Quality Street (1927)

“Dr. Brown” (Conrad Nagel) arrives, eagerly expected, at the home of his belle “Phoebe” (Marion Davies) only to tell her that he is off to help the soldiers fighting the Napoleonic wars. She and her sister “Susan” (Helen Jerome Eddy) become school teachers and almost ten years pass before the doctor, now a captain, returns to be disappointed by his now rather more aged gal. She’s horrified by his reaction so sets about rejuvenating herself to win him back. Thing is, though, she doesn’t just re-invent “Phoebe”, she creates a younger version: her neice “Livvy”. It isn’t just him whose head is turned, though. There are plenty of other dashing young men now paying court to this revamped lady and she is soon ably playing them all off the increasingly jealous “Brown”. Of course, it being a small middle-class English community, there are no shortage of nosey-parkers watching everything that is going on and they are enjoyably epitomised by spinster “Willoughby” (Flora Finch) who could give you a running commentary on the grass growing in an house two miles away! Basing a silent film on a book, and a Sir J.M. Barrie book at that, was a risky venture and does rob the story of it’s verbal flightiness and some of it’s mischief, but there’s still quite a lot of chemistry on display from Nagel and a very engaging Davis who does the doubling-up role in a way that wouldn’t fool anyone, and Sidney Franklin manages to keep all of this moving along with an entertaining skip in it’s step.