dangermousie | The River: silent movie feminism FTW!

The above image is very appropriate because last night I saw The River. Not the Jean Renoir masterpiece but a silent movie by that name that was lost and partially found and restored. It’s quite well-regarded and the critics all talk (rightly) about how unusual for a silent is its attitude and focus on physical intimacy, but what struck me much more is how feminist the movie is, arguably the most feminist silent I have seen!

TR has very few characters and develops only the two main ones with any degree of depth (thus creating a small, enclosed, self-sufficient world) so they are the ones I’ll talk about.

Character 1 is Allen John (Mr. Mousie, who watched a part of this with me said they might as well have named him Harold Richard. LOL) who is a young strapping* country guy who, it is made explicit, has never ever been with a woman in his life and probably hasn’t seen any of them up close either, not even his mother, who died when he was very small. His hobbies include making houseboats and swimming in the river naked, showing off his yummy physique.

*As he proudly tells the heroine when she comments on how big he is, he is 6’2”. I expected her to then make a comment on how big his hands are :P

Character 2 is Rosalie, the well-dressed, older, cynical mistress of a man who has just been arrested for murder of another man, out of jealousy (whether Rosalie only flirted with the corpse or had an affair with him is never made clear).

Rosalie is stuck all by herself out in this bumpkinsville middle-of-nowhere, and Allen John just might be a ticket to keep her amused.

Right from the start, the typical gender tropes have been turned on their heads: Rosalie, with her heavily painted eyes, is the older one, the more experienced one, the agressor. And boy, what an agressor she is. My favorite sequences in the movie were her attempts to seduce Allen John, which started subtly and progressed to more and more blatant ones. She started with asking him to fetch some wood for her (and ogling his posterior as he is stuffing the wood in the woodbox. Yes. Indeed) and progressed to lying on the table at which he is seated, and finally to telling him her heart hurts and putting her hand on her left breast to fondle it and then putting Allen John’s hand there!

And yet she is never percieved as a slut or someone who needs to be corrected or punished for her physical attraction and desire to satisfy that attraction. Silent movies often had vamps who took a naïve protagonist’s innocence or what not but they were always percieved as figures of evil and either drastically reformed by the end (much less likely) or were punished by death (the more common outcome).

But Rosalie not only gets a happy ending (about that more later) the movie clearly does not think there is anything wrong in her actions – why should there be? She is not taking Allen John away from a wife or a girlfriend, she is not coercing him, etc etc. The movie does not view purely physical desire (or even love which is largely based on that desire) as wrong.

In fact, the whole startlingly modern attitude to both physicality and morality is encapsulated in the fact that we are never given an explanation or excuse as to why Rosalie is someone’s mistress. Allen John asks her if she is murderer’s wife and she says no, and then he asks her if she is his family and she also says no, and the exchange ends on that. Neither we nor Allen John ever get a “justification” or an explanation because the movie seems to say we do not need one. In other movies, whenever there was a “fallen woman” portrayed positively, there was always an excuse: she was tricked into it, she didn’t have a choice. But not here. Here is doesn’t matter. We don’t know why Rosalie is someone’s mistress and whether this lover is her first (unlikely, indicates the movie) or her twenty-first. It does not matter. The movie does not equate chastity with morality a bit.

Her “courtship” is ultimately successful of course. Allen John might be incredibly innocent but he is straight. One of the most delicious things in the movie is Allen John’s reaction to the continued seduction: you can see him trying to square away his “good men do not casually sleep with women” (significantly, he doesn’t differentiate between the categories of women either) and “but she is practically writhing on top of me OMG brain short-circuiting” reactions. He is trying to convince himself he is reading into it. I laughed when he tells her they are going to have fun tonight and she gets all excited and then he produced a checkers board. Poor guy!

He tries to square the two away by proposing marriage because that’s getting him back on familiar ground and in another startlingly modern reaction, Rosalie is not pleased or grateful but appalled. Why should she bind herself for life just to have sex?

Of course, it all culminates in him getting hypothermia (long story) and the scene where he is unconscious and in her bed and stripped naked and after rubbing him with snow, she gets into the bed in her negligee on top of him and he finally opens his eyes to that. Since it’s a silent movie, we don’t really get to see what happens after except for the fact that while he is hypothermic she decides she loves him too (it’s clear that they might love each other but even if so, it’s a relationship based 95% on physical attraction. The movie is all for that).

Significantly, Rosalie is not punished. In fact, they cohabit happily for months and when her murdering ex comes back, he is killed by another character and the lovers sail off on Allen John’s houseboat, significantly still not married…Once they get to town, will Rosalie be bored with her hot but innocent beau? Will Allen John, who will finally see people and not bears on daily basis decide he wants someone else after all? Who knows and does it matter, the movie seems to say…Hooray for The River, say I!