Once again we have a 'lost' film which turns out merely to have been mislaid. No prints of "Her Wild Oat" were known to exist until an excellent print surfaced in 2001, in the Czech National Archive in Prague. Usually, when a Hollywood silent turns up in a non-anglophone nation, the original intertitles have been removed, and new dialogue (often radically different) added in the foreign language. The print of "Her Wild Oat" which I viewed (an acetate dupe, copied from the Prague print) allegedly restores the original First National Pictures intertitles in American English, yet somehow they seem like translations from some other language. The word 'duchess' (crucial to this movie's plot) is constantly rendered in the French spelling 'Duchesse'. At one point in this film, one character tells another character to keep their secret "in your hat" when surely "UNDER your hat" would be more appropriate. I wonder if this was an attempt at raising a dirty laugh: in Jazz Age America, the phrase 'in your hat' possessed a vulgar meaning.
Here we have sweet Colleen Moore, winsome as ever, cast as a demure heroine with the oddly generic name Mary Brown. Mary is an orphan whose parents left her nothing but a lunch wagon and a dog. The very large actor Ivan Linow is excellent in a very small role (which should have been larger) as a bulky friend who helps tow Mary's wagon to its next destination. Linow deserved a better film career; it's a shame that the talkie era and his thick foreign accent ended his chances.
Mary manages to 'meet cute' with a handsome young millionaire (Larry Kent) in a contrived situation which makes him appear to be a skint labourer in coveralls. For incredibly ridiculous reasons, Mary has to impersonate a duchess ... or rather a Duchesse, as the intertitles keep rendering it. This being a silent movie, we needn't worry if Colleen Moore can muster a blue-blooded accent. Hallam Cooley, in a larger and better role than usual for him, is not very good as Mary's Pygmalion. I've always found Cooley slightly too effeminate: here, he's especially so in a sequence in which he tries to teach Mary how to walk like a duchess. Cooley ponces and sashays all across the frame, but he isn't very funny.
Effectively, this is much the same story as Shaw's play -- working-class girl is taken in hand by officious male, and taught how to impersonate a peeress -- but without Shaw's commentary on the social classes. Most of the upper-crust sequences in "Her Wild Oat" were filmed at the Hotel Del Coronado in Coronado, California. This is the same posh hotel which (more than three decades later) provided locations for Billy Wilder's 'Some Like It Hot'. During the long interval between those two films, the hotel's interior decor hardly changed at all. While watching 'Her Wild Oat', I had a strong sense of deja vu, not least because both movies take place during the Jazz Age. I kept expecting to see Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis scurrying past Colleen Moore in 1920s flapper costumes.
Gwen Lee is excellent and attractive in a supporting role. Loretta Young's fans should be warned not to get their hopes up by her presence here. Young is glimpsed VERY briefly, on the right-hand side of a two-shot during a table-tennis sequence. She keeps her mouth resolutely closed, concealing her buck teeth that were fixed later.
There are extensive sequences of Colleen Moore's lowly Mary Brown getting glammed up for her impersonation of the duchess. I was repelled by a couple of enormous close-ups of false eyelashes the size of tarantulas as they squirmed across Moore's eyelids. Also, this sequence reminded me of the famous double-exposure shot in Moore's film 'Ella Cinders' in which her eyes move in opposite directions. (Other people seem to laugh at that shot; I find it extremely distressing.) Moore, with her distinctive haircut (similar to Louise Brooks's), was always much more beautiful and much more sexy as a simple working-class girl than she was on the rare occasions (such as the duchess sequences here) when she got tarted up as a glamour puss. 'Her Wild Oat' simply isn't the best vehicle for Moore's distinctive talents. I would love to have seen her take Mary Pickford's role in 'My Best Girl', a better movie than this one.
SLIGHT SPOILERS. I've seen quite a few sound comedies which were fairly realistic yet moved into fantasy territory for the fade-out with a closing gag involving a talking animal. 'Her Wild Oat' ends very amusingly, as Mary's mutt and a more upscale dog have a protracted conversation (shown in the title cards). Quite funny! I'll rate this one 6 out of 10, and Colleen Moore should have stayed with good-girl roles that didn't involve glamour treatments.
Here we have sweet Colleen Moore, winsome as ever, cast as a demure heroine with the oddly generic name Mary Brown. Mary is an orphan whose parents left her nothing but a lunch wagon and a dog. The very large actor Ivan Linow is excellent in a very small role (which should have been larger) as a bulky friend who helps tow Mary's wagon to its next destination. Linow deserved a better film career; it's a shame that the talkie era and his thick foreign accent ended his chances.
Mary manages to 'meet cute' with a handsome young millionaire (Larry Kent) in a contrived situation which makes him appear to be a skint labourer in coveralls. For incredibly ridiculous reasons, Mary has to impersonate a duchess ... or rather a Duchesse, as the intertitles keep rendering it. This being a silent movie, we needn't worry if Colleen Moore can muster a blue-blooded accent. Hallam Cooley, in a larger and better role than usual for him, is not very good as Mary's Pygmalion. I've always found Cooley slightly too effeminate: here, he's especially so in a sequence in which he tries to teach Mary how to walk like a duchess. Cooley ponces and sashays all across the frame, but he isn't very funny.
Effectively, this is much the same story as Shaw's play -- working-class girl is taken in hand by officious male, and taught how to impersonate a peeress -- but without Shaw's commentary on the social classes. Most of the upper-crust sequences in "Her Wild Oat" were filmed at the Hotel Del Coronado in Coronado, California. This is the same posh hotel which (more than three decades later) provided locations for Billy Wilder's 'Some Like It Hot'. During the long interval between those two films, the hotel's interior decor hardly changed at all. While watching 'Her Wild Oat', I had a strong sense of deja vu, not least because both movies take place during the Jazz Age. I kept expecting to see Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis scurrying past Colleen Moore in 1920s flapper costumes.
Gwen Lee is excellent and attractive in a supporting role. Loretta Young's fans should be warned not to get their hopes up by her presence here. Young is glimpsed VERY briefly, on the right-hand side of a two-shot during a table-tennis sequence. She keeps her mouth resolutely closed, concealing her buck teeth that were fixed later.
There are extensive sequences of Colleen Moore's lowly Mary Brown getting glammed up for her impersonation of the duchess. I was repelled by a couple of enormous close-ups of false eyelashes the size of tarantulas as they squirmed across Moore's eyelids. Also, this sequence reminded me of the famous double-exposure shot in Moore's film 'Ella Cinders' in which her eyes move in opposite directions. (Other people seem to laugh at that shot; I find it extremely distressing.) Moore, with her distinctive haircut (similar to Louise Brooks's), was always much more beautiful and much more sexy as a simple working-class girl than she was on the rare occasions (such as the duchess sequences here) when she got tarted up as a glamour puss. 'Her Wild Oat' simply isn't the best vehicle for Moore's distinctive talents. I would love to have seen her take Mary Pickford's role in 'My Best Girl', a better movie than this one.
SLIGHT SPOILERS. I've seen quite a few sound comedies which were fairly realistic yet moved into fantasy territory for the fade-out with a closing gag involving a talking animal. 'Her Wild Oat' ends very amusingly, as Mary's mutt and a more upscale dog have a protracted conversation (shown in the title cards). Quite funny! I'll rate this one 6 out of 10, and Colleen Moore should have stayed with good-girl roles that didn't involve glamour treatments.
