Just Around the Corner was Frances Marion’s second and final film as sole director. In scale and star appeal it was much more modest than The Love Light (1921), but after the success of Frank Borzage’s Humoresque (filmed in 1920 and released in 1921), another Fannie Hurst adaptation  seemed a solid bet. Based on the short story “Superman”, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in June 1914, the film was not as topical or enticing as other Hurst material (which often featured drug abuse, tuberculosis, divorce, racial prejudice, or infidelity), but it did feature eternal and surefire melodramatic themes such as mother love, the struggle of the poor, and romantic love. In the mother/daughter roles Marion cast Margaret Seddon, a competent stage actress, and Sigrid Holmquist, a charming Swedish newcomer making her American debut. She also relied on the wholesome looks of her brand-new husband Fred Thomson (pre-cowboy career) as the “Real Man” ex machina. Most of the action takes place indoors in cramped, nocturnal spaces, and the few scenes filmed outdoors (in snowy New York or the Jewish market) inject the film with a welcome local specificity and pictorial realism, which makes one wish cinematographer Henry Cronjager had been offered more opportunities like this.
The film tells the story of the poor but honest Birdsong family, headed by an ailing widowed mother with two working teenage children. Ma Birdsong’s final wish is to see her daughter Essie married to “a nice fella” (and no longer working for a living) and her son Jimmie in an honest job. Essie’s sweetness and good looks make her an attractive candidate on the marriage market, but her innocence and gullibility make her an easy target for shady boyfriends and vulnerable on the work floor. Marion’s adaptation foregrounds the dangers that working women faced, such as unhealthy work conditions (illustrated by a crowded, poorly lit basement), potential exploitation (working overtime, night shifts), and even sexual harassment (a term of course not in use at the time).
It is significant that the female work space is used to stage and actualize the conventional melodramatic threat of “female virtue in danger”. In Essie’s initial employment, in a basement sweatshop, her overseer takes his (sexual) power not from class or economic privilege, but from his position as her employer. Ma Birdsong seems right to want to see her daughter “safe” in a domestic environment, but as a clever intertitle makes clear (substituting for Hurst’s regular heartfelt authorial interjections) the domestic ideal is implicated in the struggle of the working-class girl whose “beauty fades in making flowers for my lady’s hat”. While the film is at times critical of actual work conditions and sympathetic to the economic necessity of wage-earning for women, it confirms the idea that paid labour is still ideally a temporary feminine activity, and promotes the belief that (only) marriage to a prosperous, providing husband will eventually guarantee physical integrity and domestic and personal fulfilment. A more conventional melodramatic convention (the seduction) is offered by Essie’s boyfriend, who looks “smart and up to date” but who steals kisses and rejects common decency.
A second melodramatic staple, a touching death scene, is staged according to conventional representations in literature, painting, and theatre, but the sequence is made more poignant – and more cinematic – by the fact that Essie is initially in danger of not making it home on time because her boyfriend is keeping her at a dance contest. A cross-cutting framework makes us fear that the desired moment of family reconciliation and forgiveness will not come to pass, rendering the final tableau all the more rewarding. (The dance sequence was missing altogether in the version held at Eye, but thanks to the reconstruction, based on material held at Eye and the Library of Congress, the final sequence’s dramatic power is revealed.)
With its conservative female values, Just Around the Corner is not a straightforward feminist text, but it is a feminine one, with a story favouring a female point of view and female experience. The film’s relative obscurity can be attributed to the fact that it was not particularly successful upon release (it received few positive reviews) and that it featured no star performances. Written by two women who were progressive, feminist, or socially unconventional in private life, with a story appealing to mainstream traditionalism and the requirements of narrative closure, with a moralizing, conservative coda, the film reflects the contradictions and compromises that characterize its period of production. Films directed by women would become increasingly sparse in the 1920s, so this small story of “bitter cruelty and sweet tenderness” rightly deserves our attention.

Anke Brouwers