A New Eroticism or Merely a New Woman? Cecil B. DeMille's Adaptation of Alice Duer Miller's "Manslaughter"
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Now almost completely forgotten, novelist and scenarist Alice Duer Miller (1874-1942) was once a best seller, a consistent producer of still readable romances, and an intermittent but sought-after worker on other authors' scripts in Hollywood. Her writing career started while she was an under- graduate at Barnard, from which she received her mathematics degree in 1899, and continued to her death, at which time she was adapting her narrative poem White Cliffs into the film The White Cliffs of Dover , released posthumously in 1944. Apparently only three of the silent adaptations of Miller's works remain; of these, Manslaughter is certainly the most discussed, although Sumiko Higashi critiques its heroine "turned saintly" as a "boring [imitation] of a Victorian [stereotype]," while Robert Birchard dismisses it as "exhibiting] all of the excesses and none of the virtues of [Cecil B. DeMiiie's] other work," a failing that he attributes to DeMiiie's bout of rheumatic fever in spring 1922, which permitted what he considers Jeanie Macpherson's inadequately supervised adaptation of the novel.
