Miss Lulu Bett (Paramount, Artcraft, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched a quite quirky and interesting film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Night”: Miss Lulu Bett, a 1921 film by William de Mille (Cecil B. DeMille’s older brother) based on a 1920 novel and 1921 play by Zona Gale. Both the author and the director have fascinating backstories. William de Mille was a well-known Broadway playwright whose younger brother Cecil B. DeMille (the two brothers spelled the last name differently) didn’t see any openings for himself in the theatrical world where his brother was an important “name.” So he went into the movies instead and ended up as co-founder of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and director of The Squaw Man (1914), the first feature-length film shot in the U.S. William, seeing how well his younger brother was doing in the movies, lit out for Hollywood (which became the production capital of American films after Cecil had shot The Squaw Man there) to seek his own fortune in films. I’d seen one William de Mille film before: The Idle Rich (1929) (see my moviemagg blog post at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/03/idle-rich-mgm-1929.html), which I’d given a mixed review of because “I have a hard time with movies whose makers couldn’t decide whether they were comedy or drama, so they tried to make them both and succeed only in making them neither.” Made nine years earlier and with the same screenwriter (Clara Beranger, whose best-known credit today is probably the 1920 John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), who was an intimate friend of de Mille and became his wife in 1928, Miss Lulu Bett is considerably better balanced between comedy and drama.

Zona Gale had an even more interesting backstory than her director; she was born in 1874 in Portage, Wisconsin, a proverbial Midwestern small town. She became a journalist when she showed up every day at the desk of the city editor of the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin (which creates the impression that Milwaukee is in some other state during the day) for two weeks until he started giving her assignments. Later she moved up to the Milwaukee Journal and in 1901 she moved to New York City and with similar persistence got a job with the New York World while Joseph Pulitzer owned it. As Gale later recalled it, “All of this was so largely sheer adventure and pioneering that none of it now seems to me to have been either will or purpose, but sheer delight.” In 1903 she moved back to Portage and saw her old hometown as a potential setting for fiction, beginning a popular series of novels called “Friendship Village.” Gale was a liberal Democrat and an activist for women’s equality, pacifism (she was a co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), and anti-racism. Later, after her mother died in 1923, she became heavily active in spiritualism. Gale published Miss Lulu Bett as a novel in 1920 and adapted it into a play a year later, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – the first time a woman won it. Though Gale wasn’t directly involved in the film, it carries through her message that sometimes families can become oppressive institutions.

Basically Miss Lulu Bett is an updated version of Cinderella, in which Lulu Bett (Lois Wilson) has been taken in by her tyrannical brother-in-law Dwight Deacon (Theodore Roberts) and his wife Ina (Mabel Van Buren). There are some amusing bits in which Dwight Deacon insists on resetting the wall clock to match his pocket watch, which is 12 minutes fast. The Deacon home is within audible distance of a factory whose whistle signaling the end of the work day lets the Deacons know that the clock was right until Dwight changed it, whereupon Dwight insists that the factory owners deliberately blew the whistle late to grab an extra few minutes of the workers’ time. Lulu has been pressed into service by the Deacons as their unpaid housemaid and, essentially, slave. The Deacons have a mother-in-law (Ethel Wales) staying with them, who may or may not be Lulu’s natural mother (though her last name is “Bett”), and two children of their own, daughters Diana (Helen Ferguson) and Monona (May Giraci). Monona is pre-pubescent but Di (as she’s called throughout the film) is a rambunctious teenager desperate to get away from the stultifying environs of the Deacons’ home and the petty tyrant who rules it. Di is dating a man named Bobby Larkin (Taylor Graves) and makes plans to run off with him and elope. Things change dramatically for Lulu when Dwight Deacon’s brother Ninian (Clarence Burton) comes to town after years of traveling abroad. Ninian takes Lulu on a dinner date – we get the impression that she’s never been on any sort of date before – and goes through a mock wedding ceremony with her that turns out, since there was a justice of the peace at the restaurant to officiate, to be the real thing.

Stuck in a marriage with someone she barely knows and doesn’t love, but also grabbing it as her chance to break away from the stultifying control of the Deacons, Lulu goes through with the marriage and lives with Ninian for a week until he confesses to her that he’s been married before and doesn’t know the whereabouts of his previous wife. Shocked by the idea that she might have unwittingly committed bigamy, since Ninian doesn’t know whether his previous wife is alive or dead, Lulu walks out on him and returns to the Deacons. While she’s been gone the kitchen has become full of dirty dishes and infested with cockroaches (de Mille and cinematographer, L. Guy Wilky, give us a surprisingly detailed and explicit extreme close-up of the infestation), and naturally the Deacons put her back to work to clean up the mess they’ve made of their own home even though they’re also hyper-concerned to make sure the town in general doesn’t learn why Lulu bailed on her marriage so soon. Dwight in particular is worried about the effect the revelation that his brother may be a bigamist will have on the reputation of himself and his family. The Prince Charming in this modern-dress version of Cinderella is Neil Cornish (Milton Sills, who starred in the silent version of Rafael Sabatini’s The Sea Hawk in 1924 and more than held his own in the attractiveness department with Errol Flynn, who played the same role in the 1940 quasi-remake), the local schoolteacher. Charles and I had a rare argument about how the plot would likely resolve; he insisted that the only way Neil and Lulu could get together would be for Ninian Deacon to die. I said that Ninian’s lost wife could turn up, but he said that still wouldn’t resolve the potential that the Deacon family could be scandalized by the revelation that one of them was a bigamist.

There’s an intriguing detour in which Neil and Lulu get wind that Bobby and Di are planning to elope. Bobby runs ahead of her at the train station and buys two tickets, and the station clerk (Charles Ogle, a veteran of the Edison studio where in 1910 he'd become the first actor to play Ebenezer Scrooge and the Frankenstein monster on screen) catches on and guesses he’s eloping. Then Neil and Lulu arrive at the station before Di does – Neil is driving a fish-tailed two-seat car that to a 1921 audience would have marked him as a bit of a sportsman – and Lulu talks Di out of leaving town with Bobby, obviously along the lines of, “Don’t make the same mistake I did.” Then Neil and Lulu declare their love for each other (courtesy of one of Neil’s students, who writes on the chalkboard, “Teacher Loves L,” in quite neat cursive writing when schools still taught that sort of thing) and Lulu finally gets a letter from Ninian saying his wife has been found alive, so his marriage to Lulu is not legally valid and therefore she’s still a single woman and she and Neil can get together legally. The End. Miss Lulu Bett is a quite charming film, ably balanced between comedy and drama, and it marked the start of a long-standing both professional and personal relationship between William de Mille and Clara Beranger; they got married for real in 1928. It’s subtly directed and engagingly acted, even though I couldn’t help but joke, during one scene in which Dwight Deacon is challenging his errant daughter Di to tell him what she was doing going out, referencing Theodore Roberts’s most famous role as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923), that he’d say, “I’ll get the truth if I have to climb Mount Sinai and ask God personally!”