Modern love… An Old Fashioned Boy (1920) with Philip Carli, Le Giornate 40th Edition Streaming, Day Three

Great marital unhappiness believed to be due to apartment hotels and dogs…

 

This film only survives as a 16mm print at UCLA and was screened as part of the American women screen writers’ series having been penned by Agnes Christine Johnson who enjoyed a long career and collaborated with King Vidor on the fabulous Show People (1928) as well as writing for Pickford and many more.

 

Directed by Jerome Storm it stars Charles Ray at the relatively short-lived peak of his popularity, looking ten years younger and still the All-American Boy earning some $11,000 a week (approximately $142,000 today) according to his obituary in The Evening Independent of 20^th November 1943. He made a fortune and then lost it as a would-be film producer but from this film it’s clear his face was not the only contributing factor.

 

An Old Fashioned Boy is very much a new-fashioned film, being a light-hearted examination of gender expectations with mass appeal at the time. There was a shift in living choices and there was concern that women would be distracted from their traditional roles by too much being provided for them in so-called apartment hotels where food and laundry could be outsourced from the home. Not quite sure how dogs came to be a threat to the American family – personally I’d have put the finger on cats! – but there you go; many things today make less sense.

Charles Ray and Ethel Shannon

Johnson’s scenario involves two couples, or rather one potential couple and one married pair complete with a trio of “angels” of which more later… Ray is David Warrington who is the titular romantic who dreams of putting his Betty (Ethel Shannon) on a pedestal complete with stairs to enable her to run down to the kitchen every few hours as well as the washroom. He’s so convinced they’re the perfect couple that he even builds a new house for Betty before he has proposed. Some might say that’s presumptive and, well, we’ll see…

 

David’s friends the Smiths are married and not enjoying anything like his vision of contentment. Herbert (Wade Boteler) is cynical and perpetually grumpy complaining about loaning their living room out for David to court Betty. His wife Sybil (Grace Morse) is long-suffering and takes the slings and arrows of outrageous Herbert as well as providing for him and those aforementioned angels: Violet, Herbie and a baby played by Virginia Brown who is very good at crying and reaching out her arms.

 

Three kids and a baby!

David is successful in his proposal and takes Betty to see a house his “friend” has built for his fiancée. Betty likes the house but, oh dear, wouldn’t want to live there so wedded is she to the freedoms of apartments. And, when she hears that David built the house for her before even asking for her hand, takes against his rather odd behaviour and storms out.

 

Betty is pretty flighty as she’s soon seeing her former beau, Fast-Car-Ferdie, or at least Ferdie who owns a sports car, and forgetting all about Drippy Dave. Meanwhile Sybil has had enough and decides to go home to mother. Quite understandably she can’t take her three children… so… she decides to leave them with David telling him on no account to tell her potentially former husband, Herbert, where they are.

 

Now, this all sounds fine and the actions of a reasonable and balanced parent under stress but in reality, Sybil has left her kids in danger with David’s solution to childcare being to muck about and fill the three of them with home-made taffy. They eat so much they get sick and so David calls Betty’s father, Doctor Graves (Alfred Allen) who he then persuades to ask his daughter to come and help. Betty’s trained as a nurse and so puts the kids to bed like a pro before making to leave forcing David to get her father to put the house in quarantine and to make up a new medical condition, Black Measles.

 

Betty can’t leave now and nor can Ferdie when he arrives to take her home… there follows much high-spirited daftness as Betty’s emotional response to her would-be husband ranges from impatience, extreme anger and borderline psychotic.

 

All of this covers an interesting “debate” on the role of women and men even as it allows Ray to show his superb comic timing and winning range of expressions. One of my favourite moments comes as Herbert accuses David of having an affair with Sybil at which point, she decks him with an absolute haymaker of a right hook leaving him unconscious. Proof that these films were sophisticated and attuned to the sensibilities of their audience.

 

The daft premise and entire story arc play on audiences’ preconceptions and they were no less aware of the “joke” than we are now. There was much praise in the contemporary press according to film historian April Miller in the Giornate notes with Louis Reeves Harrison in Moving Picture World (13 November 1920) singling Johnson out for with creating a “flawless structure” for “this bright story”.

 

Miller also quote the author as saying “women have too much creative energy to spend it merely on housekeeping. You get neurasthenic if you have only one line…” even asserting she was “a much better tempered wife and mother” when working, “… so used to writing with the babies crying”. Very much the “new-fangled” woman Betty wanted to be!

Philip Carli played along with characteristic flare and deep understanding of "the argument", that American sense of humour is not to be under-estimated!

 

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