Director: Herbert Brenon
Cast: Alice Joyce, Conway Tearle, Clara Bow, Norman Trevor
Have I Seen It Before: Never.
Did I Like It: There’s a famous runner through <Singin’ in the Rain (1952)> where Kathy Selden dismisses—before the advent of talking pictures, naturally— the entirety of cinema as a lot of “dumb show.” “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” she says. I always wince when I hear this, and wonder why she can dismiss the brilliance of Murnau, or Eisenstein, or even Chaplin…
Then I think she’s actually talking about movies like Dancing Mothers, and I get a lot more forgiving of Debbie Reynolds. Action still works without synchronized sound. Any Black and White film—especially the silents—can put more horror in the shadows than most can do with color. Comedy probably works better if we don’t bring a lot of dialogue into the process.
But a soap opera? And a cheap one at that? It’s, sadly, just a lot of dumb show. Somebody’s in love with somebody else. They shouldn’t be. Some sturm and drang follows to fill out the middle reels, and everyone comes to a sad end. The housewives who flocked to this are reminded that they should stick to the rivers and the lakes their used to. Everybody wins?
Early sound pictures were locked into being recorded productions of stage shows, and while the movie business was still trying to figure out how to use microphones, that flaw is at least understandable. Trying to adapt what absolutely had to be one of the talkiest plays this side of Our American Cousin for the screen might very well be the first instance of the plague that would completely subsume motion pictures for a large audience: The best reason to make any film is if its already based on something which people will readily recognize.
Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean that there’s something worth preserving in there.