From 1912 to 1919, Universal produced some 170 films directed by women, many of them for the studio’s female-oriented Bluebird label – and the great majority of them now lost. Universal’s roster of female directors included Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Elsie Jane Wilson and Ida May Park, though the most celebrated of them was Lois Weber, a former Christian evangelist, concert pianist and stage actor, who entered films in 1908.
Working with her husband, Phillips Smalley, Weber directed, wrote or starred in over 100 one-reel films between 1911 and 1917 for Universal’s Rex subsidiary, including the innovative 1913 Suspense, with its sophisticated use of a screen split into three separate images. After directing their first features for Universal (including the recently restored 1916 The Dumb Girl of Portici, starring Anna Pavlova), Weber and Smalley created their own company, Lois Weber Productions. But Weber’s taste for moralizing, Christian-themed films fell out of favor in the rapidly evolving America of the 1920s, and eventually, on her own after her divorce from the womanizing Smalley, she returned to Universal as a studio employee for her last few films.
Released March 20, 1927, Sensation Seekers seems in many ways Weber’s response to the changing times. Based on the short story Egypt by Ernest Pascal, the film is a moralistic melodrama in the popular DeMille style, centered on a Long Island socialite (Billie Dove) with a Jazz Age enthusiasm for drinking, smoking and shimmying – which she has apparently acquired from her dissolute father, played in a pointed cameo by Weber’s ex-husband Smalley. Egypt – so called because she is the “most pagan of her set” – finds herself drawn to the strenuously modern, emphatically masculine minister of the local Protestant church (Raymond Bloomer). Although the minister briefly considers throwing over his vocation to run away with the scandalous Egypt, the heavens intervene in the patented DeMille manner, as a storm of Biblical proportions arrives in the last reel to sort out the characters’ fates.