The Affairs of Anatol (Cecil B,. DeMille Pictures, Paramount, Artcraft, 1921)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 12) my husband Charles and I watched a particularly interesting and quite good film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Nights”: The Affairs of Anatol (1921), directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Wallace Reid (who in some closeups bore a striking resemblance to James Dean) and Gloria Swanson in a tale loosely adapted from Anatol, an 1893 play by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler. Like most of DeMille’s early films, it’s actually a sex comedy. The credits insist that the film was merely “suggested” by Schnitzler’s play; Jeanie Macpherson, DeMille’s long-time collaborator, gets credit for the script with Beulah Marie Dix and Elmer Harris acknowledged for “literary assistance,” whatever that meant. Charles and I had seen the film at least once before, the night after we screened the DVD of Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Eyes Wide Shut was also based on a work by Schnitzler (his 1926 book Traumnovelle, which means “Dream Novel”) and, like The Affairs of Anatol, relocated Schnitzler’s story from Vienna to contemporary New York City. I had intensely disliked Eyes Wide Shut, thinking it was the work of a man who had kept himself isolated from the rest of humanity for so long he’d literally forgotten how ordinary human beings behaved. My astonishment over The Affairs of Anatol came largely from how much better DeMille did with Schnitzler’s running themes than Kubrick had. In a previous moviemagg post on The Affairs of Anatol as part of an article I called “10 More Unjustly Neglected Films by Major Directors” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html), I wrote, “Surprise! The Affairs of Anatol turned out to be a far better film in every respect: a more sophisticated script (by Jeanie Macpherson, Beulah Marie Dix and Elmer Harris), superior direction (with half-lit shots, silhouette shots, mirror shots and other tantalizing visual effects) and a more intense and believable cast (Gloria Swanson and Wallace Reid as the central couple and Bebe Daniels standing out as the Satanist). This was DeMille while he was still a major creative director before years of Biblical spectaculars drained him of any real visual acumen and allowed him to coast on the sheer grandeur of his massive sets and hordes of extras.”

Ironically, though Schnitzler hadn’t yet written Traumnovelle when The Affairs of Anatol was filmed, the changes Macpherson, Dix, and Harris made to Schnitzler’s play brought the two stories closer together. Anatol Drew Spencer (Wallace Reid), single in the play (though with a fiancée in the opening scene), is married in the movie. His wife Vivian (Gloria Swanson) is a rather immature woman who expects him to buckle her shoes for her. They’ve been married just 10 months but already they’re getting bored with each other, and Anatol, partly on the urging of his best male friend Max Runyon (Elliott Dexter), decides to look around. The titles make it clear that he’s a Don Quixote type (Cervantes’s hero is name-checked) eager to get involved with other women in an attempt to “rescue” them from their troubles. His first attempted rescuee is actually an old girlfriend of his, Emilie Dixon (Wanda Hawley), who came to New York with aspirations to be an actress. She ran through all her money and got picked up by a sugar daddy, Gordon Brunson (Theodore Roberts, who just two years later would play Moses for DeMille in his first – and better – version of The Ten Commandments), who has lavished jewels on her. Anatol picks up Emilie and moves her into his home, saying that both he and his wife will be happy to help with her reclamation. Anatol hires a music teacher, The Great Blatsky (Raymond Hatton), to teach her violin, only in scenes that eerily anticipate Susan Alexander’s voice lessons in Citizen Kane 20 years later, she plays terribly and shows no acumen for the instrument. (The restoration we were watching, from a film preservation bureau on the island of Malta with help from Paramount Pictures and the Library of Congress, supplies a soundtrack that makes clear how badly she plays.) Anatol demands as part of his condition for helping her that she take all the jewels Brunson gave her and throw them in the river (we see a shot of the Brooklyn Bridge on screen). No fool she, she just dumps the jewelry cases and keeps the jewels themselves. Eventually he comes in on her while she’s throwing a wild party with Brunson and her scapegrace friends, sees her wearing one of the jewelry pieces she supposedly disposed of, and smashes all the furniture in her apartment, most of which Anatol had given her himself (another Citizen Kane anticipation!).

Then Anatol tells his wife Vivian (ya remember Anatol’s wife Vivian?) that he’s disgusted with life in the city and wants them to move to the country where people are decent and honest. Only, as the titles warn us and we could pretty well guess from the overall sense of this film, Anatol is about to run into moral trouble in the country, too. Annie Elliott (Agnes Ayres) is dreaming of fine clothes and furnishings she’s read about in magazines, but her farmer husband Abner (Monte Blue) doesn’t want to pay for them. So she steals money from his strongbox that he actually collected for the local church and uses it to order herself a nightgown. When he realizes how she got the money for it he grabs it out of her hands and throws it to the floor, stomping on it in the process. Abner tells Annie that he’ll probably be arrested for the theft, and, seeing the city slickers Anatol and Vivian and figuring they’ll be good for the money, fakes a suicide attempt. Anatol “rescues” her and gives her his jacket to keep her warm. His jacket contains his wallet, of course, and Annie steals it and gives the money to her husband, being evasive about just where and how she got it. Anatol doesn’t notice his loss until he offers to pay the doctor he summoned to help Annie for his trouble and notices his wallet is missing. The couple return to New York and Vivian decides she’s had enough; she locks Anatol out of their bedroom (there are some quite clever comedy scenes showing him trying to break in via the peephole in the door) and announces that if he can play around, so can she.

Anatol goes to a particularly decadent cabaret where the star performer is a woman who bills herself as “Satan Synne” (Bebe Daniels in a first-rate performance anticipating her role in the first version of The Maltese Falcon 10 years later). The doorway to Synne’s bedroom is emblazoned with the legend, “Those who would sup with the Devil must bring a golden spoon.” Anatol enters Synne’s private bedchamber and she feeds him absinthe and offers him “special” cigarettes to smoke. But it turns out that Synne is really the wife of a soldier who was badly wounded in World War I and is still under increasingly expensive treatments from Dr. Johnston (Winter Hall). The scenes in the hospital are shot and projected in stark black-and-white, a far cry from the rich range of tints, tones, and even full-color stencil effects (though seen only in the credits and intertitles, never in a shot that actually shows movement) with which the rest of the movie is adorned. (The current restorationists worked their proverbial asses off to reproduce the tints, tones, and stencil colors accurately.) While all this is happening, Vivian has fallen in with a hypnotist from India named Nazzer Singh (Theodore Kosloff), who successfully hypnotizes her to take off her three layers of stockings to cross a stream that in fact doesn’t exist. Nazzer Singh reappears at the ending in a scene that Arthur Schnitzler actually used to open his play: announcing that he’s on his way back to India (which causes us to heave a sigh of relief that he won’t turn out to be an alternate lover or sex partner for Vivian), he says his goodbyes to Anatol and Vivian. Anatol challenges him to hypnotize Vivian so he can ask her whether she’s been sexually exclusive with him, and Max – who’s also present – tells him to ask the question. But Anatol ultimately decides not to, choosing to trust his wife, and the two kiss and make up as the movie ends.

The Affairs of Anatol suffers from DeMille’s moralizing – there are even citations from the Bible that offer hints of the later sort of moviemaking that would be identified with him – but for the most part it’s a stunning sexual romp through the demi-monde (even though Anatol and Vivian, like their counterparts in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, never actually do the down-‘n’-dirty with alternate partners) whose moral lesson is to avoid the demi-monde because the demi-monde is just too boring and meaningless to bother with. One of the things that struck me about The Affairs of Anatol the first time I saw it is how sophisticated technically as well as morally; this is not the sort of “Cecil B. DeMille picture” that got lambasted by later critics even though millions of moviegoers paid to see them and undoubtedly left the theatre thinking they’d got their money’s worth. In Gloria Swanson’s autobiography she said DeMille offered her choice of any of the four leading female roles, and she chose to play the wife simply because that would mean she’d be in the film throughout. She also said she had major problems dealing with Wallace Reid because he was already addicted to drugs. Reid had become an addict after a film he worked on called The Valley of the Giants (1919), a film about the lumber industry that was later remade as The Big Trees (1952). He was on his way to the location when he was the victim of a train crash, and the doctors treating him prescribed him morphine. He also became an alcoholic. In 1922 Reid checked himself into a sanitarium in hopes of recovering from alcohol and drugs, but he was so far gone that he caught the flu and died in the sanitarium on January 18, 1923: the first, but sadly far from the last, movie star to die a drug-related death. Reid’s widow, Dorothy Davenport, became a public crusader against drug use and made at least two films exposing the dangers of addiction, Human Wreckage (1923) and The Road to Ruin (1934).