A frivolous melodrama which DeMille made just before leaving Famous Players-Lasky to set up his independent operation.
SPOILERS AHEAD! A spunky but poor lad (Dan Marion, portraying Admah Holtz) falls for an obviously vain and selfish rich girl (Julie Bishop as Flora, before growing up to become Jacqueline Wells and enjoy a long B-movie career) while her sister (Mary Jane Irving as Margaret), the faithful and kind one, is overlooked. Years later the girls have become grown women, with Holtz, now Rod LaRocque, still fixated on Flora, whom he eventually marries with disastrous results. Meanwhile Margaret has been adoringly helping Admah become a wealthy and successful candy manufacturer.
This all unfolds in a fairly irksome manner because the somewhat effete LaRocque behaves like such a hapless clod most of the time. We can't identify much with him. There's good acting coming, however, from the adult sisters (Lillian Rich and Vera Reynolds), especially Flora. Jeanie MacPherson's titles relentlessly remind us that Flora and Margaret are morally polar opposites, yet late in the film we can't help but pity Flora, as the wages of sin and vanity catch up with her and destroy her.
You expect fine production values in a DeMille production and they're here. He was going hard for wish fulfillment fantasies in this series of pictures (starting with Old Wives for New in 1918), appealing to female audiences, so we get the financially ruinous party Flora makes Abmah put on to spite her country club rivals. I'm not sure what people thought about this back in 1925, but the director's idea of having everything at the party made of candy (that's right, guests are shown eating the props and scenery!) is absurdly over-the-top. Which is not to say DeMille was not serious about his tale, or that he couldn't achieve subtlety from time to time. But the back and forth mixture, while interesting to watch, doesn't go down particularly well; it was notoriously on display in Madame Satan, his last film of this type, where the ridiculous goings-on aboard a partying dirigible abruptly change tone and enter disaster movie territory when the airship is crippled..
I will praise the mountain-climbing sequence in the Alps, a well-staged and suspenseful highpoint of the film's first half, though spoiled by terrible special effects at its conclusion. They're so bad DeMille should have scrapped them and used other techniques.
Warner Baxter appears as the one man Flora can't play for a sucker and clearly shows the qualities that would hold him in good stead for many years. Also of note was the theme of class differences (mainly at the beginning). The final sequence, in which the symbolism of the bed of the title becomes clear, is eerie and very good. As the ruined Flora, Lillian Rich excels. The ending, while a little pat, was atmospherically filmed.
DeMille used no camera movement, though that was beginning to come into fashion in '25, but the compositions were skillful, as was the editing, so I was OK with it. The print shown had been well-restored, complete with tinted credits and titles, but the audience left this showing (at Washington's National Gallery of Art), with mixed impressions. One audience member described it as trash, with a reprehensible moral compass. I wouldn't go that far, but The Golden Bed did strike me as being largely empty and pretentious.
SPOILERS AHEAD! A spunky but poor lad (Dan Marion, portraying Admah Holtz) falls for an obviously vain and selfish rich girl (Julie Bishop as Flora, before growing up to become Jacqueline Wells and enjoy a long B-movie career) while her sister (Mary Jane Irving as Margaret), the faithful and kind one, is overlooked. Years later the girls have become grown women, with Holtz, now Rod LaRocque, still fixated on Flora, whom he eventually marries with disastrous results. Meanwhile Margaret has been adoringly helping Admah become a wealthy and successful candy manufacturer.
This all unfolds in a fairly irksome manner because the somewhat effete LaRocque behaves like such a hapless clod most of the time. We can't identify much with him. There's good acting coming, however, from the adult sisters (Lillian Rich and Vera Reynolds), especially Flora. Jeanie MacPherson's titles relentlessly remind us that Flora and Margaret are morally polar opposites, yet late in the film we can't help but pity Flora, as the wages of sin and vanity catch up with her and destroy her.
You expect fine production values in a DeMille production and they're here. He was going hard for wish fulfillment fantasies in this series of pictures (starting with Old Wives for New in 1918), appealing to female audiences, so we get the financially ruinous party Flora makes Abmah put on to spite her country club rivals. I'm not sure what people thought about this back in 1925, but the director's idea of having everything at the party made of candy (that's right, guests are shown eating the props and scenery!) is absurdly over-the-top. Which is not to say DeMille was not serious about his tale, or that he couldn't achieve subtlety from time to time. But the back and forth mixture, while interesting to watch, doesn't go down particularly well; it was notoriously on display in Madame Satan, his last film of this type, where the ridiculous goings-on aboard a partying dirigible abruptly change tone and enter disaster movie territory when the airship is crippled..
I will praise the mountain-climbing sequence in the Alps, a well-staged and suspenseful highpoint of the film's first half, though spoiled by terrible special effects at its conclusion. They're so bad DeMille should have scrapped them and used other techniques.
Warner Baxter appears as the one man Flora can't play for a sucker and clearly shows the qualities that would hold him in good stead for many years. Also of note was the theme of class differences (mainly at the beginning). The final sequence, in which the symbolism of the bed of the title becomes clear, is eerie and very good. As the ruined Flora, Lillian Rich excels. The ending, while a little pat, was atmospherically filmed.
DeMille used no camera movement, though that was beginning to come into fashion in '25, but the compositions were skillful, as was the editing, so I was OK with it. The print shown had been well-restored, complete with tinted credits and titles, but the audience left this showing (at Washington's National Gallery of Art), with mixed impressions. One audience member described it as trash, with a reprehensible moral compass. I wouldn't go that far, but The Golden Bed did strike me as being largely empty and pretentious.