When his stepfather dies, Harrison Ford expects to inherit a fortune of almost a million dollars. Imagine his surprise when the money is left to the old man's nephew, Stephen Carr, who has a year to show up in New York City to claim it. On the evening before the deadline, the heir shows old, but it's not Carr; he died in the passage. His sister, Marion Davies, has cut her hair and is pretending to be him, at the order of her father.
Miss Davies gives a fine, layered performance as a girl pretending to be a boy, falling gradually in love with Mr. Ford, but her serio-comic performance makes up only a small part of this movie. Like her earlier hit epic, WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER, this movie is in greater part about its sets, designed again by Joseph Urban, its props, like the life-sized replica of Fulton's steamship Clermont, shot on the river with the Palisades and the Tappan Zee in background, but even more about the historical characters, offered as legends and shown as human: Fulton, trying to raise money for his steam ship; John Jacob Astor, who doesn't see it as a commercial project, but urges Davies to invest in real estate; Washington Irving; Delmonico, the city's first restaurateur, and so forth and so on in a dizzying demonstration that the great men of history were....men.
This film was recently restored by the Library of Congress, and has just been released on dvd by Ed Lorusso. It is the latest of his Marion Davies projects, and boasts a fine score by silent-music specialist Ben Model, who incorporates the waltz written by Victor Herbert for the movie's original release. Mr. Lorusso has been releasing as many of Miss Davies silent movies as he can over the past few years, working hard -- along with showings of his later pictures on Turner Classic Movies, and Mr. Model's recent dvd version of WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER, to demonstrate that Miss Davies was an actress of great accomplishment. For many decades, she was thought of as the Dorothy Comingore character in CITIZEN KANE, a talentless floozy raised to stardom through her free-spending lover, William Randolph Hearst and supported by his chain of sycophantic newspapers and magazines. While Hearst did spend a lot of money on her movies, they were successful commercially and in showing off Miss Davies talents as an actress and comedienne. Let us offer cheers to her loyal supporters, to the more than 200 people who contributed to make this dvd a reality, and to the hope that next year, when they come out of copyright, we may see good copies of her 1924 movies!
