When I'm not watching three year old movies, I watch ninety-three year old movies.
The Blot is a 1921 film directed by Lois Weber, once thought of as one of the greatest directors in Hollywood. She has since been largely forgotten, with barely any of her films surviving. Because sometimes the critical establishment sucks.
A social message picture about wealth and class, Weber was the perfect director for it. For one because she obviously cares about this message a great deal, and nothing will kill a message picture faster than a creative team that doesn't believe the message. The other reason is more interesting: one thing that makes Weber unique among silent film directors I've seen is her incredible facility with using silent film techniques to show communities. Not just undifferentiated extras, but communities full of individual members, each of which has his or her own standing and relationships within that community. It was one of the remarkable things about
Hypocrites, her 1915 fable, and it's almost entirely the point in
The Blot.
The most frustrating thing about the film (besides that I can't help but think Amelia ends up with the wrong guy, even if he is the lead and the other actor doesn't even get credited... seriously, silent film records, you are the worst) is that it just has too many intertitles. Later message pictures' key flaw of Too Much Talking About the Issue is the one thing you'd expect to get away from in a silent film, because, hey,
silent. The difference is that instead of being repetitive, they're superfluous. Weber tells us everything we need to know with the production design.
Distressingly (again, silent film records), there is no credited art director, production designer, set dresser, costumer, or anything. Not even a crew. So I don't really know who to give credit to, except whatever random people Weber had working for her production company. Because the sets in
The Blot are fantastic: a fine middle class house that's disintegrating before your very eyes; another middle class house on its way up the pay grade; a minister's small, dark, but very cozy den; a country club that seems expensive without seeming especially exciting, a fascinating counterpoint to the art deco fantasias belonging to 1930s heiresses. And Weber and her DPs (Phillip R. Du Bois and Gordon Jennings) know exactly when to give us a closeup on the ratty chair, the hole in the carpet, the characters' contrasting shoes. It's not so much attention to detail as it is devotion to detail. You know from the cars, the kitchens, and the shoes everything you need to know about the income differentials of these people. You know which characters notice these things, which characters are insecure about them, and which characters hardly notice it at all. No one needs intertitles.
Of course, it seems like exactly the kind of thing easily dismissed by the kind of manly critic who refuses to take Douglas Sirk seriously (a message picture about shoes? Not a chance). But as I grow less and less enchanted with plot-based storytelling (plot descriptions are inevitably my least favorite part of any movie review), I grow more and more intrigued by artists who let other elements do their storytelling. And any film director who can make magic out of a closeup of shoes has to be doing something right (in a way, this film really is kind of all about shoes).
