Sex (1920)

Well, I hear you sigh, I wonder what this one’s about.

Louise Glaum stars as Adrienne Renault, the feature attraction at the Frivolity Club, one of New York’s hottest night spots. Adrienne performs the “Spider Dance,” an arty representation of some poor sucker getting caught in the black widow’s web.

Her most appreciative fan is wealthy Philip Overman (William Conklin), who comes to the club almost every night after giving his wife (Myrtle Stedman) the old got-to-work-late-at-the-office routine. Mrs. Overman’s hired detective gets the goods on hubby and the wife pays a call on the mistress. Philip walks in on their tete-a-tete and when forced to make a choice between the two dishes, he chooses forbidden fruit.

We learn about Adrienne’s hedonistic philosophy of male/female relations--every-girl-for-herself—as she takes a young dancer from the show under her wing. Daisy (Viola Barry acting under the name Peggy Pearce) begins as a sweet young thing from the country, but we see her coarsening as Adrienne’s protégé. The parties get wilder, the drinks pour more freely and the men’s hands wander more widely.

At one of these orgies (very suggestively but not blatantly filmed) the Spider Dancer meets a happy-go-lucky millionaire from Pittsburgh, Dave Wallace (Irving Cummings). Tired of Overman, she throws him over for Dave, who proposes marriage. She accepts and before long discovers that she’s become a second Mrs. Overman—and to whom has the flighty Dave given his affection? Daisy.

The film ends with an abandoned Adrienne on a liner to Europe. Unknown to her when she booked passage, she’s sailing with Philip Overman, who has returned to his forgiving wife and with whom he is sharing a second honeymoon. Adrienne is left heart-broken, standing at the rail, looking at the vastness of a lonely ocean.

Glaum’s vamp character is fascinating not because she’s exotic, but because she isn’t. Adrienne is a straight forward, modern American gal, honest to the point of bluntness, a new Eva Tanguay metaphorically singing “I don’t care, I don’t care what they may think of me.” If she had a heart to go along with that cheerful ego, she’d be most attractive.

Glaum’s film career post-Sex was brief. As the vamp phase faded, so did her popularity. She was 32 when she made this picture and soon began committing Hollywood’s two biggest sins: she got older and gained weight. Her last film was made in 1925, after which she moved to the legit stage and vaudeville. Look for her in featured roles in about a half dozen William S. Hart westerns, principally The Return of Draw Egan and Hell’s Hinges.

When the Germans worked material like this they turned it into an Old World tragedy of decadence and perversion; here, it’s a melodramatic morality tale of selfishness and she-had-it-coming-to-her come-uppance. Call it Lulu-lite.

Nevertheless it was all pretty tantalizing in its day. “One of the most perfect vampire characterizations,” one reviewer wrote of Glaum's performance. Many others fell in line.

The film was directed by Fred Niblo and produced by J. Parker Read and Thomas H. Ince. It was written by C. Gardner Sullivan and shot by Charles J. Stumar using an unusual three cameras—one for an American negative, one for a European negative, and one catching non-standard angles. Just in case.