Absolutely brilliant

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This silent takes place in Holland (for some reason). Tina (Marion Davies) is a maid at the Red Mill. Her boss treats her like dirt, she's lonely and has no friends. One day she meets hunky Dennis Wheat (Owen Moore) and falls in love. Naturally he barely knows she exists. It all comes to a head a few months later.This movie is, to put it mildly, way too plot heavy. The main plot goes all over the place and brings in some wildly improbable turns. There's tons of unfunny slapstick (the part where Davies struggles to put up an ironing board was especially painful to watch) and the movie wavers uncomfortably between romance, comedy and drama. It's well-done and well-directed and the acting helps--Davies is beautiful and full of life and Moore is unbelievably handsome and hunky. But, all in all, I was bored and couldn't wait for it to end. I give this a 4.

This is a mildly astounding film, made by the finest studio (MGM) in a year (1927) by which time silent feature films were incredible works of art; the timing of the actors, cutting, and overall pacing were pretty much perfect; and all of which had to be thrown out and started all over again with the introduction of sound. This film is doubly astounding when we learn that it was directed by Fatty Arbuckle, some years after he (or at least his name) had been banned from movies. Thus we get a 2-part picture: the first third or so focuses almost exclusively on Marion Davies, giving her patient time to explore and demonstrate her comic abilities; the remainder of the picture is given over to plot, with an increasingly frantic and overall quite imaginative screenplay that is quite fun to follow.The influence of Buster Keaton (old comic partner of Arbuckle) is clearly in evidence in the opening scene: we start with a picturesque vision of Dutch citizens enjoying ice skating on a frozen canal; we cut to a shot of Marion Davies from the waist up, also apparently skating; but as we pull back, we see she is actually "skating" on two scrub brushes that are attached to her shoes, careening around a soapy floor. Very Keatonesque! More bizarre is the bewildering variety of incredibly fat males sprinkled throughout the film. This includes children: in a scene with a couple dozen Dutch kids, we are treated to a dizzying array of really roly-poly boys. And the diminutive Ed Snitzer is several times comically contrasted to the Dutch bohemoths around him. I wonder what Fatty was thinking here...Back to Marion Davies. Now I went through a period in my teens when I was infatuated by the Three Stooges. Now, 30 years later, I am astounded to see a silent female version of Curly Howard, fighting for 5 minutes with an uncooperative ironing board, complete with facial grimaces alternating between frustration and joy. Its proto-Curly! And when Davies tries to solve the problem of an uncooperative cow who keeps whacking her in the face with its tail as she tries to milk it, by tieing a brick to its tail, with the predictable result of the cow whacking her on the head with the brick - well this is a specific gag used by Curly and the Stooges in later films. Now I can't prove who copied who, but the connection from early silent comedy (Arbuckle) through late silent comedy (Davies) to sound slapstick (the Stooges) is fascinating.The only inexplicable thing here is that the Dutch characters speak (through title cards) in English to each other, but because they don't speak English well, their sentences are quite fractured; thus, for example, one girl speaks of having "dislocated" her boyfriend, when she lost him. Get it? If they were meant to be talking in Dutch, the "translations" would be in proper English.Overall, a fun and intriguing comedy, and smooth as silk.

While this film isn't nearly as good as Marion Davies' best comedy, SHOW PEOPLE, it is still a pretty good silent comedy. It is NOT sophisticated and the humor is rarely laugh out loud funny, but it is nonetheless a sweet movie about mistaken identity as well as a poor and abused girl finally getting a break. Ms. Davies played an abused young lady--much like Cinderella. However, despite her nasty boss, she maintains a sweet disposition and eventually this decency is rewarded when she meets the right man. However, at about the same time, another woman is being forced to marry a man she does not love and so the two briefly change places--creating some mildly amusing moments. All in all, this is a nice movie with a few mild laughs--well made but not exactly life changing.By the way, Davies' pet mouse is named "Ignatz" in honor of the Krazy Kat cartoons.

Despite watching this film in a less than ideal print, with a canned soundtrack (as of this writing, I hope TCM eventually airs this film with a good soundtrack based on the public domain music of Victor Herbert for this operetta -- I know they have it in their library, what are they waiting for???), I really enjoyed this romantic comedy. Although still essentially a period piece (Hearst loved those and kept putting Marion in them), Marion Davies' screwball comedy skills brighten up the whole picture, which otherwise would have been just a quaint little programmer, soon forgotten.Marion is ably supported by handsome Owen Moore (Mary Pickford's first husband), and additional comic relief is provided by wonderful Karl Dane (who looks almost handsome here!), and perky Louise Fazenda, who actually was quite pretty when young, so it was brave of her to agree to look ugly for this film. Not to mention our own little favorite funny man, Snitz Edwards, who is always a barrel of laughs in every film he's in, simply by hamming it up for the camera.The plot doesn't have much to do with the Victor Herbert operetta; that was more of a serious story, and sometimes the pace of this film seemed a bit fragmented, but overall it really is a crowd-pleaser and needs to be more widely available; just one more example of Marion Davies' astounding comedic abilities. She was so much more than just Hearst's paramour! She was the first screwball comedienne! (Also a woman with a big heart, since apparently she was instrumental in getting Roscoe Arbuckle this directorial job and I'm sure his influence added to the comedy). 8 out of 10.Update: TCM is airing this film in April 2007 for the first time.