L'irresponsable

I have had a great number of issues with the Norma Talmadge features I have seen. Her husband and producer, Joe Schenck, spared no expense in purchasing properties for her, but while they might have been excellent stage shows, they were not well adapted for the screen -- a problem that Buster Keaton, who was Schenck's brother-in-law and whose films Schenck financed, suffered from.

The problems with DELUXE ANNIE arise purely from a chopped-down script, based on a stage show, which was based on a novel. It is intended as a liberal treatise on how circumstances can lead moral people into crime. We start out by having Norma Talmadge getting clunked on the head in Manhattan, developing amnesia, wandering off into the fog and winding up in Chicago two months later, with no explanation. She is broke and about to steal a watch and a bankroll. Instead, she gets involved in a variation of the Badger Game in partnership with the man who clunked her on the head following a dust-up with her husband with Norma's predecessor in the con, and whose wallet and watch she was about to steal.

Got that? I got it and for a good twenty minutes I considered walking out in annoyance, but I didn't, because, amidst all the claptrap and plotting-by-coincidence, Miss Talmadge gives a wonderful performance, running a wide range of emotions, played subtly or broadly as the situation required. It wasn't enough to make me really admire this movie, which is believed to be the earliest surviving film of director Roland West, but it made it better than painless.

Eugene O'Brien, as her partner in crime, also gets a few good scenes, and there is some lovely location shooting in Manhattan and along the Hudson River. But except for Miss Talmadge's fine acting, I would have missed them.

This film exists in the Library of Congress and I recently viewed a safety print there. There is some decomposition in the 4th reel (out of 6), but overall it's a print of excellent quality. De Luxe Annie is a neat little pulp story - the kind Roland West would later specialize in. It's also the earliest film of his that I have seen and his earliest that may very well exist. Norma Talmadge plays a happily married woman who gets amnesia and is tricked into believing she is a master criminal. After redemption, she returns to her family in the end. West shot this as he would his later films - with a dark edge and a passion for telling a crime story. The film has excellent settings, good cutting and nice compositions. Not a heck of a lot of camera movement, but West didn't really start that until The Dove (of which 4 impressive reels also reside at LOC). There is an awesome dream sequence that utilizes split frames. Shadow-y in places with some striking under-lighting we'd later see much more of in The Bat Whispers, this is a solid film for 1918 and reminiscent of The Penalty (1920) in tone and style. And Talmadge had charisma. Hopefully it will come out on video one day.