Show People (Marion Davies Productions, King Vidor Productions, MGM, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right after Murder on a Honeymoon, Turner Classic Movies showed on Sunday, January 5 a film that’s a particular favorite of my husband Charles and I: Show People, a 1928 behind-the-scenes comedy about moviemaking that co-stars Marion Davies and William Haines and was directed by King Vidor from a script by Agnes Christine Johnson and Laurence Stallings (“treatment”) and Ralph Spence (intertitles). Charles and I have especially fond memories of this one because it’s the first intimation we’d had that Marion Davies had real talent as a comedienne and the consensus view shaped by her pathetic (in both senses) portrayal as “Susan Alexander” in Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane was damned unfair. I’ve noted before that William Randolph Hearst’s infamous campaign to suppress Citizen Kane was not about how the movie depicted him – he saw himself as a public figure with the power and resources to defend himself – but what it did to her. Ironically, in some respects Hearst himself was Davies’s worst enemy; she was at her best in light comedies with contemporary settings, but Hearst kept sticking her in elaborately produced period pieces. There’s the famous story I like to repeat about Hearst’s meeting with writer Frances Marion, who had worked on Mary Pickford’s films. Hearst wanted to hire Frances Marion to write for Davies, and she was reluctant. “You don’t understand,” Hearst said, “I am prepared to spend a million dollars on each of Marion’s films.” “That’s just the trouble!” Frances Marion said, “She’s an excellent light comedienne, and you’re drowning her in production values.” When word of that exchange got around Hollywood, a lot of people thought, “Finally, one of us had the guts to tell him what’s wrong with the way he’s promoting Marion’s career. The rest of us never dared!”

Show People is a brilliant, rambunctious comedy that Hearst should have let Davies do more of, and its premise – ironically enough in light of how Hearst was screwing her professionally as well as recreationally – is how a promising young comedy star is sidetracked into big dramatic roles and becomes a temperamental bitch until she’s redeemed by her old friends from the comedy lot where she started out and the love of a nice guy (played by William Haines, whose Gayness was probably an asset for this film because it meant Hearst wasn’t going to get jealous of him). Marion stars as Peggy Pepper, small-town girl from the South who arrives in Hollywood with her father, Col. Pepper (Dell Henderson) determined to make it in films. She goes through the usual turn-downs at studio gates and cattle-call auditions at casting offices until she runs into comedian Billy Boone (William Haines), who offers her a small part in his latest film. Peggy doesn’t realize what she’s in for, especially in a scene in which she gets seltzer water sprayed in her face; originally it was a custard pie, but William Randolph Hearst demanded that it was beneath the dignity of his protégé to get a pie in her face. So either Hearst relented and allowed her to be sprayed with seltzer water instead, or Vidor and crew shot the scene while Hearst was off the set tending to one of his other businesses. Whatever the motivation for the change, seltzer water was actually funnier because a pie in the face happens just once while she could be sprayed aquatically as long as there was still seltzer water in the bottle. Despite her protestations that she doesn’t really like doing comedies – to which Billy replies that Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels both started out doing slapstick (which is true) – Peggy becomes so popular she gets an offer from “High Art Studios” to star in dramatic films for them.

She bids a sad farewell to all her good buddies at the comedy lot and starts to make her first High Art picture – only she has trouble crying on cue until, in a surprisingly Method-ish exercise from before the Method existed (or at least before any American actors had heard of it), her director asks her to think of the saddest thing that’s ever happened to her. Naturally, the saddest thing that’s ever happened to her is leaving her friends at the comedy studio, and she weeps so uncontrollably the director has trouble getting her to stop and find the mood for the laughing scene he wants her to shoot next. Alas, Peggy’s success at High Art sends her off the deep end big-time: she insists on being billed as “Patricia Pepoire,” she buys a Hollywood mansion, she hires a maid who puts off any requests from Billy and her old friends to see her, and eventually she drifts into an engagement with her co-star, André Telfair (Paul Ralli). André has got Peggy to agree to marry him by telling her he’s a European count, even though Billy recognizes him as a former waiter – “That guy used to serve me spaghetti!” With her career already on the downgrade – the High Art studio head is getting cables from theatre owners not to send them any more Patricia Pepoire pictures because audiences don’t like her anymore – Billy sneaks into the big wedding by posing as one of the caterers and disarms André with a well-aimed pie in the face.

The picture ends with Billy Boone and Peggy Pepper reproducing one of the great scenes from King Vidor’s most successful film, the 1925 World War I drama The Big Parade, in which Mélisande, the French girl U.S. soldier Jimmy Apperson has fallen in love with, sees him off as he returns to the front – and Davies actually plays the scene better than the preposterously named “Renée Adorée” in The Big Parade itself. (Between John Gilbert and William Haines as the men, it’s more of a draw.) King Vidor, playing himself, tries desperately to get them to stop the love scene they’re both acting for the cameras and enjoying for real, a scene which reminded me of the stories of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton similarly extending their love scenes in the 1963 Cleopatra to such lengths that the film’s director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, more than once said, “Cut! Cut! I feel like I’m intruding!” (It also reminded me of the 1955 film Sincerely Yours, in which real-life Gay man Liberace fell so far flat in his love scenes I imagined the director telling him, “Lee? Can’t you at least make it look like you like girls?” William Haines had no trouble in that department!) Adding to the appeal of Show People are some fascinating cameos by real-life Hollywood stars, including Charlie Chaplin (whom Peggy doesn’t recognize out of makeup – but then a lot of people didn’t recognize Chaplin out of makeup), John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Beery, and one audacious scene in which Marion Davies as Peggy has an awestruck meeting with Marion Davies as herself. Show People is a sheer delight from start to finish and a welcome corrective to what’s become the consensus view of Marion Davies; as Gary Carey put it in his book on MGM, “She got good reviews, and not just from Hearst’s reviewers.” It was also nice that TCM presented Show People with the original music-and-effects soundtrack by Dr. William Axt (this was the sort of film that led the Better Business Bureau to warn moviegoers, “‘Sound’ doesn’t always mean ‘talk’”) instead of the re-recorded one from Carl Davis in 1982.