The Blot (1921)

• Directed by (badass woman filmmaker) Lois Weber.

• Story by Weber, screenplay by Marion Orth (yep – another badass woman filmmaker).

• To open, we meet a trio of misbehaving & unfocused, college-student friends: Phil West (Louis Calhern), the son of one of the school’s trustees, who routinely “gets away with murder” (not literally…I don’t think this is that sort of tale), Bert Gareth, the son of a congressman, and Walt Lucas, a 23-year-old lazy bones only taking classes to earn his inheritance.

(Perplexingly, neither the Bert character nor the Walt character get credits on IMDb, though they get fullscreen character introductions in the film. How strange.)

• The Boy Trio is taking a class together, taught by the continually disrespected & underpaid Professor Andrew Theodore Griggs (Philip Hubbard).

• Professor Theodore has a tired wife named Mrs. Griggs (Margaret McWade), who really wishes the Professor would stop inviting acquaintances (the local Reverend, instance) inside for tea, so they might actually be able to save a little money, every once in awhile. (A totally reasonable desire, I’d say.) They also have daughter called Amelia (Claire Windsor), who is the beautiful, single girl everyone (i.e., Phil, the Reverend Gates, and neighbor boy Peter Olsen) wants to date.

• I really like the fullscreen character introductions Lois Weber gives us, with the little hole cut out to give us a visual introduction to the person playing the character, too. This one’s my favorite, regarding Peter’s father:

“Foreign born Hans Olsen was an expert at making the high priced shoes that ruin the feet of the women who wear them. He averaged $100.00 a week in salary.”

First of all: HA! Thank you for that gift, female screenwriters. Second of all – if anyone’s curious about what that $100 equals today: about $1400. So, you know…pretty decent, but not extravagantly so.

• Great plot detail: Phil keeps coming to the library to “check out books” – i.e., check out Amelia, ’cause that’s where she works – so to investigate his motives, Amelia glues together a couple of pages of a book he’s rented (don’t panic – she didn’t permanently deface them – it was just a dot of glue in between a couple of corners). Sure enough, when he turns the book back in, the pages remain glued…though he was sure to comment on what a fabulous read it was.

Groan. What a liar! He needs to take lessons from Clark Gable in NO MAN OF HER OWN (1932) on how to properly woo a Woman of the Library.

• To his credit, Phil does offer Amelia a ride home one day when it’s pouring down rain, to spare her what would have been an utterly miserable, mile-and-a-half walk in shoes with holes.

• Phil’s Suitor Points are quickly cancelled out when we learn that Reverend Gates is a lover of antique books.

Movie’s over, you guys. Library Girl + Antique Book Nerd = the Best Shot at Love Either of Them Will Ever Have. If they can’t figure this out & make it work, they’re dumbass fools…plain & simple.

• Oh my God, y’all – this movie just got adorable, and not for any reason you’d expect. Phil & the Reverend are bonding over their drawings! Turns out they’re both artists in their hobby-time! They’re so smiley and friend-ish – let’s make the rest of the movie just about their pal-hood.

• I love Margaret McWade in this. The way she portrays the mental stress of her family’s financial shortcomings is so believable and has so much heart. When Amelia gets sick (EVERYONE HIDE, IT’S THE CORONA!!!!!) and the doctor tells Momma Griggs to make sure Amelia eats some more “nourishing” food, and McWade knows – and with her reaction, makes sure you do, too – that they can’t afford it? So goddamn heartbreaking.

• Aw, Momma Griggs! She goes out and splurges on tea fixin’s to try to help (a now partially recovered) Amelia out in her potential romantic endeavors with Phil. She’s so cutely happy while she’s doing it…and then so devastated when she makes it back home to find Phil already gone. McWade kills these scenes, and it makes me want to lean against that kitchen door and sob right next to her.

• Hey, at least she still has a teeny tiny baby cat to mew at her feet!

• I’m very proud of Phil – he’s trying really hard to help Amelia & her family in whatever ways he possibly can, while also putting a lot of effort into not offending their pride.

When he sends that anonymous basket of groceries to them? Oh man…I could hug the shit right out of him!

• Phil/Louis Calhern’s reaction to “Mushrooms under glass” is hilarious. (At a fancypants country club dinner, one of the things served is basically 3 mushrooms drowned in sauce, on a plate…with a glass over the top – which you have to remove to get to the sauced ‘shrooms.) It’s a truly dumbass dish if I’ve ever seen one…and the way Calhern just plops the glass back down after peeking underneath it is perfect.

• Movies written by women are the goddamn best. Juanita (Marie Walcamp, who won one of the few actual acting credits here, so hooray) – who’d been romantically linked to Phil before he met & started pursuing Amelia – just came up to him after a richling dinner and said, regarding Amelia, “She must be very dear and fine. I wish you all sorts of luck.”

And the way Walcamp delivers the message, you know she damn well means it, too.

Wow, rejected women can actually be kind, decent people despite their jealousy & pain?! What a concept!!!

• The complexity the movie is able to draw out of the mother/daughter relationship, from what would otherwise be a minor plot situation – the assumed-but-not-actually-stolen neighbor-chicken incident – is incredible. Why did women screenwriters and directors disappear for so long after the ’20s?! WHY!

• The movie ends with Phil convincing Papa Phil (the College Trustee, remember?) to increase Professor Teddy’s (and all the other professors’ too) salary…and also ends with Neighbor Shoe Wife (I guess her name is probably Mrs. Olsen) purposely leaving the lid off her trashcan for Kitty Griggs (which was a movie-long mini feud that I’ve neglected to mention until now).

• I definitely enjoyed this movie…but am rather astounded by how few of the acting credits are listed/known. (There are no additional names listed within the actual movie credits than are listed on IMDb, and I can’t find any additional information on other film sites.) So – despite the Reverend, Mr. & Mrs. Olsen, & Peter all playing significant parts – I have no way to give shoutouts to the solid actors who played them. They’ll be so disappointed!

(Just kidding. They’re definitely all dead.)

(Womp, womp.)