[From Luc Moullet’s monograph Cecil B. DeMille: The Emperor of Mauve (2012, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

Don’t Change Your Husband (1918)

Seventy films. Today, nine are missing.

Only short excerpts remain of three of them, which do not give an idea of the films: The Devil Stone (1917), which is a melodrama, as is Feet of Clay (1924), and a western, The Squaw Man from 1918.

And four films from early 1915, a period when DeMille was uninspired, are completely lost: two comedies, The Wild Goose Chase and Chimmie Fadden, probably in the same vein as its mediocre sequel Chimmie Fadden Out West, a melodrama (Temptation) and an adventure film, The Arab, probably along the lines of The Unafraid and The Captive. Then there are two comedies, The Dream Girl (1916) and We Can’t Have Everything (1918), partly set in the film industry, with Tully Marshall in the role of a director who may well have resembled DeMille.

I would be very curious to see it, especially since it was shot during a successful period, the year of Old Wives for New and Don’t Change Your Husband.

However, the biggest loss is that of Feet of Clay (1924), bookended by two absolutely remarkable productions, Triumph and The Golden Bed, an exuberant melodrama.

It appears that DeMille helped out with some sequences in films made by others, but the filmmaker did not think it right to mention this in the lists of his films. One of these, Chicago (1928), made by Frank Urson, is well known.