Sex

This film was released on VHS by Grapevine Video Inc. in the 1990's but seems to be no longer in stock. The print is a little fuzzy but does not suffer from nitrate decomposition.

Despite the enticingly frank title this is actually a morality tale of a woman who is done to as she has done unto others. The costumes and sets are deliriously bizarre and outré and the direction solid. Miss Glaum, a Theda Bara competitor, is a solid and attractive actress who seems a touch wholesome compared to more recent screen hussies. Whereas Theda Bara seems to have played women who were beyond redemption, Glaum does succumb to the lure of marital contentment only to discover that her former protegé has snagged her rich, indolent playboy husband. Ms. Glaum in her full vamp mode wears a lot of loose, off the shoulder gowns, smokes up a storm and knocks down alcoholic beverages with gusto. Except for some smooching and a few legs on the lap, not much of the titular activity is seen on the screen though heavily implied.

Even by some of the high standards of the silent era, this movie benefited from some outstanding labor behind the scenes. The sets are gorgeous, the costume design is marvelous (especially women's sartorial arrangements), and the hair and makeup work is splendid. Even the intertitles are graced with lovely, detailed illustrations to add flair. Meanwhile, though the narrative covers some familiar silent territory of a free-spirited woman who plays fast and loose with men's hearts, screenwriter C. Gardner Sullivan fills his screenplay with scenes that frankly exceed what one commonly supposes of early cinema and the rigid censorial standards thereof. We get instances of highly flirtatious interactions between the genders (downright scandalous for the time) well beyond what other pictures dared to get away with, or were allowed to, to say nothing of scenes of otherwise raucous behavior befitting what would become known as "the Roaring Twenties" (the thirty-minute "opening scene" of Damien Chazelle's 'Babylon' comes to mind, though far less extreme). It's to the immense credit of Sullivan, filmmaker Fred Niblo, and his cast and crew that everyone was on board with pushing the envelope of what was commonly deemed acceptable in features at the time - and moreover, that 1920's 'Sex' is such an engaging, entertaining film on its own merits.

Yes, the more provocative elements of the title (including its very name) absolutely help it to stand out among its kin, not least when the essence of the plot boils down to a thrust we've seen time and again. Even setting these aside, however, I think 'Sex' is characterized by terrific work across the board that really leaves its mark. Dialogue as conveyed by intertitles is sharp and biting, with some piercing cleverness. The scene writing at large, even less the most willfully defiant cases, is rich and flavorful - concretely building the tableau piece by piece, but also plainly feeling sufficiently open and undefined to allow the actors and director to explore each moment and make it their own. To be sure, Niblo orchestrates shots and scenes with obvious keen intelligence, sagely capturing some excellent fragments in time - including wonderful, carefully considered close-ups - and to that point, cinematographer Charles J. Stumar is surely to be commended as well. Still, maybe I'm just speculating, but maybe even Niblo's direction is pointedly free and welcoming just like the scene writing; I get a sense that the cast, given an opportunity to let go and truly let the characters and situations take over, revel in the freedom that the production grants.

Thus is Louise Glaum able to embody Adrienne with nuanced foundations of conniving and manipulation, but also stark, outward sex appeal and frivolity, belying more complex emotions to come out in time. Peggy Pearce, in the supporting part of Daisy, is just as delightful in portraying the innocent who Adrienne rather takes under her wing, with predictable results; Pearce is arguably even given an equal chance to shine, given Daisy's dramatic character arc. This is hardly to count out supporting players like William Conklin or Irving Cummings, and given relatively little time on-screen, Myrtle Stedman makes a big impression as beleaguered Mrs. Overman. Not to discount Niblo's expert, delicate guiding hand, but the cast really lean into their roles in the storytelling, and from one to the next all contribute superbly to the weaving of a tale of love, lust, and betrayal. I'd even go so far as to say that the acting is typified by more subtlety and natural comportment than what was often true of the silent era, where exaggerated facial expressions and body language tended to reign supreme (especially in the earliest years).

Despite its most uninhibited dalliances, 'Sex' isn't entirely free of the issues of its contemporaries. The eventual turnabout is absorbing, and a major part of the joy of the narrative as a viewer, but the picture also employs a trope that's as empty and tiresome as they come. Just as fiction generally is obsessed with the idea that a man and a woman appearing in scenes together must necessarily become romantically entangled (sigh), older movies loved to aggravatingly emphasize that love and marriage change a woman (gag me with a spoon), and alter their mindset and priorities (you're kidding me, right?). As much as Sullivan, Niblo, and the ensemble rejoice in resisting cultural strictures in telling their story, in some small measure they nonetheless voluntarily abide by them in a rather sexist way. Unless: might this have been a concession to let the rest of the tale be told as they saw fit? I also think this is imperfect more broadly; the last stretch of the runtime feels slightly overlong, with weaker writing that kind of limply tapers off. For as strong as 'Sex' is for most of its length, it's strikingly meager in its last few minutes - with a finish that's possibly appropriate for the saga, but weirdly heavy-handed, and less than fully convincing as it's sapped of the robust drama that would let it have all due impact.

Yet though the end result may be a tad flawed, such inelegance is quite outweighed by the considerable value the flick has to offer. Some facets are familiar, but any ordinariness and the more deficient aspects of the storytelling are outshone by those ways in which 'Sex' readily grabs one's attention. With vibrant visuals, vivid acting, and vivacious dialogue and scenes front and center more than not, this rises above its less impeccable traits and stands out from similar fare that may possess the same faults, without the same advantages. With all this said, the film still doesn't achieve such heights as to utterly demand viewership; unless you're an avid cinephile and already a devotee of the silent era, you don't need to go out of your way to see this. If you do happen to come across it, however, then I feel it's a cut above many of its brethren, and well worth checking out even with its weaker bits. 'Sex' may not be a revelation, but it's noteworthy, and a fine slice of early cinema.

We film buffs who delight in silent movies are always delighted when we find a complete print of a popular title from 1920. SEX is one that thrilled me because the print I saw from Grapevine Video and its appropriate musical sound track, was a real revelation on many levels. The black and whites and grays were ideal and the titles delightfully witty and wise.

I had watched only one of the handful of movies made by Theda Bara's main competitor--Louise Glaum--THE TIGER WOMAN and was impressed with her screen personae and talent.

In SEX, she has a starry, meaty role as Adrienne Renault, the sensational star of the Frivolity Club where she brings down the house nightly when she does her Spider Dance.

She also has an army of male admirers and is having a strong affair with a married man while his wife stays home nightly. Louise runs the gamut of emotions as the entertainer but she also captivates. Although she may give off the impression of being jaded and world-weary, there's a sweetness to her, too, although she does offer her protogee, Daisy, played very effectively by long-forgotten Peggy Pearce, on how to snare a sugar daddy.

Fred Niblo brilliantly directs this fast-moving, witty and very lavish production, with numerous interiors, shots of audiences, backstage life, and some striking costumes for its femme cast members. Louise's Spider Dance is wonderfully modern and very watchable even today.

In watching this entertainment, I often thought of how incredibly fast the art of movies had progressed by 1920--from movie-olas to short features, to full length features by 1915.

SEX is slick, lush, beautifully photographed and edited with a colorful script and knock-out performances by its cast, but especially the enchanting Louise who faded into obscurity by the early 1920s. She's remembered by some film historians for her "special mannerisms" in using her hands. You can see her doing this in several scenes when her hands convey certain ideas and emotions very effectively.

I've read she became a drama teacher over the decades and a popular social matron. A real tragedy is that these early silent screen stars were never interviewed in later years or given televised one-on-one's like Robert Osbourne did on TCM. What a wealth of stories and details on how these early movies were made!

It would be wonderful if SEX had a restoration, promoted so that a new generation of film buffs can see what movie-goers were being treated to in 1920 and beyond.

By the way, SEX was not surprisingly, a great movie title to bring in the crowds and they did come, according to records. But in some cities the moralists demanded the title be changed. So it was but it still didn't stop patrons from mobbing the ticket office.

I think anyone with an interest in cinema history and also with genuine appreciation of early films (not inclined that is to think in terms, now thankfully outmoded, of waxwork actors and "silent relics") will be impressed with how good this film is and will be surprised it is so little known.

It follows in some ways in the lineage of the classic Theda Bara vamp film of 1914, A Fool There Was, but that film, by contrast, is rather over-rated on account of its historical importance and is a much less believable account of a vamp (Yevgeny Bauer's 1914 Ditya bolshogo goroda/Child of a Big City is a rather better film on the same subject). But both these films portray the "vamp" as a horror (A Fool There Was following Kipling's somewhat mysogynist poem), even if the Bauer, unlike the Bara film, does place the behaviour of the woman in a believable social context.

Glaum's vamp in this film is a much more sympathetic character. She is for a start as much victim as predator, an aspect that had come to the fore in later in more nuanced versions of the vamp (Pastrone's Tigre Real 1916 for instance is already a case in point). In fact Glaum is less like a vamp here and more like the quasi-feminist heroines of some films of the early thirties (the 1933 Baby Face is probably the best) before the more formal enforcement of the Hays Code made it rather more difficult to portray "immoral" women as simply individuals battling to survive in an unequal world (from a point of view both of class and gender).

The film is framed as an "exploitation" film (and the producer Paker Read was already something of a specialist) but this is already a device necessary, particularly in US films, to avoid censorship. Which it did very successfully in this case. The film met with a bit of flack but received rave notices with the papers carefully utilising the supposed "moral" aspect of the film to justify it while at the same time praising the honesty of Read's approach. One can find a very interesting sample of these reviews in the appropriate Wikipedia entry.

Finally praise for the mise en scène which is unusually good for a US film of this period (reminiscent of the more "realist" Italian films of the period). There is a fine scene for instance where Daisy, the vamp's naive protégée, is in the foreground watching events unfold amongst the triangle of main characters deep in the background, two rooms beyond. The copy that I saw is rather poor and this is a film that could certainly do with sympathetic restoration in which case I do not doubt it would be regarded as rather more of a classic than a relic.

As for the ending of the film, it is rather truer to life than those of the thirties films where reform after marriage is its own romantic reward. Here the more melodramatic possibilities are sensibly avoided, the vicious circle is well portrayed and there are worse punishments than being a lonely but wealthy woman cruising around the world.

Fred Niblo is an undeservedly forgotten direct, responsible five years later for quite the best film version of the Lew Wallace novel Ben-Hur.

Never had a provocative movie title produced such hysteria as well as a huge payoff at the box office as March 1920's "Sex." Yet what the billboard promised and what Thomas Ince's Studio delivered was a common tame melodrama. Sure, sex was the motivating force behind the actions of the film's characters, but the manipulations of the single women behind the scenes of married men carrying on illicit affairs with a morality-play message was the underlying theme of "Sex." The film by any other name would have been a blip in cinematic history. But its title created such controversy that the buzz behind the marketing before the real details of the movie's plot emerged created long lines at movie theaters. "Sex" was released before a national moral code was introduced by the film industry. The country's strictest state censor board, Pennsylvania, reviewed the movie and didn't see anything wrong with it besides its title. It insisted for the studio change its name to 'Sex Crushed To Earth' before the movie could be shown in that state, which it did.

The film's producer, J. Parker Read, ever the marketeer, defended the motion picture. He wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Sex has an important part in life either for evil or good, and it is the producers' privilege to show the error of the former and the virtue of the latter. Anybody who would wish to ban sex pictures from the screen, would be simply eliminating a highly important, if not the most important phase of life from the pictures." The trouble with Parker's statement was it was all hype. The plot showcases a married millionaire on the town falling for a stage dancer played by Louise Glaum. The wife finds out about his affair and asks Glaum to stop. She refuses, but by the time the wife files for divorce, the dancer is off onto her next affair with yet another millionaire, whom she marries. Things get sticky when Glaum's friend Daisy, naive about married men before Louise sets her straight on the advantages of such affairs, successfully hones in on Glaum's new husband. Naturally, the irony of Glaum's situation when Daisy refuses to stop with the affair when asked boomerangs on the previous vamp Louise.

The actress Glaum had an interesting life as her movie career ended after acting in a handful of films post-"Sex." She returned to the stage, and with the marriage to a movie theater owner, eventually opened or bought several stage venues in the L. A. area--all which were successful operations.