Marriage & Tyranny in “The Mating Call”
This article contains spoilers.
The Mating Call was made towards the end of the Roaring Twenties and the era of silent cinema. Two different versions of the film were released, one silent and one with a synchronized soundtrack, but both used title cards in place of spoken dialogue. The soundtrack is now lost.
The film itself was also thought to be lost until the 2000s, when a print was discovered at the University of Nevada, amongst the archived collection of Howard Hughes, who produced the film through his Caddo Corporation.
The film was directed by James Cruze, a prolific filmmaker in the silent era, best known for helming The Covered Wagon, the highest-grossing film of 1923, as well as a number of “Fatty” Arbuckle comedies. The title cards were written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who remains the subject of controversy as the supposed co-screenwriter of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.
The Mating Call, based on a novel by Rex Beach, is a film with plenty of controversial material to go around. It tells the story of Leslie Hatten, a soldier in the Great War, who stops back in his hometown of Evergreen while on leave, falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Rose, and elopes with her before shipping off back to France.
When the war ends, Leslie returns to Evergreen and reunites with his old friend Marvin Swallow. Leslie is excited to see Rose again, until Marvin sits him down and drops this bombshell:
This is Leslie's tempered response:
So yeah… Leslie seems like a nice chap. He's played by Thomas Meighan, a pretty big star back in the day. Earlier in the year, he starred as a police captain in The Racket, a film which would be nominated for “Outstanding Picture” at the 1st Annual Academy Awards. Between The Mating Call and all that damned Racket, Meighan seemed to be attracted to silent pictures with noisy titles.
Rose had married a man named Lon Henderson, and the two ran off overseas. When they return to Evergreen, Rose makes a surprise visit to Leslie. She tells him how much of a cheating bastard her husband is, and then tries to seduce Leslie. When Leslie refuses, Rose asks, “What’s the matter – Afraid of the Order?”
Uh-oh. Sounds like she’s married into some sinister secret society. We see her at home with her husband Lon, and when she tells him about Leslie, he threatens to kill him if she sees him again, citing, “It is the duty of our Organization to safeguard the honor of our womenfolk!”
We get a clearer picture of what this Organization is all about when we see two men spying on Rose as she enters Leslie’s farm house. The two men perceive that they’re having an affair. One of them starts to pound his fist before the scene dissolves into a shot of him donned in a dark hood, commiserating with other hooded figures.
If it wasn't made clear enough what The Order is meant to represent, we later see a scene of one of their night-time meetings, which opens on a shot of a cross standing in front of a bonfire.
In 1928, the Ku Klux Klan in the United States boasted millions of members, and were spreading their own brand of vigilante “justice”, threatening anyone who they perceived as a threat to their White Protestant Supremacy. With this having become a major issue in the country, it figures that filmmakers would want to tackle the subject in their work. But in Hollywood, they could only go so far in their depiction. Racism is never addressed in The Mating Call. They couldn’t exactly go the full Oscar Micheaux.
So, the filmmakers switched out white robes for dark ones, and instead of targeting Black Americans, they instead conduct tribunals in order to punish alcoholics and wife-beaters, who are threatened with being tied to a cross and whipped.
The Order arrive at Leslie's farm house and threaten to take action if he doesn't cease his meetings with Rose, so he decides to run off to where he can find “a real woman who wants a home – and is willing to work for it!” Where does one look for such a woman? Well, naturally, the customs office on Ellis Island! Back then, you didn't need a passport to become a “passport bro”.
On Ellis Island, he meets a woman named Catharine (as written in the opening titles but not during the film) and her family. Their nationality isn't specified, but by their attire, they appear to hail from Mother Russia. The implication may be that they are refugees from Bolshevism, another topic that the filmmakers had to dance around.
Leslie offers to help Catharine and her family if she’ll marry him. The immigration officer tells the family that they’re fortunate to get such a bargain from a man with a decent property. So, Leslie and Catharine are escorted to a booth with a minister standing behind a podium, who marries the two of them, right there on the spot. So it was common practice for Americans to coerce desperate immigrants into a life of bondage to someone they don’t love, in order to live in a decent home. Remember, back then you needed a legal grounds for a divorce beyond, “I just don’t like this guy.” That wasn’t enough. You were trapped.
Also, the town of Evergreen seems to have a few too many palm trees for it to be New York, so that must mean that Leslie took the train all the way across the country, and then brought the family all the way back to the West!
Catharine soon begins her work as a housewife, doing the cooking and cleaning. Leslie sits her down at the kitchen table, and then points his finger down, declaring, “This is your place!”
In the third act, Leslie recovers the corpse of a woman from the river, and the audience is expected to distinguish which of the three interchangeable-looking female characters it's supposed to be, with her hair and clothing all damp. It turns out to be the body of Jessie, a young woman that Lon had an affair with.
The Order accuses Leslie of having driven her to jump into the river, and bring him before the tribunal to receive his sentence. However, it is soon revealed to the Judge that Lon was the one who drove Jessie to suicide, and that he was subsequently murdered by Jessie's father.
It isn’t entirely clear what kind of picture that filmmakers intended to paint of The Order. Throughout the film, they are depicted as sinister, shadowy figures, emerging from the woods like Ringwraiths to stalk their targets. But towards the end, when they are shown to have made a wrongful judgment, they are instantly humbled and then move to correct their mistakes, releasing Leslie and covering up Lon’s murder, placing the pistol in his hand to make it look like suicide. Are The Order meant to be villains or rebellious anti-heroes, doing the job the police refuse to do, akin to the gunslinging vigilantes of westerns, and later of urban crime films like Death Wish and Il cittadino si ribella? Perhaps if we still had the original soundtrack, we could better understand the tone the film was trying to set.
And so, all of these morally dubious fellows, including the coercive narcissist Leslie Hatten, are ultimately vindicated and allowed to return to their lives and carry on with their business.
At a brisk 70 minutes, The Mating Call breezes through its series of events, perhaps a bit too fast to keep track. I have not read the novel by Rex Beach, but it feels like they may have glossed over a lot of details that were made more explicit in the source material.
However, if you can tolerate the convoluted melodrama, you will find a time capsule of one hell of a backwards time in history, and the vague intent of its authors only makes it more fascinating to ponder.
Alejandro Martinez writes about film and other stuff on his mind because he has nothing better to do. He is the owner of “It’s Only A Movie” and “The Early Years” on Medium. He is working on a book on “1994 In Film”.
