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Sold for Marriage (1916)

Posted By: Someonelse

Date: 13 Jul 2019 12:17:32

SD / DVD IMDb

Sold for Marriage (1916)
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 53 mins | 2,68 Gb
Score MP2 @ 224 Kbps with English intertitles
Genre: Drama

Director: Christy Cabanne (as William Christy Cabanne)
Writer: William E. Wing (story and scenario)
Stars: Lillian Gish, Frank Bennett, Walter Long

Marfa (Lillian Gish), a Russian peasant girl, is in love with Jan (Frank Bennett). However, her uncle and aunt (A.D. Sears and Pearl Elmore) want her to marry an older, wealthy man. Colonel Griegoff (Walter Long) wants her, but Marfa will have nothing to do with him. When he tries to have his way with her, she knocks him out with a club and runs off. Along with her uncle and aunt, she emigrates to America. Jan, who wants to make his fortune, is on the same ship. They all settle in the Russian district of Los Angeles. Once again, Marfa's pushy relatives try to force her into an arranged marriage, but they are foiled by Jan and the police. A quick glance at this plot shows why Lillian Gish preferred to downplay many of the films she made with directors other than D.W. Griffith.

IMDB | Wikipedia | TCM

While preparing for my essay on the well-known and not-so-well-known movies of 1916, I stumbled across a rather obscure Lillian Gish feature, Sold For Marriage, which I'd recommend both to fans of the legendary actress and to those interested in how Hollywood treated what was then, as now, a hot-button issue in American politics, immigration.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

By 1916, approx- imately one of every eight persons living in the United States was a first- gener- ation immigrant, with a million more arriving every year, and given that most studio owners were themselves immigrants, it should come as no surprise that the daily lives of immigrants was a frequent topic of movies throughout the decade. Sold For Marriage is specifically about Russian immigrants, a substantial community of over 3 million mostly Jewish, Ukranian and Belarusan peasants and laborers who between 1881 and 1914 had arrived in the U.S. seeking political and religious freedom and economic opportunity.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

The story opens in Russia with Gish playing Marfa, a young woman on the verge of being sold into an arranged marriage to the town's most eligible bachelor, a short, fat "beast" who nevertheless promises wealth and social standing. Predictably, Marfa prefers Jan (Frank Bennett), a young, handsome—and poor—laborer. Following a narrow escape from a lusty army officer who won't take no for an answer, Marfa and her family immigrate to the U.S., where once again a struggle ensues between Marfa's desire for Jan and her family's desire to arrange a profitable marriage.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

Even though Sold For Marriage was directed by Christy Cabanne, the ending is straight out of the D.W. Griffith playbook, with classic three-part intercutting between Gish and her tormentors as her would-be savior rushes to the rescue, the sort of sequence Griffith more or less invented in 1909 and repeated many times, including in Gish's very first film, 1912's An Unseen Enemy.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

I'd like to tell you that Sold For Marriage is a nuanced look at life in the Russian community on par with near- documentary quality films such as Traffic in Souls or The Italian. It isn't. Instead, the story of a girl forced into marriage has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel to it, exploiting a hot topic for quick box-office bucks rather than offering any meaningful insight into what life might have been like for these newly-minted Americans.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

And you thought Law & Order invented cheap exploitation.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

What makes Sold For Marriage worth tracking down is Gish's performance. Not only is it good—as you would expect—but it reveals a side of her I can't say I've seen before. She's sullen, she's petulant, at times she funny, and more to the point, she's flirtatious and sexual, for example, clinging to Frank Bennett with a hunger that is as refreshing as it surprising. Even her performances in The Scarlet Letter and La Boheme, a pair of romances from 1926, didn't prepare me for the notion that Gish as an actress could ever be particularly comfortable as a romantic lead.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

While we think of Gish from this era as D.W. Griffith's go-to girl – e.g., The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms and Way Down East – her chief collaborator in 1916 was a Griffith protege, director Christy Cabanne, and maybe this accounts for the uncharacteristic nature of Gish's performance. While Cabanne isn't nearly as imaginative a director as Griffith, perhaps he didn't so narrowly conceive of Gish as the embodiment of a virginal Victorian fantasy, allowing him to see in Gish possibilities Griffith never did.

Sold for Marriage (1916)

In any event, Sold For Marriage is an unusual entry in the Lillian Gish filmography and will require me to broaden my sense of her range.
A Mythical Monkey