Les Signes de l'amour

Ultra-cute little comedy starring a luminous Constance Talmadge as a "love expert" who goes around rearranging everyone's love lives so the guy she loves (John Halliday) can be free from his family and free to marry.

Once she realizes she wants Halliday (who works for her step-father), Talmadge sets about to lure him and his family (maiden aunt and two frumpy sisters) to Palm Springs where he father is vacationing. She sends a bogus telegram and the family goes south by train, almost killing the old lady (who is also deaf).

Talmadge sizes up the male population wintering by the sea and selects suitable men for the frumpy sisters. But the men want nothing to do with them. So Talmadge sets about to give them make-overs (very funny). Meanwhile the old lady becomes invigorated by the balmy sea air and becomes a dance-floor demon. Then on to a happy ending.

Talmadge is terrific as the madcap heiress. No one is safe from her maneuvers, including her crabby step-father. Aside from Halliday, the cast is mostly not well known, although Natalie Talmadge plays frumpy Dorcas. But this is Talmadge's film from the getgo and she's a hoot, especially when yelling into the old lady's ear trumpet, "Say, when is the last time you had a thrill?" Tiles cards are nicely done, with dialog presented in a straightforward fashion, but other cards, those that introduce scenes are beautifully illustrated. Along with other 20s comedies that survive like THE PRIMITIVE LOVER and THE DUCHESS OF BUFFALO, this is another film that shows what a delightful comedienne Constance Talmadge was. Now if we can just find a copy of HER SISTER FROM Paris.

As with sister Norma, precious few of the Talmadge sisters' films have survived. What a shame.

Having read a book on what a woman should know by the time she is forty-five, Constance Talmadge has become a love expert and is ejected from the girl's school she attends. When she refuses to be polite to her father's business partner and pastor because she does not feel the instant pangs of love, he cries that enough is enough, and sends her to stay with her aunt Marion Sitgreave in wintry Boston. She immediately feels those pangs for her aunt's fiancé of six years, John Haliday, decides to cut auntie out on the grounds that they're not really in love; his excuse for a long engagement being two dependent sisters and elderly aunt, she totes them down to Palm Beach, where passion can flow among the youngsters and tropical disease slay the old.

This sort of self-assured flapper, snapping her fingers in the face of propriety and getting away with it was a favorite theme of 1920s comedy; certainly Marion Davies enjoyed appearing in this sort of vehicle whenever Hearst allowed her out of costume dramas. What makes this a particularly delightful example of the genre is not just Miss Talmadge's blithe playing of the self-assured young idiot, but the happy writing that surrounds her, thanks to John Emerson and Anita Loos, who provide not only a funny scenarios\, but some fine, witty titles that made me giggle, illustrating the heartless self-adoration that seems to be the province of the young -- until we take a look at the world and see it all around us.