A Thrilling Romance

Until just recently I'd never heard of Wanda Wiley, and now I'm madly in love with her. Okay, maybe "madly in love" is a bit of an overstatement, but I'm definitely interested.

Miss Wiley, for those of you who haven't yet made her acquaintance, was a charming comedienne who starred in her own series of two-reel comedies, most of which were made for the Century studio in the mid-1920s. She was a cute, trim brunette, somewhat along the lines of Colleen Moore. But unlike Moore, Wiley appeared only in short comedies, not features. And sadly, most of those shorts are now lost. Wiley seems to have been moderately popular in her day, but along about 1927 she married and quit making movies before the talkie revolution, a prime reason her name quickly faded from public memory. Stars who appeared in talkies often regained some measure of popularity in the '50s when T.V. came along, when their movies were shown to a new generation of viewers, but not the silents-only performers; their films mostly remained in the vaults, all too often rotting in their tins.

In any case, I've now seen a couple of Wanda Wiley's surviving comedies, and she's terrific. She's something of a female Buster Keaton, a cool customer who maintains a calm facade in the midst of wild adventures. (She does occasionally smile, however.) In the opening scene of this short, A Thrilling Romance, she also wears the kind of tortoise-shell glasses associated with Harold Lloyd, but here it's a device to establish her bookish character: Wanda plays an aspiring writer, a decidedly unsuccessful one who lives in an all-female apartment house. We first see her sitting at her typewriter, tapping away, in a room full of wadded papers. When the mailman arrives, he brings her several rejected manuscripts and a cruelly worded cover letter, saying something to the effect that her stories lack romance, thrills, and intelligence, "but otherwise they're fine." At this point there are some low-key slapstick gags involving the other lodgers, and the postman (as Wanda attempts to fling her rejected manuscripts back into his pouch), but all this is by way of preliminaries. We soon learn that Wanda is broke, can't pay her rent, and can't even afford to buy cheap food at a lunch counter across from her apartment house.

Complications develop. We meet an elegantly dressed crook and his slinky female accomplice, as they steal a string of pearls from a jeweler in a nearby shop. Through a convoluted set of circumstances, the jeweler's money, a fat roll of bills, finds its way into Wanda's handbag. And then Wanda's handbag is swiped by the crooks, as they race away in their car. Wanda takes off after them, with the help of a handsome young cabdriver who has befriended her, while the jeweler takes off after everyone. The ensuing chase is both funny and exciting, very nicely handled, and it all winds up at a cliff overlooking a highway that silent comedy fans will recognize instantly. Billy Bevan, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, and many other comedians used this cliff in their comedies, but I believe the sequence in A Thrilling Romance is one of the best. The finale concludes with an amusing, witty surprise ending; I should have seen it coming, but I confess it took me by surprise, which is the way it's supposed to happen.

A Thrilling Romance, and Wanda Wiley, both deserve to be better known. I was lucky to see a beautiful 35mm print of this film, shown at a screening of silent comedy shorts earlier this month. The print comes from the Library of Congress, so it's good to know that it's being properly preserved, but I do wish this short -- and all additional surviving comedies of Wanda Wiley -- could get wider distribution. She belongs in the same category as Raymond Griffith and Charley Bowers, i.e. long forgotten silent comedy stars who are ripe for rediscovery.