Directed by Lois Weber • 1921 • United States
Starring Claire Windsor, Louis Calhern, Philip Hubbard
The last film made under the banner of Lois Weber Productions, this moral drama, also written by Weber, is a biting commentary on economic inequality. Through her portrait of the Griggs family—an underpaid college professor, his long-suffering wife, and their daughter Amelia, a young librarian—Weber reveals a society where “keeping up with the Joneses” is an issue of basic nutrition rather than material possession. Examining issues of class through the varied stations of the three men vying for Amelia’s heart—an affluent college student, a middle-class “boy next door,” and an impoverished minister—THE BLOT reveals both Weber’s trenchant social insight and her powerful command of visual language.
Up Next in Women Make Film
-
The Peasant Women of Ryazan
Directed by Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov • 1927 • Soviet Union
Starring Kuzma Yastrebitsky, Olga Narbekova, Yelena MaksimovaReturning to a pre–Russian Revolution mode of narrative storytelling, this melodrama focuses on two peasant women—one the victim to an abusive father-in-law and t...
-
Merrily We Go to Hell
Directed by Dorothy Arzner • 1932 • United States
Starring Sylvia Sidney, Fredric March, Adrianne AllenOne of director Dorothy Arzner’s most fascinatingly subversive portraits of marital dysfunction stars Sylvia Sidney as a wealthy socialite who falls in love with an alcoholic writer (Fredric M...
-
Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nat...
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl • 1938 • Germany
More has been written about Leni Riefenstahl's OLYMPIA than about any other sports documentary in history. Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic e...
