Idle Wives
Scen.: Lois Weber. F.: Allen Siegler. Int.: Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley, Mary MacLaren, Edwin Hearn, Seymour Hastings, Countess Du Cello, Pauline Aster, Cecilia Matthews, Ben Wilson, Maude George, Neva Gerber. Prod.: Universal 35mm. L.: 501m. D.: 24’ a 18 f/s. Bn.
Film Notes
Newly restored, these first two reels of Idle Wives offer an astonishingly reflexive consideration of filmmaking and film viewing. Characters in the film attend a movie entitled Life’s Mirror (pointedly directed by one ‘Lois Weber’), where they watch parallel, cautionary versions of their own lives. A shop girl ‘stepping out’ with her boyfriend sees her screen surrogate conceive a child and retire to a home for unwed mothers. An estranged married couple watches as the wife’s onscreen counterpart leaves an uncaring husband to return to her post as a settlement worker. A working family struggling to make ends meet learn the perils of living beyond their means. In each case the recognition of oneself onscreen proves revelatory – film viewing provides opportunities for identification and affect unavailable anywhere else. Idle Wives shows Weber, at the height of her career, considering cinema’s extraordinary impact on American culture as it became the nation’s leading mass entertainment in the 1910s.