Zeus

Adam's Rib (1923)

• Director
  • Cecil B. DeMille
• Writer
  • Jeanie Macpherson(screenplay)
• Stars
  • Milton Sills
  • Elliott Dexter
  • Theodore Kosloff

  No, this society drama is not related in any way, shape or form to the 1949 Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy comedy. It's one of Cecil B. DeMille's most critically savaged pictures. At 34, Anna Q. Nilsson was a bit young to play the neglected middle-aged wife of business man Michael Ramsay (Milton Sills). The deposed King of Morania (Theodore Kosling) begins to draw Mrs. Ramsay's attention away from her marriage and she makes plans to run off with him. Ramsay, meanwhile, is trying to keep his marriage intact by spending his fortune in an attempt to get the king back on his throne. All this is viewed with disgust by the Ramsay's flapper daughter, Mathilda (Pauline Garon). Although she is engaged to professor Nathan Reade (Elliott Dexter), Mathilda makes a play for the king, just to keep him away from her mother. She winds up saving her mother but ruining her own reputation and destroying Reade's trust. Ramsay makes himself a new fortune and reconciles with his wife, who writes a confession for Mathilda to hand to Reade. She takes it down to him in the tropics, where he is working, but he decides to believe her and destroys the letter without reading it. The last part of the film contains a sequence shot on color film. DeMille was famous for his fantasy sequences and this one, which takes place in caveman days, is one of his worst.