The Red Lily (MGM, 1924)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work in time to join me for the third movie on my agenda last night: The Red Lily, a 1924 melodrama from MGM directed and written by Fred Niblo (he’s credited with the original story and Bess Meredyth with the screenplay) and co-starring Enid Bennett (his wife; they married in 1918 and stayed together until his death in 1948) and Ramon Novarro. Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart made a big deal of the fact that of all the major studios, MGM had the reputation for being the most wholesome, whereas this is a dark, almost noir movie that explores crime and sex work. In fact MGM’s reputation as the most wholesome of the major studios only began after production chief Irving Thalberg’s death in September 1936. Thalberg had wanted to build a reputation of MGM as a source for sophisticated stories that dealt more or less honestly with human relationships, including human sexuality, and between the relative freedom of the so-called “pre-Code” era from 1930 to 1934 and Thalberg’s tenure as studio head, MGM green-lighted some pretty edgy melodramas that were far from Louis B. Mayer’s later insistence on wholesomeness: A Free Soul, The Easiest Way, Five and Ten and blockbuster hits like Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight. Ironically, though The Red Lily has some pretty edgy sexual content by 1924 standards, its TV rating is “G.” The Red Lily begins in a small town in Brittany, France in which the poor cobbler’s daughter, Marise La Noue (Enid Bennett), is in love with a rich boy, Jean Leonnec (Ramon Novarro), son of the town’s mayor (Frank Currier). The film opens with a scene of them riding through town in a horse-drawn carriage; they cross a set of train tracks but they get over them harmlessly just before a train comes speeding through. (The gag is they were so much into each other they never noticed the train; it reminded me of a favorite Buster Keaton gag, used in several films, in which the oblivious protagonists narrowly miss being run down by a train – only to be hit by another train going the opposite direction on an adjoining track.)

Alas, catastrophe strikes when Marise’s father suddenly dies of a heart attack, and since she isn’t yet of age she’s shipped off to live with her scumbag relatives, including a drunken husband who wants to whip Marise just for his sick set of kicks. She runs away and Jean agrees to help her flee with him to Paris, where he plans to marry her as soon as they’re old enough, only in the meantime Jean’s father discovers that his home safe has been rifled and his money stolen. Convinced that Jean did it to finance his escape, the mayor swears out an arrest warrant against him and two cops take him into custody after he gets off the train in Paris and take him back to Brittany – only he escapes when the cops get so wrapped up in a card game they’re playing with each other, they allow him to flee. Marise sits at the train station in Paris waiting for Jean to arrive … and waiting … and waiting. Ultimately Jean returns to the train station, but in yet another gag the makers of The Red Lily borrowed from Buster Keaton they just keep missing each other. Meanwhile, back in Brittany, the mayor discovers that it was another man who stole from his safe and Jean is innocent after all – but there’s no way to communicate that to him. Both Jean and Marise end up mixed up in the Paris underworld in general and one member of it, Bo-Bo (Wallace Beery), in particular. Bo-Bo encounters Marise when she’s sitting on the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide, and he’s going to steal her purse. Then he thinks better of it when he opens it and sees she only has three small coins, only he has another change of heart and steals the coins before replacing the purse. Later, encountering Jean while he’s also contemplating suicide via the Seine, Bo-Bo talks him out of it by telling him there are thousands of women in Paris available for the taking. Bo-Bo also talks Jean into a real-life safecracking job; Bo-Bo escapes but Jean is sentenced to a year in prison. When he gets out Bo-Bo is there to meet him and says, “Just one year in prison? I’ve done 10!”

The two do a lot of hanging out at a sleazy café owned by Madame Poussot (Milla Davenport), and for the scenes in the café composer H. Scott Salinas, who added a new score for this film in 2005, makes his music sound deliberately scratchy like a 1924 recording. Poussot’s café has a regular hooker, Nana (Rosemary Theby, who was W. C. Fields’ leading lady in his hilarious 1933 Mack Sennett short The Fatal Glass of Beer), and Madame Poussot also hires Marise to be a B-girl. (The online information about this movie says Marise ends up as a prostitute, and “The Red Lily” is her nom de whore, but that’s not mentioned in the film itself.) On the run from the cops (again) after having assaulted a uniformed officer, Jean crashes into Marise’s apartment. At first he doesn’t recognize her, but when he realizes what she’s become he’s so disgusted he literally slams her to the floor, cutting her cheek. The cops trace Jean to Marise’s apartment via a trail of his blood – he was wounded in a gun battle with them – but she hides him out and tells the police that was her own blood. Eventually he’s arrested and serves two years, but the final scene shows them back together in the little town in Brittany, still in that horse-drawn carriage and still barely missing being run over by a train they’re blissfully aware of – though the final shot shows Bo-Bo sitting in the tailgate of their carriage, carrying a bird in a cage and registering heavy-duty disgust at being their third wheel.

If nothing else, The Red Lily has shot my estimation of Fred Niblo up several notches. I’d always thought of him as a hack, perpetually enlisted to take over troubled projects that had come a-cropper under other directors (he took over Rudolph Valentino’s Blood and Sand from George Fitzmaurice – much to Valentino’s disgust – and the blockbuster silent Ben-Hur, also with Novarro, from Charles Brabin), but here, in a personal project he both wrote and directed (and in which his wife was the female lead), he shines. Though it’s more a romantic melodrama than a crime story, The Red Lily could be considered a film noir 20 years early, not only in the sordid nature of the story but Victor Milner’s powerful chiaroscuro images. It occurred to me that in The Red Lily Niblo might have consciously been trying to make an American version of the so-called “street films” that were coming out of Germany in the mid-1920’s about the urban poor and their sordid struggles to stay alive. (The most famous “street film” was G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street from 1925, mainly because the second female lead was the young Greta Garbo, in her last European film and her last made anywhere other than at MGM.) It also occurred to me that Niblo was probably influenced by Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), also about an innocent country girl who flees to Paris and is forced to sell herself, both physically and psychologically, to make her way in the big bad city. The two films even have virtually the same ending, though in A Woman of Paris the heroine makes her way back to her country town alone because her original boyfriend has committed suicide in the meantime. The Red Lily is an amazing movie, a welcome rediscovery from the silent vaults and a highly sophisticated movie in its own right that ratchets up my respect not only for its director but also its female star. I’d seen Enid Bennett before, mainly as the leading lady in the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood (1922), but in The Red Lily her director/husband puts her through her paces and gets a marvelously nuanced performance out of her. It’s a much more challenging role than Maid Marian was, and like Niblo she rises to the challenges effectively.