exposed, however, the maid consoles her in a medium two-shot that conveys an intimacy impossible between two women who are not social equals. A medium shot invites sympathy for Mrs. Stone's dilemma because she is next shown alone in a room with a gilded bird cage. After dismissing the re-porters, Nora tells her mistress, "I don't want any thanks, ma'am but you've got to promise not to see him again!" Silently witnessing the pact between the two women, the wounded "man about town" hovers in the extreme lower right hand corner of the frame, a sign of his irrelevance. A cut to the neglected children shows them waiting in the hallway; in the next shot, Mrs. Stone embraces them for the first time in the film.

As for Nora, her real loss is neither her reputation nor her employment, but Tommy. A delightful child, he is inconsolable when she leaves the mansion and he gives her his favorite toy, a wooden duck, as a token of his affection. DeMille orchestrates a heart-wrenching farewell sequence by intercutting medium shots of the sobbing child staring into dappled sunlight, long shots of Nora and Nolan as they walk away from the estate, and a reverse angle shot of Tommy as he lays crumpled on the bench window seat inside his room. The director was so skillful in eliciting performances from child actors that their absence from his later work is regrettable. In the final shot of the film, Nolan comforts an equally desolate Nora by offering her a branch with orange blossoms to signify their future together.

DeMille singles out The Heart of Nora Flynn rather than The Cheat in his autobiography as a film that "was praised for its lighting effects. 'An auto-mobile charging along a dark street, with only the lights and the reflection of the street lamps on the pavement visible' seems commonplace now," recalls the director, "but it was deemed worthy of special mention in The Motion Picture News ."^[76] A film that relies heavily on intertitles in addition to lighting to convey a moral lesson, The Heart of Nora Flynn dramatizes the contradictions of a consumer culture according to a conflicting visual strategy. A scrutiny of the reviews shows that the critics themselves were divided about ambiguities in the film. As the New York Dramatic Mirror complained, "one or two of the subtitles could have been greatly improved, as they lent

a decidedly false note to an otherwise realistic production." Variety described the film as "one of those self-sacrificing yarns, on the 'Peg' lines, in which a little Irish maid . . . saves her mistress from being compromised." The Motion Picture News concluded, however, "it is needless to speak of artistry where the DeMilles are concerned. There seems to be a deftness about their touch . . . understood by persons who never even heard the word 'art.' " Moving Picture World concurred: "Of the splendid lighting effects, the superb settings and realistic atmosphere it is not necessary to say much on a Lasky production."^[77]

Signifying contradictions involved in the redirection of the privatized family outward toward consumption and commercialized leisure, DeMille's discourse on the "new woman" endorsed the values of the "old" as opposed to the "new" middle class. Such ambiguity permeated the film's narrative strategy. As critics observed, the director relied heavily upon the use of intertitles to convey a sentimental message that conflicted with a technically advanced visual style. Although DeMille's mise-en-scène drew upon the legacy of Victorian pictorialism as an intertext, lighting setups not only reinforced moral lessons but also enticed spectators by imparting a luster to expensive commodities like home furnishings and automobiles. The representation of material goods, in other words, was seductive and contradicted didactic intertitles. Silent cinema, like other cultural forms in the genteel tradition, privileged sight as the key to spectacle in an era of increased conspicuous consumption.^[78] As symbolized by the self-indulgent "new woman" in The Cheat and The Heart of Nora Flynn , however, the pleasures of self-gratification were not as yet unambiguously inviting. Guilt was thus displaced, on both a literal and symbolic level, onto the working-class, ethnic, and racial "Other" while the "new woman" was recuperated according to sentimental values.

DeMille later maintained, in his role as a cultural steward, that the cinema promoted understanding across class and ethnic, if not racial, barriers; he asserted: "the screen has made good progress in teaching the lower grades of society that every rich man is not purse-proud and heartless and in disabusing the minds of the upper ten of the belief that every laboring man goes home . . . and beats his wife and children."^[79] Yet his Progressive Era films preserved class, ethnic, and racial hierarchies in an articulation of genteel middle-class ideology. To be sure, the traditional line between separate spheres based on gender was also redrawn according to Victorian social practice. As demonstrated by The Golden Chance, The Cheat , and The Heart of Nora Flynn , however, the "new woman" was constructed as spectacle for display in the front region through spatial exile of the urban "Other" to the back region. Although the Irish, or old, immigrants—unlike the Japanese, or new, immigrants—were assimilable in a future increasingly

dominated by popular rather than genteel culture, the director's work attests to fault lines in the body politic during a period of rising nativism and racism. Apart from describing the terrain of the respectable middle-class home as a site of self-theatricalization, the terms front and back region also serve as a useful metaphor for exploitive class, ethnic, and racial relations in consumer capitalism.