Channing Pollock’s play The Sign on the Door opened on Broadway at the Republic Theatre on 19 December 1919. Joseph Schenck reputedly bought the film rights for $75,000, and the film was released in July 1921, barely 18 months after the play’s premiere. Herbert Brenon received a letter from Pollock thanking him for the “faithful manner in which he has adhered to the original material,” so it seems likely Brenon and Mary Murillo had the playwright breathing down their necks while making the adaptation; as a result the play and the film are extremely similar. The film added an opening scene in which Frank Devereaux persuades Ann Hunniwell to go with him to the opera, a few transitional scenes on New York City streets and in the gardens of the Regan house (Brenon was reported to have been in Palm Beach shooting exteriors for the film, but the vegetation in these scenes does not look very Floridian), and a view of a transatlantic liner at the New York docks. The main sets, the sitting room of the Regan house and Devereaux’s living room, are almost identical to the corresponding sets for the play as revealed in stage photographs, and the Regan house set in the film even has the characteristic excessive width of stage room sets.
As far as plot, situations, and genre are concerned, contemporary comments on the play and the film are more or less interchangeable. Patterson James in Billboard described the play as “a cheap, vulgar, trashy, preposterous, worm-eaten melodrama,” and many other commentators felt the same, but, as the New York Times review of the film put it, “the play, though unoriginal, has theatrical, as opposed to dramatic, intensity, and so those who like ‘ersatz’ melodrama may like it in its present form.” In this period the term “melodrama” was often applied to what were seen as overly complex and contrived plots. It seems likely that the critical disapprobation of Channing’s play and the film adaptation derived from this position, a reaction to the elaborate narrative contrivance of the primary, suspenseful situation, and the startling coincidence which resolves it. Nonetheless, the plot seems to have appealed to popular tastes. Most of the critics ignored the high-toned objections and simply reported that the play (or film) would do well. And they were right. The play ran for 187 performances through the 1919-20 season; receipts picked up after Marjorie Rambeau replaced Mary Ryan in the part of Ann Regan in March, and she led the cast in a tour throughout the U.S. the next season. For none of the other films in this Giornate Talmadge series were the exhibitors’ reports so nearly unanimously favorable, despite its release at the height of the summer, when the heat always reduced admissions, especially in provincial venues which usually lacked air-conditioning.
Those few reviewers of the movie who considered the film as a film expressed reservations. The New York Times noted: “It is just Channing Pollock’s melodrama done in words and pictures, and may be classed as a fairly good substitute for the stage production. But it’s only a substitute. It is not distinctly a work in kinetic photography, and, what is more to be regretted, it lacks the pictorial quality that usually distinguishes Mr. Brenon’s work. It is excessively wordy and gives one the impression that a motion picture camera was set up in a theatre while the play was being acted on the stage, the resulting photographs being made intelligible later by the writing in of the spoken lines.” Leed, in Variety, similarly complained about its reliance on titles. But the popularity of the film suggests these reservations were not shared by the mass of moviegoers. Leed argues that Talmadge “is here at times so much the actress it is apparent to a skilled observer. The careless abandon that is life itself has given way to a trained, well thought-out attempt to make a graceful picture.” But is “the careless abandon that is life itself” an appropriate style for a melodrama like The Sign on the Door? And does it ever capture the acting that she called “characterization,” which works by carefully adjusting stereotypes to characters and situations? Talmadge’s acting is always small-scale, but it is not “natural,” “simple,” and “straightforward,” whatever Leed claimed.

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs