The Look Out Girl

"The Look Out Girl" (1928) is an example of cheap on the prowl, out looking (no intent of a pun on the name) for patrons to see if "sucker" really can be applied every minute, as a certain showman once said. The film is not difficult to watch. It's a lot like some early television where, when somebody got home from work and was dazed from the day, that person would sit down; read the paper; eat dinner in a haze; then turn on the TV, watch with glazed eyes something about as interesting as watching strands of vegetable matter turn into straw material which becomes hay at some future time; then fall asleep with the TV still on.

Starring a very nice looking Jacqueline Logan, with Ian Keith, Gladden James, Lee Moran, William H. Tooker, Jimmy Aubrey, and others, my copy is not tinted, is in ratty, but a watchable state. Logan's the "look out girl" for a gang of robbers, but she wants to get out from under such conditions of being a "moll". This Victorian style, dime novel story has her marrying the man who saves her from what amounts to being an attempted suicide; marrying him so quickly after he quickly falls in love with her - that it's ridiculous; but, okay, the story's watchable, and I'm not glazed over enough to fall asleep, so I'll just continue watching this automatonistically told story as if I were an automaton, too.

There, if you wish to watch it, you won't be disappointed, believe it or not. Besides, it's just 55 minutes long, and you'll appreciate that Jacqueline Logan's really good looking and could at least act to the directions of a director. Oh, by the way, the director's Dallas M. Fitzgerald, and he directs about as well as I could - not. Have at it.

Jacqueline Logan tries to kill herself by jumping in a lake. Wealthy doctor Ian Keith rescues her, nurses her back to health and asks her to marry him. She agrees if he never asks her about his past. Soon, however, old associate Lee Moran comes by to blackmail her.

I'll look at anything with the beautiful Jacqueline Logan, and she's certainly worth looking at here. If you're looking for a well-told story, however, this is not the movie for you. Certainly the big mystery, which uses up two-thirds of the show's length, is made apparent by the title and behavior of Miss Logan within the first ten minutes. While the acting is good, the story is hackneyed and its course apparent from the very beginning.

The director, is Dallas Fitzgerald, a name I don't recall from anything else. He was quite prolific for a few years, starting that phase of his career in 1919, and directing ten movies in 1927 and 1928.... then nothing until a single one in 1933. He died in 1940, aged 63.

It's always a pleasure to watch a nice tinted print of a silent picture, even a tatty effort like this one. Admittedly, it does have one redeeming quality in the agreeable performance rendered by Gladden James who bravely figures in the tables-turned climax.

Otherwise we are stuck with two of the wettest, dullest and least charismatic principals of all time. Instead of playing the lookout girl with appropriate spice and gusto, Miss Logan (who can look alluring when she wants to) has opted to play her as the matronly heroine of a Victorian melodrama who keeps her feelings under cover and does little else than pose enigmatically or strike attitudes of mental anguish. It amazes me that she was quite a popular star even in the days when exaggerated posturing was all the rage.

As the hero of this dime-novel saga, stiff-as-a-scarecrow Ian Keith only seems to do a little better because the camera doesn't focus on him so often.

And what a sorry excuse for a camera it is! It spends all but two location shots bolted to the studio floor. In fact, to describe Dallas Fitzgerald's direction as dreary, uninspired and deadly dull would be totally accurate, although it does come to life briefly at the climax. In all, if it were not for this brief spurt of climactic action and the presence of Mr James, "The Lookout Girl" would be a dead loss. Except for the tints.