Les enfants du divorce

...and I mean that in a double sense. First there is the scenario which is a traditional love triangle. Two young girls meet in a "divorce colony" in Paris and become childhood friends. It's a place run by nuns where children of well-to-do divorced parents are left so that the parents can get on with their lives. Sometimes the parents even came back to visit. One day the friends encounter a rich boy who has scaled the colony wall. They promise to remember each other and he departs.

The three grow up to be Esther Ralston, Clara Bow, and Gary Cooper. Cooper is rich, Ralston has become rich and Bow is looking to become rich. The best way for her to do that is to marry Cooper who is in love with Ralston. However Cooper marries Bow after a drunken one night stand which he doesn't remember. Needless to stay things do not go smoothly and none of the principals are happy. This ultimately leads to a surprising but powerful ending with Bow giving one of her best performances. The popular moral of the story was quite clear. Marry for love and not for money or there will be consequences. But then of course it's the consequences that the mostly female audience came to see. After all CHILDREN OF DIVORCE is a 1920s "chick flick".

1927 was Clara Bow's biggest year as a box office star with IT!, WINGS, and this film among others. This was Gary Cooper's first big role and although considered miscast at the time, his performance has improved with age because of who he became. In fact this is classic Cooper although he's younger (26) then we're used to seeing him. Clara was romantically involved with Cooper at the time and lobbied for him to get the part. Esther Ralston is forgotten today but she was a big star in the late 1920s under contract to Paramount at over $1,250 a week. She was in PETER PAN (1924) and OLD IRONSIDES (1926).

Also in the cast is Hedda Hopper in a small role as Bow's mother. This is before she became celebrated as the gossip columnist famous for her hats. The pleasant surprise is how good the principal performances are considering the material. The Scottish born director Frank Lloyd had been around since the early days of silent movies (his 1917 A TALE OF TWO CITIES deserves to be restored and released) and he would go on to direct the Oscar winners CAVALCADE (1933) and MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935). However this project wasn't his cup of tea so an uncredited Josef von Sternberg was brought in to tidy things up.

The other aspect of this being better than it has any right to be has to do with the restoration of the film. The original camera negative had been deposited at The Library Of Congress and a fine grain master copy was created in 1969 but parts of the movie were already beginning to deteriorate. By the turn of the century restoration technology had improved dramatically and after 7 months of laborious work using the best of both sources, this new digital version was created and it looks gorgeous. I'm one of those old school silent film enthusiasts who prefers DVDs to Blu-Rays as the latter gives us too much detail and the contrast always seems to be an issue.

However with this Flicker Alley release you can have your cake and eat it too as it contains both formats. The score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra is also first rate. An ideal vehicle for Flicker Alley's 50th release, this is for all silent film fans. It should be pointed out that this is one of the last projects made with the help of Film Preservation Associates and Blackhawk Films head David Shepard who died earlier this year. He was one of the most important figures in silent film preservation and will be greatly missed...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

This tragic silent movie completely lives up to its title. The beginning of the movie shows a school for children whose parents are busy getting a European divorce. One mother drops her daughter off without a care in the world, and the lonely child quickly gets taken under the wing of a more experienced girl, whose mother is on her fourth divorce. The girls become very close, but a boy comes between them.

The older girl sees a boy at the "orphanage" and vows to marry him when she's older. She grows up into Esther Ralston, and the younger girl grows up to become Clara Bow. The boy is Gary Cooper, and while he and Esther have feelings for one another, Esther isn't as pushy as the beautiful flapper. Clara is impulsive and doesn't let a little thing like friendship stand in her way. After all, how can a child of divorce really respect and value marriage?

You've been warned: this is a heavy movie, and you'll probably shed a tear by the time it's all over. But if you love watching Clara Bow movies or want to see Gary Cooper in a silent movie, you can give it a chance.

"Children of Divorce" (1927) is a melodramatic love triangle directed by Frank Lloyd, and starring Clara Bow, Esther Ralston and Gary Cooper. In 1927, the Cooper stock was on the rise. Gary had met Clara Bow in a party just after she had finished her signature film "It" (1927). They quickly became "special friends", and Bow insisted that Coop must be inserted into her new film, even though it was finished and all but one of the sets had been destroyed. But the studio was forced to agree with their star, and Josef von Sternberg filmed a quick scene with Cooper as a reporter, and it was added to the film. This is all told very well in Larry Swindell's book "The Last Hero: A Biography of Gary Cooper" (1981).

By their next onscreen encounter, Cooper was elevated to be the male lead, albeit in a very female centric melodrama. "Children of Divorce" is a morality tale that asks, whether children of divorced couples are more likely to become divorcees themselves. Thus, its attempt is to glorify the sacred nature of marriage by casting shame on divorced couples. It's not a subtle film. Like many a silent film, it begins with the characters as children. All three, Jean (Ralston), Kitty (Bow) and Ted (Cooper) were raised in a children's home run by nuns, because their rich, divorced parents couldn't bother to take care of the kids themselves. As they grow up, Jean and Ted are in love and want to marry, but Kitty also has an eye for Ted.

The contrast between Jean and Kitty is shown to be night and day. Jean is respectful, "wife material" so to say, while Kitty is a carefree flapper who likes to have fun. During a night when he gets drunk, Kitty tricks Ted into marrying him, and when it's announced that they are going to have a child, Jean won't allow Ted to divorce Kitty, because then world would have one more child of divorce. If you can't guess the outcome, you probably haven't watched too many silent melodramas.

I have mixed feelings about this film. The core merit it has going on, is the presence of Bow and Cooper, who are both very charismatic. The film is worth watching solely because of them. I dislike films that give such a black and white separation of good girls and bad girls. From my perspective, probably from today's perspective, Ralston appears boring and lifeless, while Clara Bow's charm has not been damaged by the years. I for one would love to wake up and discover myself married to a girl like Kitty. The film is heavy-handed with its marital themes, and it feels like it tries to brainwash the female audience into obedient housewives and dutiful mothers. Clara Bow is another alternative for a female role model, and therefore must be destroyed. "It" presented Bow's sex appeal in a lively way, and allowed it to exist. This film looks down on her, even if she is the star.

I also have never liked the American notion of "childhood sweethearts must marry as adults" in films. This is nonsense. It is very unlikely, that the first person of the opposite sex that you meet, is going to be the most suitable marital candidate you will ever meet. Therefore films like this, that tell the audience how Ted and Jean must be re-united, because they loved each other a long time ago, don't really hit home for me. There is even a creepy scene, where Ted stares at Jean, who is comforting his child, and imagines Jean as a little girl. It played the wrong way in this context, sorry.

So all in all, as a narrative, this doesn't hold up even a bit. But it does show how Cooper can act and led to better parts for him. Clara Bow may be the bad woman here, but she is easily the most memorable thing in the film.

Children Of Divorce has an honored place among films of Hollywood's wildest child of the Roaring 20s Clara Bow It's also her second film with Gary Cooper with whom she was getting wild with at the time.

According to the Citadel Film series book on the Films Of Gary Cooper, Bow saw him and raved like the rest of the American public in his breakout role in The Winning Of Barbara Worth. She got him a small role in her film coming up which was It and personally saw he was cast as the male lead in Children Of Divorce.

Two girls who met as kids and coming from divorced parents grow up to be Clara Bow and Esther Ralston. Esther is a good girl with firmly fixed ideas on morality and a man size crush on a boy who grows up to be Gary Cooper. Clara is not so good and she has a fool proof way of getting a man. In fact after a drunken orgiastic night they find themselves married.

Ralston who has a lot of bucks on her own gets nailed by an impoverished prince who played by Einar Hansson on the rebound. Hansson wants to start living like a prince for a change.

Bow is at her hedonistic best in Children Of Divorce. And as we all learned the movie camera just loved Gary Cooper. He was fortunate indeed to have a voice that matched that look when talkies came in.

Children Of Divorce is the kind of old fashioned morality tale that is unlikely to be remade today. One for fans of the stars.

Seems as though everyone's in love with everyone else in this soaper from what ultimately became Paramount Studios. There are good performances from all concerned, even from Gary Cooper in his first starring role. It is summarized by the reviewer from the Library of Congress above, and is a jumble of love shuffled among the various characters. The nominal star is Clara Bow, who here plays the 'heavy', but all eyes are on Gary Cooper, who subsequently became a huge Hollywood star. Esther Ralston has the supporting actress role and she is beautiful in a sympathetic part.

The film is what amounts to a polemic on the hazards of divorce but is not without merit. There are several poignant, sentimental moments which hold up due to some very competent performances, even by Cooper himself in his first big part. The year is 1927 and the film holds some very outdated views of marriage and divorce but, as often with silents, they must be viewed with a sense of atavism, as when one goes to a museum - or, in this case, a film festival. (Capitolfest, Rome, N.Y., 8/12/16.