A 1916 Film Diary: Should A Wife Forgive?
Former Ziegfeld Follies star Lillian Lorraine was the main attraction in what was described as a ‘sex problem film,' Should A Wife Forgive?, which Margaret saw at the Audley Theatre on January 26. The film was an early work by director Henry King, who would go on to a distinguished Hollywood career, and here played the key role of the weak-willed husband who found himself seduced away from his loving wife by a vampish cabaret dancer known simply as La Belle Rose, and is later implicated in her death.
Since the smash success of A Fool There Was (1915) the previous year, the 'vamp’ film had evolved into an entire genre. Reports from America suggest a note of novelty was introduced in this one: in an intertitle, the audience itself was asked to answer the question posed by the film’s story. Should the husband be found guilty, or should he be forgiven? Differences between Australian and American reviews suggest that the version Margaret saw may have been considerably bowdlerised for local release.
As La Belle Rose, Lorraine’s character was described in one review as 'a gypsy trollop with a heart that is cold and calculating in a voluptuous body’. Theda Bara had established the stock figure of the vamp: exotic, seductive, fascinating, liberated; the possessor of a cold heart and eccentric habits, such as adding perfume to her tea.
Lillian Lorraine would have been seen as an ideal candidate to follow in Theda’s footsteps. She had been a favourite of Florenz Ziegfeld - far more than just a favourite, according to several of the impresario’s subsequent wives - and her reputation as a heartbreaker filled many a newspaper column. Until Should A Wife Forgive? her film appearances had mainly been restricted to serials, such as Neal of the Navy. Her offscreen behaviour was rumoured to be erratic, and though she was named a WAMPAS Baby Star of 1922, she made her final film that year.
Moving Picture World judged Should A Wife Forgive? 'very good work done on a subject not of the highest.’ Criticising the character of the husband as an “outline of a type, rather than a type - whose inner heart is not shown to us,” it instead reserved its praise for Mabel Van Buren’s more understated performance as the wronged wife: “If Miss Van Buren’s work is not so "artistic” as Miss Lorraine’s, it is much more pleasing. It rings true emotionally and is full of dignity.“
Should A Wife Forgive? survives in a film archive, a rare remaining product of Long Beach’s Balboa Studios. Once a flourishing concern known as 'Hollywood by the Beach’, Balboa had closed by 1918, at around the same time that many of film’s earliest companies were either dying out or being consolidated into larger studios.
