"Ah yes, of course, I'm going to fall in love with a random girl that looks exactly my adopted sister! Nothing to read into there!" - Conrad Nagel's character, probably.
An amusing Marion Davies picture, set more or less in the same era as Scorsese's <i>Gangs of New York</i> with all the anti-Irish sentiment, Tammany Hall hucksters, gangs, class divides, and brand new electric lights you can muster. Even has cameos from a young Thomas Edison and a child Teddy Roosevelt, curious how accurate those timelines match up, and a whole bunch of era-specific references that even leave me scratching my head 101 years later. The whole movie is kinda winking like that, like how they keep saying how electricity will never be a successful means of energy. Marion Davies is fun to watch, but the whole separated twins factor doesn't really have much to do with anything in the story and if anything creates some more peculiar unaddressed issues like I mentioned in the opening joke. I guess people just really wanted to see Marion Davies act against herself, and it's pretty neat! It's not Mary Pickford in <i>Stella Maris</i>, but I'm always impressed when these early movies do the twins gimmick, even if it's superfluous. Speaking of gimmicks, the use of two-color technicolor is pretty neat too, especially during the climax.
"Ah yes, of course, I'm going to fall in love with a random girl that looks exactly my adopted sister! Nothing to read into there!" - Conrad Nagel's character, probably.
An amusing Marion Davies picture, set more or less in the same era as Scorsese's <i>Gangs of New York</i> with all the anti-Irish sentiment, Tammany Hall hucksters, gangs, class divides, and brand new electric lights you can muster. Even has cameos from a young Thomas Edison and a child Teddy Roosevelt, curious how accurate those timelines match up, and a whole bunch of era-specific references that even leave me scratching my head 101 years later. The whole movie is kinda winking like that, like how they keep saying how electricity will never be a successful means of energy. Marion Davies is fun to watch, but the whole separated twins factor doesn't really have much to do with anything in the story and if anything creates some more peculiar unaddressed issues like I mentioned in the opening joke. I guess people just really wanted to see Marion Davies act against herself, and it's pretty neat! It's not Mary Pickford in <i>Stella Maris</i>, but I'm always impressed when these early movies do the twins gimmick, even if it's superfluous. Speaking of gimmicks, the use of two-color technicolor is pretty neat too, especially during the climax.
