Ghosts of Yesterday is an adaptation of Two Women, a play by Rupert Hughes first produced on Broadway on 29 November 1910. The play was Mrs. Leslie Carter’s return to the legitimate stage after four years in vaudeville since breaking with Belasco in 1906. It had only 47 performances in New York in the 1910-11 season, but ran on tour for several years. Critical response to it was interestingly mixed. The Billboard’s review (26.11.1910) of its first performance in Cleveland, Ohio, on 21 November, was enthusiastic, comparing the play favorably to Camille and Zaza, and raving about Mrs. Leslie Carter’s performance. The follow-up in the same magazine on the Broadway premiere (10.12.1910) was much cooler, predicting that it would be successful, but only because of the power of a Mrs. Leslie Carter claque. In the same issue it reprinted a scathing review from the New York World that described it as “this old-fashioned melodrama of perfervid emotions […] as untrue to reasonable plausibility as any stage performance could possibly be.”
As the World reviewer of Two Women, and the Moving Picture World critic who reviewed Talmadge’s film noted, Two Women is a descendant of La Dame aux camélias. Hughes’s play was a translation, or rather an adaptation, of an 1862 play by the Friulian political activist and playwright Teobaldo Ciconi, La statua di carne. Ciconi signals the Camille connection by instructing that, at the beginning of the last act, “muted violins play the aria ‘di quell’amor’ from La Traviata in a barely audible manner.” (This aria is today usually named from its first line, “Un dì, felice, eterea” – in the passage starting with the words “di quell’amor,” Alfredo outlines to Violetta a mystical philosophy of love which is central to Ciconi’s play.)
La statua di carne tells the story of a man, Paolo di Santa Rosa, who loves a beautiful and virtuous woman, but she dies, leaving him inconsolable, until he meets another woman, Noemi Keller, who resembles her, and tries to make her a substitute for the dead lover. She, however, only outwardly resembles the first woman. This plot subsequently had a long career. Two variants can be distinguished. The optimistic one, to which Ciconi’s play and at least one of the later Italian film adaptations, Mario Almirante’s La statua di carne (1921) – screened at the Giornate in 1991 and 2014 – belong, centers on the second woman, who falls in love with the hero and is thereby redeemed. The pessimistic one is exemplified by Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-morte (1892), which focuses on the man, whose realization that the second woman is unworthy of the first drives him eventually to kill her, strangling her with his former wife’s carefully preserved hair. Bruges-la-morte also had a cinematic afterlife; it is the basis of one of Yevgeni Bauer’s most delirious films, Grezy (Daydreams, 1915; shown at the Giornate in 1989), but also, more surprisingly, of an American one-reeler, The Braid, produced by Comet films in 1910. Camillo Mastrocinque’s 1943 film La statua vivente (recently restored by the Cineteca del Friuli) belongs to the pessimistic lineage, despite being advertised as an adaptation of Ciconi’s play, since the hero ends by killing the second woman; Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) continues the motif.
Two Women and Ghosts of Yesterday clearly belong to the optimistic variant, though precisely how they end is uncertain. Hughes’s play was never published, as far as we can tell, and to avoid spoilers, summaries in the reviews are coy about the ending (though the World reviewer boasted that he walked out before the final act – he predicted, however, that there would be a duel, the hero would be injured, and the second woman could nurse him back to health; a likely conclusion, and the summaries indicate there was a duel). The surviving print of Ghosts of Yesterday lacks the final reels, but plot summaries indicate that the hero is blinded in a fight with a rival rather than fighting a duel with him, a plot turn that seems to be unique to this film.
Ghosts of Yesterday also points more directly than La statua di carne to another motif behind these stories – the myth of Pygmalion. The film’s protagonist, Howard Marston, is a painter, and his interest in the second woman, Jeanne, is as a model for him to complete a portrait of the first woman, Ruth Grahame, not as a replacement lover. The same situation is implied by the title of Ciconi’s play, and Ciconi signals it when, after Noemi’s redemption, Paolo compares it to the softening of Galatea’s stony body as she comes alive.
The portrait gave rise to a story much repeated in the press. The filmmakers had two copies, one “real”, or at any rate costly, another a cheap prop that Talmadge had to slash in frustration at her lover’s apparent indifference. Unfortunately, Talmadge managed to slash the “real” one, occasioning comment about how the company ignored wartime strictures against waste.
Talmadge was praised for her handling of the dual role, which involved not only playing two people, but one of them radically changing in character. As Longacre in Motion Picture News (26.01.1918) put it, “The larger of the two parts undertaken by Norma Talmadge was, if we may be permitted to suggest, extremely difficult to characterize. To register the change from the vain, pleasure-loving, profane Jeanne Le Fleur of the Paris cabaret to the sweet tenderness … [of] her first role, that of Ruth, demanded the concentration of all Miss Talmadge’s talents, particularly the application of the remarkable sense of character which the actress numbers among her accomplishments. Her work as an emotional actress has long held for her undisputed leadership of the stars of the screen and her latest effort is in no wise her least.”

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs