AN OLD FASHIONED BOY (US 1920)
Jerome Storm
Naïve David Warrington (Charles Ray) so longs to live a traditional suburban life that he surprises his “new-fashioned” love interest Betty Graves by purchasing the “perfect” suburban bungalow after their first kiss, and sweeps her off to see their prospective home. Finding David’s pre-emptive home buying and furnishing presumptuous, and bridling at the prospect of living in old-fashioned domesticity, Betty breaks off the engagement and takes up with Ferdie Blake, a roguishly “modern” competitor who is the opposite of everything the “old-fashioned boy” represents.
David subsequently finds himself with the unexpected opportunity to test the domestic life he craves when a heated dispute between his friends Herbert and Sybil Smith causes Sybil to run away to her mother’s apartment hotel, entrusting her children to David’s care. The young bachelor quickly finds himself overwhelmed.
It’s in trying to manage the rambunctious youngsters that Ray gets to showcase his comedic talents, embodying the bumbling but good-natured country-boy character that made him such a success. The Atlanta Constitution (3 November 1922) delighted in David’s attempts to provide for the children, particularly the taffy-making sequence in which the kitchen is reduced to a shambles, transforming his domestic paradise into “something like a gambler’s den after a raid by the police.” David desperately phones for help. Betty’s father, Dr. Graves, arrives to treat the children’s taffy-induced stomachaches, and decides to quarantine the entire household, citing a case of “black measles.” The lockdown now includes Betty, acting as their nurse. The situation can be regarded as prescient in the light of parallels with today’s pandemic world, whose audiences will be able to relate to the strained dynamics of sequestering too many people with incompatible personalities in a small bungalow.
At the dawn of the 1920s, this romantic comedy struck a chord as a “satire on rural life,” and many reviewers praised its ability to produce laughs, and Ray’s winning performance. The contribution of the film’s scenarist in creating a “flawless structure” for “this bright story” was also rightly singled out in Moving Picture World (13 November 1920) by Louis Reeves Harrison. Agnes Christine Johnston (1896‒1978) worked in the film industry for over 35 years, and was the scenario writer for some of the most popular comedy-dramas of the silent and sound periods, for stars such as Mary Pickford, Charles Ray, and Marion Davies, as well as several of M-G-M’s popular “Andy Hardy” family series. In “The Comedy Scenario,” a 1917 article in Moving Picture World, Johnston calls the “comedy-drama” the ideal photoplay because of its ability to invoke “elemental” emotions that are “nearest to real life” and place a “smile sandwiched in with a tear, each increasing the other’s potency by power of contrast.” She stresses that silent film not rely too heavily on the spoken word, but instead focus on visual methods of storytelling, and create “continuity” via writing and editing working in tandem to maintain an uninterrupted narrative.
In another article, for the Washington Post (14 November 1920), “A Feat in Photography,” Johnston claims she lobbied for An Old Fashioned Boy to develop transitions between scenes without the use of iris shots, wanting to create transitions via contrasting scenes, in which action sequences would be followed with a love scene or “bit of human interest.” Although this article and several reviews describe the film’s “continuous” approach to scene transitions as a “novelty” that allowed spectators to experience a story “unfolding” without the interruption of either a “break” or a “fade,” such technique was, of course, common industry practice by 1920.
While the light-hearted action that fans had come to expect from Charles Ray forms the backbone of An Old Fashioned Boy, the film also engages in one of the era’s heated debates, asking whether a “modern girl” like Betty’s disdain for suburban domesticity and preference for raising dogs over children was a harbinger of the traditional family’s demise. An early sequence contrasts the charming little country bungalow with the high-rise apartment house where “moderns” like Betty and Ferdie live, with the camera lingering on its exterior.
In fact, considerable ink was being spilled off-screen over the evils of such modern dwellings, as laws restricting apartment-hotel cooking and child-rearing were being tackled by mayors and Supreme Court justices. Conveying its stake in the issue via art title cards adorned with bucolic country houses and domestic iconography, the film also explicitly weighs in on the debate via a close-up of a newspaper headline (“Great Marital Unhappiness Believed to be Due to Apartment Hotels and Dogs”). With Betty ultimately choosing bungalow over apartment hotel, and the “old-fashioned boy” over the “jazzy” roué, Photoplay’s reviewer (February 1921) seemed to think “this picture proves conclusively that apartment houses are the root of all evil.”
While the film might be best known as a “rip-roaring Charles Ray comedy” that under-utilizes its female characters, it displays Johnston’s characteristic ability to interweave debates about women’s labor and domestic politics into an otherwise “old-fashioned” narrative of “good boy gets girl.” This focus should come as no surprise, given that Johnston was frequently asked how she balanced her roles as scenario writer, wife, and mother, with headlines remarking how she traveled to Europe with her infant in tow, and publicity stills showcasing her ability to work in a studio office with a baby on her writing desk.
The Los Angeles Times (22 March 1925) noted that “Agnes worked right up to the day [their] first baby was born. The very night Budgie came, she went to a pre-view of Rich Men’s Wives, and got home at 3 o’clock in the morning.” Johnston definitely sounds a bit like An Old Fashioned Boy’s Betty, claiming that “women have too much creative energy to spend it merely on housekeeping. You get neurasthenic if you have only one line.” She even asserted she was “a much better tempered wife and mother” when working, and that she “got so used to writing with the babies crying” that she could no longer work “except in an office where the trucks are thundering by.” One cannot help but hope that this film’s female protagonist will succeed in achieving her “new-fashioned” goals from within the confines of a “charming, old-fashioned English house,” much like its much-celebrated scenario writer. – April Miller
AN OLD FASHIONED BOY (US 1920)
regia/dir: Jerome Storm.
scen: Agnes Christine Johnston.
photog: Chester Lyons.
mont/ed: Harry L. Decker.
art titles: F. J. van Halle, Carl Schneider, Leo H. Braun.
scg/des: W. L. Heywood.
tech dir: Harvey C. Leavitt.
cast: Charles Ray (David Warrington), Ethel Shannon (Betty Graves), Wade Boteler (Herbert Smith), Grace Morse (Sybil, sua moglie/his wife), Hal [Hallam] Cooley (Ferdie Blake), Alfred Allen (Doctor Graves), Gloria Joy (Violet), Frankie Lee (Herbie), Virginia Brown (the baby).
prod: Ince Paramount-Artcraft; supv: Thomas H. Ince.
dist: Famous Players-Lasky Corp.; Paramount Pictures.
uscita/rel: 31.10.1920.
copia/copy: DCP, 67′ (da/from 16mm, orig. 4617 ft.); did./titles: ENG.
fonte/source: UCLA Film & Television Archive, Los Angeles.