THE FLAPPER (1920)

Inconsequential yet essential pop product from producer Lewis Selznick (father of David O. & future super-agent Myron) stars popular 25-yr-old Olive Thomas as a 16-yr-old private school girl whose earnest steady goes to a Military Academy just across the road, but whose eye lands on a sophisticated older gentleman who picks her up (literally) after her buggy tips over in the snow.  Naturally, he invites her to his fancy country club party (where she’s out of her depth), before returning to school where she just misses catching a pair of jewel thieves busy ransacking the girls dorm room.  Thinking they can use this naïf to safely move the loot, the crooks suggest a rendezvous at a swanky Manhattan hotel where they plan to leave Olive holding the bag (again, literally) and get her to safely delivery it to her father’s country estate for later pickup.  And while it may seem her adventures have gone terribly wrong, all will be settled when the cops show up and the separate parties (age appropriate beau; rich older neighbor; glam robbers) are forcibly brought together to clean up the mess.  Silly stuff, smoothly directed by Alan Crosland (a competent craftsman doomed to be remembered only for THE JAZZ SINGER/’27) and written by top scripter Frances Marion working on auto-pilot.  The main reasons for watching is to check out just what ‘flapper’ meant in 1920, a few years before these modern girls started ‘bobbing’ their hair.  (Colleen Moore & Louise Brooks got that trend going around 1925.)  For a chance to take a ride on the top of a double-decker bus cruising down Fifth Avenue, NYC (great ‘stolen’ footage on the streets & sidewalk), and especially for a chance to see the delightful (if doomed) Olive Thomas before she died just a few months later while on a ‘second honeymoon’ during her short, troubled marriage to hard-partying husband Jack Pickford, kid brother of Mary.  (One of the first major Hollywood scandals.)  Long thought a suicide after Pickford gave her an STD (the scandalous novel THE GREEN HAT took off from that idea*), it's now thought accidental (she drank the ‘wrong’ medicine).  The Milestone DVD, from the Eastman House Collection, doesn’t have the delightful original animated titles as seen in a print owned by MoMA, but is in generally excellent condition.  A real charmer, the early loss of lovely, talented Ms. Thomas considerable.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Banned from using the book’s original title, M-G-M renamed their adaptation A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS/’28, with Clarence Brown directing Garbo & John Gilbert to fine effect, along with the impossibly handsome teenage Douglas Fairbanks Jr as Garbo’s kid brother.  Fairbanks Sr., of course, was married to Mary Pickford, sister to Jack Pickford, Olive Thomas’s widower.  Even in Hollywood, it doesn’t get much more incestuous than that.