“This is the fluffiest sort of fluff, but good summer booking just the same, though any but the best type of houses may find it lacking in dramatic meat…” So wrote the Variety reviewer on the film’s release in May 1920. Olive Thomas, whose “appeal is the sex appeal” here continued “her trip toward film fame…”
Sadly Olive’s trip was a very short one and within months
she was dead, accidentally poisoned in Paris on holiday with her second husband
Jack Pickford. She had been a star of the Follies with (reluctant) sister-in-law
Mary describing her appeal: “The girl had
the loveliest violet-blue eyes I have ever seen. They were fringed with long
dark lashes that seemed darker because of the delicate translucent pallor of
her skin.” Those eyes still work in black and white but on this showing
Olive was more than just a fine pair of peepers but also a fine comic actor;
and all of this in spite of a uneven script from Frances Marion.
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| Olive eyes trouble |
Directed by Alan Crosland, The Flapper was clearly a vehicle for the rising star – a Pickford
by style and not just association – and plugs into the vogue for teen rebellion
epitomised by those young women who just liked to have fun particularly those
saddled with the tragic restraints of being born into wealth.
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| A bored teenager |
Olive (then 24) plays 16-year-old Genevieve 'Ginger' King
a poor little rich girl suffocating in the empty acres of her family mansion in
Orange Springs – a town in which “they didn’t even have a saloon to close”. Her
father (Warren Cook) is a senator and rules his castle with determined
authority. He’s had enough of his daughter’s waywardness and, on the advice of
his friend, Reverend Cushil (Charles
Craig), decides to pack her off to boarding school run with strict discipline
by Mrs Paddles (Marcia Harris).
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| Bill takes Ginger for a ride |
Before this, we meet Ginger’s (almost) boyfriend, Bill
Forbes (Theodore Westman, Jr.) who is about to go to military academy and is
part deus ex machine part red herring.
Ginger arrives at school to be confronted by the inmates
lined up on the stairs, their short skirts revealing “the limbs of Satan from
old family trees…” and appraising eyes who give her the “once over”. The title
cards from Frances Marion are quirky whereas the tone of the film is sometimes
just odd.
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| Limbs of Satan?! |
She finally gets to meet her man after a sleigh ride in
which Bill forgets to remember that he can’t drive a sleigh; they tumble off
and as he tries to recover the horse and snow-cart, Ginger convinces Richard
that she’s twenty and on the lookout for some… sophistication.
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| Joining the grown ups... |
Back in the school we have already met some of the other
girls, one of whom is played by Norma Shearer (genuinely of school age at the
time – 17 years old). Another, is “a moth amongst the butterflies” Hortense
(Katherine Johnston) who has too much mascara to be a goody and a scheming boyfriend
called Tom (Arthur Housman).
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| Goodies or baddies? |
Ginger sneaks away for an evening of jazz dancing with
Richard at the country club and Hortense tells Mrs Paddles in an effort to
create a distraction. Sure enough as the school mistress heads off to
re-capture her lost lamb, Hortense burgles the school safe just as Paddles
pulls Ginger out from the dance, rightly suggesting to the unsuspecting
Chenning that he should be locked up for romancing one so young… As he laughs
this off to his friends Ginger’s heart breaks as she is dismissed as a silly
thing.
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| The robbery is revealed... Norma Shearer second left? |
On return to school she naturally decides to commit
comedy suicide but is distracted by the sounds of Hortense dropping the stolen
good down to Tom. Naively she accepts her classmate’s lame explanation.
We move on and after an impressive little dance with a
ukulele – one of my favourite parts of the whole film! – Ginger is in New York
en route to an assignation with Hortense and Tom. I always love seeing real
backgrounds in films of this period… an open-top time-travel-tram-ride!
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| Ginger takes in the sights |
Ginger agrees to help the two tea leaves – swallowing
their story that they were eloping and only “borrowing” the goods as a joke…
She decides to use the contents before she returns them to “vamp” Chenning and
thereby gain her revenge… Oh dear Ginge, that sounds awfully complicated,
dontcha think?
Queue Olive at last dressed as a proper flapper and
cutting and rug very sharply at a mid-town nightclub. She convinces her prey
that she is now “grown up” and there is much coded face-pulling at the shock of
her lost virginity.
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| The flapper vamps it up! |
Then she returns home to pull the same trick on friends
and family… but lost honour is not to be taken lightly and things get a little
complicated.
For all its disappointments – this is no prototypical Flaming Youth, It or Bare Knees – The Flapper remains diverting and that is entirely
down to its star aided by Marion’s cute intertitles. There are just a few too
many elements in the story – is Tom really necessary or his two hero worshiping
hangers on from the academy? - but you can see why Thomas was a major starlet and who
knows what she could have gone on to achieve as the twenties progressed?
I watched the Milestone DVD The Olive Thomas Collection which comes with an hour-long
documentary produced by Hugh Heffner (a connoisseur of that which Olive exudes…)
and which provides a decent summation of Thomas’ short life and career. Some
IMDB reviewers pick holes in the tone but, as with The Flapper itself, I much prefer its existence to the alternative!
It is available direct from Milestone or from those canny
tax-avoiders over on the long river.
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