FILM REVIEW – THE GODLESS GIRL.
The last silent film directed by Cecille B. DeMille, and a much maligned work, which caused some controversy on release. This version, shown recently on Channel Four is a cleaned up version of the original silent print, edited lovingly by the BFI.
The film suffered badly at the box office, as the talkies were now being made in earnest. A later version of the film was issued with some dialogue, but that edition is now largely forgotten, though the silent print contains so many dialogue captions that this would really have worked best as a talkie.
Plot-wise, this is a love story and a melodrama, though it took up two major issues, religion and prison conditions as central themes. Religion fares badly, but the prison reform issues are the heart and soul of the film.
The plot concerns a student riot between an atheist faction who organize clandestine meetings to discuss Darwinism, and the Christian Right student union, who decide to crush the movement. Despite assurances to the college Deans of settling the matter without violence, the Christians orchestrate a major riot, in which a young girl is accidentally killed when a stair rail gives way.
As the atheistic young lady dies, she starts to doubt her atheism, and asks for assurances that she will go to Heaven. The heroine, Lina Basquette, the Godless Girl of the title, is coldly unwilling to offer such soothing words, but a policeman intervenes and does it for her.
The leader of the union, Tom Keene, and the Godless Girl, are now sent to a reformatory, a brutal US Borstal prison for their part in the death of the girl, and it is here that the film finds a more valuable purpose. The harshness of the reformatory prison regime is captured superbly. It is clear that DeMille had social reform of such conditions in mind, and the film helped to relieve some of the conditions. The couple are of course separated, but with the male and female prisons being back to back, separated by electric fencing, they see one another every now and then. In a horrible sequence, they hold hands through the deactivated fence wire but a particularly sadistic guard switches the juice on, forcing them to keep in one another’s grip until he is forced to let them go before they die..
In the girl’s prison, the heroine befriends a devout Christian girl called Mame, (Marie Prevost) though they fall out when the heroine throws Mame’s Bible on the floor. When they fight over it, the guards catch them, and Mame loses her Trustee status, but the ladies are soon friends again.
In the ultra-nasty male prison, the hero faces endless brutality from the chief warden in particular, there is a stark scene where the hero stands defiantly and stoic as the guards attack him with a high-pressure water hose. Later, cast into solitary confinement, the hero witnesses the chief warden beat a young boy close to death for offering the prisoners too much bread and water. He is enraged enough to attack the warden, and then he escapes from the prison, and manages to help the Godless Girl escape from hers too.
For a brief time, the couple find happiness, and love. She is seen skinny-dipping in a river by the deserted farmstead they make their own. However, while she is discovering a sense of God in her freedom and love of nature and man, her man is becoming embittered and cynical after the horrors he has endured in prison. He is losing the faith she has rediscovered.
Freedom is short lived however, as the couple are soon recaptured. Separated and cast into solitary confinement in their respective prisons, they are fated to meet again in terrible circumstances.
An accidental fire in the women’s prison sends the whole complex up. The prisoners are happy to fan the flames, hoping it will lead to a better new home for them if they need moving, and some plan to use the fire as a means to escape. Only Mame is concerned about The Godless Girl still trapped in the solitary cells, all but forgotten.
The fire and riot gets so severe that the male prisoners are enlisted to help put it out, including the hero, but when he learns about his girl being trapped from Mame, his efforts to reach her are marred by both the fire and the brutal chief warden.
The very spectacular fire traps the key players, but the hero gets the heroine from her cell. However, the warden who has been so mean to each of them gets trapped and begs to be rescued as he is terrified of burning to death. The embittered hero is al for leaving him to his fate, but the heroine begs him to learn Christian forgiveness. He does, and pulls his former nemesis from the path of the fire. Though he later dies, the equally reformed and forgiving warden recommends the couple, Mame, and another prisoner who helped them out, (a kid who has a crush on Mame) for immediate release. We see them leaving the prison as the film ends.
The religious notion of good things only coming to those who accept God in their lives is revolting, but the sense of a need for prison reform is very apparent too, and the prison scenes are genuinely moving and powerful nearly 80 years on.
Arthur Chappell
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