Too Many Kisses (Paramount, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” aired a movie that I’d heard of many years ago but hadn’t had a chance to see: Too Many Kisses, a 1925 Paramount programmer and an unlikely vehicle for Richard Dix, who stars as Richard Gaylord, Jr., son of Richard Gaylord, Sr. (Frank Currier), who has built a fortune with his mining company that Gaylord fils is frittering away through various breach-of-promise settlements with at least seven women (we see the seventh being paid off by Gaylord, Sr. at the start of the movie, complete with an audacious scene in which it looks like, having struck out with the son, she’s going to try to vamp the old man). To stop his son from blowing the family fortune on women, Gaylord père and his assistant Simmons (Joseph Burke) hit on the idea of sending him to the Basque region between France and Spain to negotiate for mining rights to the world’s largest known deposit of a mineral called turidium (turidium, vibranium, unobtanium -- as both a New Yorker critic reviewing Black Panther and an online imdb.com reviewer writing about Too Many Kisses joked, they might as well call it “MacGuffinium”). Simmons thinks that will prevent Gaylord, Jr. from getting into any more scrapes with females because the Basques are a proud and insular people who never marry out of their own race.

Well, the inevitable happens and Gaylord, Jr. falls hard for Yvonne Hurja (Frances Howard, who made only three films before retiring to marry Sam Goldwyn -- ironically, her last film was The Swan, which was remade in the 1950’s as Grace Kelly’s last film before she retired from the screen to get married to an authority figure), daughter of the Basque region’s biggest landowner, Manuel Hurja (Albert Tavernier), even though she’s already sort-of engaged to the local police chief, Don Julio (William Powell). What kept this film at least marginally in the silent canon, both when it was thought lost and once it was rediscovered in 1971 (in a 16-millimeter reduction print from the collection of director Irwin Willat -- even though he didn’t direct it; Paul Sloane did), was that the minor role of “The Village Peter Pan” was played by, of all people, Harpo Marx. Billed with quotation marks around his first name, as “Harpo” Marx (his birth name is Adolph but in 1933 he had it legally changed to Arthur because he understandably didn’t want the same first name as Hitler), he has a minor supporting role, popping up here and there in crowds and having just two significant scenes.

In one of them, he helps William Powell prop up a ladder so Powell can ascend to the woman’s balcony and interrupt Dix’s attempts to make love to her -- and in a bizarre mistaken-identity gag that plays quite differently now than it no doubt did in 1925, Powell kisses Dix’s hand. In his other, he comes upon Dix after the townspeople have tied him up to keep him from going to the town carnival -- where the woman will announce her intended by dancing the Farandole with him (I had visions of Richard Dix asking one of the local townspeople, “How do you dance the Farandole, anyway?”) -- Harpo asks Dix, “Are you sure you can’t move?” When Dix assures him he can’t, Harpo takes a poke at him. A lot of people writing about this movie had pointed out the irony that in his one surviving silent film Harpo “speaks” a line of dialogue via a title, while in all the talkies he made later he never said a word. Though Richard Dix and William Powell are both significant names in Hollywood history and survived well into the sound era, when Too Many Kisses finally had its first theatrical revival since its rediscovery the theatre was filled with Marx Brothers fans who had been waiting for a chance to see Harpo’s silent movie. A lot of critics have wondered whether the great silent clown of the Marx Brothers could have had a solo career in silent comedy, though Harpo’s role in Too Many Kisses is really too small to make that determination. My own inclination is that he probably couldn’t have: he didn’t have the soulfulness of Chaplin or the sheer inventiveness of Keaton, and much of what makes Harpo funny in the Marx Brothers movies is precisely the incongruity of a mute character in what are otherwise pretty relentlessly dialogue-driven films.

Written by Gerald Duffy based on an original story called “A Maker of Gestures” by John Monk Saunders -- who, like his star, was more comfortable in action movies than comedies (Saunders’ next script for Paramount would be for the Academy Award-winning film Wings,the World War I aviation movie that seems to have set the cliches for all military aviation movies since) -- Too Many Kisses is an all too predictable silent rom-com. One imdb.com reviewer said it could have worked better with a different male lead -- it’s really the sort of insouciant tale of romantic intrigue in a foreign country Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. had specialized in a decade earlier (and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. would explore in the minor but charming 1931 film I Like Your Nerve) -- and with that in mind I found myself imagining how Buster Keaton might have played it. (I thought Keaton rather than the other great comedians of the time because he was the one who most often played upper-class twits.) Of course a Keaton Too Many Kisses would have been a very different film from the one we have; for one thing, he would have crammed it full of big acrobatic “trajectory” gags, and he would probably have wanted to show the turidium mine in operation so he could do gags with it and work out an Electric House-type system to extract the stuff more efficiently.

As it is, Too Many Kisses is an O.K. film, which when it was new was probably the sort of film you saw when you decided just to “go to the movies” rather than concern yourself with what movie was actually playing or who was in it. The writers miss obvious plot points that have become clichéd in other movies -- I was expecting when Gaylord, Sr. showed up in the Basque city of Poitigny (yes, I know it’s supposed to be on the border of Spain and France, but that still seems like an awfully French name for a Spanish town) that he (and we) would learn that Manuel owned the land with the world’s largest supply of turidium and therefore for Gaylord’s son to romance Manuel’s daughter was, among other things, a sound business decision that would put these huge mineral holdings at the Gaylord Company’s disposal. It’s an O.K. movie and a fascinating footnote to the Marx Brothers’ career, but it’s hardly a significant addition to the canon of surviving silent films -- especially when potentially great movies like Herbert Brenon’s 1926 film of The Great Gatsby remain lost!