Six
Set and Costume Design as Spectacle in a Consumer Culture: The Early Jazz Age Films

DeMille's "Second Epoch"

In January 1922 Paramount Pictures ran a full-page ad in Motion Picture News that displayed a cornucopia titled "Cecil B. DeMille's Horn of Plenty for Exhibitors." Stacks of bundled dollar bills and quantities of loose coins poured from the cone's opening. At the tip of the horn, labeled with the titles of all but two of the director's postwar films, was Old Wives for New (1918).^[1] Clearly, this first Jazz Age feature marked the beginning of a "second epoch" in the periodization of DeMille's extraordinary film career, an event recognized and even touted by the studio at the time. Apart from the frontier sagas and biblical spectacles of the sound era, the director is mostly remembered today for the stylish sex comedies and melodramas of the late 191 Os and early 1920s. Yet he reluctantly changed course, to one that would distinguish his career as a commercial filmmaker, against his own predilections and in response to the repeated urging of his longtime business associate, Jesse L. Lasky.

Although DeMille continued to address the genteel middle-class during the Jazz Age, he also constructed a showcase for ostentatious consumption that appealed to lower-middle-class and working-class female spectators. At the center of his society dramas was the sentimental heroine converted into a sexual playmate, a transformation accomplished by visual strategies emphasizing not only set and costume design but didactic intertitles. The director's mise-en-scène, which had won critical acclaim during the Progressive Era, influenced as well as registered the social change of the postwar decade. As consumption became a pleasurable aspect of modernity, his compositions were less distinguished by dramatic low-key lighting to articulate ethical dilemmas and more renowned for spectacular sets. Scripts give

27. A trade journal advertisement celebrates the lucrative 
"second epoch" of DeMille's career with the titles of 
his Jazz Age sex comedies and melodramas.

evidence of these changes. Jeanie Macpherson included details in Old Wives for New , for example, of furnishings like an elegant desk in the study of a wealthy businessman, a carved Italian chair in a fashionable boutique, and a festooned canopy in the boudoir of a prostitute.^[2] DeMille's Jazz Age texts, in short, represented increasingly ostentatious and even outré levels of consumption both as spectacle for visual appropriation and as a showcase that set fashion trends in apparel and interior decorating.

A barometer of socioeconomic as well as aesthetic changes, DeMille's filmmaking style now exemplified a reversal of the intertextual relationship between cinema and established forms of genteel middle-class culture. During the Progressive Era, the director had legitimated feature film by demonstrating its correspondence to spectacles such as stage melodrama, social photography, world's fair and museum exhibits, and department store displays. As the First World War was drawing to a conclusion, however, he himself became a trendsetter. A sign of rebellion against cluttered Victorian taste, contemporary women's clothing as well as the interior decoration of houses, themselves ascribed with expressive personalities, had been changing even before the war.^[3] After the armistice, Theatre announced in the flippant tone that characterized discourse on women as consumers:

Los Angeles now fills the proud position Paris once occupied as the arbiter of fashion. . . .

More women see deMille's pictures than read fashion magazines. . . . five whole reels just crammed and jammed with beautiful creations. . . .

And then there are the tips on interior decoration and house-furnishing wherewith the Art Director and his staff . . . adorn each scene. It is within bounds to say that the taste of the masses has been developed more by Cecil B. deMille through the educational influence—

Good Lord! The beans are spilled. Nobody will read any further than the word "Educational."^[4]

Indeed, the consumer revolution of the early twentieth century required massive education to influence and mold public taste, an enterprise undertaken by the advertising industry in its role as a social agency. Significantly, DeMille's early Jazz Age films constituted a useful intertext for middle-class advertisers who, as Roland Marchand argues, considered themselves "apostles of modernity" with a mission to legitimate consumption. The sanctioning of consumer behavior through appeals to Victorian moralism was in fact an essential message in DeMille's pictorial mise-en-scène of the late 191 Os and early 1920s. Furthermore, the director's representation of consumer goods such as fashion ensembles and bathroom fixtures, as well as his use of color processes and of Art Deco to signify modernity, were several years ahead of developments in advertising.^[5] A discussion of specific texts will clarify the relationship between DeMille's mise-en-scène and magazine ads as etiquette manuals for a consumer culture.

Speaking in patriarchal tones in an autobiography compiled by Donald Hayne and Art Arthur, DeMille is apologetic about relinquishing his ambition to film historical epics in favor of" the art of the theater [which] must be popular." Indeed, he characterizes this transition in his career as an "original sin" and as "a last good-by to integrity and art."^[6] Since the director was uncomfortable even in retrospect about momentous changes that enabled him to become an architect of modern consumption, Jesse L. Lasky's influential role as the corporation's vice-president deserves scrutiny. After

the financial disappointment of Joan the Woman , Lasky suggested that DeMille consider "a subject modern in theme" and attached to his correspondence, dated January 1917, a memo from Carl H. Pierce on the subject of "Costume Stuff." Pierce wrote that "Joan will get over big—a modern story would have gotten over bigger. . . . What the public demands to-day is modern stuff with plenty of clothes, rich sets, and action." Two months later, Lasky recommended that DeMille and Macpherson "write something typically American. . . that would portray a girl in the sort of role that the feminists in the country are now interested in . . . the kind of girl that dominates. . . who jumps in and does a man's work." In August, Lasky urged DeMille to make an adaptation of David Graham Phillips's novel, Old Wives for New (1908), because it "is full of modern problems and conditions, and while there are a number of big acting parts, it does not require any one big star. . . . It would be a wonderful money maker and make a very interesting picture." As an alternative to Adolph Zukor's costly and escalating contract negotiations with Mary Pickford, a shrewd businesswoman, Lasky was proposing all-star features that capitalized on the studio's stock company. Toward the end of the year, he purchased the rights to the Phillips novel for $6,500, a decision that resulted in further communication with his director-general on the West Coast: "Personally I would like to see you become commercial to the extent of agreeing to produce this novel. It will do twice as much businesss as 'The Woman God Forgot' or 'The Devil Stone' [two Geraldine Farrar features about the historical past or with a flashback to a former era] on account of the subject matter and the fame of the novel." Unrelenting, Lasky wrote a few weeks later: "You should get away from the spectacle stuff for one or two pictures and try to do modern stories of great human interest. 'Old Wives for New' is a wonderful title. . . . I strongly recommend your undertaking to do it."^[7]

Accordingly, DeMille began production on the film in March 1918 in time for a midyear release and set an important trend both in the industry and in a burgeoning consumer culture. Although Lasky described "an entire change in the taste of the public" that manifested itself in the popularity of war pictures as well as "a decided tendency toward lighter subjects," later that year DeMille made another version of his first film, The Squaw Man (1918). Its title is missing from the cornucopia of riches accruing from studio productions advertised in Motion Picture News . Lasky's reaction was lukewarm: "I doubt if it will do as much business for the exhibitors as your other pictures, as the subject seems rather old-fashioned." Still unenthusiastic about costume dramas, he encouraged the director to make a variation of Old Wives for New that was titled Don't Change Your Husband (1919). Somewhat defensive, DeMille replied, "The success of 'The Squaw Man' has convinced me that I can do other revivals of this sort." Most likely, he was also prodded to direct Why Change Your Wife? (1920), the last film in the trilogy, because Lasky wrote, "It is really better that you produce this

picture than William [credited with the story] on account of your being so strongly identified with 'Don't Change Your Husband.'"^[8] DeMille was able to indulge his penchant for historical epics in his trademark flashback sequences, but the vice-president had accurately taken the pulse of postwar filmgoers. Less than five years after the Lasky Company was founded to upgrade cinema for the respectable middle class, Lasky himself was encouraging his director-general to think in terms of production for a broad audience. DeMille thus set an industry trend with the production of Old Wives for New . After its success, countless titles hinting at marital problems such as Rich Men's Wives, Too Much Wife, Trust Your Wife, How to Educate a Wife , and His Forgotten Wife appeared on marquee signs.

The Commodification of Marriage: Old Wives for New, Don't Change Your Husband, Why Change Your Wife?

Although Old Wives for New is an adaptation based on a well-known novel, the credits unequivocally announce that cinema is now on an equal footing with literature. Macpherson is thus acknowledged as the author of the photoplay in the same title that attributes the film to the novelist. DeMille, of course, is credited as the author of the production. (By the time he made Why Change Your Wife? the director designed a trademark for his credit, a round medallion with his name etched around the upper half and his profile stamped in the center.) Since Macpherson embroidered the essential plot of Old Wives for New in numerous scenarios about the commodification of marriage throughout the silent era, Lasky was astute in recognizing the importance of the novel. Phillips, a best-selling novelist whose stories appeared in widely circulated periodicals like the Saturday Evening Post , was ahead of his time in contemplating the impact of modernity upon the upper-middle-class family, specifically, "the bearing of the scientific revolution upon woman and the home."^[9] An increasing incompatibility on the part of antagonists Charles and Sophy Murdock, a couple drifting apart in middle age, is shown in the husband's fastidiousness and receptivity to fashion as opposed to the wife's neglect of her appearance and household. Because a woman's home was considered an expression of her personality, Sophy's slovenliness not only affected members of her family, including two grown children, but revealed a serious character flaw. Phillips was sympathetic about her failings, attributed in part to rural family origins, but DeMille proved merciless in deconstructing the sentimental image of the American wife and mother in favor of the "new woman."

Macpherson begins Old Wives for New with a symbolic sequence cleverly titled in the script as follows: " 'Life's' Bargain Counter / Across which our destinies are bartered like / so many Sacks of Meal—to 'Fate.' / Some are sold for Dollars / Some for Ambition / Some for Love—but all—are 'Sold.' " As described in the script, "Life," costumed as Harlequin, is "constantly

laughing" behind a counter with "tiny figurines of live people, grouped in four sections, marked. . . staples, remnants, novelties, and mark-downs. . . . Among these are the main characters of the story. . . . Sophy Murdock—in 'Marked Downs,' Murdock and Juliet in 'Staples'—Berkeley and Jessie in 'Remnants,' Viola in 'Novelties.'" Shopping at the bargain counter, "Fate," costumed as Columbine, purchases some of the figurines and pays "Life" by "lifting a purse full of gold coins" that "shower over the counter."^[10] Possibly, this sequence about the commodification and reification of marital relations in a consumer culture was too literal a representation of marketplace transactions invading the domestic sphere. Instead, DeMille begins Old Wives for New with a didactic intertitle that could be construed as a quote from the novel but was not even a paraphrase and, moreover, could not be attributed to any character in the film:

It is my belief, Sophy, that we Wives are apt to take our Husbands too much for granted. We've an inclination to settle down to neglectful dowdiness —just because we've "landed our Fish!" It is not enough for Wives to be merely virtuous anymore, scorning all frills: We must remember to trim our "Votes for Women" with a little lace and ribbon—if we would keep our Man a "Lover" as well as a "Husband"!

Such was the sermon of the film, a legacy of Victorian pictorialism, addressed to female spectators enjoined to embrace the delights of the consumer culture if only to retain their marital status.

After DeMille introduces the main characters in terms of their social status, signified by close-ups of their hands performing various functions, he opens the film with the first of his celebrated bathroom sequences. Although the set design is modest compared to the spacious tiled bathroom with a sunken tub and a shower decorated with a silk curtain in Male and Female (1919), the scene was surely impressive for audiences who may have been able to afford an automobile but still lived in homes without bathtubs.^[11] DeMille's mise-en-scène includes a tub on the left opposite a door flanked by two wash basins, each with hot and cold water faucets, a mirror, a shelf, and a pair of sconces for illumination; the basin on the left is at a right angle to a stained glass window above a towel bar on the rear wall. Ornate molding decorates the cornice, doorway, window, and mirrors of the room. The flooring consists of alternate black and white tiles in a diamond-shaped pattern. Charles Murdock (Elliott Dexter), dressed in a bathrobe and assisted by a valet, opens the window so that a view of the trees contrasts nature with artifice. A fastidious person, he is disgusted to find Sophy's hair clogging his basin, not to mention a messy comb and toothbrush that have been carelessly left in his corner of the bathroom. Worse, a close-up from his point of view shows untidy toilet articles strewn haphazardly about his wife's basin and vanity. Sophy (Sylvia Ashton), introduced in the credits as she is eating chocolates and reading the funnies, enters the bathroom in a grumpy mood

28. A flashback in Old Wives for New (1918) shows Wanda Hawley 
as the lovely young woman courted years ago by Elliott Dexter, now 
a dissatisfied spouse. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

and slams the window shut. She is wearing a loose bathrobe over her corpulent figure and has carelessly swept her unkempt hair into a knot. Deciding that a bath is not worth the effort, Sophy decides to seek refuge in bed while her family breakfasts downstairs. Murdock seats himself at a table set with silverware and a glass fruit compote but is displeased to find an orange spoon in the wrong place. The maid, who is as slovenly as her mistress, serves overcooked poached eggs with broken yolks. As he rises from the table in disgust, his daughter, who is a more sympathetic character in the novel, murmurs, "I'm sorry dear—if mother would only let me run the house!"

Disgruntled, Murdock retreats to his study and stares at a photograph of his wife, shown in an insert, when she was a slender, young woman with masses of blond curls (Wanda Hawley). A dissolve to a picturesque country scene shows how he literally reeled in his bride while she was walking barefoot in the stream—a reference to fishing in the first intertitle of the film. DeMille cleverly juxtaposes past and present tense as Murdock's memory of his lovely young bride is intercut with Sophy, now a middle-aged, obese, and untidy matron, emerging from her room and bursting in on his

reverie. Appalled by her aging figure, the offended husband declares, "Sophy—it's a degradation for two people to go on living together who no longer care for each other! I propose that you will take half of all we've got—and that you and I shall release each other." A display of armaments on the panelled wall of the study includes a pistol, a long blade, and a sword. Apparently, the battle of the sexes has commenced. Murdock and his son, Charley, who sides with his mother in the novel's version of the marital breakup, decamp on a hunting expedition. Again, DeMille associates romance with outdoor sportsmanship as the businessman falls in love with Juliet Raeburn (Florence Vidor), the vacationing owner of a fashionable boutique aptly named Dangerfield's.

Sophy is angered to learn that she may indeed have a rival. During a marital argument photographed in low-key lighting, she tears up the photograph of herself as a young bride in a gesture of self-loathing and exclaims, "Have all the fun you want with that younger, fresher woman—But just you remember . . . I'll never divorce you—never!" Who is at fault here? Unlike the unambiguous moral dilemma dramatized by low-key lighting in earlier films such as The Heart of Nora Flynn , the scenario of Old Wives for New is more complicated. Sophy is self-indulgent, but Murdock, whose relationship with his daughter has incestuous overtones, is in love with a much younger woman. Consequently, low-key lighting becomes a technique increasingly keyed to the emotional mood of a shot rather than the dramatic articulation of moral issues. With respect to the use of genre conventions, however, DeMille is less ambiguous. As in the Chimmie Fadden series, he is uninterested in sustaining comedy throughout and resorts to melodrama. Although he employs misogynistic humor to lampoon Sophy, the film takes a melodramatic turn that equates consumption with sexual lust and sinful behavior as opposed to sentimental romance.

Characteristic of DeMille's visual style in the early Jazz Age comedies and melodramas, set decoration and costumes provide a more reliable sign of personal ethics than dramatic low-key lighting.^[12] Several weeks after the hunting trip in Old Wives for New , for example, Murdock is shopping with his daughter at Dangerfield's and meets his business partner, Tom Berkeley (Theodore Roberts), who is accompanied by his mistress, Jessie (Julia Fare), and her friend, Viola (Marcia Manon). DeMille's mise-en-scène underscores the interpenetration of home and marketplace or the decline of separate spheres based on gender in that Juliet's boutique resembles a tasteful upper-class residence. A split-level design features a checkerboard, black and white marbled floor, walls framed with moldings and intersected with pilasters and columns, an imposing chandelier, an elegant floor lamp and sconces, dark velvety drapery with tie backs, plush upholstered chairs, and artistic floral arrangements. Yet this well-appointed establishment, as signified by its name, has become the site of questionable transactions in which

women's bodies are commodified. Since Juliet retains her scruples and shuns him as a married man, Murdock later joins Berkeley, Jessie, and Viola at a supper club, where a dancer in a harem costume evokes Orientalist fantasies of luxury and sensuality. Unfortunately, Berkeley transfers his attentions to a flirtatious blonde named Bertha (Edna Mae Cooper), and Jessie disrupts their rendezvous to shoot her fickle lover. A sign of lower-class origins as well as loose morals, Bertha's gaudy boudoir, where Berkeley dies, contrasts with Juliet's tasteful boutique. The prostitute has a penchant for garish furniture decorated with gilt rococo curves, ruffled drapery and shiny bedspreads, cheap imitations of art work on wainscoted walls, and kitsch memorabilia.

A complicated scenario, the final events of Old Wives for New unravel when Sophy, flattered by Murdock's impecunious secretary, Melville Blagden (Gustav Seyffertitz), decides to undergo a tortuous beauty regimen in order to remarry. A benign representative of a patriarchal order, Blagden regulates female behavior by educating Sophy to redefine herself as a commodity through the consumption of cosmetics, gowns, and accessories. At the film's conclusion, DeMille cuts from Sophy's elegant wedding to Murdock's second marriage in Venice. After having met at an outdoor flower market signifying nature as opposed to artificiality, the businessman and dressmaker have reconciled. Yet the film's affirmation of self-theatricalization and fashion cycles emphasizes the importance of artifice rather than sincerity in sexual and marital relationships. The reification of social relations signified by performance rituals in genteel living rooms, in other words, has now invaded the back regions of respectable households. Far from constituting a safe haven, even the private quarters of well-to-do homes now simulate the marketplace as a site for the commodification of female bodies.

According to a fan magazine article, "So many wives wrote in indignant letters to DeMille about 'Old Wives for New' that C. B. and his clever writer, Jeanie Macpherson, wrote a story from the wives' standpoint." The Chicago News described the second film of the trilogy as an attempt "to restore harmony with . . . feminine followers."^[13] Although Don't Change Your Husband was interpreted as the wife's version of matrimonial strife, in effect the heroine has already been transformed into a "new woman" so that her next lesson is to reduce unreasonable demands on her mate. DeMille begins the film with a humorous intertitle that foregrounds the battle of the sexes to contrast its more intimate scale with the tumult of World War I: "This does not deal with the tread of victorious Armies, nor defeated Huns—but is just a little sidelight on the inner life of Mr. and Mrs. Porter." Leila Porter (Gloria Swanson), an elegant and fastidious woman, finds "several dull gray years of matrimony—getting slightly on her nerves." Oblivious to his wife's discontent, Jim Porter (Elliott Dexter) boasts an expanded waistline, buries

29. Gloria Swanson enjoys an elegant breakfast but finds her second mate 
as immersed in the news as the first spouse she has just divorced in Don't 
Change Your Husband (1919). (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

his head behind newspapers, forgets their wedding anniversary, and indulges a taste for green onions.

As in What's His Name , the director registers reversals in marital relationships through clever use of mise-en-scène. During a compromising flirtation with ne'er-do-well Schuyler Van Sutphen (Lew Cody) at a costume ball, Leila, who appears as Juliet with ropes of pearls in her hair, ascends a marble staircase with an ornate balustrade on the right side of the screen. After declaring that she can no longer tolerate her " 'corn beef and cabbage' existence," Leila descends a marble staircase on the left in the vestibule of the house she is abandoning. Whereas Jim is seated to her left with his head buried in the papers after dinner in the opening sequence, in her second marriage Leila finds Schuyler seated to her right at the breakfast table and equally immersed in the news. DeMille's mise-en-scène thus dramatizes the reification of marital relations; that is, marriage partners have in effect become interchangeable parts attesting to the dominance of exchange value in commodity production. Yet this transformation, based on the conversion of the sentimental heroine into the fashionable "new woman," raised disturbing moral issues. As his version of Freud's enigmatic question, "What do women want?" the director shows a sphinx and a pyramid in an art tide, "The Eternal Feminine." An equation of mysterious Orientalism with

female self-gratification in a consumer culture, the Egyptian symbols reveal the persistence of the image of the vampire whose extravagance spelled ruin.

Determined to win back his former spouse, Jim shaves off his mustache, adopts an exercise regimen, and acquires a dapper wardrobe. Phillips observes in Old Wives for New , ". . . of those external forces that combine to make us what we are, dress is one of the most potent. It determines the character of our associations, determines the influences that shall chiefly surround and press upon us. It is a covering for our ideas no less than for our bodies.^[14] Macpherson's blunt rewriting of this quotation in Don't Change Your Husband exemplifies the reification of human consciousness in a consumer culture in which human beings are confused with commodities: "Of those external forces which combine to make us what we are, DRESS is the most potent. It covers our ideas no less than our bodies—until we finally become the thing we look to be." Social ritual as an indecipherable hieroglyph in genteel living rooms, in other words, has been reduced to a reading of external appearances that reinforces self-commodification. A proliferation of mirror shots in DeMille's Jazz Age films attests to the increasing importance of style over substance.^[15] A medium shot shows Jim, for example, standing in front of a mirror while staring at his image in a hand mirror. Although he is a powerful businessman who dominates complex financial negotiations, his pose in this instance resembles that of prostitutes, namely Viola in Old Wives for New and Toodles (Julia Faye), Schuyler's mistress in Don't Change Your Husband . During the credits of the former film, Viola, a "Painted Lady" with Orientalized features, is seated in front of a dresser and applies rouge as she gazes in the mirror.^[16] Similarly, Toodles is presented in the credits as she primps in front of a dresser with a three-way mirror, turns around to face the camera, and kisses an image of herself in a hand mirror. Genteel concern with appearances as a sign of the character and breeding of the "best people" has deteriorated into narcissistic self-absorption. Accordingly, Jim wins back his former wife at the conclusion of Don't Change Your Husband by transforming himself into a dapper dinner guest wearing a tuxedo and a fur-collared coat.

Although the scenario of Don't Change Your Husband appears to be a variation of Old Wives for New , the intensity of moral issues raised by a consumer culture begins to diminish in the midst of pleasurable pursuits. Significantly, the characters in Old Wives for New are still troubled by their scruples or exhibit some degree of conscience in their behavior. Juliet, for example, refuses to be involved in a relationship with a man who has deceived her about his marital status. When Sophy wrongly names her as a corespondent in a libelous divorce suit, Murdock goes to extreme lengths to protect her reputation. Even Berkeley, as he lies dying from a gunshot

wound in a prostitute's apartment, begs his partner to avoid a scandal that will tarnish his family name. The frivolous characters in Don't Change Your Husband , on the contrary, pursue their pleasures without much regard for the consequences of their actions. Leila engages in a flirtation with Schuyler, whom she marries after divorcing Jim, and Schuyler in turn has an affair with Toodles during his marriage to Leila. While the members of the younger set impulsively gratify their whims, their elders, personified by Schuyler's Aunt Huckney (Sylvia Ashton) and an aging bishop (Theodore Roberts), register indignation in point-of-view and reaction shots. DeMille, interestingly, comments on generational differences by representing conscience as the disapproval of middle-aged spectators rather than as an internalized set of behavioral norms. But in Why Change Your Wife? , the last film of the trilogy, even the older generation relinquishes adherence to conventional standards of behavior. Aunt Kate (Sylvia Ashton), who is the equivalent of Aunt Huckney in the guise of a chaperon, is no longer alarmed by the flirtatious behavior of young spouses and herself falls prey to the charms of an attentive European violinist.

To dramatize the less inhibited and hedonistic nature of the marital relations in Don't Change Your Husband , DeMille conflates exotic visions of distant lands and employs a bizarre mixture of Orientalist motifs in set and costume design. A Middle Eastern backdrop for social entertainment, Leila's living room features ornately carved pilasters, tapestry, carpeting, and a potted palm. An Asian servant in Chinese dress provides drinks in cups carved out of precious jade at an anniversary dinner. Leila, whom Schuyler addresses as "Lovely Chinese Lotus," poses in an off-the-shoulder gown and turban as part of the decor; to complement her ensemble, she carries an enormous fan of peacock feathers. Even more exotic is Schuyler's residence, a mansion that includes a loggia with matching rattan furniture and a study simulating a display window with chinoiserie for the decoration of elegant homes. A scroll hangs on the rear wall, and an Oriental vase stands on the cabinet to its right. A chair in the foreground is upholstered in fabric with a bamboo pattern, and a fringed throw in floral print is artfully tossed over a nearby sofa. On the right side of the floor, partially covered with an Oriental carpet, stands an ornate table with an incense burner. Leila, responding to the pungent aroma filling the air, enters this sybaritic domain at her peril. Delighted by a beaded gown unpacked for a costume party, she drapes the fabric around her body in a pose that recalls Edith's posturing in the Shoji Room of The Cheat . The showcasing of women as manikins or commodities serves in both features as a prelude to rituals of seduction. A description of this scene in the script reads even more like the sequence in the earlier film because Schuyler presents Leila with a mandarin coat that has a hypnotic effect: "A change comes over Leila; . . . she seems suddenly

to be slipping back into Orientalism; to be taking on a real, subtle, un-American personality. She is no longer a laughing Society Woman merely trying on a Chinese Cloak, for fun."^[17]

A cultural practice established by halftones, magic lantern slides, panoramas, stereographs, and actuality footage, as well as by department store displays and museum and world's fair exhibits, consumption in the form of visual appropriation was linked to exotic sites. Indeed, picturesque images of the "Other" mediated the disturbing experience of urban pluralism for middle-class consumers who preferred social reality contained within the framework of photographs, plate glass, and theatrical venues. Yet the correspondence of cultural forms in genteel society accounted for the intrusion of the marketplace, simulating an elegant living room, into the back regions of affluent households. Symbolic of the accelerating dissolution of separate spheres based on gender was the fashionable "new woman" who shopped in emporiums laden with enticing Orientalist displays of merchandise. Aestheticized visions of modernity, however, were rooted in a legacy of Victorian pictorialism and thus raised the specter of moral dilemmas. Consumer behavior in effect implied sexual license that was interpreted as un-American, unpatriotic, or uncivilized, even as Americans loosened their purse strings and eased their consciences to buy goods signifying refinement. Preoccupation with bathing rituals and with elegant bathrooms in the latest fashion, as represented in DeMille's celebrated texts, therefore belied anxiety about consumption insofar as it evoked the "Other," including women, as threats to the body politic.^[18] Furthermore, commodities that denoted genteel status, like the restraints of sentimental culture against which men rebelled, threatened masculinity. Schuyler in Don't Change Your Husband , for example, is a morally bankrupt and effeminate voluptuary because Orientalism remains at the core of his obsession with illicit sexuality and sybaritic luxury. Thus his exclamation about "'Pleasure'—'Wealth'— and 'Love"' cues the sensational fantasy sequence of the film. A spectacle prefiguring the well-known flashback to a Babylonian court in Male and Female , this footage consists of three separate scenes photographed mostly in extreme long shot: Leila seated on a gigantic swing suspended over a swimming pool adorned with masses of flowers and bathing beauties in fishnet stockings; Leila draped in rich fabric and jewels with the well-oiled bodies of black male slaves at her feet in an opulent Oriental court; and Leila clad in flimsy chiffon as she lounges in an Edenic paradise, with Bacchus squeezing grapes into her mouth.

Although DeMille was quite willing to pique the curiosity of prewar audiences, as evidenced in The Golden Chance and The Cheat , his postwar flashback and fantasy sequences left very little to the imagination. The Jazz Age films, in particular, exemplify Guy Debord's discourse on the "society of the spectacle" as a "Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially

translated. . . . a world vision which has become objectified." Furthermore, motion picture images as spectacle constituted a form of commodity fetishism, an investment of desire in objects displacing human relations, that represented a confluence of the filmmaker's own fantasies with the burgeoning of consumer capitalism. Granted, the commodification of spectacle was hardly a recent historical phenomenon, but its replication and mass distribution by the cinematic apparatus occurred during a period of accelerated economic development. DeMille's texts thus represented a consumer culture that appealed to the eye, an appeal that had been stimulated for decades by a realist aesthetic enhanced by technological developments such as halftones in periodicals and electric lights in theaters and department stores. Consumption thus became "a hegemonic 'way of seeing,'" as T.J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox argue, in that an elite cultural practice eventually dominated the marketing strategies of a nationwide economy.^[19] The issue of whether consumer behavior patterns including leisure-time pursuits followed a top-down or bottom-up model is debatable, but the significance of visual appropriation in a postwar decade of increased class and ethnic conflict cannot be underestimated. As the middle class became more immersed in consumption as a way of life, the lower class, especially women, found that the democratization of luxury was accessible for the price of a movie ticket, a price they could still afford at neighborhood venues if not at downtown movie palaces.^[20]

A year after the completion of Don't Change Your Husband , Lasky prevailed upon DeMille to make Why Change Your Wife? Although the director later sought to obtain rights to the film for Macpherson, William deMille received credit for the story and Olga Printzlau and Sada Cowan wrote the scenario.^[21] Granted, the film's intertitles are much wittier, but given the similarity of the plot to the previous two films, based on the best-seller by Phillips, Macpherson's influence was probably not inconsiderable. A remodeling of the Victorian sentimental heroine as the centerpiece of a consumer culture, Why Change Your Wife? is a variation of Old Wives for New and opens with yet another of DeMille's famous bathroom scenes. Robert Gordon (Thomas Meighan) is shaving in front of an oval mirror at right angle to an elegant oval window, decorated with a scalloped and fringed valance, on the rear wall. As his wife Beth (Gloria Swanson) constantly interrupts his toilet, a title informs us "Marriage, like genius, is an infinite capacity for taking pains—" DeMille in fact proved quite daring by showing Robert sitting on the toilet seat twice when Beth demands access to the medicine cabinet behind the mirror and requires help fastening her dress. Unfortunately, Beth's "virtues are her only vices" in a hedonistic era associated with playful flappers, bathtub gin, and raucous jazz. She disapproves of her husband's commodious wine cellar, furnished with leather furniture, a full-size bar, and racks of bottles. When Beth voices concern about postwar issues, such as "the

starving millions in Europe," Robert replies, "Why do you insist that everything I do for our happiness robs someone else?" Social problems—not to mention the primary role of the middle-class family in rearing children—disappear from DeMille's Jazz Age films as self-gratification displaces noblesse oblige.

Drawing on Orientalist themes about consumption that equate an expensive boutique in the public sphere with the privacy of a woman's boudoir, DeMille shows Robertvisiting a shop, aptly titled Maison Chic, where an Asian woman in exotic dress greets him at the door. A medium long shot shows Sally Clark (Bebe Daniels), an attractive model, climbing on top of a dresser with a three-way mirror to peer out an oval-shaped window, a decorative motif that links the dressing room of the boutique to the Gordons' bathroom. DeMille deleted an intertitle in the script that characterizes Sally as a gold digger "who buys the necessities of her life with her salary and the luxuries with her alimony" so that she is not entirely unsympathetic but a sexual playmate in contrast to highbrow Beth. Preparing to model a backless negligee with transparent sleeves and a train trimmed with fur, she removes the full-length slip beneath the flimsy skirt in a close-up revealing high-buttoned shoes,^[22] places a heart-shaped tattoo on her left shoulder, and daubs perfume from a bottle labeled in an insert as "Persian Night." Beth, on the contrary, is outraged that evening when she tries on the negligee and gazes at her image in the bedroom mirror. Robert insists, "My dearest, since time began dress has played it's [sic ] role in love, and woman has worn it to delight her mate." As in Don't Change Your Husband , the seduction of women with expensive apparel triggers a fantasy or flashback sequence. But DeMille edited out footage described in the script as follows: "Dissolve to Gloria Swanson as a wood nymph in cave man days, then an Oriental courtesan. . ." Since a still photograph of Swanson and Meighan in exotic costumes survives, the director most likely photographed these scenes but deleted them in the final cut.^[23] A marital rupture thus occurs without the disruption of pictorial moralism instructing women to become commodities, although Beth's indignation is obviously a response to the flashback: "Do you expect me to share your Oriental ideas? Do you want your wife to lure you like a—Oh why didn't you marry a Turk?" Robert, in a medium shot, smells Sally's perfume on the sleeve of the negligee and recalls her seductive image, superimposed on the screen between himself and his incensed wife.

Aside from fashion, an essential aspect of the transformation of the genteel upper-middle-class woman into a sexual playmate is an appreciation of popular as opposed to highbrow culture. Anticipating the delivery of the negligee, Robert decides to play the "Hindustan Fox Trot," a popular postwar tune with distinct Oriental overtones, but Beth insists, "Try to cultivate your taste, dear!" and prefers "The Dying Poet." Robert is not only bored with Beth's dowdy clothes and spectacles, he would also prefer to

attend the follies rather than listen to an adagio performed by Radinoff (Theodore Kosloff), whom he stereotypes as "a wired-haired foreigner." Still dedicated to spiritual uplift, Beth reads books with titles such as How to Improve Your Mind . After an inevitable marital rupture occurs, the irate wife removes all traces of her spouse from the living room and tosses in the trash can a copy of Motion Picture Classic (an inspired choice for DeMille) and a baseball magazine. She then announces, "I'm going to give my whole life to charity, Aunt Kate. I hate clothes—and men." A satirized version of the genteel woman who believes in social commitment and values highbrow culture, Beth is instantly converted to consumer values during a shopping trip. DeMille cuts between adjacent dressing rooms in a smart boutique to show Beth's angry reaction when she overhears two gossiping women attribute her divorce to her frumpy appearance. Assuming the role of a manikin, she places ornaments in her hair, poses with a leathered fan, and drapes brocade against her body as she gazes at her image in a hand mirror. She then instructs the sales clerk, "I'll take this and six more; and make them sleeveless, backless, transparent, indecent—go the limit!"

Beth's sensational debut as a "new woman" occurs at a fashionable beach resort, where Robert is vacationing with his new wife, Sally. An establishing shot shows musicians playing on a balcony and hotel guests seated at dining tables around a large swimming pool with an island featuring an octagonal fountain. Potted plants and palms, as well as wicker and rattan furniture, convey a tropical atmosphere as the backdrop for romance. An extreme long shot shows Beth standing in an archway that is the entrance to the pool area. She advances to the foreground in a floral-patterned bathing suit and a matching fringed cap, an eye-catching ensemble that attracts instant attention. A long shot next shows Beth conversing with several male admirers, including members of the military in uniform. A cut to a long shot of her seated on the wall of the fountain but hidden under her parasol results in an amusing scene when Robert enters from the right. A close-up of her legs, rendered alluring by stylish high-heeled shoes and an ornate garter wrapped around her left calf, represents his point of view. Unaware that he is admiring his former wife, Robert walks behind her and peers down at her from the left. An angled close-up of her peering up at him through the plastic folds of her parasol results in a shocking yet delightful recognition. When Radinoff, costumed in a leotard with a cape and wearing sandals with straps crisscrossed up to his knees, escorts Beth away, Robert, now thoroughly enticed by his former spouse, angrily slams his cap on the ground.

DeMille orchestrates another divorce and remarriage in a complicated scenario that results in Robert, seriously injured, being nursed in Beth's home while Sally is determined to reclaim her spouse. Due to a head injury, Robert's vision is blurred until Beth's face comes into focus in a close-up, a scene that prefigures the introduction of Christ healing a blind girl in The

30. Thomas Meighan is quite disconcerted to discover that his dowdy 
former wife (Gloria Swanson) has transformed herself into a seductive fashion 
plate in Why Change Your Wife? (1920) (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

King of Kings (1927). An object of struggle between two determined women, Robert lies helpless as they fight over him in a brawl that ends with Sally shattering a mirror and attempting to disfigure Beth. Since she has unmasked herself as being ill-tempered and vindictive, traits previously disguised by self-theatricalization and lavish gowns, Sally concedes defeat and resumes flirting with Radinoff. Beth, in the meanwhile, remarries Robert, wears the negligee she had earlier scorned, and plays the "Hindustan Fox Trot" in the wine cellar. DeMille's patriarchal and didactive voice is heard in the final intertitle: "And now you know what every husband knows: that a man would rather have his wife for his sweetheart than any other woman: but Ladies: if you would be your husband's sweetheart you simply must learn to forget that you're his wife." To put it another way, genteel women who exchanged the supportive intimacy of homosocial ties in a sex-segregated Victorian culture to become sexual playmates were still not equal to men, not even in a companionate marriage.^[24]

Yet the issue of equality between the sexes was at the heart of the so-called revolution in manners and morals that nevertheless witnessed an increasing

commodification of female sexuality. DeMille did hint at the darker aspects of heterosexual relations in a disarmingly blunt intertitle in Old Wives for New . After Jessie shoots Berkeley, she confides to Murdock, "I killed him—he was a beast! No man ever knows what another man is with a woman!" Also revealing is a sequence in Don't Change Your Husband in which Toodles bursts into the Van Sutphen residence to claim a share of the cash that Jim has paid Schuyler for Leila's solitaire. Giving her husband's mistress half a wad of thick bills, Leila explains, "Don't misunderstand—he owed you something—and you are paid! He promised me a few things, too, such as Love and Protection—and he didn't pay! Let's only one of us be cheated!" The use of financial language is extremely apt in a film that dramatizes the increasing commodification and reification of matrimonial life. DeMille, interestingly, cuts from a medium two-shot of Schuyler and Jim looking away from the scrutiny of the camera to a medium long shot of the two accusatory women eyeing the men. For a brief moment, the battle of the sexes takes precedence over class conflict. Although nineteenth-century feminists outraged genteel society by comparing marriage with prostitution in attempts to reform divorce laws, the reification of marital relations based on exchange value, as shown in DeMille's trilogy, implied no less.^[25] Furthermore, the displacement of female desire onto fashion and furnishings was yet another expression of commodity fetishism in consumer capitalism. The exploitation of this aspect of the culture of consumption as it related to the composition of the film audience became the focus of Paramount exhibition practices during the 1920s.^[26]

Discourse On the Old Versus the New Morality: the Demographics of Film Audiences

Significant changes in the demographics of film attendance in the 1920s were related to trends established by the production and exhibition of DeMille's early Jazz Age films. Exhibitors, to be sure, distinguished between middle-class patrons of first-run theaters and working-class and ethnic audiences at neighborhood venues, and between urban centers and small-town or rural areas. During a decade characterized by tumultuous events such as the Red Scare, immigration restriction, prohibition, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Scopes trial, the search for a national market in film distribution and exhibition practices was essential. The exploitation of DeMille's controversial films showed, however, that differences based on class, ethnicity, religion, and geographical region that might segment the audience could be superceded by an appeal to gender. Although the reception of a consumer culture including commercialized amusement was mediated by a variety of subcultures, the director's emphasis on set and costume design appealed overwhelmingly to

women. As his brother William noted regarding the democratization of luxury, "Paris fashion shows had been accessible only to the chosen few. C. B. revealed them to the whole country, the costumes his heroines wore being copied by hordes of women and girls throughout the land, especially by those whose contacts with centers of fashion were limited or nonexistent." DeMille himself represented this obsession with style in The Affairs of Anatol (1921) when a farmer's wife copies a magazine illustration, shown in an insert, to trim an ordinary hat. Since the director became the industry's most important trendsetter in the late 1910s and early 1920s, his emphasis on fashion was surely related to changes in the demographics of the film audience. According to Richard Koszarski, the percentage of men in motion picture audiences began to decline in the 1910s, while the number of women rose from 60 percent in 1920 to 83 percent in 1927.^[27]

An analysis of industry discourse shows that exploitation campaigns appealing to women displaced censorship issues in DeMille's texts that might otherwise have segmented the audience. Indeed, the controversy provoked by scenes in Old Wives for New was scarcely an issue by the time Why Change Your Wife? was exhibited two years later. DeMille later claimed that Zukor, who "spent millions to plaster the country about the purity of Paramount Pictures," released the first film in the trilogy with great reluctance.^[28] During the same month that critics were taking note of the director's trendsetting production, Zukor asserted in Motion Picture News that "Wholesome dramas, uplifting in character, clean comedies, comedy dramas, and plays dealing with the more cheerful aspects of life will be exclusively chosen for production."^[29]Old Wives for New had in fact been subject to in-house censorship before its distribution. A few weeks before the film's premiere, Lasky received a detailed memo that proposed a number of cuts in the film. Among the suggestions was deletion of the first intertitle referring to the dowdiness of married women because "it is liable to be misconstrued by the average spectator." Clearly, Famous Players-Lasky was now marketing its product in terms of a broad-based appeal rather than targeting genteel audiences. Also objectionable were close-ups of the wash basins in the bathroom and signs of Murdock's fastidiousness. (These scenes were not cut, however, in the surviving print in the director's nitrate collection bequeathed to George Eastman House.) But the suggestion that DeMille insert an intertitle to indicate that Murdock, contrary to the scenario, did not engage in an affair with Viola was heeded. Further, risqué scenes of Berkeley's rendezvous with Bertha were cut to emphasize Jessie's confrontation with the couple. Perhaps most interesting, given negative Catholic reception of Joan the Woman , was deletion of a scene at the film's conclusion in which Jessie seeks refuge in a convent while both Sophy and Murdock remarry. According to the New York office, this scene would be considered

"offensive to Catholics, in as much as it implies that a Catholic Institution would receive and protect a murderess."^[30]

Critical discourse on Old Wives for New and subsequently Don't Change Your Husband and Why Change Your Wife ? did focus on the impact of controversial moral issues on audience reception. A reminder that Old Wives for New was condemned by the Pennsylvania State Board because it dealt with the subject of prostitution provides present-day readers with some insight into censorship issues that characterized past cultural formations.^[31] Critics disagreed at the time about the extent to which these films violated social conventions, yet their very disagreement reveals a lack of consensus regarding problematic issues such as divorce. R. E. Pritchard, for example, summed up his assessment of Old Wives for New in Motion Picture News : "There are some risque situations in the story, but these have been handled delicately." Frederick James Smith, however, objected to "scenes of disgusting debauchery" and "immoral episodes" and concluded, "It is extremely difficult to build up a pleasing romance upon a foundation of divorce." Similarly, Edward Weitzel claimed in Moving Picture World that "hardly any of the characters command the spectator's respect. Charles Murdock. . . has but little moral stamina, and is surrounded, principally, by well-dressed men and women of no morals at all." Weitzel even suggested censoring objectionable material: "The cabaret scene is too insistent in establishing the moral laxity of its female guests, and other scenes of the same nature would stand cutting." Variety's critic also referred to the possibility of censorship: "There appears to have been some doubt as to the propriety of presenting the picture in total at the Rivoli in New York [a first-run theater] . . . . cutting was no doubt considered." Clearly, the critics recognized that the subject matter of Old Wives for New was questionable, if not offensive, but moved their discussion to the high ground of art in order to claim the patronage of the respectable middle class. Pritchard asserted that "it is the kind of picture that will convince those who doubt that the photoplay has reached the artistic plane of the spoken drama." The "Exhibitor to Exhibitor Review Service" in Motion Picture News agreed that the "feature will prove objectionable to some of you. Nevertheless, this picture is very artistic."^[32]

Don't Change Your Husband elicited another chorus of disagreement among critics in fan magazines and trade journals that is revealing with respect to exhibition practices. Smith stated in Motion Picture Classic , "We do not agree with Miss Macpherson's philosophy, but we admire her effort . . . in approaching the realities of things as they are." Variety labeled the film "clean and wholesome," but Motion Picture News counseled exhibitors, "It suggests the divorce element without your having to go into that, and we wouldn't do so directly, because you are likely to sacrifice some of the intensely human appeal of this picture." As for the fantasy sequence, the

journal claimed, "There is a sensuous touch here and there in the scenes that follow. They will offend no one, but they will create a lot of talk for the picture itself." Controversial subjects like prostitution and divorce were evidently difficult for exhibitors to market due to differences in social mores, especially in small towns and rural areas that were increasingly centers of religious fundamentalism. As a matter of fact, the Phillips novel, though published a decade before the film's release, still construes divorce as socially undesirable in contrast to the blasé manner in which DeMille's characters exchange spouses. Apparently, exhibitors engaged in a high wire act by exploiting the sex appeal of a film but taking steps not to offend the sensibility of their patrons. Despite controversy, DeMille's early Jazz Age films played to large and enthusiastic audiences in first-run theaters in major cities. At Grauman's Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, Don't Change Your Husband broke all attendance records so that Sid Grauman, departing from established policy, held the picture over for another week. By the time Why Change Your Wife? was released in April 1920, Smith gave an indication of the shifting moral standards of the postwar era when he stated, "What a shock Cecil deMille's latest silken orchid drama. . . would have caused but two short years ago." But Motion Picture News pointed out that the feature "practically throws that which most people call part of the moral code overboard with its teaching, [and] presents its principal characters as people who have about as much regard for the sanctity of the marriage vow 'as an Arab does for a sun bath.'. . . [F] or an exhibitor with a neighborhood or small town house it may not be an ideal attraction."^[33] The trade journal's equation of sexual license with images of Orientalism, however, inadvertently served as part of a parallel discourse comparable to the film as a text on the evils of modernity.

An example of bridging the cultural divide between rural and urban America, the exhibition of Why Change Your Wife? was successful in major cities because exploitation avoided mention of divorce and emphasized consumption to appeal to female shoppers. Although these two issues were interrelated, as the film's title implies, exhibitor emphasis on fashion was a clever way to defuse public reaction to controversial moral issues. Sid Grauman, for example, simulated the movie screen by installing oil paintings of captivating stills in downtown Los Angeles shops, surely a reversal of DeMille's construction of the frame as a plate glass window. Such advertising tactics resulted in a special 10:45 P.M. performance that was added to the screening schedule to accommodate overflowing crowds at Grauman's Rialto. Los Angeles was hardly an exception, however. A similar exploitation campaign with window tie-ups in fashionable stores was orchestrated in Memphis with the cooperation of the Chamber of Commerce. A month after the film's release, Paramount ran an ad in Motion Picture News that claimed "'Why Change Your Wife?' has broken records in every city in

which it has been shown." Constructing an elaborate showcase for the premiere of DeMille's film in New York, Adolph Zukor spent thirty, thousand dollars to renovate the Criterion. Indeed, Zukor's strategy of acquiring a financial interest in first-run theatres paid off in terms of the enormous publicity generated for Famous Players-Lasky specials shown at higher admission prices. As Moving Picture World remarked about the record-breaking success of The Affairs of Anatol in the following year, "a Broadway showing is not always indicative of the attitude of the country, [but] such a run determines a great deal."^[34] The exploitation of feature films at movie palaces, especially those appealing to fashion-conscious women, thus influenced nationwide trends in exhibition practices.

Although the industry still relied on small-town exhibitors in the countryside, as well as on neighborhood venues in urban areas, exploitation that stressed window tie-ups in chic department stores and movie ads in magazines like Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal , and Colliers were obviously aimed at respectable middle-class women with disposable incomes. As for working-class and ethnic women, social historians emphasize the importance of filmgoing for a younger generation preoccupied with fashion as a mode of self-representation and assimilation.^[35] The film industry's appeal to female spectators was thus a phenomenon that crossed socioeconomic and cultural boundary lines. As early as 1918, Motion Picture News suggested that exhibitors display pictures of female stars in elegant costumes to attract women and to persuade their escorts to buy admission tickets. Advertising, moreover, did not cease once members of the audience seated themselves inside the theater and began to enjoy the entertainment. As Motion Picture News observed about Why Change Your Wife? : DeMille inserted close-ups of commodities including perfume and "a certain talking machine company's records" that functioned as ads in the narrative.^[36] Advertisement representing the allure of consumer goods, especially the latest fashion in apparel and home furnishings, was surely related to the demographic fact that throughout the decade the ratio of female to male spectators continued to rise.

In contrast to trade journals counseling exhibitors to downplay controversial issues, fan magazine discourse on DeMille's trilogy, linked by advertising and a reissue of Old Wives for New , focused on the relationship between fashion and divorce as a sign of the times.^[37] Indeed, the rate of divorce almost doubled during the first two decades of the twentieth century, while expenditures for personal grooming, clothing, furniture, automobiles, and recreation tripled in the second two decades. Divorce was especially common in urban areas in the postwar years when hasty wartime unions were dissolved. Significantly, an increasing number of complaints in divorce suits involved the desire of wives for a more pleasurable life-style and the inability of husbands to provide income for such pursuits. According to the New York

Times , "if dissatisfied wives were guided by the argument of 'Don't Change Your Husband,' the divorce courts would be more crowded than they are now." Postwar discourse on divorce as a function of urbanization, secularization of liberal Protestantism, and changing patterns of wage earning and consumption focused on the "new woman."^[38] A discourse paralleling DeMille's texts, fan magazines attest that Victorian didacticism was essential to rationalize the transformation of the genteel woman into a sexual playmate. But unlike the scenario of thousands of actual divorce cases, consumption was touted as the solution rather than the cause of marital discord. During the production of Old Wives for New , DeMille asserted in a magazine interview that the film provided a "moral lesson to wives." According to the director, "Husbands leave home because their wives are no longer physically attractive. . . . It's simply the most rudimentary example of sex psychology." As for his merciless lampooning of Sophy Murdock as the obese and indolent spouse, he claimed, "It is typically American to. . . idealize the wife, paint her virtues, blacken the man, and think we're standing by the bulwarks of civilization. In reality, we're making men hide their domestic bitterness and seek their comforts. . . secretly."^[39]

Upon the release of Don't Change Your Husband , DeMille repeated his thoughts in Motion Picture Magazine by claiming that "man must have mystery, and, above all, lure, and if his wife doesn't retain it herself, he'll find it elsewhere." Pursuing a similar theme but with an emphasis on Orientalism, Photoplay published a short piece about Sessue Hayakawa and his wife, actress Tsuru Aoki, in which "husband-holding" was equated with "pyramid building" and "making Damascus blades" as lost arts! What lessons could be learned from the "wisdom of the Orient"? Captioned photographs showed Aoki waiting on Hayakawa in a solicitous yet refined manner. After the premiere of Don't Change Your Husband , Gloria Swanson claimed in Motion Picture Magazine that "divorce should be made more easy. . . . Then the wife, knowing she might lose her husband. . . would exert herself to hold him. And. . . the husband would go on paying attention to his wife, bringing her flowers and candy, taking her to theaters." A response to discourse that appeared frivolous but revealed profound changes in matrimonial expectations, Motion Picture Magazine published an editorial titled "Cinema Husbands": "Let us have a screenic [sic ] burial of the movie husband . . . . The average American husband is no fool. The cinema husband is not only a fool but a blind egoist as well."^[40]

Perhaps the most revealing fan magazine article that pointed to the contradiction of defining the "new woman" in terms of a Victorian legacy was published after the success of Why Change Your Wife? Acclaimed as "the film's greatest authority on matrimonial problems," DeMille claimed in Photoplay , "I believe I can do more to prevent divorce, that I am doing more to prevent divorce than any minister or anti-divorce league in the world."

Despite the contemporary and racy tone of his Jazz Age films, the director expressed attitudes about sexual difference and marriage that were Victorian clichés. For example, he asserted, "Sex. . . is a universal problem. It is the one thing one is never free of. If the relations between a man and woman are not right, not harmonious, every other relation of their lives is affected—their home, their children, his business, his usefulness as a citizen." Such distinctions in the use of plural and masculine pronouns implied that separate spheres for the sexes, in a new era of woman's suffrage, was still an ideal arrangement. Furthermore, the filmmaker argued, "Fidelity to the marriage covenant—the most sacred of all obligations— . . . is to be gained only by showing wives how men may be, if not lifted entirely above sex, at least taught to hold it within the bounds of moral law and decency." What exactly were those bounds? DeMille blithely confessed that in eighteen years of marriage, he had never spent a Saturday evening at home, a revelation that attested to the habit of respectable middle-class men visiting brothels.^[41] Apparently, a man's sexual nature required a certain amount of discreet tolerance on the part of his wife.

Five months later, DeMille revealed in another piece in Photoplay , titled "More About Marriage," that his earlier interview had resulted in an avalanche of mail—presumably from women—surpassing the response to any film he had produced. Fan magazine readers wished to know if Mrs. DeMille, whose photograph was featured in the follow-up article, enjoyed the same privileges on Saturday night that he did. The director asserted, "no matter how willing a man may be to accord his wife complete freedom, men and women are not 'exactly alike'" because "the really good woman. . . is the . . . wise, pure, understanding woman, who . . . tries to kill the beast in man. . . . helping him to overcome the Adam inheritance of lust and dust that eventually lead to ruin." Asserting that a "woman's love that has not much of the maternal is only passion," DeMille appeared to contradict the lesson in his films, dictating that the "new woman" should be a playmate in a companionate marriage.^[42]

In sum, the "new woman" who emerged in DeMille's feature films and in fan magazines was, on the one hand, a sexual playmate and herself a commodity, and, on the other, a sentimental heroine adhering to an outmoded Victorian legacy. The emphasis on self-theatricalization informing discourse on these contrasting models of femininity ultimately served to validate consumption rather than sexual equality or freedom. A proliferation of discourses on pleasure, as Michel Foucault argues, was linked to a concern "to constitute a sexuality that was economically useful and politically conservative."^[43] To put it another way, commodity fetishism, or the displacement of desire onto material goods, proved to be a useful stimulus in the growth of consumer capitalism. Gloria Swanson, an actress who rose to stardom in DeMille's Jazz Age films, thus became an appropriate icon for

an era of increased hedonism.^[44] She later claimed that "working for Mr. DeMille was like playing house in the world's most expensive department store." A successor to Geraldine Farrar, whose operatic career was associated with highbrow culture, Swanson became Famous Players-Lasky's most important female star and inherited the soprano's leading man, Wallace Reid, in The Affairs of Anatol . Aware of the director's crucial role in her career, a relationship parodied in Sunset Boulevard (1950), Swanson attracted immediate attention in her first DeMille film, Don't Change Your Husband . Lasky rightly predicted that the feature "ought to go a long way towards establishing her as a big possibility." Critic Frederick James Smith echoed Lasky's opinion in his review when he stated, "Gloria Swanson . . . is a distinct discovery." Similarly, Motion Picture Magazine labeled her "one of the distinct acquisitions" of the silver screen.^[45] Yet fan magazines focused on Swansoh's persona as a fashion plate rather than on her stature as an actress. Motion Picture Classic labeled her "The Silken Gloria." Photoplay described the Oriental look of her exotic hairdos in articles with amusing titles such as "Don't Change Your Coiffure" and "She Changed Her Coiffure." Variety kept readers informed about the details of her costume, jewelry, and hairstyle in Don't Change Your Husband . And Motion Picture Magazine declared, "Gloria believes in the psychology of clothes. Put her in short dresses and bob her hair and she wants to play around like a child. But swathed in an evening gown with her hair high and heavily ornamented—she immediately becomes the society, woman. . . . Gloria loves clothes, loves luxuries, loves fame ."^[46] What did Swanson's persona as a glamorous clotheshorse imply with respect to the nature of female self-theatricalization and artifice in a consumer culture? Was preoccupation with the appearance of the "new woman," costumed as man's companion with short skirts and bobbed hair, not a commentary on issues of female sexuality and of equality between the sexes? As feminists advocating dress reform had earlier learned, women's fashions, a sign of sexual difference as well as male prescriptive power, was indeed a barometer of heterosexual relations.^[47] DeMille addressed these complex issues in his most exquisite achievement in the postwar decade, The Affairs of Anatol .

Ambivalence as a Sign of Modernity: the Affairs of Anatol

Although Famous Players-Lasky paid Arthur Schnitzler ten thousand dollars for the rights to Anatol , a series of seven one-act plays set in fin de siècle Vienna, the credits of the film, represented as the embossed pages of an expensive edition, acknowledge only that the screenplay was "suggested" by the playwright.^[48] Jeanie Macpherson receives credit as scenarist but "appreciation of their literary assistance is extended to" Beulah Marie Dix,

a writer who was formerly active in the civic pageantry movement, and Elmer Harris. At first, the narrative structure of The Affairs of Anatol consisted of discrete episodes titled Five Kisses , each written by a different scenarist and starring a separate cast. Lasky was convinced that the film was "typical DeMille material," but he was concerned about the expense of engaging numerous stars and wired the director: "It would of course be absolutely necessary that you get finished script before you start with episode in which you use stars like Hawley, Daniels, Swanson . . . . each episode would probably consume about twelve hundred feet so that you should not require any girl for more than one or two weeks." An elegant spectacle, the film broke box-office records upon its Los Angeles premiere in 1921, but Lasky proved astute in minimizing its cost because the nation's economy was mired in a postwar recession. During production, DeMille relied on Lasky as usual to communicate with Zukor regarding expenses such as the use of the painstaking Handschiegl color process, and he agreed to retitle the film The Affairs of Anatol .^[49] Since the director later eliminated one of the five episodes from a production that was becoming too lengthy for the taste of exhibitors, the title change, a result of canvassing theater operators, was fortuitous. According to Lasky, "the picture is too big and important to be called by the. . . trifling title of 'Five Kisses.' The big exhibitors all like the title of 'The Affairs of Anatol' because it is dignified and important and without exception, only the cheap exhibitors of the poorer class voted for 'Five Kisses."'^[50] Apparently, distribution and exhibition practices remained very much influenced by industry, perceptions about class and ethnic differences that characterized the film audience.

A sign of the escalating budget of his oversized Jazz Age spectacles, DeMille's production staff began to expand in the postwar period. Aside from hiring additional writers to assist Macpherson with the script of The Affairs of Anatol , the director assigned cameraman Karl Struss to work with Alvin Wyckoff, a practice he established on two previous films, Something to Think About (1920) and Forbidden Fruit (1921). Unquestionably, the most intriguing change in his roster was the departure of Wilfred Buckland, whose decision to form an independent production company as the economy began to decline is puzzling.^[51]Forbidden Fruit , an extravagant remake of The Golden Chance , does not credit an art director even though its grandiose set decoration prefigures later spectacles. An exquisite work attributed to Parisian designer, Paul Iribe, The Affairs of Anatol proved to be a delightful exception in DeMille's pursuit of increasingly outré set and costume design. Whether his decision to engage international talent accounted for Buck-land's departure after a close and lengthy collaboration, dating back to The Virginian (1914), is a matter of conjecture.

An artist whose career encompassed the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco toward the end of the Belle Epoque, Iribe had designed significant

projects for couturiers like Jacques Doucet and Paul Poiret, who set trends by patronizing a streamlined aesthetic. Art Deco did not become commonplace until the Parisian Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925), an event that led to an exhibit sponsored by Macy's and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But emphasis on opulence, symmetry, and functionalism was earlier in evidence on both sides of the Atlantic. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, popularized a geometric style in the United States that influenced the design of the art titles in Old Wives for New in contrast to the more curvilinear Art Nouveau motif employed in The Cheat . Although Buckland decorated sets with Art Nouveau furniture, such as Swanson's bed in Male and Female and twin beds in Why Change Your Wife? he also used a panel of leaded glass in geometric design as the window of the dining room in Old Wives for New . Iribe's more streamlined and minimalist version of a breakfast room in The Affairs of Anatol consisted of vertical slats admitting translucent light in the background and a small oval-shaped table with chrome legs. Such designs prompted Motion Picture News to observe that the sets in the film were "lavish, sometimes bizarre, and novel."^[52] A summation of efforts to render set decoration in terms of aesthetic movements in high art, The Affairs of Anatol exhibited an early Art Deco style with antecedents in Art Nouveau to represent ambiguity toward the "new woman" who symbolized modernity.

Since the leading character in the Schnitzler one-act plays is a wealthy aesthete and philanderer who engages in a series of meaningless affairs, the film adaptation, subject to the objections of municipal and state censors, is equivocal. As in DeMille's earlier trilogy about marriage and divorce, costume and set design express the ambiguity of the characters' ethics. Yet The Affairs of Anatol unmasks contradictions in the semiotics of performance because appearances that constituted mysterious hieroglyphs in genteel society have deteriorated into signs without a stable set of referents in a consumer culture. Anatol DeWitt Spencer (Wallace Reid), for example, is an urbane and sophisticated young man who resides in an elegant mansion with uniformed servants, but yearns for a rustic setting as a sign of moral certitude. When he goes boating in the countryside, however, his wallet is stolen by a farmer's wife (Agnes Ayres). Furthermore, he becomes involved in several episodes in which he rescues lovely young damsels in distress, a proclivity that he, but not his wife, Vivian (Gloria Swanson), interprets as a sincere act of conscience. Articulating "the decline of the referentials" or the dissolution of a fixed system of referents for verbal and visual signs in everyday language, The Affairs of Anatol serves as an intertext for advertisers not only in its set and costume design and use of color, but also in its representation of a moral vacuum resulting from signification that is unstable if not meaningless.^[53]

A dramatization of the new morality of the Jazz Age, The Affairs of Anatol renders questionable traditional values based on distinctions between the private and public spheres, not least because its hero is a wealthy and indolent figure. Unlike male leads in previous DeMille texts that show businessmen at their desks, Anatol has only affairs of the heart to preoccupy him. Further, the line between front and back regions of respectable homes has also become indistinguishable so that the marketplace penetrates the most private recesses of the domestic sphere. Anatol, for example, waits impatiently for his young bride, Vivian, to make an appearance so that they may breakfast; instead, he becomes a spectator of her toilet in a series of long and medium long shots that emphasize set decoration in the mise-en-scène. Standing in the high-ceilinged hallway outside Vivian's boudoir, the fidgety husband waits before a sliding door resembling a Japanese fusuma screen with floral decoration. Art Nouveau and Art Deco, it should be noted, were both movements that drew upon Asian artwork converted into Orientalist discourse. When the panel, revealed as a huge mirror in reverse shots, finally slides open, Anatol views the backstage area represented as a spectacle. Vivian rests her foot on a tasseled cushion plumped on an ornate footstool while a French maid gives her a pedicure.^[54] She is seated behind a translucent screen with a floral design on a curvilinear edge, a motif echoed by Art Nouveau patterns that decorate the small circular window to the right. A medium long shot shows Anatol, who has entered the room, standing before a luxurious bed at right angle to a modernist design of concentric arches. Assuming a coquettish pose behind the screen, Vivian flirts with her husband in a mirror shot that shows both their reflections in the large semicircular mirror of the dresser in the rear.

When Anatol, Vivian, and their friend, Max (Elliott Dexter), dine at The Green Fan, the decor of the elegant supper club signifies a correspondence between private entertainment and commercialized leisure that represents yet another sign of the collapse of separate spheres. An establishing shot in color shows a limousine driving up to the elegant facade of a pink building topped by two green glass domes with amber light emanating from below and at the entrance. Arranged in the semicircular fan above the entranceway, the name of the supper club appears in bright green letters. A cut to the interior, tinted in amber, shows chorus girls performing on a stage demarcated by four slender pillars topped with fans, an area situated against the backdrop of a gigantic fan displaying a feminine form. The walls of the supper club, obviously a playground for the well-to-do, are decorated with elegant round medallions stamped with fans. A solicitous waiter offers guests a fan-shaped menu that boasts delicacies such as calves' head vinaigrette and cold roast squab. A luxurious Art Deco setting with a semicircular motif, The Green Fan, not coincidentally, replicates the curvilinear screen and mirror

31. Gloria Swanson, as a svelte young bride, begins to quarrel with her 
wealthy husband (Wallace Reid) at a fashionable Art Deco supper club in 
The Affairs of Anatol  (1921). (Photo courtesy George Eastman House )

32. An aesthete critical of modernity, Reid attempts to transform a 
prostitute of lower-class origins (Wanda Hawley) into a "highbrow" 
who plays the violin. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House )

in Vivian's boudoir. As he dines with his wife and friend, Anatol renews his acquaintance with Emilie Dixon (Wanda Hawley), the mistress of an old roué, Gordon Bronson (Theodore Roberts reprising his role in Old Wives for New ). Since the respectable upper-class home and the elegant supper club are linked rather than contrasted by set decoration, the mise-en-scène renders ambiguous Anatol's project to rescue Emilie from a dissolute life. Indeed, the hero wears on his pinkie finger a snake ring that matches the jewelry adorning the prostitute whom he wishes to save. DeMille does emphasize the socioeconomic, class, and hence moral distinctions between wife and harlot in terms of their costume. Emilie is wearing a shiny evening dress with a full skirt and a lace bodice trimmed with roses, patterned hosiery, and a headband over loose curls. She adorns herself with a diamond necklace and several gold bangles including a bracelet in the form of a snake. Vivian, on the contrary, is well coiffed and projects sleek upper-class elegance as represented later in the decade by Art Deco ads and posters. She is exquisite in a dark, svelte gown with a pearl-trimmed neckline and wears matching jewelry consisting of pearl earrings, necklace, bracelet, and ring.

Attempting to rescue and refashion Emilie as a "highbrow," Anatol installs her in an elegant apartment and pays for her violin lessons. As his price, however, he insists that the former prostitute discard all the expensive jewelry she has accepted from her lover, Bronson. A construction symbolic of modernist aesthetic as well as technological innovation becomes the site of an outmoded but solemn ritual of self-purification. Anticipating the celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1920s, DeMille shows amber-tinted footage of a frontal shot of the structure at sunrise and then cuts to a medium long shot of Anatol and Emilie stepping out of a limousine in midpassage to gaze at the view.^[55] A cut to a panoramic point-of-view shot shows the harbor as the camera pans right to reveal busy tugboats and the breathtaking skyline of the city. Several shots show the two characters on the bridge with crisscrossed steel girders dominating the mise-en-scène. As they stand on the spectacular bridge in sight of the country's greatest metropolis, Anatol instructs Emilie to throw her jewels into the river. Disjunction between symbols of American industrial progress and Victorian morality thus reinforces the film's ambivalent view of modernity.

Anatol's subsequent disillusionment with Emilie, who succumbs to Bronson's gifts and promise of marriage, leads to an interlude that illustrates the recurrent theme of Orientalism in DeMille's texts about consumption. As opposed to the one-act play in which Anatol hypnotizes a lover to inquire about her fidelity, DeMille projects the hero's repressed amoral and sensuous traits onto a Hindu character named Nazzer Singh (Theodore Kosloff).^[56] A sensation at one of Vivian's elegant tea parties, held in an immense high-ceilinged living room that accommodates dozens of guests, the

turbaned hypnotist performs in a heavily draped area in front of the archway just off the vestibule. Although it is afternoon, the lighting is low-key and the tinting is blue to suggest magical explorations of the unconscious. Anatol is not at all amused, however, when Vivian, shown in close-ups as she falls into a trance, loses her inhibitions and takes off her stockings and shoes to step into an imagined stream of water. Disrupting the act, he orders Vivian restored to her senses and suggests, "Let me take you away from all this rotten, hypocritical crowd! Let's go to some clean sweet place in the Country, where people are honest and decent and find ourselves again!" Since Anatol is being self-righteous while he himself harbors unacknowledged sensual impulses, the low-key lighting conveys an atmospheric mood rather than an unambiguous moral dilemma.

During a quarrel that began while they were enjoying the countryside, Anatol exclaims in a violent outburst in footage now tinted amber, "I give you fair warning. . . I'll go out and find a way to forget!" Upping the ante, Vivian instructs her maid, "My lowest gown—my highest heels, Marie! If there's room for husbands in the Gay White Way—there's room for wives! " Anatol amuses himself at "A Certain Roof—where the entertainment provided makes the Feasts of Babylon look like a Cafeteria!" An insert of the program announces "A Tableau Vivant. . . 'The Unattainable' featuring Satan Synne." Against a background of rolling hills and a sharp precipice, a muscular black man in a jewelled costume wields an enormous sword, while, to his left, a woman's prostrate body forms a graceful curve as her long hair and flowing robe spill onto the floor. An intrigued Anatol wanders backstage to meet the star of an Orientalist tableau that inveighs against sins of the flesh by contrasting not only gender but race in a provocative manner. A floral Art Nouveau pattern ornamenting the backstage area, not coincidentally, repeats the decorative motif of Vivian's boudoir. Satan Synne (Bebe Daniels) wears a sensational costume with a long double rope of pearls that is a camp version of the elegant gown Vivian wore to The Green Fan. She mysteriously warns Anatol, in footage now tinted light pink, "the devil's not a man, but a WOMAN!"

DeMille did not require a flashback in The Affairs of Anatol because its episodic narrative structure emphasized elements of fantasy that were displacing the realist aesthetic of his prewar films. A fanciful episode toward the end of the film provided an occasion for an extraordinary set piece. Satan's apartment, "The Devil's Cloister," is an Orientalist illustration of high camp in amber-tinted footage. Greeting Anatol at the door is a manacled female slave dressed in a costume appropriated from an Egyptian bas-relief. A mirror shot that repeats an earlier mise-en-scène in Vivian's boudoir shows Anatol as he approaches Satan while she is seated in front of her dresser. A triangular mirror outlined with bat wings is flanked by two lamps in the shape of cobras. Decorating the right side of the vanity is a

33. Julia Faye, costumed like an Egyptian slave to accentuate the 
Orientalist decor, waits on Bebe Daniels, signifying the decline of referentiality as a 
prostitute who is in reality a devoted wife. ( Photo courtesy George Eastman House )

human skull, while on the floor, a large ceramic turtle sits before the chair. Satan is wearing an extravagant headdress and a swirling cape with alternating light and dark stripes bordered with rows of beads. As suggested by shots tinted pink that show Anatol gazing at a reflection of a skeleton in a mirror and then through a transparent curtain of flames at the entrance to the bedroom, the philandering husband is playing with fire. But the line between a respectable upper-class home and an illicit establishment has become indistinguishable, as conveyed by the repetition of set design that links both the backstage area of the cafe and Satan's apartment with Vivian's boudoir. Although Satan's bizarre self-theatricalization emphasizes the reptilian imager), of the Garden of Eden, she ensnares men only to pay for her husband's medical expenses. Disgusted with the truth behind seductive appearances, Anatol exclaims, "If this is what they call the gay life—I'm going back to my wife!" Vivian, however, does not return home until nine in the morning, after spending the evening with Max, and refuses to give an account of her actions. Max does secretly yearn for her, as DeMille earlier conveys in a rare shot-reverse-shot while the couple play chess, but Vivian's

outing has been innocent, albeit quite merry. Seizing upon an unexpected visit from Nazzer Singh, Anatol is determined to hypnotize his wife to elicit the truth but decides, when Max intervenes, to trust her after all. Appearances have in fact deceived him throughout the film.

A sequel to DeMille's trilogy about marriage and divorce, The Affairs of Anatol represents the collapse of sign systems based on coded distinctions between private and public spheres, and even between front and back regions of respectable homes.^[57] As the moral certainties of the Victorian synthesis began to dissolve in an era of increased self-commodification, appearances no longer functioned as a reliable index of character and breeding. Discourse in fan magazines implied that stars like Gloria Swanson assumed new personalities whenever they changed their wardrobes. Given the remapping of spheres based on traditional definitions of gender, at issue was the nature of female sexuality in relation to marriage and the family. As Walter Lippmann argued at the time, birth control and female employment outside the home meant that the sexual experience of women was no longer related to their role as wives and mothers. Further, contraception, which in effect was practiced mostly by educated middle-class women, dictated that sexual intercourse be construed as a pleasurable experience rather than as an obligation for procreative purposes. A companionate marriage was equivalent to childlessness—as DeMille demonstrated in Don't Change Your Husband and Why Change Your Wife ?—and thus required a sexual playmate in view of trends toward a higher marital rate among the younger generation. But a serious ethical dilemma resulted from this transformation of the Victorian woman. As Lippman acknowledged, "The whole revolution in the field of sexual morals turns upon the fact that external control of the chastity of women is becoming impossible."^[58] Anxiety about women's extravagant spending on fashionable apparel, represented in DeMille's texts as a prerequisite for the pursuit of pleasure, was more than a concern about household budgets; it also registered suspicion about women's sexual fidelity. When the farmer's wife in The Affairs of Anatol uses church funds to indulge her desires, the rage that she inspires in her self-righteous husband, who wields a whip and stomps on her new dress, is telling. A symbol of the consumer culture, the "new woman" raised questions regarding the nature of female sexuality apart from such traditional issues as monogamy and fidelity. As evident in DeMille's representation of upper-class marriage as spectacle that constituted a form of commodity fetishism for female audiences, the consumption of images as well as goods functioned as a substitute for sexual pleasure. Perhaps this was the ultimate irony resulting from the reification of human consciousness and social relations in postwar consumer capitalism. Display windows including the movie screen constituted a "ladies' paradise" or an "Adamless Eden" as the locus of female desire,

characterized as infantile and irrational by advertisers and thus subject to manipulation, in a decade touted for a revolution in manners and morals.^[59]

Advertising for Affluent Consumers: Demille's Texts as Intertexts

In their study of Middletown, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd claimed, "It is perhaps impossible to overestimate the role of motion pictures, advertising, and other forms of publicity" in the rising level of expectations sought in living standards.^[60] Indeed, film distribution and exhibition practices capitalized on the interrelatedness of these promotional forms to interest female spectators in the latest style in fashion and home furnishings. A closer scrutiny of intertextual issues shows, moreover, that contrary to the prewar years when DeMille sought to legitimate feature films in terms of genteel culture, he himself set trends for advertisers targeting middle- and upper-class readers in the 1920s. The director's visual style, in other words, became associated with escalating levels of conspicuous consumption rather than with technical advances in film as an art form. DeMille remained ambivalent about this transition in his career and objected to ad campaigns that marketed his films as spectacle. Assuming a defensive and contradictory tone, he protested to Lasky in 1922:

The handling of my pictures, from an advertising standpoint, is not in proper proportion to the importance of the productions nor the amount of money expended thereon . . . . The attitude of the publicity and sales department. . . seems to be that the only thing that there is to talk about in a DeMille picture is the size of the sets and the spectacle generally . . . . I make far more stills than any other company and there is greater attention given to gowns, detail, story and direction than in any pictures made today.^[61]

Yet the mise-en-scène of such productions as Forbidden Fruit and The Affairs of Anatol demonstrates that the director was in effect orchestrating spectacle that displaced the realist aesthetic of his Progressive Era films.

The decline of realist representation in DeMille's Jazz Age films characterized significant trends in the advertising industry as well. An accelerating pace in consumption as well as diminished middle-class sympathy for workers and immigrants were developments related to the waning of realism as a reponse to shocking inequities in urban life. Contrary to the fantasies that pervaded his Jazz Age spectacles, DeMille had earlier stated in a fan magazine that "realism. . . is the most insistent demand of the public."^[62] As he had once vitiated realist aesthetic in favor of sentimentalism in films such as the Chimmie Fadden series and Kindling , DeMille now showcased the life-style of the wealthy. An unusual film like Saturday Night (1922) that

reiterated prewar discourse regarding class and ethnic divisions, interestingly, upgraded the set decoration of the homes of the poor as well as the rich. Yet the legacy of Victorian genteel culture remained evident in the director's representational strategy' throughout the 1920s, albeit pictorial-ism now served to authenticate the commodified self. DeMille's early Jazz Age films thus provided advertisers with a primer on how to sell consumption as an American way of life. A closer focus on the intertextuality of the director's mise-en-scène and magazine ads first requires a brief overview of the consumer revolution and related developments in the advertising industry.

As Martha L. Olney demonstrates, a consumer durables revolution stimulated by credit financing and massive advertising, which became a fully deductible corporate expense after enactment of a 1917 excess profits tax, occurred during 1929-1929. She argues that a decrease in savings correlated with an increase in expeditures for major durables such as automobiles, household appliances, and radios despite a relative increment in their cost, whereas the purchase of minor durables such as home furnishings, china, artwork, and books declined in the same period. Although Olney does not explore the social significance of this shift in family expenditures, the status symbols of the middle class most likely changed from goods such as furniture and tableware, signifying gentility in social rituals, to an invention that led to a further collapse of separate spheres, the automobile. A big-ticket item, even lower-priced cars like Chevrolets cost 20 percent of a family's annual income and had to be financed on an installment plan. But automobile ownership, as the Lynds point out, was the mast important sign of a family's social standing among the younger generation. Within the context of a consumer durables revolution, then, the cultural war of the Jazz Age was a continuation of a basic conflict in values that had been occurring within a broad middle class differentiated between "old" and "new." Since social historians emphasize that working-class and immigrant groups subject to periodic layoffs had neither the disposable income nor the predilection to purchase consumer goods on credit, the democratization of luxury was for them restricted to visual appropriation.^[63] By contrast, the respectable middle class not only enjoyed increasingly seductive forms of spectacle, as exemplified by DeMille's feature films, but also had access to levels of consumption that signified a superior social status.

Although filmmakers courted a mass audience in the 1920s, in contrast to advertisers who addressed an upper-middle- and upper-class readership, Famous Players-Lasky developed an exploitation strategy that emphasized premieres at first-run theaters patronized by more affluent filmgoers. Why were DeMille's spectacles major attractions at downtown movie palaces during the Jazz Age? Why, indeed, did the director's mise-en-scène provide a useful intertext for advertisers? As Roland Marchand argues in a study in

which he singles out the director, magazine editors and copywriters borrowed from the film industry its image of a public bored with humdrum lives. DeMille articulated a viewpoint regarding the function of spectacle for the lower class that advertisers found relevant in addressing the well-to-do: "Your poor person wants to see wealth, colorful, interesting, exotic—he has an idea of it many times more brightly colored than the reality." An earlier statement reveals that the director also understood the function he performed for audiences as a showman: "The desire [for beauty] is greater than the means of gratification . . . . Give beauty to the world, and you'll be successful."^[64] Apart from glamorous representations of upper-class life in widely circulated magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal , the influence of filmmakers like DeMille on advertising is observable in a number of industry developments during the 1920s.

Particularly significant in the evolution of advertising during the decade was the seductive and streamlined image of the "new woman." As opposed to World War I posters that emphasized maternal and nurturing qualities, the image of a young woman seated before a dresser, a standard shot in Old Wives for New, Don't Change Your Husband, Why Change Your Wife?, Forbidden Fruit , and The Affairs of Anatol , became formulaic in ads that defined the modern woman. Ladies' Home Journal —a Curtis Publishing Company product that pioneered ad stripping in 1896 so that ads were placed in a format with fiction and feature articles—increased its fashion content from 16 percent in 1918-1920 to 30 percent in 1922-1923. A major breakthrough in the use of color in magazine ads for such domestic products as bathroom towels occurred between 1924 and 1928. An emphasis on ensembles in women's apparel and accessories became popular in 1926-1927 and also served as an important theme in home furnishing, especially the decoration of bathrooms as a conspicuous showcase. DeMille's feature films served as significant intertexts for several of these developments. A trendsetter, the director featured elegant table settings, novel bathroom scenes, and ensemble, woven cane bedroom furniture in Old Wives for New in 1918. A medium close-up of Swanson sleeping on an embroidered pillowcase trimmed with lace in Don't Change Your Husband stressed the importance of fine linens in 1919. For advertisers, the streamlined Art Deco design that DeMille used so inventively with the Handschiegl color process in The Affairs of Anatol in 1921 became a signifier of modernity. An increasing use of elements of fantasy in representational strategies was countered, however, by a tradition of realism that was still persuasive in ads as opposed to film spectacle. Without question, the intertextuality of feature film and advertising was most evident in the use of narrative to sell products. Copywriters created social tableaux in the pictorial tradition and employed the conventions of melodrama to dramatize consumer desire for commodities. As Motion Picture Nays observed, DeMille engaged in a reverse practice by

inserting product labels in Why Change Your Wife? , surely a blatant mode of incorporating advertising in filmic narration. Undoubtedly most important in these narratives was the rationalization of a consumer ethos in terms of the Victorian rhetoric of uplift. Ad men, as Marchand argues, thought of themselves as "apostles of modernity" with a mission to assuage anxiety, provoked by modernization and to educate the public, especially women, about the advantages of using products to achieve a distinctive life-style. Ads created by these men were "secular sermons" that bestowed upon goods spiritual qualities transcending the mere satisfaction of material needs. The sacrosanct tone associated with the refinement of highbrow culture, ironically, was transferable to mass cultural forms that stimulated the growth of consumption and commercialized leisure.^[65]

A filmmaker who shared the elite socioeconomic background of men in the advertising business, DeMille, too, spoke in terms of a mission that was part of his family's theatrical legacy to use the stage as a pulpit. At the beginning of the 1920s, he articulated a faith in cultural stewardship that belonged to the Progressive Era: "I believe that the people who make up the middle and sometimes the lower elements of human society have a keen grasp on the essentials of drama and life; that their appreciation is worthy of our cultivation." Similarly, he summed up his achievement toward the end of the decade: "I believe I have had an obvious effect upon American life. I have brought a certain sense of beauty and luxury into everyday existence, all jokes about ornate bathrooms and de luxe boudoirs aside."^[66] Such sentiment was undoubtedly shared by advertisers who reproduced the director's representational strategy to mediate the experience of modernity for affluent consumers. DeMille himself set an example, as he not only preached uplift through consumption but led a baronial life-style that included a hillside mansion, chauffeured limousine, yacht, and Western style ranch.^[67] Yet in response to critics who began to dismiss his productions as ostentatious exercises in set and costume design, he returned to the Bible as an inspiration for The Ten Commandments (1923) and articulated a nostalgic vision of America that still resonated in a consumer culture.