The first of King Vidor’s comedies with Marion Davies, and as good-natured as their more famous collaboration,
Show People. Like that movie, it’s a Jazz Age Cinderella story built around Davies’ tomboyish sunniness -- here as
the put-upon daughter of bulldog matriarch Marie Dressler, yearning to be "entrancing, alluring, ravishing... like a
stocking advertisement." With snooty older sister Jane Winton hogging the attention of dream beau Orville Caldwell,
Davies ditches washing dishes for a personality transfusion and drives her family nuts by mangling dictums and hitting
on soused playboys. Coming off the Dreiser-like grimness of The Crowd, Vidor goes for gentler social satire, equally
sympathetic to MGM chic, Yacht Club frivolity and Dressler’s Keystone mugging. Best of all, he releases Davies the
cutup: whether bopping around the house or hilariously skewering ‘20s divas (Mae Murray’s vamping,
Lillian Gish’s hand-twisting agitation, Pola Negri’s gypsy heat), her sense of self-enjoyment is as infectious as Carole
Lombard’s. Adapted from a play by Barry Conners. With Dell Henderson as the henpecked father, and Lawrence
Gray. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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