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The Whispering Chorus

The Whispering Chorus is a 1918 American silent drama directed by Cecil B. DeMille, in which an embezzling accountant fakes his own death, assumes a new identity, and is eventually tried and executed for his own murder. The film is remembered chiefly for its visualization of the protagonist's conscience as superimposed whispering faces, an early sustained experiment in representing inner life on screen.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	March 1918; the AFI Catalog gives 25 March, while the DeMille estate site and the Silent Era film list give 28 March¹^•²^•³
Source	Screen story by Perley Poore Sheehan, published as a serial in All-Story Weekly (12–26 January 1918) and later as a novel by G. H. Watt in 1927¹
Principal cast	Raymond Hatton (the accountant), Kathlyn Williams (his wife Jane), Elliott Dexter (George Coggeswell), Edythe Chapman (the mother)¹
Key crew	Scenario Jeanie Macpherson; cinematography Alvin Wyckoff; art direction Wilfred Buckland; producer Jesse L. Lasky; DeMille credited as editor by a modern source¹
Finances	Cost $72,499.55 and grossed $242,109.27, before reissue and later-format income²
Survival	A 35mm positive print exists in the George Eastman Museum film archive; the film is in the public domain in the USA³
Copyright	Registered by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation on 12 March 1918, number LP 12193⁴

Spoilers

Plot

John Trimble, a low-paid accountant dissatisfied with his position in society, heeds the image of evil in his mind and embezzles a sum of money from his firm. When a state investigation threatens to expose him, he leaves his wife Jane and his mother and hides on an island near the city waterfront. There he exchanges clothes with a corpse that has drifted ashore, mutilates the body, and sets it adrift; the press reports that John has been murdered.¹

Under the assumed name of Edgar Smith, he wanders the world and becomes addicted to opium in Hong Kong. Believing her husband dead, Jane marries George Coggeswell, who becomes governor of the state. John returns to visit his dying mother, who passes away from shock, and as Edgar Smith he is arrested for his own murder and sentenced to death. Knowing that revealing the truth would ruin Jane's happiness, he listens at last to the whispering chorus of conscience and allows himself to be executed.¹

Interpretation

Scholarship has treated the film mainly as an experiment in representing consciousness, and as a drama of class and gender. The protagonist's fantasy of a clean slate and personal reinvention turns into a nightmare that ends at the electric chair for a crime he did not commit, and the film branches into two storylines, one tracing his social decline and the other his wife's ascent.⁵ From Jane's vantage point, the disappearance of the criminal husband and the arrival of a respectable second one is a dream come true, and an early review pointed uneasily to the fact that Jane and Coggeswell "base their happiness upon a lie." The scholar argues that the film tries but fails to resolve this moral predicament, merging moral instruction with wish-fulfillment rather than choosing between them.¹⁰

The AFI Catalog lists the film's major subjects as conscience, demonology, executions, fugitives, mistaken identity, and self-sacrifice, with embezzlement, opium, and Hong Kong among the minor subjects.¹ A retrospective review reads the ending's sacrifice as a critique of the justice system that convicts a man of his own murder, noting the closing image of the flower John crushes in his hand as the switch is thrown.¹¹

Production

The film was produced by the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation as "A Cecil B. DeMille Star Series Picture" and distributed through Artcraft Pictures (Paramount Pictures Corporation), with Jesse L. Lasky presenting.¹^•³ Portions were shot on the Ohio River.¹ According to a news item, DeMille considered using a method for coloring film that he had developed with cameraman Alvin Wyckoff for the whole film; his previous films had colored only certain scenes, and no record establishes whether the whole film was in fact colored.¹

The AFI Catalog lists the film at 6,655 feet in seven reels, while the Silent Era list records it as six reels.¹^•³ Sources also disagree on the protagonist's surname: the AFI Catalog spells it John Trimble, while the Silent Era list and most reviews use John Tremble.¹^•³

The whispering chorus on screen

The title device renders the protagonist's inner voices as superimposed faces that murmur conflicting advice. A scholarly account identifies the good impulse as a female face (Edna Mae Cooper), the bad impulse as a male face (Walter Lynch), and a mocking commentator (Gustav von Seyffertitz); the voices forecast consequences in the conditional or future tense, such as "What would Jane think of a thief?" against "Don't be a fool! No one will ever know!"⁵ The reviewer at Movies Silently notes that the whispering voices were given their own whispery lettering style in the title cards.⁶

The device drew a contemporary notice. The Weekly Variety wrote on 29 March 1918 that the film "is intended to represent the small voices and thoughts of the average mind that work for good and evil," adding that "the usual tricks of double exposure are employed... but they are not worked to death."² A later critic compares the film's disjointed, nightmarish, dream-logic narrative to Kafka's writing, while observing that DeMille's plot retains too much causation to reach Kafkaesque depths.⁷ One scholar describes the film as DeMille's most extreme example of film expressionism.⁸

Reception and the "failure" legend

A persistent story holds that the film's failure drove DeMille to abandon artistry for commercialism. The film historian Sumiko Higashi's account in Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood calls this legend untrue: criticized in some quarters as overly morbid, the film performed below DeMille's four previous star vehicles with Geraldine Farrar and Mary Pickford, but it was far from a commercial disaster.⁹ The recorded figures support this: a cost of $72,499.55 against a gross of $242,109.27, a margin of roughly three to one before reissue income.² A retrospective review places the film's gross in the median range for DeMille's 1918 releases, which grossed between $200,000 and $280,000.⁶

Regional exhibitors responded positively. M. C. Kellogg of the Homestake Theatre in Lead, South Dakota, wrote in Exhibitors Herald (July 27, 1918) that it was "a work of art" worth promoting, while warning of "some gruesome scenes."² The American film historian William Everson, by contrast, read the film as a turning point at which DeMille abandoned his "artistic" path for films of proved appeal.⁷

Legacy and availability

The film is extant: the Library of Congress American Silent Feature Film Survival Database records it as surviving, and a 35mm positive is held at the George Eastman Museum.¹^•³ It has been released on home video on DVD, including as an accompaniment to DeMille's Old Wives for New, and is available through commercial DVD editions.⁶^•¹² The New York Public Library's silent film research guide lists the title among its 1918 holdings on DVD and VHS.¹³ Retrospective assessments treat it as a stylistic outlier in DeMille's silent career, a dark, small-scale psychological drama from the director later known for large-scale spectacles.⁶^•¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1914 to 1926

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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