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The Admirable Crichton, J.M. Barrie's spoof of Swiss Family Robinson, given the Cecil B. DeMille adjustment: "Why shouldn't the bath-room express as much art and beauty as the drawing-room?" Morning at the manor, each spoiled aristocrat introduced via keyhole, the dainty peacock (Gloria Swanson) rises from bed to be unwrapped in the marble tub. The butler (Thomas Meighan) takes stern pride in his duties, the lovelorn maid (Lila Lee) can't catch his eye but a certain Henley verse can. "High and low," back to Nature. The camera on the yacht posits a distant precursor of L'Avventura, until Sennett bursts in through a wreck that leaves the heroine slipping and sliding in drenched satin. The clueless bourgeoisie plus one resourceful plebeian in the jungle, class rules replaced by macho rules—the lady stands her ground until her belly growls, then she's by his side asking for soup. (A memory-insert from an earlier scene has the master refusing the servant's too-soft toast.) "I suppose there was a certain amount of... sentimentalizing going on, wasn't there?" Fish bones for combs and sea turtles for pillows in a surreal menagerie that includes apes and leopards and "the sacred lions of Ishtar," the most curious specimen dons rags and a monocle. The gusto of the ensemble is perfectly keyed to the lunacy of the surroundings, clinched by DeMille by dissolving from verdant idyll to Mesopotamian splendor and gratuitously recasting his leads as haughty monarch and untamed slave. "I had no idea that you were interested in ancient Babylonian kings." Rescue halts the union and restores the upstairs/downstairs structure, it closes on a view of the New World and a divination of It Happened One Night. With Theodore Roberts, Raymond Hatton, and Bebe Daniels. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |