Free Flapper by Joshua Zeitz Page B

about youth going away from the old morals,” he maintained. “Never since the beginning of time have there been so many girls and boys who were clean, so young, their minds are beautiful, they are sweet. Why? To win the dearest thing in the world, love from mankind. That is the motive that separates out civilization from dirty savages.”
    Griffith was well within the currents of the early motion picture industry. Most first-generation filmmakers were Protestant moralists who used the new medium to drive home the importance of virtue in an unvirtuous world. And this went double for women, whose intrinsic goodness was surely subject to a grave challenge from the forces of modernity.
    Early movies like The Fate of the Artist’s Model (1903), in which an innocent young lass is seduced into a sexual affair by a lecherous artist who then leaves her high and dry, and The Downward Path (1900), the story of a young country girl who is tricked by a depraved theater agent into becoming a soubrette and commits suicide before her parents can come to her rescue, continued to inform Griffith’s style well into the late 1910s. 5
    Writing a few years later, in 1925, the actress Linda Arvidson Griffith, Griffith’s wife, acknowledged that this plotline was growingincreasingly irrelevant in the years leading up to World War I. 6 “We were dealing in things vital in our American life,” she observed, “and [were] not one bit interested in close-ups of empty-headed little ingénues with adenoids, bedroom windows, manhandling of young girls, fast sets, perfumed bathrooms or nude youths heaving their muscles.”
    The problem was, by 1920 or so these were precisely the things that a lot of American moviegoers wanted to see. “D. W. Griffith is an idealist,” observed Irving Thalberg, the production chief of MGM Studios in 1927, “and his love scenes on the screen were idealistic things of beauty … but his pictures are not stressed today because modern ideas are changing. 7 The idealistic love of a decade ago is not true today. We cannot sit in a theater and see a noble hero and actually picture ourselves as him.”
    Thalberg had a point. The same social forces that were producing a revolution in morals and manners were rendering obsolete the didactic themes that informed Griffith’s work.
    Films produced between 1908 and 1912—those directed not just by D. W. Griffith, but by all the major production outfits—tended to follow set plotlines. Leading men and women turned inward to find strength and thereby prevailed over insidious threats to Victorian virtue—over alcohol, material indulgence, sexual urges, crime, passion. By 1913 or 1914, those themes began to give way to a glorification of pleasure, excitement, physical comedy, athleticism, and luxury—that is, to the consumer ethos that was coming by and by to dominate American culture. Moviegoers now reveled in the antics of Charlie Chaplin, “the little tramp,” and the Keystone Kops, whose bumbling incompetence appealed to the lowest common denominator of popular humor.
    The most popular film personages of the new era were Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose off-screen love affair—and, later, marriage—seemed to mirror perfectly the on-screen magic they produced in dozens of films. 8 Doug was a man’s man for the new age—athletic, handsome, dazzling, perfectly attired, and suave to a fault. Mary, on the other hand—“our Mary,” “Little Mary”—was demure and childlike, yet carefree and full of life. She represented the altar of youth before which so many Americans were dropping totheir knees. “We are our own sculptors,” she advised her devotees. “Who can deny that passion and unkind thoughts show on the lines and expressions of our faces … young people seldom have these vices until they start getting old, so I love to be with them.”
    So compelling was her cinematic exaltation of youth and vivacity that the poet Vachel Lindsay composed an