Joan the Woman was opera diva Geraldine Farrar’s fourth collaboration with Cecil B. DeMille. In production from 19 June to 7 October 1916, it was the only film made during her second season in California. The script was prepared by Jeanie Macpherson and DeMille, who greatly admired Mark Twain’s 1896 novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. It was Farrar’s third film with co-star Wallace Reid, who plays a 15th- and 20th-century Englishman, Eric Trent.
Vachel Lindsay’s disenchanted review in The New Republic (28 April 1917) captures the combination of romantic longing and virility in Farrar’s interpretation of Joan by observing that “the Lasky photoplay turns [Joan] into Venus in Armor,” while he dismisses her co-star as “simpering.” The film’s presentation of masculinity is predictably critical – Joan is surrounded by incompetent, bloodthirsty, or cowardly men who reward female bravery and self-sacrifice with derision and cruelty. It proposes that Joan has the right to demand Eric’s sacrifice during a suicide mission in 1916 as penance for the perfidy of the English in 1431, but those sins appear to be at least as specific to weak and hangdog Eric as they were general to the English lords of 1431. In framing Joan as requiring male self-sacrifice to match her own, the film manifests current wartime fascination with a female strength that might compensate for the enforced “feminization” of men in the trenches (we see one soldier darning a sock and pricking his finger in the prologue). This screen Joan may be a victim of masculine connivance, but Farrar’s “sturdy country maiden” is also a better man than any of those who surround her: brave, loyal, honest, and chastely loving – with the last quality presented as quintessentially feminine. In one of the film’s most arresting images, she is presented as a 15th-century Christ crucified on the shadow of the fleur-de-lis.
As one would expect of DeMille, the film concentrates mightily on spectacle, in this instance primarily the spectacle of war in both present and past eras. While this would appear to glorify male military ambition, Joan’s physical and emotional suffering suggests that war is appropriately self-punishing. Most accounts of the production note the physical difficulties of making the film – despite her value to the company and as the pre-eminent American opera singer of the 1910s, Farrar was repeatedly required to do unpleasant and risky things. The storming of La Tourelle involved a certain amount of rough handling by both “French” and “English” extras; although frightened of horses, Farrar rode one in some scenes until she was replaced with a stuntwoman; and the immolation scenes were fraught with the potential for injury, or worse. Affectionately nicknamed “Our Gerry,” Farrar was a game and enthusiastic participant in the filming, her eminence as a diva notwithstanding. Her close connections to Germany, where she was trained in opera before the war (and was rumored to have had an affair with Crown Prince Wilhelm), made her participation in this project a useful demonstration of her patriotism. Vachel Lindsay’s review notwithstanding, the film generally received warm notices, although Farrar’s fleshy, sword-waving performance – reminiscent of some of her commanding acting on the opera stage – elicited both admiration and hostility.
Famous Players-Lasky was in the midst of being consolidated while Joan the Woman was in production, and a dedicated company, the Cardinal Film Corporation, was formed to produce and distribute it. Jesse Lasky hoped that the premiere of D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance in September 1916 might pave the way for the reception of Joan the Woman, which was released in late December 1916. However, Joan’s considerable length (American trade papers say that it was released at 11 reels) created the circumstances for weaker than expected box office, especially in the American heartland, and exhibitors pleaded for cuts to improve their takings. DeMille finally agreed to allow states-rights buyers to cut the film to 8 reels, but insisted that the prologue and epilogue relating the narrative to trench warfare in France be retained. Later in its run, distributed by independent outlets, it suffered further cuts. In November 1917 Moving Picture World reported that the Famous Players Film Service in Detroit would be reducing it to “about six reels”. It endured further excisions in France: The French version of the film omits the Britain-focused framing narrative, and makes other cuts.
While Intolerance has never receded from view, Joan the Woman is not nearly as well known, although DeMille thought very highly of it among his own works, numbering it among the six best films of all time in 1923; by 1951, it had dropped from his personal list of the ten best films (that the list contained four other DeMille films suggests diffidence wasn’t an issue!). Nonetheless, in years to come the film was periodically recalled to the attention of film fans: a 1930 Screenland photo essay on “Roles the Stars Would Like to Play” contrasted an “ethereal” Loretta Young with the more earthy, forceful Farrar. At the time of the production of the 1948 Victor Fleming film starring Ingrid Bergman as Joan, Variety rated DeMille’s version as the most distinguished previous American treatment of the “Joan saga.” The film is thus most likely to be remembered in the context of treatments of the Joan legend or filmmaking representing the experience of the First World War.

Anne Morey