The Patsy (MGM, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later in the evening Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American woman who used to wear her hair in long and quite beautiful braids, until recently when she cut them off), which featured the 1928 film The Patsy. It was made at MGM and was billed both as “A King Vidor Production” and “A Marion Davies Production.” King Vidor was the director for what would be the first of three films he made with Davies, whose reputation took a nosedive when, four years after her retirement in 1937, the film Citizen Kane came out and offered a wicked portrayal of a news media mogul and the untalented “singer” he tried to promote into a career in opera she neither wanted nor was qualified for. Just about everyone in Hollywood read this as a reference to William Randolph Hearst and his mistress and protégée, Marion Davies, and since a lot more people have seen Citizen Kane than have ever watched a Marion Davies film start to finish, Orson Welles’ portrayal of their relationship and Dorothy Comingore’s vivid acting in the Davies-ish role have “frozen” public perceptions of Davies as an untalented sex toy Hearst tried to foist on the American public as a major movie star.

In fact Davies was a very talented comedienne, and if she didn’t have the film career she could have it was largely because Hearst kept putting her into big, heavy melodramas which demanded dramatic acting chops she didn’t have. When Hearst tried to hire screenwriter Frances Marion, who already had a major reputation as one of Mary Pickford’s favorite writers, to write Davies’ films, she was reluctant. “You don’t understand,” Hearst said. “I am prepared to spend at least a million dollars on each of her films.” “That’s just the problem!” Marion said. “She’s a great light comedienne, and you’re drowning her in production values!” When that story started circulating in the Hollywood grapevine, other people in the business thought, “At last! Somebody had the guts to tell him! The rest of us never dared!” For a while, at least, Hearst followed Frances Marion’s advice and gave Davies back-to-back roles in quite effective silent comedies, The Patsy and Show People, both directed by Vidor. Charles and I watched Show People many years ago and were astonished by the film’s concept (a young actress gets a great reputation as a comedienne, then switches to dramatic roles, bombs in them and makes a comeback only by returning to her roots in comedy – sound familiar?) as well as Davies’ performance, especially in the scene in which she and William Haines redo the famous leave-taking in Vidor’s 1925 World War I film The Big Parade and perform it at least as well as the people who did it originally, John Gilbert and Renée Adorée.

The Patsy isn’t as good a film as Show People and it doesn’t offer Davies as challenging a role, but on its own merits it’s quite entertaining. It began life as a play by Barry Connors, and the writing credits list Agnes Christine Johnson for “continuity” (oddly her name is left off the imdb.com page for the film) and Ralph Spence for the titles. (Many of the titles are genuinely funny – not always the case in silent comedies – though it’s unclear how many of the wisecracks are Spence’s work and how many came from the original play.) The Patsy is a sort of modern-dress rewrite of Cinderella in which the central characters are the Harringtons – Pa (Dell Henderson), Ma (Marie Dressler – a hugely talented comedienne in her own right whose 1914 film debut Tillie’s Punctured Romance had boosted the career of Charlie Chaplin, though it’s a movie that “throws” modern audiences because Chaplin played the villain), and their daughters Grace (Jane Winton), a typical 1920’s “flapper” vamp, and Pat (Marion Davies), a nice girl – we know that because she’s blonde instead of dark-haired and wears white instead of dark clothes, an interesting “take” on the Westerns in which the good guy wore a white suit and rode a white horse, while the bad guy wore a black suit and rode a black horse.

The plot deals with Ma’s obvious favoritism for Grace over Pat – at times dad tries to intercede on Pat’s behalf but gets nowhere against Marie Dressler’s force (though I’ve seen better films with Dressler; here’s she’s too much the bitchy villainess and we get tired of her after a while) – and in particular trying to smooth the way for Grace to marry rich land developer Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell). The Harringtons go to a dance at the Yacht Club (a title jokes about their high prices – $4.50 for a typical dinner for one) and Grace gets to wear Pat’s new coat while Pat gets sloughed off with a so-called “Spanish shawl” that, she complains, “has been patched so much it looks like a Spanish omelet.” At the party Pat, who has a hopeless crush on Tony, learns that Grace is running around on him with an even richer guy, Billy Caldwell (Lawrence Gray), who takes her out for rides in his speedboat – and there’s a grimly funny scene in which Tony and Pat vainly try to keep up with them in the only craft they have available, a rowboat. To get close to Tony, Pat tells him she’s got a crush on a man who doesn’t know she exists, and Tony tells her that if she develops a “personality” this mythical would-be boyfriend will start to notice her. Accordingly she buys a bunch of books with supposedly witty sayings that will impress people (and when Marie Dressler discovers her daughter’s collection of these she reacts as if she’s caught Pat with porn!) – Barry Connors and/or Ralph Spence must have had their tongues firmly in their cheeks when they devised these lines – and it all ends pretty much the way you expect it to: Pat confesses to Tony that he is the mystery man she had a crush on who didn’t notice her, and the two end up together, Grace heads off for what is probably a very short affair with Billy Caldwell (he doesn’t seem like the type who’s ready to settle down with anybody), and Dad finally gets to pull husbandly rank on Marie Dressler.

The Patsy isn’t a great movie, but it’s a lot of fun and certainly demonstrates that Marion Davies could act just fine in the right sort of part; she gets a little too flibbertigibbety for my taste, but that was an occupational hazard of silent movie heroines, especially in comedies. It’s a nice, assured piece of moviemaking and also proof of how fully mature an art form silent films were when they suddenly ended within two years after the introduction of sound – which threw Marion Davies for a loop because she had a bad stutter, though it was less extreme when she was singing or reciting memorized dialogue than in private conversation, and I’ve seen some Davies talkies I quite liked – notably her first sound film, Marianne (1929), and Five and Ten (1931), in which she held her own against co-star Leslie Howard. A lot of nonsense has been written about the silent-to-sound transition, including the oft-repeated claim that sound films demanded a whole new crop of stars. Actually most of the male stars of the late 1920’s – Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, William Powell, John and Lionel Barrymore – made the transition just fine. John Gilbert didn’t, but as I figured out when TCM showed some of Gilbert’s talkies, his problem was not his voice per se but that he never really learned to act with his voice, to vary his inflections to convey emotions. And if fewer of the women stars successfully transitioned to sound than the men, I suspect it was largely because the changeover hit when many of the silent leading ladies were hitting their early 30’s, a problematical age for women in movies even now.