The Love Charm

The Love Charm (1928)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Decent silent one-reeler was thought lost for nearly eighty years until a print turned up in New Zealand along with other films from this era. The story is pretty simple as a yacht winds up on an island where its owner (Lucio Flamme) realizes that his life is pretty boring with his fiancée. He then sees a beautiful native woman (Ann Christy) and the two fall in love. There's really not too much that happens throughout the ten-minute running time but with such a short time I must admit that this helped keep me involved in the picture. There's no question that this thing isn't going to win any major awards but there are still enough good things here to make it worth viewing. The best is obviously the two-strip Technicolor, which actually holds up quite well and especially when you consider that this was lost for so many decades. This Technicolor really shines during the outdoor scenes where we get to see the sand and the ocean. I thought the performances were also good enough for this type of film as both Flamma and Christy manage to be charming together in their own way. The lack of a real story certainly hurts the picture at times but then again, it's so simple that you can't help but enjoy it.

Very slight tale that seems more concerned with showing off exotic locations in colour than telling any kind of meaningful story. At less than 10 minutes long, it's too short to offend in any way.

A yacht shows up at a small island where the wahinis are dancing the hula -- in colorful tops, alas. The men are charmed. The ladies are disapproving the the yacht owner falls in love with one of the dancers in this late silent, two-strip Technicolor short from Tiffany.

Tiffany was a poverty Row studio with ambitions. They hired John Stahl and fronted some prestigious stuff, including distributing some two-strip movies, before they crashed and burned in the early 1930s under the stresses of the Depression. This particular short, which turned up in New Zealand, is in very good shape. It was shot by Technicolor's Ray Rennahan to show off the process. There are lots of colorful leis, the ladies all wear clearly differentiated dresses in strikingly different colors, the trees are almost emerald green and the sands are pink: which is actually the point of this production.

As for the story, it is a simple one, credited to Duncan Renaldo, better remembered for playing the Cisco Kid in the movies and on the television. He had ambitions, though: half a dozen screenplays, one turn as director and a few as an associate producer in the late 1940s. The director was a busy actor who directed about thirty movies. This was his last.