Can Nature save the American capitalist? Mary Willard hopes so. When ruthless “Wall Street alchemist” Harvey Judson tries to forcibly acquire Mary’s railroad business, she warns him, “You’ll learn some day that money isn’t everything.” To hurry the lesson along – and protect her shareholders – she has him kidnapped and deposited in the wilderness with nothing but a full wallet. She stays nearby, with her father’s old wilderness guide, Jim Willis, to watch the education unfold. Harvey soon discovers that his money isn’t worth much in the great outdoors. Mary arranges a series of challenges to Harvey’s manhood, even roping in a lecherous French-Canadian (played by a young Boris Karloff) to help, but both New Yorkers soon get more than they bargained for.
This was Blanche Sweet’s third feature for producer Jesse D. Hampton, released by Pathé Exchange; the partnership lasted until 1921 and comprised eight titles. Notable is the beautiful location shooting of sparkling lakes and misty woodlands, filmed in Truckee, California (standing in for East Coast woodlands) – the same spot where parts of The Gold Rush were made. The sylvan setting plays on the idea championed by everyone from John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt to the YMCA and the Boy Scouts, that urban Americans needed to return to their frontier roots through hiking and camping. Rather than restoring lost vitality, as Roosevelt would have it, the film suggests that these wilderness encounters could rein in the most exploitative aspects of capitalism. The film fails to recognize the irony that the alleged untamed wilderness sought after by white American settlers as an antidote to capitalist rapaciousness was in fact stolen from its inhabitants as part of this very capitalist rapaciousness.
The press agents had a field day with the story and its title, which they announced would be promoted via a series of syndicated articles written by Sweet about famed women through history, entitled “The Deadlier Sex.” Only her dissection of Eve has been located, appearing in various forms in a number of U.S. newspapers, in which she expounds on the first “nasty woman”: “Eve…led a dull life with Adam, who was the first Bolshevik. He never worked and was so lazy he wouldn’t even pluck his own fig leaf garments, but waited until they fell from the tree. The monotony of their Bolshevistic existence began to pall and Eve, after careful deliberation, decided to eat of the forbidden fruit and see if she couldn’t start something and get her name into print.”
The Deadlier Sex was recently preserved by the Academy Film Archive from the only known surviving film element, a 35mm tinted nitrate print from the archive’s Lobster Film Collection.

Laura Horak