Little Old New York

Actress Marion Davies was box office gold in the mid-1920's. Riding the wave of the number one hit the previous year in 1922's 'When Knighthood Was In Flower,' Davies saw her August 1923's "Little Old New York" break a record for ticket receipts for that period. In the first two weeks after its premier, the movie attracted over 200,000 paying customers, beating the previous record holder, Douglas Fairbanks' 1922 'Robin Hood.' Theater owners recognized Davies' appeal, naming her the number one female star in their annual poll in 1923.

"Little Old New York," focuses in on Steven Fulton's first steamboat launch in 1807. Davies plays an Irish girl disguised as a boy to claim the inheritance her brother was given to him before he died. She (he) gets caught up in the middle of Fulton's efforts to secure money to expand his steamboat operation.

The ambitious movie almost wasn't completed because of a tragedy occurring in the middle of filming. Financed by newspaper tycoon and boyfriend to Davies, William Randolph Hearst, the production was interrupted by a fire at his New York City movie studios on February 18, 1923, destroying the sets, costumes and buildings. Fortunately, the negatives of the prints, consisting of two-thirds of the shot movie, was saved. To complete the remainder of the film, Hearst had to pay for a few sets to be rebuilt and new costumes to be sown. But he made up for all the added expenditures, and more, when it attracted over 1.2 million viewers in a three-month period, including a 300-straight performance stint at New York City's Plymouth Theater. "Little Old New York" became one of Davies' highest draws for silent movies.

This was also the first of three movies where Davies appear with actor Harrison Ford. The Broadway stage performers first entered cinema in 1915 and enjoyed a very successful movie career right up to the transition to sound. Harrison, no relation to the later actor of 'Star Wars' fame, returned to the stage after one talkie, 1932's 'Love In High Gear.' While walking in Los Angeles, Harrison was struck by a car in 1951 with a teenage girl behind the wheel. He never fully recovered and remained in a convalescent home until his death in 1957.

The otherwise likeable Marion Davies gives us possibly cinema's worst female-pretending-to-be-a-male impersonation in this lively but hoary silent from William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions. She's pretending to be her own recently deceased brother so that she can claim the inheritance left to him by an American uncle who has long been estranged from her side of the family. Harrison Ford (not that one) is the relative who stands to inherit otherwise. There's something a little unavoidably uncomfortable about the increasing affection Ford's character feels for Davies when she's disguised as a boy, and it isn't completely dispelled once her secret is revealed. It's an entertaining silent though, which features an hilarious boxing match (featuring Louis Wolheim) followed by a mass brawl.

Little Old New York, with Marion Davies, is a cute little period piece, nothing heavy, except it is one of her first performances as a comedienne and significant from that standpoint. In most of the movie she's disguised as a boy, although she neither looks nor really acts much like a boy. This isn't important to the story though, as it's equivalent to when an actor plays Abe Lincoln who doesn't look like the real Abe did, but everyone accepts that because it doesn't effect the story at all. You know who he's supposed to be! My favorite parts are the comedy bits when Marion makes her usual hysterical faces and when she dances an Irish jig. I thought they handled the historical aspects of the early part of the ninetieth century quite well. It takes place a the time of the invention and launch of the first steamboat, and several historical persons are portrayed. The sets and costumes are quite authentic looking and add to the ambiance.

Anyone who cares about silent movies and enjoys Marion Davies will like this one!

I will not write about this interesting film in general, but will focus on one little aspect of it. Let's begin.

The old mr. O'Day had two kids, Patrick and Patricia. I wonder what would he have called a third child, had he had one. But that's out of the question, now. Well, the young and beautiful Patricia O'Day (Marion Davies) plays almost all the film through en travesti, impersonating her dead brother. And she manages to fool half the population of 1807 New York (the other half didn't have the occasion to meet her). Which is astonishing.

First of all, her new dress: it's quite boy-ish, in the sense that it is different from the dresses the other women wear in the movie, but it's also different from those of the men. Her curly hair is cut and straightened: again, it does not resemble either the girls' or the boys'. She wears make-up, lipstick and all, and, well, she even has quite some boobs! It reminds me of an early personification of Hannah Montana. Younger generations could know who I am referring to: anyways, this miss Montana is a (fictional) girl whom nobody recognizes when she wears a wig, and, apart from that, is absolutely identical to the girl without a wig.

As you can well understand, in a film conceived in that way there must be a moment in which she reveals her identity and her sex: and there is indeed, toward the end. How does she manage the revelation? Boy or girl, she looks almost the same, so there's only one way (compatible with public morality) to do it: she just says it. I'm a girl! In the next scenes she looks as before, only with a more girlish dress and her hair curled again. The overnight perming.

By the by, another little thing: in the middle of the movie an U. S. flag is raised, with 15 stars for 15 states: in 1807 there were two more.

When his stepfather dies, Harrison Ford expects to inherit a fortune of almost a million dollars. Imagine his surprise when the money is left to the old man's nephew, Stephen Carr, who has a year to show up in New York City to claim it. On the evening before the deadline, the heir shows old, but it's not Carr; he died in the passage. His sister, Marion Davies, has cut her hair and is pretending to be him, at the order of her father.

Miss Davies gives a fine, layered performance as a girl pretending to be a boy, falling gradually in love with Mr. Ford, but her serio-comic performance makes up only a small part of this movie. Like her earlier hit epic, WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER, this movie is in greater part about its sets, designed again by Joseph Urban, its props, like the life-sized replica of Fulton's steamship Clermont, shot on the river with the Palisades and the Tappan Zee in background, but even more about the historical characters, offered as legends and shown as human: Fulton, trying to raise money for his steam ship; John Jacob Astor, who doesn't see it as a commercial project, but urges Davies to invest in real estate; Washington Irving; Delmonico, the city's first restaurateur, and so forth and so on in a dizzying demonstration that the great men of history were....men.

This film was recently restored by the Library of Congress, and has just been released on dvd by Ed Lorusso. It is the latest of his Marion Davies projects, and boasts a fine score by silent-music specialist Ben Model, who incorporates the waltz written by Victor Herbert for the movie's original release. Mr. Lorusso has been releasing as many of Miss Davies silent movies as he can over the past few years, working hard -- along with showings of his later pictures on Turner Classic Movies, and Mr. Model's recent dvd version of WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER, to demonstrate that Miss Davies was an actress of great accomplishment. For many decades, she was thought of as the Dorothy Comingore character in CITIZEN KANE, a talentless floozy raised to stardom through her free-spending lover, William Randolph Hearst and supported by his chain of sycophantic newspapers and magazines. While Hearst did spend a lot of money on her movies, they were successful commercially and in showing off Miss Davies talents as an actress and comedienne. Let us offer cheers to her loyal supporters, to the more than 200 people who contributed to make this dvd a reality, and to the hope that next year, when they come out of copyright, we may see good copies of her 1924 movies!