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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Picture, if you can, Griffith’s ice-floe heroine swapped for a flapper in flour-dusty galoshes, her halo askew like a crooked halo of baguette steam—that is the mischievous miracle of No Darn Yeast. The film, a 1920 one-reeler that somehow feels three reels too short, pirouettes on the knife-edge between sacrilege and Sunday-school parody. From its first iris-in on a steeple so sharp it could puncture the sky, the camera winks: expect no hallelujahs here, only the sour stench of dough gone wrong.
“She came without yeast, yet every loaf in town refused to rise.” —Intertitle card #7
That single card, hand-tinted in sulphuric yellow, flickers like a match in a barn full of hay. It is the gauntlet hurled at the feet of D.W. Griffith’s moral absolutism. Where Judith of Bethulia sought to sanctify bloodshed and virtue, No Darn Yeast chooses to lampoon them with a custard-pie finesse. The result is a film that feels drunk on its own anachronism, a bootleg cocktail of Puritan primness and Jazz-Age insolence.
Cinematographer Lucien Andriot, moonlighting from his usual duties at Fox, smears the frame with chiaroscuro so luscious you could butter it. Note the sequence where Elsie’s nameless baker sneaks into the communal bakehouse at 3 a.m.: shadows yawn like cathedral arches, while a solitary lantern carves her silhouette into a trembling cameo of guilt. The camera tilts—just a whisper—so the rafters appear to judge her. It is German Expressionism wearing a Pilgrim’s buckle hat, and it is delicious.
Compare that visual audacity to the stolid moral binaries of The Call of Her People, where every silhouette stays upright as a lamppost. Here, even the shadows slouch.
Davenport, often dismissed as a mere “facial comedienne,” orchestrates a masterclass in micro-gesture. Watch her left eyebrow when the deacon sniffs her empty yeast tin—its quiver is a syllable of Morse code spelling out damnation. She never overcranks the pathos; instead she lets it seep like molasses through a crack. Her chemistry with the miller (played by a rakishly uncredited Norbert McFarland) is less romantic clinch than mutual rescue mission, two outcasts stitching a parachute out of societal scorn.
One could splice her performance beside Babs’s titular gadabout, yet where Babs ricochets like a pinball, Davenport glides—on a sled, on a river, on the sheer slick of her own audacity.
The anonymous scribe responsible for the intertitles ought to have been prosecuted for libel—or knighted for bravado. Consider:
“Virtue, like bread, grows stale when left unwrapped.” —Intertitle card #12
Each card is lettered in a spidery cursive that seems to snicker. They arrive at a pace that feels almost conversational, punctuating gag beats the way a drummer brushes cymbals. Silent-era novices often skip the intertitles when bingeing on YouTube rips; do so here and you will miss half the orgasmic subversion.
Viewers at the Strand in 1920 reported that the theater piped in the odor of fresh loaves during the climactic river rescue—a promotional gimmick that also serves as meta-commentary. The aroma becomes a ghost-character, reminding the nostrils of what the plot withholds: the yeast, the agent of fermentation, the invisible catalyst. Without it, the village’s bread—and its morality—remains leaden. The sensory trick anticipates the scent-track experiments of Hearts and the Highway by nearly a decade, yet here it is deployed with Brechtian alienation rather than romantic envelopment.
Academic Twitterspheres have resurrected No Darn Yeast as a proto-feminist text, and the evidence is persuasive. The baker’s crime is not sexual indiscretion but economic autonomy: she refuses to buy yeast from the deacon’s monopolistic store, preferring wild sourdough starter passed down from her immigrant mother. The town’s wrath is less about morality than market control—a thread that resonates with To the Highest Bidder’s auction-block feminism, albeit played for laughs here.
Yet the film refuses to hoist a placard. Its liberation arrives in the form of slapstick: a chase through a henhouse where bloomers flutter like surrender flags, a millstone that crushes the deacon’s prized Bible into papier-mâché. The revolution is ridiculous, therefore unstoppable.
Lurking beneath the hijinks is a sly critique of American exceptionalism. The village, founded on covenants and cornmeal, dreams itself a city upon a hill—yet cannot stomach a woman who bakes without purchased yeast. The allegory feels freshly baked in 2024, as artisanal sourdough culture vies with corporate yeast conglomerates. Every crunchy-granola hipster insisting on heritage grains is, perhaps unknowingly, quoting Elsie Davenport’s insurrection.
Compare that subtext to Udenfor loven, where the outsider status is criminalized outright; here it is domesticated, literally shoved into kitchen crockery.
For decades the only known print languished in a Parisian asylum’s archive—misfiled under Pain sans levain—until a nitrate whisper was discovered in a Maine barn, nestled beside cider presses and a stack of temperance pamphlets. The 4K restoration by EYE Filmmuseum rivals the resurrection of The Curse of Iku in its chromatic vibrancy. Grain swarms like flour motes; the tinting alternates between periwinkle dusk and infernal amber, echoing the film’s oscillation between piety and libido.
The new score—composed by Rhiannon Giddens and performed on banjo, bones, and bread-pan percussion—avoids the usual Mickey-Mousing. Instead it hums with work-song rhythms, as if the dough itself were breathing.
GIFs of Davenport sledding across the ice—her skirts ballooning like a deflating brioche—now circulate on TikTok with the tag #YeastlessAndFearless. Academics pen monographs; Etsy vendors sell reproduction yeast tins. The film has become both artifact and ammunition, proof that satire can survive the silence of its era and the cacophony of ours.
Yet perhaps the most radical legacy is the simplest: a reminder that revolutions often begin not with gunpowder but with flour—lightly sifted, fiercely kneaded, and utterly unwilling to rise on command.
IMDb —
1918
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