Little Old New York (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, 1923)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 15) my husband Charles and I watched a genuinely moving film called Little Old New York (1923) as part of Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” on Turner Classic Movies. This was actually a star vehicle for Marion Davies, and was one of the few times in which Davies’s lover and partner, William Randolph Hearst, actually got screen credit on one of his films (he’s listed as the copyright holder). Charles and I have already seen a number of Davies’s films on TCM and been quite impressed at the level of her talents. Davies’s reputation was destroyed in 1941, four years after she retired from filmmaking, when Orson Welles produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in Citizen Kane, in which he played a character loosely based on Hearst and cast Dorothy Comingore as “Susan Alexander,” a wretchedly untalented opera singer whom “Charles Foster Kane” tried to build into a major star. Since a lot more people have seen Citizen Kane than have ever seen a Davies film start to finish, that reputation has stuck on her and permanently tarred her image. In fact, Davies was a quite talented light comedienne with a flair for spunky, independent roles; it’s a wonder that feminist film critics haven’t latched on to her as one of classic Hollywood’s most powerful examples of a woman with real agency. Part of the problem was that Hearst liked her best in period pieces even though she was at her best in contemporary roles; he spent a lot of money on her films to make the historical backgrounds as authentic as possible, with the ironic result that even though Davies was genuinely popular at the time (as film historian Gary Carey put it, “She got good reviews, and not just from Hearst’s reviewers”), many of her films lost money because Hearst had over-spent on them. Little Old New York was produced as a co-venture between Cosmopolitan Pictures, Hearst’s own studio, and Goldwyn Pictures during its three years in the commercial wilderness between founder Samuel Goldwyn’s ouster in 1921 and its absorption into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924. It was one of Davies’s few films that not only made money but was a blockbuster hit, partly because screenwriter (and future director) Luther Reed, artfully adapting an original story by Rida Johnson Young (who wrote books and lyrics for Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta and Sigmund Romberg’s Maytime, both of which became hit movies for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the mid-1930’s), gave Davies a role that essentially enabled her to play a “modern” 1920’s-style woman even in a plot set a century or more earlier.

Patricia O’Day (Marion Davies) is a young, high-spirited Irishwoman whom we first see horse-whipping a collection agent for her family’s landlord in Ireland. Her father, barman John O’Day (played by future John Ford favorite J. M. Kerrigan), has been raising her and her brother Patrick (Stephen Carr) as a single parent, presumably since the death of their mother. Meanwhile, O’Day’s brother emigrated to New York and became rich; his stepson Larry Delevan (Harrison Ford – definitely not the same one!) eagerly awaits the $1 million (in 1809 money!) inheritance he expects when the old man croaks, but instead he willed it to his nephew Patrick O’Day with the proviso that if Patrick doesn’t show up in New York within a year, Larry will get the money after all. Patrick and Patricia take a sailing ship to New York to claim the money, but the already sickly Patrick dies in mid-ocean and Patricia decides to impersonate him to claim the fortune for her family. This pisses Larry off not only because he thought he was going to inherit $1 million and all he ends up with is a New York house and a $500 per month stipend, but because he was hoping to use $10,000 of his inheritance to invest in the Claremont, Robert Fulton’s (Courtenay Foote) pioneering steamboat. Quite a few real-life New Yorkers appear in the dramatis personae, including John Jacob Astor (Andrew Dillon), Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sam Hardy), Washington Irving (Mahlon Hamilton) and restaurateur Pietro Delmonico (Charles Judels). Astor is shown as a dealer in pianos and furs, but he also has control of the O’Day family fortune and regards steamboats as a preposterous idea and refuses permission to invest any money in them either from Larry or from Patricia when she shows up in New York and, posing as Patrick, demands the $10,000 Larry had agreed to invest in the Claremont. Ultimately Patricia as “Patrick” tricks Astor into writing her a check, ostensibly to buy a parcel of real estate, and she displays that to Fulton and his skeptical investors as proof that Astor will cover whatever Larry owes them. Naturally there are some scenes in which Larry finds himself mysteriously attracted to “Patrick” even though we know, but he doesn’t, that she’s really a woman.

Three years after this film, Hearst and Davies made Beverly of Graustark, another film in which Davies donned FTM drag to protect her brother’s inheritance by passing as him, and while neither one is as convincing as Katharine Hepburn’s marvelous FTM role in the 1936 film Sylvia Scarlett (made by a Gay director, George Cukor, and co-starring her with real-life Bisexual Cary Grant), Davies is quite convincing as a man in both movies. Indeed, she’s actually sexier in drag – particularly when shot from behind, in tight black pants that reveal a “womanly” ass – than she is in the ridiculous white frilled-up and laced-up dress she wears in the final scenes once she’s “outed” as a woman. She appears in this preposterous outfit (which led Charles to joke, “Who’s that drag queen?”) during a scene in which she has to appear before the New York Town Council to persuade them not to give her a two-year prison sentence for her masquerade as Patrick. Once she’s freed – she’s spared the prison sentence and the council itself agrees to pay her fine – she decides to go to London to get away from the scandal, and predictably Larry offers to come with her and turn the trip into a honeymoon. Little Old New York, though set in the early 19th century, is at least close enough to the contemporary world so Marion Davies could so what she did best – romantic comedy in which she played fiery, spunky and independent – and it’s a quite welcome rediscovery. It also survived intact with all the original titles included – apparently Davies (and Hearst, who after all was paying for them!) had enough clout with the studios to insist on keeping copies of all her films, which her estate eventually donated to the Library of Congress. The only part of the film where the original titles have been altered is at the end, when the original credit for a musical score (so-called “silent” films always had musical accompaniment, and the most prestigious ones had original scores composed for them which were sent out along with the prints in various reductions – full orchestra, organ, string trio, piano – depending on how important the theatre was and what their budget was for musicians) was crudely blacked out and replaced by Ben Model, who recorded a quite convincing new score on a theatre organ (or possibly a synthesizer set up to sound like one) that added effectively to the film.