Exit Smiling (MGM, 1926)

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

My husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for the welcome return of Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” after the August hiatus, which featured a 1926 MGM comedy, Exit Smiling. The film was a showcase for live comedy star Beatrice Lillie, who in a script by Sam Taylor (who also directed), Marc Connelly, and Tim Whelan plays Violet, the “drudge” in a traveling theatre company which produces an awful play called Flaming Women. Of course, she’s just the cleaning woman, but she has dreams of stardom in her own right and one night she almost replaces the alcoholic leading lady, Olga (Doris Lloyd), though Olga returns at the last second, albeit considerably the worse for wear after having stumbled on a case of “real beer.” (It’s interesting how references to Prohibition stumbled into the plots of films like this.) The plot thickens when Violet meets Jimmy Marsh (Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford’s younger and considerably less talented and more dissolute brother), a bank clerk from East Farnham, a small town in upstate New York, who’s on the run for embezzlement. Of course, he’s really innocent: the actual crook is fellow bank employee Tod Powell (Tenet Holtz) – we can tell almost immediately by the little “roo” moustache he wears and his heavier-set appearance – who not only stole the money but framed Jimmy for the crime. Jimmy pleads with Violet to figure out a way to hide him from the police officers who are presumably after him. Violet arranges with the theatre company to hire Jimmy to play the play’s villain, a no-goodnik landowner who attempts to compromise the heroine’s virtue until he’s defeated by the play’s leading man, Cecil Lovelace. Cecil is being played by Franklin Pangborn, who like Lillie was making his feature-film debut, and though he’s supposed to be at least relatively butch, the first card title writer Joseph Farnham (infamous in standard film histories as the man who eviscerated Erich von Stroheim’s Greed at the behest of studio heads Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg) gives him is a bit of screaming-queen dialogue that would have perfectly fitted in to Pangborn’s later talkies.

Things are going well for the company until the train car they use (they presumably have one of those deals with the railroads in which they can hitch their entire car to a train going to their ultimate destination) arrives in East Farnham. Jimmy refuses to go on for fear the police will recognize and arrest him, so Violet disguises herself in drag and prepares to play the villain’s role herself. This scene is actually the funniest part of the movie, especially since Beatrice Lillie in drag looks astonishingly like her good friend Charlie Chaplin (Lillie was American but had her first successes in Chaplin’s native country, Great Britain) and draws on many of Chaplin’s gestures. Unfortunately, the rather dull plot about Jimmy being framed for embezzlement keeps getting in the way of the parts of this movie we want to see: Violet’s increasingly desperate attempts to get into the play and establish herself as an ACTRESS. Exit Smiling rather peters out as Tod gets exposed as the embezzler, his confederate Jesse Watson (Harry Myers) is also found out, and much to Violet’s shock Jimmy decides to stay in East Farnham and marry his former girlfriend, Phyllis Tichnor (Louise Lorraine), who is also his employer’s daughter. It would have made a great beginning for Beatrice Lillie’s film career if she’d wanted one, but she didn’t. Apparently she was just too nervous about performing privately and not having the laughter of an audience to tell her whether or not she was actually being funny. Also, she was primarily known as a dialogue comedienne and a comic singer, and neither of those skills translated to a silent film. Though Lillie had a long and distinguished career on stage on both sides of the Atlantic, imdb.com lists only eight films by her (plus two TV appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and in a British series called Before the Fringe), many of them brief in definitely supporting roles like the 1929 Warner Bros. extravaganza, The Show of Shows and what was her last film (aside from that Before the Fringe extravaganza), Thoroughly Modern Millie, in which she played the thoroughly villainous housekeeper Mrs. Meers, who’s human-trafficking her hotter, more attractive babes. Still, Exit Smiling is a quite enjoyable film and a haunting indication of what might have been!