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Cult Review
Archivist John
Senior Editor
A century-old nitrate reel shouldn’t throb with this much blood. Yet from the first vinegar-sweet whiff of emulsion, The Awakening of Bess Morton pulses like a thumb slammed in a doorway—intimate, involuntary, impossible to ignore. What William V. Mong understands, and what most contemporaries merely flirted with, is that the silent frame is not an absence of voice but an overabundance of listening. Every intertitle here arrives like a shard of ice slid against the viewer’s carotid: brief, breath-stealing, already melting.
Set in the fictional mill hamlet of Greylock—actually a crumbling back-lot re-dressed to pass for Massachusetts—Bess Morton’s universe feels refrigerated at thirty-three degrees. You can practically see the breath of the characters. Gertrude Bondhill, heretofore relegated to wide-eyed ingénues, flays herself open in the lead. Watch the way she occupies negative space: when Bess is supposedly dead, Bondhill lets her arms sink so deeply into the coffin-lining that the fabric bruises. Upon resurrection, the same limbs jerk as if operated by an apprentice puppeteer learning cruelty on the job.
Mong’s script cannibalizes regional folklore—the trance maiden, the river revenant, the mill that bleeds children—but refuses to genuflect before any single myth. Instead he folds them into a kind of Puritan gumbo, thick with guilt and peppered with erotic dread. The result lands somewhere between The Wishing Ring’s pre-Raphaelite hush and the Expressionist cardiac arrest of Der Zug des Herzens.
Who, or what, is the Visitor? Cinematographer Harold R. Klein shoots him in triple-exposure: a semi-transparent outline that hovers a full body-width to the left of his own outline, as though the man and his echo have filed for divorce but still share the same apartment. In one sequence he leads Bess through a root-cellar door that opens—impossibly—onto a shoreline of black sand. The camera pirouettes 360°, revealing the town far above them, inverted like a moral lesson. Bess’s hair streams upward, defying gravity, and for a heartbeat the film becomes a meteorological event rather than a narrative one.
Compare this to the corporeal villains of The Boss or The Captive, where brutality wears a waistcoat and twirls a mustache. Mong intuits that true dread is ontological, not sartorial.
There is a moment, roughly twenty-three minutes in, when Bess learns her dowry has been devoured by her guardian’s speculative binge in cotton futures. The information arrives via telegram, that curt Victorian dagger. Bondhill’s reaction is a masterclass in micro-gesture: her left eyeball drifts a millimeter off-axis, the right corner of her mouth hooks onto an invisible fish-hook, and the color drains from her knuckles so completely that the skin appears candle-waxed. You swear you can hear the rustle of the paper even though the film is silent.
Modern viewers might liken it to Madame X’s courtroom implosion, but Bondhill predates that histrionic showdown by several years and achieves more with a single shudder than most divas manage with a full aria of tears.
Most surviving prints arrive heavily deteriorated; the 2018 MoMA restoration reinstates the original tinting schema. Cyanide-blue for exteriors after sundown, umber for interiors lit by kerosene, and—most unsettling—a sickly chartreuse for any scene where the Visitor intrudes. The shade sits halfway between bile and absinthe, suggesting both sickness and intoxication. When Bess finally confronts her own mirrored future, the frame floods with this hue until the spectator feels their own gastric juices respond in sympathy.
By contrast, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine used tinting as postcard ornamentation; here it functions like a fever chart.
Mong’s background in vaudeville pantomime taught him that words, when they finally arrive, should limp, swagger, or pirouette—anything but merely explain. Consider:
“She woke to find the moon nailed to her bedroom floor—
and every nail a promise broken by someone she had not yet become.”
That’s the entire intertitle. No expository sludge about lunar calendars or psychiatric diagnoses. Just imagistic shrapnel that explodes in the viewer’s skull long after the projector’s clatter fades.
Archival records indicate the premiere at Boston’s Tremont Theatre featured a seventeen-piece orchestra performing a pastiche of Sibelius and shape-note hymns. Contemporary festivals often resort to free-form improvisation or doom-laden electronics. Either approach works because the film’s rhythm is inherently musical: a slow adagio of repression that crescendos into a bacchanal of liberation, then subsides into an unresolved chord that vibrates the ribcage. Try pairing it with The Call of the Dance for a double bill and you’ll notice both films share a metronomic obsession with bodies that refuse to synchronise to societal time.
Unlike the sacrificial maternal martyrs of The Prodigal Son or The Gilded Cage, Bess’s transgression is not extramarital lust but ontological curiosity. She wants to know what it feels like to occupy the skin of her future self, even if that self is monstrous. The film grants her that privilege, then refuses to punish her with death. Instead she is exiled—not from geography but from chronology. The final iris-in closes on her back as she walks into a horizon that jitters like a heat mirage, implying she has stepped outside the reel itself.
Beneath its gossamer of supernatural romance, the picture is a scalpel laid against the artery of New England capitalism. The mill owner’s mansion is shot in grotesque wide-angle: pillars bulge like varicose veins, and the black servants are framed in chiaroscuro so extreme that their eyes become cavities of light. Meanwhile the Irish and Italian laborers below decks resemble the living-dead of The Port of Missing Men, except here their exhaustion is not criminal but revolutionary fuel.
Place Bess Morton beside the unattainable starlets of The Unattainable and you’ll see how far Mong has pushed the envelope. Where that film fetishizes distance, this one erases it, letting the spectator inhabit the same epidermis as the protagonist. Compared with Zudora’s episodic cliffhangers, Bess’s journey is a single exhalation held for eighty-two minutes until the audience becomes light-headed and complicit.
Cinephiles still mourn the allegedly lost reel in which Bess undergoes a ritual of collective dreaming with the mill girls. Eyewitness accounts from 1917 describe a hypnotic montage: spinning wheels that morph into lunar discs, yarn that transforms into umbilical cords. The current restoration bridges the gap with a flickering intertitle and a sustained organ chord. Purists howl; pragmatists argue the absence amplifies the film’s dream-logic. Either way, the gap functions like a cavity in a molar—tongue keeps probing the hollow, unable to forget the tooth that once lived there.
Without Bess Morton there is no Carnival of Souls, no Portrait of a Lady on Fire, no Uncut Gems anxiety-attack. The DNA is unmistakable: the use of ambient sound as negative space, the refusal to psychoanalyze the supernatural, the heroine who embraces catastrophe as one might a tango partner. Even the Coen Bros’ Barton Fink borrows the peeling wallpaper and the sense that walls perspire secrets.
As of this month, the only sanctioned streaming source is the National Film Preservation Foundation’s encrypted portal, accessible via university libraries. The 2K transfer retains cigarette burns and chemical stains; watch it on the largest screen you can find, preferably after midnight, with all lights extinguished and a thermos of lapsang souchong to mimic the smoky ambience of a nitrate fire. If your local arthouse is enterprising, lobby for a double feature with A Trip to the Wonderland of America to experience the full tonal whiplash.
The Awakening of Bess Morton is not a comfort watch; it is a possession. You will emerge blinking into daylight convinced that your own reflection is lagging three seconds behind. And yet, like Bess stepping onto the water-sky horizon, you will stride back into the world rewired, attuned to the subterranean rivers that flow beneath the everyday. That is the alchemy of great art: it ruins you for the ordinary and refuses to apologize.
Grade: ★★★★★ (out of 5)
IMDb —
1920
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