The Red Mill

This is yet another movie that should be shown to anyone who might doubt the talents of Marion Davies. She is delightful in this performance, with some wonderful bits of physical comedy. Director Fatty Arbuckle surely deserves the credit as well. The supporting players are also quite good, but make no mistake - this is her film.

Very enjoyable silent romantic comedy set in Holland which stars Marion Davies as Tina, pigtailed drudge of the Red Mill Tavern - she cleans the floor by skating around with scrub brushes attached to her feet and has a little pet mouse who lives in her wooden shoe. The man who runs the tavern is a real meanie who goes around with a snarl and a whip and likes to lock local boys in the "Haunted Mill". Handsome Dennis (played by Owen Moore), visiting Holland (attracted by the damsels not the dams) along with his valet, is outside skating where Tina observes him through her window, immediately falls for him, and races right out there to meet him! Well, they are soon skating together while she swoons on his shoulder - but he leaves town before anything can come of this, spring comes, and she dreams of love. Meanwhile, the Burgomaster's daughter Gretchen (Louise Fazenda) is being forced by her father to marry the Governor - and is being locked in her room at the Inn until the wedding day. But Gretchen loves another - so to help her out, Tina gets the idea that they should exchange clothes so Gretchen can sneak out to meet her secret love. Misunderstandings ensue when Dennis, now back at the Inn, meets Marion dressed as Gretchen and falls in love with her.

This is a really excellent film - well done and full of charm. There are a number of amusing, laugh out loud scenes in this - Marion Davies has a face full of expression and is really wonderful here. There is one very funny scene when she first meets Owen Moore's character - she enters a skating race which he is judging (with the prize of a kiss for the winner!) and ends up with a face covered in ice (and no kiss - ah). Another funny bit shows her with no make-up as she covers up her face with a "mud massage" which magically comes off to reveal her now fully made-up, beautiful face. Snitz Edwards, who plays the valet, also adds a lot of humor to this - I think he's funny when he's just standing there! This film was very reminiscent to me of the type of film that Mary Pickford might have starred in - so it's interesting that Owen Moore stars in this, Mary's first husband. The version of this as shown on TCM featured a gorgeous clear print with a lot of contrast and a really terrific music score that I loved - I thought the music really helped enhance this film. A romantic, funny, and delightful film.

This is a mildly astounding film, made by the finest studio (MGM) in a year (1927) by which time silent feature films were incredible works of art; the timing of the actors, cutting, and overall pacing were pretty much perfect; and all of which had to be thrown out and started all over again with the introduction of sound. This film is doubly astounding when we learn that it was directed by Fatty Arbuckle, some years after he (or at least his name) had been banned from movies. Thus we get a 2-part picture: the first third or so focuses almost exclusively on Marion Davies, giving her patient time to explore and demonstrate her comic abilities; the remainder of the picture is given over to plot, with an increasingly frantic and overall quite imaginative screenplay that is quite fun to follow.

The influence of Buster Keaton (old comic partner of Arbuckle) is clearly in evidence in the opening scene: we start with a picturesque vision of Dutch citizens enjoying ice skating on a frozen canal; we cut to a shot of Marion Davies from the waist up, also apparently skating; but as we pull back, we see she is actually "skating" on two scrub brushes that are attached to her shoes, careening around a soapy floor. Very Keatonesque!

More bizarre is the bewildering variety of incredibly fat males sprinkled throughout the film. This includes children: in a scene with a couple dozen Dutch kids, we are treated to a dizzying array of really roly-poly boys. And the diminutive Ed Snitzer is several times comically contrasted to the Dutch bohemoths around him. I wonder what Fatty was thinking here...

Back to Marion Davies. Now I went through a period in my teens when I was infatuated by the Three Stooges. Now, 30 years later, I am astounded to see a silent female version of Curly Howard, fighting for 5 minutes with an uncooperative ironing board, complete with facial grimaces alternating between frustration and joy. Its proto-Curly! And when Davies tries to solve the problem of an uncooperative cow who keeps whacking her in the face with its tail as she tries to milk it, by tieing a brick to its tail, with the predictable result of the cow whacking her on the head with the brick - well this is a specific gag used by Curly and the Stooges in later films. Now I can't prove who copied who, but the connection from early silent comedy (Arbuckle) through late silent comedy (Davies) to sound slapstick (the Stooges) is fascinating.

The only inexplicable thing here is that the Dutch characters speak (through title cards) in English to each other, but because they don't speak English well, their sentences are quite fractured; thus, for example, one girl speaks of having "dislocated" her boyfriend, when she lost him. Get it? If they were meant to be talking in Dutch, the "translations" would be in proper English.

Overall, a fun and intriguing comedy, and smooth as silk.

The saddest thing about The Red Mill is that it never got a sound adaption so the Victor Herbert-Henry Blossom score was never heard. Watching it I was hoping at least to hear some of the songs on the sound track. But there was nary a note of Herbert's heard in the film.

The Red Mill was a vehicle for the famous vaudeville team of Fred Stone and David Montgomery and ran in the 1906-07 season for 274 performances. The score consisted of such Herbert classics as In Old New York and Every Day Is Lady's Day With Me and Moonbeams. Purportedly there was a planned remake of it that was shelved that would have starred Laurel and Hardy. It might have been a great film.

This version has the plot somewhat altered to fit Marion Davies who plays a Dutch barmaid who falls in love with visiting Irishman Owen Moore. It's a good thing that Roscoe Arbuckle directing under the pseudonym William Goodrich was in charge. He saw that Davies got some nice comedy bits at which she was so much better at than some of the heavy dramatics that William Randolph Hearst her patron and paramour saw as her strength.

MGM spent a lot of money designing some great sets including a Dutch mill where Davies spends the climax trying to elude the villain with Moore trying to rescue her. It's similar to the rather outlandish and funny climax in the rollicking film Many Rivers To Cross that starred Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker with Davies her own worst enemy in the rescue.

The mill itself is very similar to the one in the Frankenstein movies over at Universal. It's quite remarkable even for today.

I'm disappointed in not hearing any Victor Herbert music, but Marion Davies is quite good in this film.

While this film isn't nearly as good as Marion Davies' best comedy, SHOW PEOPLE, it is still a pretty good silent comedy. It is NOT sophisticated and the humor is rarely laugh out loud funny, but it is nonetheless a sweet movie about mistaken identity as well as a poor and abused girl finally getting a break. Ms. Davies played an abused young lady--much like Cinderella. However, despite her nasty boss, she maintains a sweet disposition and eventually this decency is rewarded when she meets the right man. However, at about the same time, another woman is being forced to marry a man she does not love and so the two briefly change places--creating some mildly amusing moments. All in all, this is a nice movie with a few mild laughs--well made but not exactly life changing.

By the way, Davies' pet mouse is named "Ignatz" in honor of the Krazy Kat cartoons.