Second Honeymoon

This early Phil Rosen talkie is well directed visually, as one would expect of a Rosen movie -- he started out as a cameraman -- and it has an amusing script, but the dialogue direction is very weak; Ernest Hillard, as the family friend who agrees to be seduced by gorgeous Josephine Dunn under the supervision of her husband speaks his lines with little sense of spontaneity. But the outdoors scenery that makes up the middle of the movie, particularly the sequence of donkey riding -- much of which is shot in a series of traveling shots -- is gorgeous.

Rosen was one of the many skilled directors of silents who retreated to the B list with the coming of sound. Although his silent career showed him capable of directing sometimes brilliantly -- he directed Valentino in a fine mystical movie, THE YOUNG RAJAH and was called in to rescue a von Sternberg project that had gone ridiculously over time and budget, and acquitted himself well -- he spent his sound career directing for Monogram. Perhaps he could have acquitted himself well had he been given better talent to work with, but his sound work rarely exceeded competence.