Why Change Your Wife, unscensored: DemILLE AND DIVORCE
One hundred years ago today … Cecil B. DeMille’s risqué new movie continued the successful run at the Criterion Theater, 44th and Broadway, though “its musical program would be changed” (Daily News, 6 May, 1920, p. 32). Pennsylvania censors had insisted that DeMille cut some of the film’s steamier scenes, but in New York it stayed intact.
The run had begun two weeks earlier, to much fanfare, and with much acclaim for its star Gloria Swanson, a frequent DeMille collaborator and a cinema legend in the making.
Daily News, 12 April, 1920 p. 12. Newspapers.com.
The film depicts a marriage troubled by the husband’s philandering, implied a to a result of the wife’s lack of interest in sexuality, Accordingly, the marriage is saved when Swanson’s character transforms herself from a dowdy housewife into a vampy lover of jazz. This was as much an introduction to the “flapper” as anything written by Fitzgerald.
The theme of marital struggles and infidelity was a popular one in 1920 culture, as we reported in our March 19th post. DeMille, receiving accusations that his movies paint a negative picture of marriage, took to the Tribune to explain that he saw works such as his as part of a campaign against divorce.
New York Tribune, 18 April, 1920, p. 36.
It is not a convincing argument. The movie’s rather facile, moralistic ending is no match for Swanson’s performance as a modern, liberated woman.