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]