Movies:
The Whispering Chorus
- Rating:
- Genre: Drama
- Movie Type: Psychological Drama, Crime Drama
- Themes: Mistaken Identities, Starting Over, Assumed Identities
- Director: Cecil B. DeMille
- Release Year: 1918
- Country: US
Plot
The Whispering Chorus was arguably the closest Cecil B. DeMille ever came to making an "art" picture. Stalwart DeMille supporting player Raymond Hatton gave the performance of his career as embezzling bank clerk John Trimble. Hoping to escape punishment for his crimes, Trimble arranges for an anonymous, mutilated corpse to be identified as his own then starts life over again with a new identity. Several years later, however, Trimble is caught in a web of circumstantial evidence, and ends up being put on trial for his own murder! Prepared to reveal his true identity, Trimble is begged not to do so by his dying mother (Edythe Chapman), since such a revelation would bring disgrace upon Trimble's "widow" Jane (Kathryn Williams), who has since become the wife of Governor George Cogswell (Elliot Dexter) and is currently pregnant with her second husband's baby. Not wishing to see his wife branded a bigamist and her unborn child labelled a bastard, Trimble maintains his silence and willingly goes to the gallows. Some of the special-effects work in The Whispering Chorus bordered on the miraculous, especially the sequence in which Trimble is "surrounded" by the voices of his Thoughts, but what lingers longest in the memory are the performances by Raymond Hatton and Edythe Chapman. Unfortunately, The Whispering Chorus was a resounding failure at the box office, convincing director DeMille to ever afterward forsake "Art" in favor of gaudy showmanship. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideReview
Sometimes referred to as "the first film noir," Cecil B. DeMille's The Whispering Chorus is certainly downbeat but is perhaps more akin to the "uplift" melodramas of Lois Weber and others and comparable in some ways to Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart. Like Poe, the conflict here is in the soul of the protagonist, the browbeaten clerk John Tremble (Raymond Hatton), rather than some external force. DeMille and scenarist Jeanie McPherson tell their story well and without too much fuss. The performances are restrained and not at all what a modern audience may conceive as silent era acting. Kathlyn Williams and Elliott Dexter are fine as the "widow" and her new husband, and the three voices of doubt -- superimposed faces feeding contradictory advice to Hatton's troubled assistant bookkeeper -- are performed by actors with the appropriately haunting expressions: Walter Lynch, Edna May Cooper, and Gustav Von Seyffertitiz. Best of all, however, and most surprisingly so, is Raymond Hatton himself. For viewers familiar with Hatton's stalwart but rather limited work as a B-Western sidekick, this performance remains a revelation. Beautifully restored, The Whipsering Chorus has been re-released on video cassette with a fine period-appropriate score by the Mont Alto Orchestra. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie GuideCast
Noah Beery, Sr. - Longshoreman
W.H. Brown - Stauberry
John Burton - Charles Barden
Edythe Chapman - John Trimble's Mother
Edna Mae Cooper - Good Face
Elliott Dexter - George Coggeswell
Julia Faye - Girl in Waterfront Dive
Raymond Hatton - John Trimble
J. Parke Jones - Tom Burns
Walter Lynch - Evil Face
Tully Marshall - F. P. Clumley
James Neill - Channing
Guy Oliver - Chief McFarland
Gustav von Seyffertitz - Mocking Face
Kathlyn Williams - Jane Trimble
