There are moments in Wild Oranges when you wonder what you’re watching. It’s a silent film alright, and it looks like one—but this story of a love affair in a secluded patch of Georgia coast, at times, seems plucked from another period entirely. In form, it’s the early-20s, but in content, often, it feels like something made much later.
King Vidor directed Marion Davies twice in 1928: first in The Patsy, released in April, and then in Show People, released the following November. Show People was a career highlight for the actress—a funny, weird, intelligent comedy, one of the best of the silent era. The Patsy, also a comedy, falls far short of it. It’s not that The Patsy isn’t funny, or that it isn’t weird. It is frequently both. It just isn’t very smart.
I needed a laugh last night and I got a hundred. I watched Show People: a silent film spoofing the making of silent films and the phony stars who star in them—one of the funniest movies, silent or sound, that I’ve ever seen.
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