The Smart Set (Jack Conway, 1928)

William Haines in The Smart Set

Cast: William Haines, Jack Holt, Alice Day, Hobart Bosworth, Coy Watson, Constance Howard, Paul Nicholson, Julia Swayne Gordon. Screenplay: Byron Morgan, Ann Price; titles: Robert E. Hopkins. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist.

Given that we now know what everyone in Hollywood knew at the time, namely that William Haines was one of the few openly gay leading men of the 1920s and '30s, it's fascinating to watch how he camps up the role of Tommy Van Buren in The Smart Set. Haines mugs, poses, and generally upstages everyone in the film -- and gets away with it, considering that his performance is almost the only entertaining thing about this silly romantic comedy. Tommy is a conceited champion polo player, and the plot, such as it is, deals with his self-centered sabotage of the United States polo team in a match against the British, and his developing relationship with the pretty Polly Durant (Alice Day), the daughter of a wealthy owner of polo ponies. Does Tommy come to his senses and save the day at the film's end, winning the game and Polly, too? What do you think?

Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, 1925)

Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, 1925)

Cast: Mary Pickford, William Haines, Walter James, Gordon Griffith, Carlo Schipa, Spec O'Donnell, Hugh Fay, Viola Vale, Joe Butterworth, Oscar Rudolph, Francis X. Bushman Jr., Charles K. French, Eugene Jackson. Screenplay: Mary Pickford, Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton; titles: Tom McNamara. Cinematography: Hal Mohr, Charles Rosher. Art direction: John DuCasse Schulze, Paul Youngblood. Film editing: Harold McLernon.

To our eyes, there's something grotesque about a 33-year-old movie star pretending to be a hoydenish 12-year-old girl. But then there's also something grotesque about a 50-year-old diva playing Octavian or Cherubino. Operagoers accept the one, so why can't we accept the other? Moviegoers of the 1920s certainly did -- in fact, they demanded it of Mary Pickford, rejecting attempts in which she tried to play roles her own age. Pickford was exceptionally small, just a fraction over 5 feet, which helps her carry off the scenes in which she's performing with actual boys, though it's worth noticing that there are no other "girls" in these battling gangs, probably because putting Pickford up next to real girls would draw our attention to the maturity of her face. We become aware of that maturity most when we see her with other adults in the film, like 6-foot-tall William Haines, when only the costuming and her diminutive stature work to maintain the illusion. Still, Little Annie Rooney was near the end of Pickford's turns as a little waif. Four years later she would almost act her age in Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929) and win a not particularly well-deserved Oscar for it, then follow up with some grownup roles, including Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (Sam Taylor, 1929), in films that flopped and precipitated her retirement. Little Annie Rooney was cooked up by Pickford herself almost as a conscious farewell to the little girl in curls. You have to get yourself in the frame of mind of the original audiences to appreciate how good Pickford is in this hodgepodge of slapstick action and tearjerking family drama, but she really was a formidable actress.

West Point (Edward Sedgwick, 1928)

William Haines and Joan Crawford in West Point

Brice Wayne: William Haines
Betty Channing: Joan Crawford
"Tex" McNeil: William Bakewell
Bob Sperry: Neil Neely
Bob Chase: Ralph Emerson
Football Captain Munson: Leon Kellar
Coach Towers: Raymond G. Moses

Director: Edward Sedgwick
Screenplay: Raymond L. Schrock, story; Joseph Farnham, titles
Cinematography: Ira H. Morgan
Film editing: Frank Sullivan

For a silent film, Edward Sedgwick's West Point is awfully talky, by which I mean that it's heavily laden with intertitles. That's because it's partly a romantic sitcom and partly a patriotic tribute to the values of the United States Military Academy, and it needs the titles to carry the gags and repartee as well as the flag-waving endorsements of honor and probity. William Haines plays Brice Wayne, an entitled but charming jerk, and the opening scenes in which he establishes both the arrogance and the charm of the character are chopped up by titles feeding us his jokes. A sample: Meeting a fellow cadet with a Jewish name, Wayne quips, "Oh, an Eskimo!" Fortunately, Haines is a fine comic player and overcomes both the title interruptions and the lame dialogue, especially when Wayne meets the female lead, Haines's frequent co-star Joan Crawford, who has matching comic skills. Crawford lets us know from the outset that Betty Channing sees through Wayne's jerkiness to the attractively vulnerable guy beneath. If West Point stuck more to the interplay between Wayne and Betty, it might have been a more enduring classic comedy, but when it ventures into the area of esprit de corps, after Wayne becomes a star on the Army football team and stumbles over his own arrogance and entitlement, the movie becomes a predictable Moral Lesson. Fortunately, the vintage footage shot at West Point is interesting enough to keep us going through the dull parts. William Bakewell is good as Wayne's friend Tex McNeil, a naïf who worships Wayne to a point that's suggestively homoerotic, given what we now know about Haines's sexual orientation.

Show People (King Vidor, 1928)

William Haines and Marion Davies in Show People

Peggy Pepper: Marion Davies
Billy Boone: William Haines
Col. Pepper: Dell Henderson
Andre Telfair: Paul Ralli
Casting Director: Tenen Holtz
Comedy Director: Harry Gribbon
Dramatic Director: Sidney Bracey
Maid: Polly Moran
Producer: Albert Conti

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Agnes Christine Johnston, Laurence Stallings, Wanda Tuchock; Titles: Ralph Spence
Cinematography: John Arnold
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Hugh Wynn

It's a shame that Marion Davies is known today primarily as William Randolph Hearst's mistress, and hence the presumable model for the talentless opera singer Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). For Davies was not only not an opera singer, she was also bursting with talent. King Vidor's Show People demonstrates her skill for comedy, acknowledged as an inspiration by such later glamorous comedians as Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball. Everything Davies could do except talk -- this is one of her last silent films -- is on display, including her skill at slapstick: She does a fine pratfall and takes copious amounts of seltzer in the face. (Hearst reportedly forbade her being the recipient of a custard pie -- that was somehow one shtick beneath her.) She mugs divinely as the comic actress Peggy Pepper who is "promoted" into the serious artiste Patricia Pepoire. Attempting a Mae Murray-style bee-stung lips, Davies comes up with a hilariously rabbity moue. The movie also gives us a chance to see William Haines at work. One of the few leading men of the day who dared to lead an almost openly gay life, Haines plays the comic actor who gives Peggy her first break into pictures, loses her when she tries to become a dramatic actress, but of course finally gets her after she sheds the Patricia Pepoire persona. When he was ordered by MGM's bullying Louis B. Mayer to pretend to be straight in his offscreen life, Haines quit pictures and became a successful interior designer; his life partner, Jimmie Shields, became his business partner as well. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were among their clients. Show People also has cameos by Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, and other stars of the day. Peggy Pepper even encounters Marion Davies herself in one scene.