Sat 3 Apr 2010
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: BROADWAY LOVE (1918).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews , Silent films[3] Comments
BROADWAY LOVE. Bluebird Photoplays, 1918. Dorothy Phillips, Juanita Hansen, William Stowell, Harry von Meter, Lon Chaney, Eve Southern, Gladys Tennyson. director and author of the screenplay: Ida May Park. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.
This was an unusual screening, a silent film directed by a woman. Ida May Parks, according to Wikipedia, directed some 14 films, and wrote at least 50 screenplays, in a career that lasted from 1914 to 1930.
The star was the then popular Dorothy Phillips, who plays Midge O’Hara, a small-town girl who goes to New York where she gets a job as a chorus girl. She is befriended by Cherry Blow (Juanita Hansen) who attempts to introduce the virtuous Midge to the incidental pleasures of her new life at a riotous party in the apartment of Cherry’s sugar daddy.
Midge is rescued by an Arizona millionaire, only to find that his intentions are dishonorable. She flees New York, pursued by the persistent Henry, as well as by Elmer Watkins (Lon Chaney), her loutish suitor from back home.
Parks sets up her shots for the actresses with great care, and is particularly successful with the party sequence. Relatively few Universal silent films (Bluebird Photoplays was Universal’s prestige feature unit) survived the studio’s purge, and the survivors are often in poor condition.
However, the print shown was in excellent condition, and the film was more than competently directed, making one hope that other films directed by Parks may have survived.
April 3rd, 2010 at 8:48 pm
This sounds fascinating.
Would love to see this!
April 3rd, 2010 at 8:57 pm
I’m sure that Dorothy Phillips’ name has no “marquee” value now, but with Lon Chaney in the movie, you’d think that there’d be a chance it would show up on DVD, commercial or non.
So far, though, I’ve turned up nothing, and I’ve been looking.
— Steve
April 3rd, 2010 at 11:13 pm
With a character of a ‘loose woman’ named Cherry Blow during the heyday of the first great cocaine snow storm this would seem to be a must see.