Billie Dove was one of the most beautiful and highly paid of all Ziegfeld girls but movies were her ambition and so she decided to use the Follies as a stepping stone to her dreams. It didn't take her long to score featured roles, her beauty would not be denied. Lois Weber, champion of the moralistic message movie saw something other than beauty in her and used her for "The Marriage Clause". After that Billie was offered a contract with First National who saw her as eventually replacing Corinne Griffith and Colleen Moore in popularity. It definitely didn't happen with Moore but Weber remembered her and in the midst of bits of fluff like "An Affair of the Follies" and "Heart of a Follies Girl" she was cast as "Egypt" Hagen, the most pagan and also the richest girl of the Hungtington Bay smart set. She catches the eye of the new pastor, Reverend Norman Lodge - she mistakes him for a lifeguard!! While Mrs. Hagen is a regular church attender, "Egypt" and her dad are worshippers at the House of Mammon but it still shocks her when she comes face to face with her father at one of her cabaret parties!!
Billie Dove is sensationally beautiful, nowhere more so than when she pays an "after office hours" visit to the perplexed parson - in a dreamy out of this world outfit with a beaded head-dress. He feels her outlandish behaviour is a pose and so he goes out of his way to make a friend of her but he is oblivious to the gossip - the town has formed a committee to have him replaced. Definitely some chunks of the film are missing - Egypt is caught with a flask in a police raid but the jail scenes are missing from my Alpha copy, although it is not hard to follow the story. The elderly priest visits him but is on his side, he also had to give up the girl he loved because of village gossip and has always carried a picture of her!!
Starts out a bit like a Clara Bow movie, although Mrs. Hagen is no "dancing mother". I also agree that the ship-wreck and the storm are quite spectacular - Billie forgoes her glamour for this sequence. At this stage Lois Weber was on the come-back trail, she had been on a hiatus because she was fed up with the censorship troubles that seemed to dog her films. In 1925 she signed a distribution deal with Universal and at the time of directing "The Sensation Seekers" was also called in to replace an ailing Harry A. Pollard on "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Interesting footnote - Phillips Smalley, Weber's first husband, although by 1926 she had already remarried, played Dove's father, Mr. Hagen.
Highly Recommended.
Billie Dove is sensationally beautiful, nowhere more so than when she pays an "after office hours" visit to the perplexed parson - in a dreamy out of this world outfit with a beaded head-dress. He feels her outlandish behaviour is a pose and so he goes out of his way to make a friend of her but he is oblivious to the gossip - the town has formed a committee to have him replaced. Definitely some chunks of the film are missing - Egypt is caught with a flask in a police raid but the jail scenes are missing from my Alpha copy, although it is not hard to follow the story. The elderly priest visits him but is on his side, he also had to give up the girl he loved because of village gossip and has always carried a picture of her!!
Starts out a bit like a Clara Bow movie, although Mrs. Hagen is no "dancing mother". I also agree that the ship-wreck and the storm are quite spectacular - Billie forgoes her glamour for this sequence. At this stage Lois Weber was on the come-back trail, she had been on a hiatus because she was fed up with the censorship troubles that seemed to dog her films. In 1925 she signed a distribution deal with Universal and at the time of directing "The Sensation Seekers" was also called in to replace an ailing Harry A. Pollard on "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Interesting footnote - Phillips Smalley, Weber's first husband, although by 1926 she had already remarried, played Dove's father, Mr. Hagen.
Highly Recommended.