(There is a sound version, with a smattering of dialogue added. My review is for the silent one.)
I'm starting to really like Norma Shearer! She comes across as very natural onscreen - and when she is a bit affected, she's cute and spunky enough that you don't mind. This, her last silent film, finds her as Dolly, aka Angel Face, a grifter who thinks she's found an easy mark in trusting country boy Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown - who always does well in these "gosh-golly-gee" roles). Once she marries him, however, and makes her way back to his Southern "plantation", she finds herself falling in love with him despite things not being quite what she'd expected. When her old partners in crime, Brad and Gwen (a convincingly oily and smarmy Lowell Sherman, and the appropriately hard-boiled Gwen Lee) show up at Steve's home looking for a piece of the action, does Dolly admit her past - or let Steve be taken for everything he's got?
It's a funny, good-hearted film, with clever intertitles. Also: keep your eyes open for a silly little cameo by Polly Moran.
I give this one: 
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8 comments:
I have had this film sitting around for years unwatched. I hope it's the silent one. Those really early sound films where they all speak into a flower pot are really bad.
That would be RomeO and Juliet. Romey & Juliet is entirely other thing.
I find that Norma Shearer is very entertaining in her silent and early "naughty" talkie pictures. It's just when she got into the later, "great lady" part of her career (Romey & Juliet, Marie Antoinette, The Barretts of Wimpole Street) that she became utterly, unbearably affected.
Cristiane
J_R, I hope it is too. Especially since we don't get to hear Norma speak in it - just a little banter from her costars.
Cristiane, I agree with you - except I thought it worked to her advantage in Marie Antoinette. A "great lady" playing a great lady. ;)
Well, I would agree that she gets better as the picture winds its slow length along - she's quite moving by the end - but her early, trilling, "I'm going to be queen! Queen of France!" scenes irritated the squat out of me. I think that Marlene Dietrich (of all people) carries off the naive princess thing better in The Scarlet Empress. Marie Antoinette is not a great movie, but it does have its recompenses - Robert Morley's touching Louis, John Barrymore's cynical, dissolute Louis XV, and, above all, the art direction of Cedric Gibbons and the fantastic costumes of Adrian. And the fact that Tyrone Power was in the full flower of his beauty doesn't hurt, either.
Cristiane
Have you read Gavin Lambert's book on Norma Shearer? He put her in a different perspective for me-- between that and A Free Soul I decided I take back all my intital hate speech about her. She really is a pistol! I'll have to check this title out-- haven't seen it.
That is definitely going on my book Wish List! Thanks for that!
I just discovered this movie about a month ago when TCM had a day devoted to Norma Shearer. I recorded this one and I really like her in this one as opposed to things like Marie Antoinette. Her early talkies and her silent movies were the best.
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