"What Do Men Want?" is another Lois Weber film to exist today in an incomplete form, with only its middle reels three, four and five surviving from its original seven reels. And, what does remain contains an unusually large amount of flickering, as if it were filmed or projected too slowly, although it's not too distracting. An account in Anthony Slide's book, "Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History," of a copy of the film is another demonstration of the negligence that led to most silent films being lost and a good many that do survive doing so only as fragments. This film was one of six features and two shorts from Weber's personal collection that were donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1947, where it was left to rot until it wasn't one of the survivors to be copied to safety film in the 1970s. What we do have today is from the American Film Institute's archives, as restored by the Library of Congress.
Based on the coherent middle section of the film that remains, "What Do Men Want?" is similar to the other pictures on marital problems Weber made at her independent studio around the same time, the more-extant titles of "Too Wise Wives" and "The Blot" (both also from 1921 and all three starring Claire Windsor). As recounted in Shelley Stamp's book, "Lois Weber in Early Hollywood," Weber described these films as "little afternoon teas," as opposed to the "heavy dinners" of the controversial ripped-from-the-headlines and often censored fare she made at Universal in the 1910s, including "Hypocrites" (1915) and "Where Are My Children?" (1916) and topics such as abortion, birth control, capital punishment, drug abuse, eugenics, poverty, rape, religion, and working women. Granted, for a Progressive reformer and evangelist like Weber, even "little afternoon teas" may consist of adultery, child and spousal abandonment, class issues, gender issues, suicide and such and all within a heavily-titled and solemn lecture format.
Where, to paraphrase, a "little afternoon tea" does seem an accurate description is for the current state of this film now--a treat, or snack, but not an entirely satisfying meal of a complete film. Consequently, not too much may be made of an answer to the titular question credited to a line from a George Bernard Shaw play. Both men seem to mostly just want to be away from the women in their lives, whether that means working on an invention, or going to a stripper party and appearing to about to commit adultery when reel five ends, or just skipping town on a pregnant woman, while the women seem to want nothing more than the men--what with them being such apparent, aforementioned catches, I guess--to the point that one of them choses not to live at all without him. Oh, of course, it's a gorgeous-looking picture, too, and one should expect nothing less from a great director like Weber, but from what remains, I find it too heavy-handed in its domestic moralizing, as much in line with the problems I had with "The Blot," and absent the subtle artistry that lifted "Too Wise Wives," as well as some of those "heavy dinners" at Universal.
Regardless, "What Do Men Want?" appears to have marked a decline in Weber's career--not artistically, but commercially, as Paramount decided not to release it as they did with her other independent productions. The decision effectively forced Weber to work at other, less-prominent studios, as she precipitously made fewer features, including turning down the one production she was offered at a major studio (United Artists), "Topsy and Eva" (1927) (and she was surely wise in turning it down given the material is based on a minstrel show being made out of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the latter book reportedly being what attracted Weber to the production), until the end of her career with one talkie. Unfortunately, and as opposed to her days at Rex and Universal where she worked beside several other female directors and writers, it appears that as the studio system came into full swing in Hollywood, the answer to the question of "What Do Men Want?" appears to increasingly excluded female filmmakers.
To end on a more positive note, however, I am looking forward to reviewing two later Weber features and superior copies to films that have been in limited circulation for a while now, "A Chapter in Her Life" (1923) and "Sensation Seekers" (1927), when the Kino Lorber Blu-ray is released soon.
