Criminal Women

I've made a few small changes to my planned paper and am now writing about Manslaughter, a 1922 Cecil B. DeMille film, and the 1921 Browning film, Outside the Law. There are several reasons for the change in plans. First, the temporal proximity of their production makes it easier to talk about the historical and political events that impacted both films' representations of female deviance--not the least of which is the Volstead Act and prohibition. Second, the films actually represent two distinct trends in representations of the female criminal: one showcases the female criminal's excess of masculinity and power-mongering, while the other highlights her excessive femininity and almost hysterical succeptiblity to excessive drinking, overt displays of sexuality, and other modern vices.

I also just discoverd that the actor who played Lydia Thorpe in Manslaughter, Leatrice Joy, based her performance on a real female criminal, Madalynne Obenchain. Apparently Obenchain became famous for murdering her boyfriend J. Belton Kennedy, a sucessful stock broker, who she shot after he tried to "give her the slip." The story goes that at the age of twenty she left her husband of two years so that she could be with Kennedy. Unfortunately, once the divorce was finalized, Kennedy wanted nothing more to do with her. Madalynne took Kennedy for a "farewell" drive in her roadster and lured him out to her cabin where he was shot. Madalynne claimed that she heard shots fired and that two men "of foreign appearance" were seen driving away shortly after Kennedy fell. Eventually, Obenchain was charged with the crime but only after the case received extensive coverage in the national papers. Like many of the sensational criminal investigations at the time, the papers covered this crime with great zeal. The newspapers reported on various new clues as they were revealed, the unresolveable paradoxes, and the comings and goings of witnesses and suspects, creating narratives that read like detective dime novels.

I also suspect that other high-profile crime cases like the Fatty Arbuckle case and the murder of film producer William Desmond Taylor were having an impact on films like Manslaughter and Outside the Law. The Taylor case in particular inspired a heated debate about how to deal with the increase in "dope peddling" among Hollywood women. The reporters commenting on the Taylor case complained that Mabel Normand, one of Taylor's lovers and a known heroine user, was not being severly questioned by the police. Reporters claimed that her fame and her femininity caused officials to conduct her questioning like a "polite tea party" in which she told her "smiling alibi complaint of a severe cold, and let it go at that." These reports also discussed the increasing number of women who were becoming involved in the drug trade, suggesting their fame and their gender protected them from severe punishment.