This is a recently restored film, stitched together from two different prints for two different markets, which I watched through the online version of Le Giornate del cinema muto (also known as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival).
Here’s how a movie magazine summarized the film’s plot in 1921:
Ma Birdsong, her son Jimmie, and her daughter Essie live together in New York City’s East Side. Essie, enamored with the city’s night life, becomes an usherette in a cheap theater where she falls in love with Joe Ullman, a crooked ticket speculator. Her ailing mother repeatedly asks to meet Essie’s fiancé, but Joe always has a ready excuse to decline. Following a heart attack, Ma makes another plea to meet Joe. Essie finds him in a poolroom, but he scornfully refuses to accompany her. In desperation, Essie relates her story to a stranger; he agrees to pose as the girl’s fiancé for the sake of her mother. Ma Birdsong dies, secure in the thought that Essie is to marry “a real man.” Essie later falls in love with the stranger and they marry.
Frances Marion wrote and directed this Fannie Hurst adaptation, after having written the adaptation of Hurst’s Humoresque the previous year. That film was directed by Frank Borzage, who was originally been set to direct this one as well, according to the AFI’s movie magazine research. Instead Marion took over, making this her directorial debut. She would go on to direct two more films, The Love Light (1921) and The Song of Love (1923).
Just Around the Corner, based on a short story titled “The Superman,” is a Fannie Hurst tale through and through—the story of working poor New Yorkers crowded into a tenement, struggling to lead lives that matter, with family tragedy just around the corner…
In it, we meet the Birdsong family: brother and sister Jimmie (Lewis Sargent) and Essie (Sigrid Holmquist, called “the Mary Pickford of Sweden”), and their mother (Margaret Seddon), who is slowly dying of an incurable heart ailment.
The hat shop scene early on is a fascinating representation of women’s material labor at the time (and maybe a nod to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth?). Hurst and Marion are bold in their pro-labor feminist politics, deftly showing-not-telling that bosses exploit both women’s labor and their bodies, and that poor women are forced to accept both the illegal working conditions and the sexual assault because they need money to survive.
Ironically, when Essie wants to take a job as a theatre usher for better pay, her mother and brother object because of the job’s connotations of prostitution. “It’s night work!” Ma Birdsong exclaims. As though Essie wasn’t already getting her breasts groped by her aggressive sweatshop boss!
The film starts to drag a bit as it shifts into full melodrama mode, pairing Essie off with a bad beau who keeps dodging her attempts to bring him home to meet her family. Despite her anti-sex work stance, the sight of Ma Birdsong waiting endlessly at the set dinner table, adjusting the silverware again and again, broke my heart. Unfortunately, the story moves slowly and predictably in this section, really sucking the energy out of things.
The pace picks up somewhat towards the end thanks to the intervention of a big sweet hunk, played by Marion’s real-life husband and literally credited as “The Real Man,” who arrives just in time to do a whole heap of emotional labor and teach everybody a lesson about non-toxic masculinity. Even in 1921 we loved a deus ex himbo.