Too Wise Wives (Lois Weber Productions, Paramount, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on Sunday, September 28 my husband Charles joined me to watch the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature, Too Wise Wives, made in 1921 by studio owner, producer, director, and co-writer Lois Weber. Lois Weber is one of the great forgotten names in early movie history, at least partially because early movie history was consciously written to slight the major contributions made by women in the early days. The first woman whose immense contributions to early cinema were flushed down the memory hole was Alice Guy-Blaché, the French-born director who appears to have been the first person to realize that movies could be made to tell a fictional story instead of just recording everyday reality. (Turner Classic Movies showed a documentary about Alice Guy-Blaché which I wrote about; my review appears on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/be-natural-untold-story-of-alice-guy.html.) Though she had got her start working for the French Gaumont studio (the oldest movie company in continuous existence; it was founded in 1895, a year before the second oldest, another French company, Pathé), the official history of Gaumont didn’t mention her. Lois Weber had a direct connection to Alice Guy-Blaché; she was briefly involved in an affair with Guy-Blaché’s husband, Herbert Blaché, when she was an actress working at Solax, the company the Blachés founded. Weber gradually worked her way up through the movie ranks from acting to directing, and by 1916 she was an established director at the level of D. W. Griffith. The first Lois Weber film Charles and I saw was Where Are My Children? (1916), made for Universal and a problem for modern-day feminists because it was both a great film (the male lead was Tyrone Power, father of the Tyrone Power who became a major star in the 1930’s and continued until his death in 1958) and a stern propaganda piece against abortion. I had forgot that Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley (who was listed as her assistant on many of her films; the two were collaborators but it was clear who “wore the pants” in that family) had also directed The Dumb Girl of Portici, based on Daniel-François Auber’s 1828 opera Masaniello and starring ballet star Anna Pavlova in her only feature-length film. TCM showed this on a previous “Silent Sunday Showcase” and I wrote about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-dumb-girl-of-portici-universal-1916.html.

By 1921 Weber had founded her own studio, Lois Weber Productions, and was releasing her films through Paramount. Too Wise Wives was a surprisingly compelling drama about two married couples: Mr. and Mrs. David Graham, Jr. (Louis Calhern and Claire Windsor) and Mr. and Mrs. John Daly (Phillips Smalley – Weber’s real-life husband – and an actress billed as “Mona Lisa” – if she had another name besides that preposterous one, imdb.com doesn’t list it, but she’s quite good). David Graham had briefly dated Mrs. Daly – whose first name, we learn first from an intertitle in which her husband addresses her and then from a note she writes, is Sara – before he married his current wife. (The Wikipedia page on Too Wise Wives lists Mrs. Graham’s first name as “Marie,” but I don’t recall that from the film itself.) Then Sara married John, partly because she needed money to help her mother and partly because she just wanted a sugar daddy. But she doesn’t really love him and spends a lot of her spare time going to meetings of the “Women’s Social and Political Club” (remember that this movie was made in 1921, just one year after the 19th amendment went into effect and women won the right to vote nationwide, and when this film was made the League of Women Voters was organizing to give newly empowered female voters the information needed to use the franchise wisely) and also going on shopping trips with her women friends, all of whom except Mrs. Graham seem to be married to rich, indulgent husbands. Too Wise Wives is a surprisingly class-conscious film, though the classes are the middle and upper classes rather than anyone more proletarian. There’s a great scene in which everyone else who went to the Women’s Social and Political Club meeting is being driven home in a fancy car by a chauffeur, and poor Mrs. Graham has to get in her own dowdy-looking vehicle and drive herself home. There’s also a marvelous sequence in which Mrs. Graham and Mrs. Daly are in a clothing store, and Mrs. Graham buys a dress she really can’t afford on her husband’s allowance. But she doesn’t want to embarrass herself in front of Mrs. Daly, so she buys the dress, alters the price tag so her husband will think it’s cheaper than it is, and swears she’ll earn the difference herself “some way”!

Though the Grahams are supposed to be the middle-class family, they still have two servants (a cook and a housekeeper) compared to the Dalys’ one. Sara cheerily admits she’s hopeless as both a housewife and a cook, while Mrs. Graham is proud of her own skills in the kitchen. She’s also good about doing things she thinks will please her husband whether they will or not, like knitting him a pair of slippers when he thinks knitted slippers are “an abomination.” Mrs. Graham’s devotion to David approaches masochism, and as with Weber’s stance on abortion in Where Are My Children?, it’s hard to reconcile her portrait of wifely duty and submission here with her own life, in which she insisted on using her maiden name professionally and wouldn’t have thought for one minute to bill herself as “Mrs. Phillips Smalley.” Ironically, one fault I found with The Dumb Girl of Portici was the highly stylized, stagy quality of the acting. As I wrote about Dumb Girl, “Moving their arms like semaphore signals and heaving their bodies around to register rage or disgust, the actors in this movie perform in the sort of heavily stylized, flamboyantly unrealistic acting style a lot of people who’ve never seen a silent movie start to finish assume they were all acted like.” In the five years between Dumb Girl and Too Wise Wives, Lois Weber had got the message, because one of the things I liked best about Too Wise Wives is both the subtlety of Weber’s writing and the understated performances she got from her cast. Both the story and the acting are remarkably free of typical silent-era hamminess.

The climax of Too Wise Wives comes when Sara Daly invites both Mr. and Mrs. Graham to the Dalys’ home for a weekend during which she intends to seduce Graham. She’s picked that particular weekend because Mr. Daly is leaving town for a business trip (it’s not clear just how these people make their livings, but we know David Graham works for his father in a white-collar job and dad’s company is facing financial issues, which was one of the reasons why Mrs. Graham wasn’t sure about whether he could afford the dress she wanted to buy), and while it seems a bit raw by today’s standards for Sara to be making her move on David while his wife was a guest in the same house, she’s hoping to get him alone. She’s written him a note to that effect and even doused it with perfume, but the messenger entrusted to deliver it to David’s office missed him and instead took it to the Grahams’ house and gave it to his wife. She was tempted to open the letter but ultimately didn’t. While all this is going on, John Daly arrives at the train station to take the train for wherever he’s going on his business trip, only the train is delayed for an hour. Where I thought this was going was that John would return home and catch his wife in flagrante delicto, or as close thereof as a 1921 movie could allow, with David Graham. Much to their credit, Weber and her co-writer, Marion Orth, avoided anything so tacky and melodramatic. John does indeed bail on his trip and return home, but the film ends with Mrs. Graham saying that from now on she’s going to do what her husband really wants instead of what she thinks he should want, and both the Grahams and the Dalys reconcile.

Though, among other things, Too Wise Wives is a propaganda piece for traditional morality, it’s also a fascinating film for its time and an indication of Weber’s formidable skills as writer, director, and producer. According to TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, Weber divorced Phillips Smalley a year after making this film, and that started the unraveling of her career and her previous power position in Hollywood. Charles was struck by the fact that Too Wise Wives obviously took place in California; even before the return address on Sara’s letter nailed it, he’d guessed it from the big picture windows in the houses and other architectural features you wouldn’t put in homes in locations that actually have hard-core winters. Too Wise Wives is another compelling film from Lois Weber (whose studio logo was an Aladdin-style lamp, an emblem later used by the spectacularly misnamed Educational Pictures, a 1930’s indie which didn’t make educational pictures but specialized in two-reel comedy and musical shorts and billed its products as “The Spice of the Program”) and another indication of how good she was as a director and how unfairly neglected she’s been in the historiography of film. Also I was interested in Too Wise Wives because I wanted to see how Louis Calhern had looked young – surprisingly good, it turned out. He had a William Powell-esque quality (though this film was made a year before Powell made his screen debut as a crook turned good guy in the John Barrymore Sherlock Holmes from 1922), and it was a pleasant surprise to see how good he was as a leading man when the films of his I’m most familiar with are his role as the rival ambassador in the Marx Brothers’ political satire Duck Soup (1933), the shady lawyer and mastermind of the heist in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and the title character in Julius Caesar (1953).