If you have a low tolerance for silly plots, silent film is probably not for you. A lot of the greatest silent tales come alive only in the telling—maybe they have to—and if you try to describe them to someone else, you get grins. Try summarizing Sunrise, for example, and see.
Now listen to this one: In the early 19th century, a beautiful Baltimore socialite falls in love with her French teacher. He is handsome and clever; impoverished, it seems, but well-educated and handy with a rapier. What the socialite doesn’t know is that the teacher is not really a teacher, but a nobleman. He is the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. He is on the run, and the French want to find him. They have a noblewoman they need him to marry. This is Glorious Betsy.
Glorious Betsy is a film in three guises: romance, farce comedy, and a third, not often paired with the second: historical drama. Yes, these things really happened. Kind of, anyway. There really was a Jerome Bonaparte, who really did live in America where, in 1803, he married Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Patterson, daughter of a Baltimore merchant. Napoleon really did have plans for his brother: a marriage to Catharina of Württemberg, a German princess, and in real life, Jerome’s marriage to Betsy was annulled by brother Napoleon, in favour of the political union. This was the weight of history, and in 1908, playwright and songwriter Rida Johnson Young displaced most of it, creating the frothy stage production upon which the 1928 film was based.
