Having read a book on what a woman should know by the time she is forty-five, Constance Talmadge has become a love expert and is ejected from the girl's school she attends. When she refuses to be polite to her father's business partner and pastor because she does not feel the instant pangs of love, he cries that enough is enough, and sends her to stay with her aunt Marion Sitgreave in wintry Boston. She immediately feels those pangs for her aunt's fiancé of six years, John Haliday, decides to cut auntie out on the grounds that they're not really in love; his excuse for a long engagement being two dependent sisters and elderly aunt, she totes them down to Palm Beach, where passion can flow among the youngsters and tropical disease slay the old.
This sort of self-assured flapper, snapping her fingers in the face of propriety and getting away with it was a favorite theme of 1920s comedy; certainly Marion Davies enjoyed appearing in this sort of vehicle whenever Hearst allowed her out of costume dramas. What makes this a particularly delightful example of the genre is not just Miss Talmadge's blithe playing of the self-assured young idiot, but the happy writing that surrounds her, thanks to John Emerson and Anita Loos, who provide not only a funny scenarios\, but some fine, witty titles that made me giggle, illustrating the heartless self-adoration that seems to be the province of the young -- until we take a look at the world and see it all around us.
This sort of self-assured flapper, snapping her fingers in the face of propriety and getting away with it was a favorite theme of 1920s comedy; certainly Marion Davies enjoyed appearing in this sort of vehicle whenever Hearst allowed her out of costume dramas. What makes this a particularly delightful example of the genre is not just Miss Talmadge's blithe playing of the self-assured young idiot, but the happy writing that surrounds her, thanks to John Emerson and Anita Loos, who provide not only a funny scenarios\, but some fine, witty titles that made me giggle, illustrating the heartless self-adoration that seems to be the province of the young -- until we take a look at the world and see it all around us.