The Captive
|  The Captive was one of legendary director Cecil B. DeMille’s earliest feature-length silent films, and it was made during a period of transition for the nascent art of American cinema, which to cultured eyes was still a debased form of amusement. At the time, DeMille was working as the director-general for the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, which he cofounded in 1913 with Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Arthur Friend, all of whom were committed to elevating film to an art on par with the stage. They first attempted to do this by focusing on adaptations of respected novels and plays that would be familiar to middle- and upper-class patrons, but DeMille soon turned his attention to filming original scenarios, which would take his ever-evolving career into an entirely new direction.The Captive is particularly important in this regard as it was not only DeMille’s first film based on an original scenario, but it marked his first writing collaboration with Jeanie Macpherson, an actress and sometimes director who had acted in several of DeMille’s previous films. Macpherson quickly became DeMille’s favorite screenwriter (and his mistress), working in various capacities on more than 40 scripts for him between 1915 and her death in 1946. Their collaborations ranged across genres, from historical dramas, to jazz-era social comedies, to biblical epics and included such well-known works as The Cheat (1915), Male and Female (1919), Manslaughter (1922), The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927), and Madam Satan (1935). They shared a taste for Victorian melodrama, and both were fascinated by strong characters, both men and women, as well as weak characters who learned from their experiences and found redemption. We see this quite explicitly in The Captive, which takes place in the Eastern European country of Montenegro (some historians have suggested the scenario was designed to take advantage of the costumes already created for DeMille’s earlier Montenegro-set film The Unafraid, also released in 1915). The story takes place during the Turkish-Serbian War of 1912 primarily on a farm near the village of Ostrog. The farm is run by Sonya Martinovich (Blanche Sweet), her brother Marko (Page Peters), and her kid brother Milos (Gerald Ward). The early parts of the film are divided between depicting life on the farm and Marko’s leaving to join the Serbian army and introducing the character of Muhamud Hassan (House Peters), a Turkish nobleman and military office who is involved in the Battle of Lule Burgess, in which Marko is killed. During that same battle Muhamud is captured and, like many Turkish prisoners of war, becomes a forced laborer to replace all the men who are off fighting. He is given over to Sonya, who at first treats him like a slave. However, as time passes, Muhuamad is befriended by Milos, whose youth and innocence makes him more open to others and less taken with “us versus them” divides. Muhamad, who enjoyed the privileged life of a nobleman back in Turkey, begins to recognize the benefits and joys of hard work and the simple life on the farm; even after he discovers that the bars that keep him prisoner at the back of a barn are easily removable, he does not try to escape because he has taken to his new life. Sonya registers those changes as well, and the master-slave relationship soon develops into friendship, with Muhamud protecting her from soldiers on both sides who try to take advantage of the lawless environment produced by the war. Blanche Sweet was already a veteran actress, having transitioned from stage to screen in 1909. She had worked with the Edison Company and Biograph, where she starred in a number of D.W. Griffith’s important early films, including A Corner in Wheat (1909) and The Lonedale Operator (1911). The Captive was one of two features she starred in for DeMille that year, the other being The Warrens of Virginia. She turns in the film’s best performance, convincingly showing her character’s various emotional shifts, especially as her cruel mistreatment of Muhamud gradually melts into respect and affection. She is no wilting flower either, as she readily joins Muhamud is the film’s climactic siege, fighting off a would-be rapist, barricading windows, and pulling out a gun to return fire. The scene in which Muhuamud tries to convince her to leave with him and return to Turkey is particularly affecting, as she resists the idea due to her status as a peasant and her realization that the Turks will not accept her (tensions around interracial relationships were nothing new to DeMille’s work, as his first feature-length film, 1914’s The Squaw Man, was about an Englishman and a Native American woman who become lovers and have a child). It’s played primarily for melodrama, rather than social critique, but it works both ways. Both characters end up suffering for making the right decisions—Sonya recognizing Muhamud’s humanity and treating him accordingly and Muhamud protecting Sonya from his own brutal countrymen—but there is redemption at the end, with DeMille using the open road as a visual metaphor for the characters’ joint future, which is nevertheless bittersweet since it requires leaving behind everything they have previously known.
Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Olive Films | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(3)
