Claire Windsor and J. Frank Glendon are married. Even as they are expecting their first son, Glendon feels restless. Meanwhile, George Hackathorne breaks off his affair with Edith Kessler; no one knows she is expecting a child and she kills herself.
Windsor and Glendon continue married life: more children and a successful business career distract him for a while, but one night he quarrels with Miss Windsor, gets in his car and drives to the country club, where he has a great time with the unattached crowd. He realized that he married too young. Miss Windsor realized that, unlike Miss Kessler, she had chosen wisely.... and still lost. Glendon opens an office in the city and only comes home on weekends. He spends his week nights at wild night clubs.
It's a well thought out, well produced, serious movie by Lois Weber, and it was an utter disaster. Paramount canceled their distribution deal with her, and eventually she lost her studio, her independence and finally, her ability to direct. She made only seven more movies over the next twelve years and died in obscurity in 1939.
Miss Weber divorced her first husband, Phillips Smalley, the following year. The marriage had been shaky for a while. The publicity since she and Smalley had become prominent had been about her; she was viewed as the brains and talent of the team. There's a good deal of truth in that. Smalley's movies lacked the flair and serious underpinnings that movies like this had, and after 1919, he worked solely as an actor, in increasingly small roles. He was playing bit parts by 1939, when he died, the same year as Weber.
Yet I cannot help but think that there was more to the partnership and the marriage than that. This movie was a flop and her next one, THE BLOT, also failed to win an audience, was lost for many years and on its recovery, was seen as a masterpiece. Changing tastes, the increasing industrialization of the film industry and a failing marriage did her in. It's a shame. She had a lot to offer an audience that no longer wanted her.
This movie as it exists today, is incomplete. It had an original running time of 70 minutes. The version I looked at was 41 minutes, starts clearly several minutes into events, and is missing a reel or two at the end. I'm sure Miss Weber offered her opinion of what men -- or at least Frank Glendon in this movie -- wanted. It's unfortunate she didn't know what the men who were now running the industry wanted.... or was unable or unwilling to give it to them.
