Behind the Mask of Innocence by Kevin Brownlow

Author:Kevin Brownlow [Brownlow, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82970-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

Said future President Herbert Hoover in 1928: “We in America today are nearer the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.… The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage. A chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage.”84

THE BLOT Poverty was the lot not only of those at the bottom, but of many skilled professionals. This was vividly portrayed in Lois Weber’s The Blot (1921), a film animated by her sense of outrage on behalf of dedicated but underpaid clergymen and educators. Inadvertently, the exposure of genteel poverty impinges on a wider political issue, and The Blot begins to look rather like a socialist’s view of America. The wealthy son of a college trustee is shown at a banquet, consuming expensive food and squirming with embarrassment as he thinks of the girl he loves all but starving. But at heart, the film is anything but radical.

The picture opens in a college hall, where Professor Griggs (Philip Hubbard) is faced by bored and obstreperous students. One of them, wealthy Phil West (Louis Calhern), is far more interested in the Professor’s daughter Amelia (Claire Windsor), who works in the town library. He haunts the place in the hope of speaking to her. She, cool and distant, is merely puzzled by his interest in literature.

Amelia’s mother (Margaret McWade), well born and ill equipped for poverty, resents the prosperity of her next-door neighbors. Hans Olsen, foreign-born, makes the kind of shoes “that ruin the feet of the wealthy women who wear them.” Mrs. Griggs’s shoes are worn, her carpets threadbare.

When Amelia falls ill, the doctor instructs her mother to prepare the proper food—preferably chicken. But how can she afford it? The food store refuses credit. Driven to the limit, she looks across at the Olsens’ kitchen and sees several chickens being prepared. Overcome by the sight, she dashes over and grabs one. A second later, aware of what she has done, she replaces it. But Amelia fails to see this part of the incident. She has recoiled in horror from her bedroom window, convinced only that her mother is a thief.

When a chicken arrives as a gift from Phil, Amelia cannot eat it—she thinks it is stolen property. Ill as she is, she gets up next morning and goes to see the Olsens and offers to pay. Mrs. Olsen is overcome, but says nothing was taken. Amelia has to be carried home, where she and her mother embrace in a silent flood of emotion.

“The blot on our present civilization—that we engage the finest mental talent in the country for less than we pay the common laborer.”

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