When you’re a boy… The Snowbird (1916), Cinema’s First Nasty Women Box Set

How do I know that you do not lie, all women lie!

 

A couple of years before Nell Shipman and her menagerie made their way to “God’s Country” another, altogether less robust woman was trekking across land and snow to look after the men in her life albeit in the hills of northern California. Mabel Taliaferro was tiny in comparison to sturdy Nell, and she probably also had warm hotel rooms built into her contract, but here she plays almost as feisty as the rich man’s daughter who finds something worth fighting for up in the snowy wastes of Canada.

 

Presented on Disc Four of the Mighty Cinema’s First Nasty Women set, The Snowbird provides something of a cross-dressing companion to Phil for Short the other gender bent feature included in this venture and it follows a similar path in that its heroine does not dress as a man for romantic reasons for the practical purpose of projecting a challenge to male dominance. The fact that she finds a woman-hating man who comes to appreciate her first as a boy is neither here nor there… There’s no Weimar sauciness in this confusion just that the man in question is won over by what she does as a man before realising that she has proved him wrong in his categorical feelings about the “lying, devious, faithless…” group of humanity known as Womankind.

 

It's only money matters my dear, you would not understand…

Mabel Taliaferro and Warren Cook

As in Phil, Lois Wheeler’s Mabel Taliaferro has a nice fool for a father, who needs protecting from himself. Daddy Wheeler (Warren Cook) is living in a big house with a portfolio of businesses but a liquidity issue based on cashflow complications that I wouldn’t want to worry your pretty little heads about let alone mine. Wheeler’s so close to broke that he asks his friend Bruce Mitchell (James Cruze), currently attempting to woo his daughter over a game of tennis, to loan him some money based on his share of some lumber land in Chalet, Quebec.

 

The land is worth twice what Mitchell signed up for and is co-owned with a French-Canadian (aye, aye…) Jean Corteau (Edwin Carewe, who also directs) who has inherited it from his father. It seems a safe bet but when Wheeler heads to see his attorney in Chalet, Magistrate Le Blanc (John Melody), he discovers that a fire has destroyed his copy; only Corteau has a copy and he is not inclined to find it, realising that he can take all of the site which, you’ll have to forgive me, seems very un-Canadian.

 

The plot gets much thicker as Mitchell, rebuffed by Mabel, who likes his tennis but not his amorous intention, declaring the match 40-Love in her favour, sees a way of forcing a tie-break and blackmailing the old man into selling his daughter’s hand in exchange for the debt he can no longer complete.

Edwin Carewe multi-tasks as director and women-hater

Like a wounded snowbird you have fallen from the sky to share my loneliness … here you can stay and be my boy.

 

When the going gets tough, the woman gets going though and Mabel is transformed when travelling up to plead with Corteau, disguising herself as a boy who the odd bachelor decides to take in as his ward, trusting the youth far more than the woman from Paris who, in his youth, had made a fool of him and spurned his advances in front of polite society leaving him to seek bitter isolation among the woods and ice.

 

Mabel aims to steal his copy of the contract but, you wonder, is there anything else she might steal… time will tell, especially as the mean old Mitchell also heads north to protect his ill-gotten gains.

This sparkling restoration comes with an all-new score from Diana Reason, who plays piano and keyboard, Sean Sonderegger on sax and woodwind, Peter Valsamis on drums and Jan Michael Looking Wolf on native American flute. It’s playful and energetic and adds greatly to the viewing experience of a film that balances humour and drama in skilfully interlaced measures.

 

Definitely a wrong-un'... James Cruze

Directed with wit and economy by Carewe, the story is based on a plot credited to Mary Ryder and June Mathis, two of the many women writers working in American film at this point, a situation that was to change dramatically over the next few decades as the studio system rigged opportunity and agenda in favour of men; the facts speaking for themselves in an industry still to reach the same levels of female involvement. Change is happening once again but progression is no longer guaranteed, is it?

 

I’d not seen Mabel Taliaferro before and her stage experience plus an awareness of the cinematic remit sees her put in a delightfully natural performance that makes her character’s transition all the more winning. Character will out indeed, and her Lois is resourceful and steadfast, identifiable and inspirational, just as Philomena was, a new kind of feminine hero just as the times they were indeed changing as the Great War brought women to the forefront of manufacture and other industries not just film where they already contributed in abundance!

 

Mabel Taliaferro 

 

The box set can be ordered direct from Kino Lorber or via all good retailers around the World, it's even available via UK Amazon now. Whilst I suspect you may already have it; I still wouldn’t want you to miss out on one of the key releases of this century.

Granda Pa Trump had a hotel near these frozen wastes in the 1900s and he would have been bowled over by Mabel Taliaferro and her cousins Leontine et al, if only they’d done more stage work in the far North West, perhaps his grandson might have been just a little less of the misogynistic misanthrope he has become with his original coining of the phrase Nasty Woman. Well Junior, these women are not nasty they’re just forceful, funny and smart and if that’s a problem for you… just blow it out your ear! 

Olive branches out... The Flapper (1920)

“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.

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.

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).

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.

Limbs of Satan?!

For example… the girls like watching grown men but rather than fixate on someone age appropriate, Ginger falls for Richard Chenning (William P. Carleton – 47 at the time) – a middle aged man who wouldn’t give George Clooney or Cary Grant any sleepless nights… Maybe she’s looking for a father figure.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.