The Circle (MGM, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ weekly silent Sunday feature called The Circle, a 1925 production by director Frank Borzage (who after this film left MGM for Fox, where he made his most famous and commercially successful films) starring Eleanor Boardman (the second Mrs. King Vidor), Malcolm McGregor and Alec B. Francis in a tale of infidelity and wanna-be infidelity based on a play by W. Somerset Maugham (with Kenneth B.. Clarke as the actual screenwriter). Early on I realized this film looked familiar, and I soon figured out why: I’d seen the talkie remake MGM had made in 1930, Strictly Unconventional, directed by David Burton with Catherine Dale Owen, Paul Cavanagh and Tyrrell Davis in the leads and Sylvia Thalberg (sister of MGM production head Irving Thalberg) and Frank Butler doing the script. I’d remembered Strictly Unconventional as a minor gem of a film, savoring the irony of the central situation -- a woman who left her husband for her lover 30 years previously is just as bored and unhappy in her relationship as she’d have been if she’d stayed, and she warns her daughter-in-law not to repeat her same mistake -- and Burton got a quite marvelous performance from Catherine Dale Owen, whose usual incompetent passivity challenged far more reputable directors than he (like John Ford).

Alas, five years earlier MGM got almost nowhere with this story, at least partly because Maugham at this stage in his career was mostly the successor to Oscar Wilde, writing comedies of manners about the British upper classes and filling them with wisecracks. I suspect the play was just too dialogue-driven to be suitable material for a silent film, and it also doesn’t help that Borzage was ill at ease directing romantic comedy. He’d only have been a suitable director for The Circle if he’d had Clarke turn it into serious romantic melodrama and projected the bored misery of Lady Catherine Cheney (Eugenie Besserer, best known for playing Al Jolson’s mother in The Jazz Singer two years later and getting the first dialogue scene especially written for the screen with him) and dyspeptic Lord Hugh Porteous (George Fawcett, one of Erich von Stroheim’s favorite character actors but ill used here) as justified comeuppance instead of irony. Nor is the cast as good as this film got five years later: in Strictly Unconventional Lady Catherine was the great comedienne Alison Skipworth (who made three films with W. C. Fields and actually held her own on screen against him) and Porteous was the marvelous character villain Ernest Torrence in one of his rare comic roles.

The leads are pretty nothing here: Eleanor Boardman was an actress MGM was really pushing towards stardom, but she had nothing to offer but a blank prettiness and an ability to look good with bobbed hair and the short “flapper” dresses au courant young women were wearing in the 1920’s. As Lord Arnold Cheney, the husband she is considering leaving, Alec B. Francis way overdoes the upper-class twit schtick -- though he gets a marvelous moment towards the end when Catherine and her lover Teddy Luton (Malcolm McGregor, who’s considerably hunkier and more charismatic than most silent leading men but is wasted in a pretty nothing role) are running off together, only Arnold disguises himself as their chauffeur, deliberately runs the car off the road, forces Teddy out of it and drives his wife back home. The actors play dully under Borzage’s leaden direction and the film turns out to be pretty dull, enlivened only by accident. Eugenie Besserer’s costume is the funniest part of the film, preposterously “sexy” and the sort of thing only a drag queen would dare wear today -- though Alison Skipworth, a far finer performer best remembered for her three films with Fields and her marvelous performance in the otherwise lame second version of The Maltese Falcon, Satan Met a Lady, in 1936, in whcih they sex-changed the character of Casper Gutman into a woman and Skipworth ate it up, did a far better job making Maugham’s ironic point that she thought she was doing the daringly romantic thing of runningoff with her lover and letting herself in for a long-term relationship as boring as the one she’d have had if she’d stayed with her husband.

The most noteworthy aspect of The Circle is its prologue, which features the young Hugh Porteous (Frank Broadwood) seducing Lady Catherine and getting her to run away with him. Lady Catherine is played in these scenes by a young MGM starlet named Lucille Le Sueur, who would later achieve worldwide fame and legendary status as Joan Crawford (a name actually picked for her in an MGM-sponsored “name that actress!” contest). Though she’s virtually unrecognizable (thanks, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, to the hairstyle she wears in this film being different from the one she used later), she plays her part with a quiet dignity and strength that eluded all the other actors in this film. Alas, ironically, that quiet dignity and strength also eluded Joan Crawford later in her career when she became MGM’s Mistress of Overacting (and, if her adopted daughter Christina’s memoir is to be believed, she overacted off the screen as much as she did on!).