Silent movies - The Patsy

Last week was very dramatic, so it's time for a bit of fun again this week, but not as short as the last one.
Interestingly enough, I stumbled upon this movie thanks to a review of last week's movie, but we'll come to that later.
I present "The Patsy" from 1928.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

First the plot (with spoilers):

Meet the Harringtons. We have the father who has a hard time standing up to the imperious mother, and we have two daughters, Grace, the older one, and Pat(ricia), the younger one.
Grace is always favored by the mother and although the father is on Pat's side and sometimes tries to help her, Pat never wins. To make things even worse, she's hopelessly in love with Grace's suitor Tony which is obvious to anyone but him.
At a dinner held at the Yacht Club, Grace is noticed by local playboy Billy. He charms her until she leaves the dinner with him in his speed boat. Pat sees her chance to get Tony's attention. She asks him for suggestions regarding a man she's in love with. Tony, who still doesn't understand that he's said man, advises her to develop a personality and thus attract him.
With the help of books, Pat practices witticisms which convinces her mother and sister that she's gone mad, but her father tells her to keep going on like that.
Tony is annoyed about Grace and Billy and turns his attention to Pat which makes Grace decide she wants Tony after all.
So Pat and her father hatch a plan in which Pat goes to Billy's house faking an attack to make Tony come and rescue her. Billy, however, is so hung over that he doesn't even notice her no matter what she tries.
Pat arranges the place to look as if there was a fight, locks herself up in Billy's bedroom and calls Tony. The plan backfires when Tony picks her up and scolds her for even going to the house of a man like Billy by herself. Let's be honest, it was a stupid plan and not fair towards Billy.
Seeing her so down, her father finally takes heart and tells the mother and Grace off for the way they are behaving towards Pat and himself. To scare them, he announces he'll be leaving and goes to hide outside in the bushes for a while until Ma is ready to promise him to be good.
In the end, Tony comes back demanding to know of Pat if Billy is the man she had been talking about and she admits that it is not Billy, but he. They kiss.

"The Patsy" was adapted from a successful Broadway comedy by Barry Conners which got 245 performances between 1925 and 1926.

The plot itself isn't really that important here, though.
I just enjoyed the performance of Marion Davies so much. I had never heard of her before (no surprise there, there are of course so many people from the silent film era I don't know) and didn't know that she moved between drama and comedy.
There was a reason for that. Davies was the mistress of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst - for 35 years until his death - and Hearst wanted to see her in big dramatic and epic films (although I read reviews saying Davies would have become a star without having been promoted by Hearst).
Director King Vidor said that he had experienced Davies as a very funny person in private who, for example, entertained friends with impersonations of colleagues. He wasn't keen on working with her on one of her usual films.

It was the right decision. Davies was indeed very funny in this movie, supported very well by the rest of the cast.
For Marie Dressler and Dell Henderson who played Ma and Pa Harrington, "The Patsy" was a comeback after years off-screen. It was amazing how I actually seemed to be able to hear especially Ma in some scenes 🤣

Although I laughed throughout the movie, the following scene was the funniest to me.
When Pat is at Billy's house (a terrible plan, by the way, and not very fair towards him), she looks at the pictures of his favorite actresses standing around. To make him notice her in his hung over state, she impersonates all three of them and it's absolutely hilarious.

The first one is Mae Murray who was also called "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" for the way she wore her lipstick. 

The second one is Lillian Gish from last week's movie.
In one blog, this "mockery" is mentioned and that's how I found "The Patsy".
Even having seen just one of Gish's films so far, it looked really good to me.

The last one is Pola Negri.

The ending of the movie seemed a bit rushed to me, however. It's nice that the father got his chance, but there's not much going on between Pat and Tony anymore. Despite the kiss, that was a bit of an anticlimax.

This was probably my film with the most intertitles so far. There were a lot and sometimes that disturbed the flow of the movie a bit, but a lot of the intertitles were quite funny, so I think they were probably taken from the play and they didn't just wanted to drop that.
The witticisms really made me laugh, not because they were extremely witty, but because they could be right off Facebook or other social media.
"Don't cry over spilt milk - there's enough water in it already." "What is a hot dog? A hamburger in tights." "If it wasn't for the rain there wouldn't be any hay to make when the sun shines."
Oh, how far we have come in almost 100 years.

I watched the movie on YouTube. The channel owner wrote this: "Another lovable silent uploaded to YouTube with a great catalogue of amazing jazz tunes prior 1929 ..." and I have to say that they worked really well and added to the fun of the movie.
This is definitely going on my re-watch list!


Sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: The Patsy (1928) - A silent film review. On: Movies Silently, April 30, 2015
2. The Patsy (1928). On: Obscure Hollywood
3. Thomas Gladysz: The Patsy. Essay. On: Silent San Francisco Film Festival 2013
4. David Kiehn: The Patsy. Essay. On: Silent San Francisco Film Festival 2008