***** The New York Times September 15, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section E; Part 1; Page 25; Column 1; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk HEADLINE: HOME VIDEO; Women's Work In the Silent Era BYLINE: By Peter M. Nichols
New VHS and DVD editions of "This Is Spinal Tap," Rob Reiner's 1984 parody of a rock documentary, were released on Tuesday, but some of the better entertainment issued this week can be found in two new series from the silent era: "First Ladies: Early Women Filmmakers 1915-25" from Kino and "Equal Time: The Women of Cinema" from Milestone
Good silent films hold surprises, not least the people who made them. In the earliest days strong women frequently produced and directed what they also wrote and starred in. "Women were allowed to work because there weren't great profits to be made yet in that industry," said Dennis Doros, president of Milestone, a distributor of classic films.
Once the money got better in the 1930's, men asserted themselves and professional life became more complicated for women like Dorothy Davenport Reid, the producer and co-director of "The Red Kimona" (1925), about a young girl who is tricked into becoming a prostitute in New Orleans and murders her pimp.
The Kino series includes five films, all of them preserved by the motion picture department at the Library of Congress. The four others are "The Ocean Waif" by Alice Guy-Blache, one of the first directors of either sex, who had made more than 700 shorts and features by 1916; "49-17," a western satire by Ruth Ann Baldwin; "Eleanor's Catch" (1916), a two-reeler by Cleo Madison about still another young woman done in by a lowdown man; and "Hypocrites" (1915), written, directed and produced by Lois Weber.
A colleague of Guy-Blache, Weber was known for her moral crusades. In "Hypocrites" the subject was "the naked truth" as envisioned by a hand-wringing religious ascetic and sculptor who, inspired by a woman scampering in the buff, renders a nude statue of same. On its unveiling, the good citizens, all cheats and perverts, to judge by Weber's interpretation, are shocked.
Notes on the cassette box call the film "amazingly complex." Bizarre, too. "Definitely off the wall," said Jessica Rosner of Kino. "That's real nudity. If you look closely, you can see everything." In Boston, clothes had to be painted on the woman before the film was distributed.
The Milestone series moves on to the talkies with "The Gay Desperado" (1936), starring Ida Lupino, and Mervyn LeRoy's "Tonight or Never" (1931), with Gloria Swanson as an opera diva who has lost the passion for her work. But there are also Frances Marion's silent "Love Light" (1921), with Mary Pickford as a betrayed wife, a role intended to change her her little-girl image, and two silent films by Nell Shipman, "Back to God's Country" (1919) and "Something New" (1920).
Shipman, a conservationist, set her two films in northern Canada and the Mojave desert, respectively. "She did action films," Mr. Doros said. In "Something New" the heroine (Shipman), her boyfriend and her collie, Laddie, escape mounted bandits across rocky terrain in a Maxwell sedan, a forerunner of the sport utility vehicle.
For information on the Milestone series, call (800) 603-1104. For the Kino tapes, call (800) 562-3330. *****
Yoshie