This is a typical story of temptation to adultery. A man with an irritatingly over-uxorious wife has a certain nostalgia for his more easy-going former girlfriend. She had thrown him over in order to marry money and herself plays the "good wife" in an entirely cynical manner to manipulate her husband and obtain whatever she wants. But she is irritated that her former lover should have, as she puts it, been "so easily consoled" and plans with equal cynicism to make him unfaithful to his goose of a wife.
It is rare to have such a story told almost exclusively from the feminine side. The two husbands are portrayed as having little notion of what is going on and to be merely reacting, positively or negatively, to the activities of their wives.
Of female solidarity there is no sign whatsoever and a senes showing a woman's suffrage meeting if used by Weber to satirise the political activities of women. Of the three women we see, one is simply there to show off socially, the second is there to keep an eye on er rival and the third hs no notion of what the meeting is about. The speaker at the meeting is a man. Women had obtained the vote by the time the film appeared in 1921 but Weber seems to have held a very dim view of the long political battle that had preceded it. The fact that Weber introduced this scene (which is in itself quite unnecessary to the plot of the film) indicates a deliberate satirical intention.
She seems to take an equally dim view of the cchracters of both the "too wise wives" she portrays. The one certainly is formally presented as "unselfish" and "good" but she is actually portrayed as exceptionally irritating. When, at point, she concedes self-deprecatingly that no one could love such a foolish woman as herself, the spectator can only really agree with her. As for her rival, she is vain, manipulative and selfish while the only other woman shown in the film is quite simply stupid. Nevertheless it is these women who have characetrs - the men are portrayed as almost entirely characterless - and whose chaarcetrs determine the action.
So Weber has here very deliberately set out to make a female-entered that is anything but feminist. Weber is often accused of being over-moralistic but this is sometimes to ignore the way in which she deliberately undercuts her own ostensible moral position. This film is in the end a rather amoral one and has more in common than at first meets the eye with the male-centred films on a similar theme made at this time by Erich von Stroheim (Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives) to which the title of the Weber film is itself an allusion.
It is a common Weber strategy to take a conventional point of view and reverse it - she uses a frame story in Idle Wives to undercut the message of the popular novel on which it is based and in the short comedy Discontent she deliberately reverses the sentimental view of civil war veterans that had been presented in the films of Thomas Ince. Here she is performing several such reversals. The women's movement is portrayed as kind of pious fraud,. It is not women who are at risk from men but men who are at risk from women since it is women not men who are the active social agent. Finally the opposition between the good and the bad woman is a false one (a male myth in fact) since the two types of women are equally "too wise", each in their own way and equally concerned to pursue their appearently quite different. - but in the end not so different as all that - strategies of manipulation.
It is rare to have such a story told almost exclusively from the feminine side. The two husbands are portrayed as having little notion of what is going on and to be merely reacting, positively or negatively, to the activities of their wives.
Of female solidarity there is no sign whatsoever and a senes showing a woman's suffrage meeting if used by Weber to satirise the political activities of women. Of the three women we see, one is simply there to show off socially, the second is there to keep an eye on er rival and the third hs no notion of what the meeting is about. The speaker at the meeting is a man. Women had obtained the vote by the time the film appeared in 1921 but Weber seems to have held a very dim view of the long political battle that had preceded it. The fact that Weber introduced this scene (which is in itself quite unnecessary to the plot of the film) indicates a deliberate satirical intention.
She seems to take an equally dim view of the cchracters of both the "too wise wives" she portrays. The one certainly is formally presented as "unselfish" and "good" but she is actually portrayed as exceptionally irritating. When, at point, she concedes self-deprecatingly that no one could love such a foolish woman as herself, the spectator can only really agree with her. As for her rival, she is vain, manipulative and selfish while the only other woman shown in the film is quite simply stupid. Nevertheless it is these women who have characetrs - the men are portrayed as almost entirely characterless - and whose chaarcetrs determine the action.
So Weber has here very deliberately set out to make a female-entered that is anything but feminist. Weber is often accused of being over-moralistic but this is sometimes to ignore the way in which she deliberately undercuts her own ostensible moral position. This film is in the end a rather amoral one and has more in common than at first meets the eye with the male-centred films on a similar theme made at this time by Erich von Stroheim (Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives) to which the title of the Weber film is itself an allusion.
It is a common Weber strategy to take a conventional point of view and reverse it - she uses a frame story in Idle Wives to undercut the message of the popular novel on which it is based and in the short comedy Discontent she deliberately reverses the sentimental view of civil war veterans that had been presented in the films of Thomas Ince. Here she is performing several such reversals. The women's movement is portrayed as kind of pious fraud,. It is not women who are at risk from men but men who are at risk from women since it is women not men who are the active social agent. Finally the opposition between the good and the bad woman is a false one (a male myth in fact) since the two types of women are equally "too wise", each in their own way and equally concerned to pursue their appearently quite different. - but in the end not so different as all that - strategies of manipulation.