The Lure of Crooning Water

Gorgeous silent film directed by Arthur Rooke has the look of a Cecil Hepworth film with its extensive shots of the English countryside. Ivy Duke plays a stage actress who is ordered by her doctor to retreat to the countryside for a rest cure after she collapses on stage. She goes to a farm called "Crooning Water" and brings many trunks and bags that she directs the driver to be careful with as he tosses them into a wagon. Only after she reaches the farm does she realize he's the owner of the farm (Guy Newall).

Condescending and haughty, she plays the great lady as she flounces around the farm, sniffing at the drab country wife (Mary Dibley) and toying with the busy farmer. In one scene she spies a threshing machine and demands to sit upon it. He refuses to lift her onto the contraption to which she responds with a pouting and stagy "PLEASE." Duke is totally out of touch with nature and completely bored. In a telling scene she hilariously teaches the 2-year-old toddler how to smoke a cigarette.

In any case, Newall eventually falls for her and follows her back to London where to has returned to th stage. Back in her own world, she brushes him off since for her it was a meaningless dalliance. Broken, he returns to the farm. The doctor intercedes again with a letter and asking Duke what kind of woman she is to have broken up this simple family. She is shamed and makes her way to the farm to make peace, but the children are sick there's little time for Duke's apologies. She pitches in to help and recedes into the background when the farmer's hand accidentally touches the wife's as they soothe the children and realize that their lives are there at Crooning Water.

Duke and Newall (who scripted this film) were married in real life and both ranked as major silent stars in England. Duke is sensational as the flamboyant actress and makes the most of the comic bits as well as the dramatic. Newall is also excellent as the dour farmer who resists her charms for as long as he can. Dibley is the picture of the drab house drudge who cannot compete with the glamorous actress.

Ivy Duke made her last film in 1928 and never made a talkie. Newall continued to act in films in the 1930s. They divorced in 1929. They both died in 1937. Newall was in his early 50s, Duke was only 41.

Actress Ivy Duke collapses on stage. Her doctor prescribes a rest at Crooning Water Farm, owned by Guy Newall (real-life husband of Miss Ivy) and his wife, Mary Dibley. At first Miss Duke is a pain, treating Newall like a dumb beast, but soon she falls in love with him, and he with her.

The copy I looked at was a very poor one, but between that and the now-hackneyed plot, I didn't think much of this film. Over on the Continent, film was busy reinventing itself to combat the dominance of Hollywood. Within a couple of year,s the British industry would have a downturn from which it never really recovered, while American producers fought back by going to Europe and hiring all the behind-the-screen talent that was available. In the meantime, a lot of English-language productions in 1920 were stodgy in their pacing, and this is one of them. Miss Duke is lovely and a fine film actress in her other surviving, better preserved picture, of the period, FOX FARM, but here she is not shown to advantage. Newall is an inert lump except in flashback sequences, and rather surly in his few titles.

A better copy might yield a more favorable opinion, but when dealing with movies of this age, we are frequently left noting, as Popeye might, that we have what we have, and that's all we can base our assessments on.

Here she plays an actress who is stressing out due to over-work. She's sent on a rest-cure by her doting doctor, and arrives at Crooning Water (a farm) to find it stuffed with Arts and Crafts furniture - all ladder backed chairs with rush seats and fireside settles. Guy Newall is also there, looking (as he always does) like he's swallowed a couple of lemons. Ivy takes one look at his Jodhpers, though, and you know there's going to be trouble.

She ingratiates herself with his wife and teaches his four-year-old how to smoke a cigarette, but she only ever treats Guy with contempt. As a result he is putty in her hands, and during a most effective storm scene (complete with animated lightning), they get it on. The wife knows something's up as soon as she sees Ivy emerging from his inner sanctum...

Ivy and Guy, as ever, are a winning combo and some of their love scenes are startlingly erotic - with much stroking of his manly forearms.

There's an interesting flashback scene where she's plucked out of a milliner's shop by a theatrical agent and put on the stage, which apparently is an explanation of her shenanigans with Guy. As the doctor tells her "You'd flirt with the shadows of men outside a tobacconist's window". She has to give him up in the end, of course, he being wed and all, but there are plenty of other men sniffing around...

If you thought British films were lacking in emotion then think again.