Ontario-born Marie Prevost (1896-1937) began her film career as a Keystone Bathing Beauty in 1915 and ended it with a trail of bit parts in the 1930s. However, in the Roaring Twenties Prevost briefly reigned as one of Hollywood’s most modern, mischievous leading ladies. At Warner Bros., she starred in Sidney Franklin’s Scott Fitzgerald adaptation, The Beautiful and Damned, in 1922, and became a favourite of Ernst Lubitsch, appearing in three of his films (The Marriage Circle and Three Women, both 1924, and Kiss Me Again, 1925).
Bobbed Hair, directed by Alan Crosland in 1925, features Kenneth Harlan, Prevost’s co-star in The Beautiful and Damned, and by this point her husband. Jack Warner had wanted the pair to wed on the set of the F. Scott Fitzgerald film, but Prevost was, the Los Angeles Mirror reported, inconveniently still married to someone else. Harlan appears belatedly in the surviving footage of this film, which features Prevost as pretty, ringletted heiress Connemara Moore, unable to decide between two suitors. One wooer is a traditionalist who wants her to keep her curls and the other a modernist who urges her to bob her hair. If Connemara doesn’t marry soon, she will lose her inheritance, so her duo of admirers await her appearance at a costume ball (they’re briefly distracted by a spin across the floor in the arms of Dolores and Helene Costello): if the curls are gone, she will marry Bingham Carrington (Reed Howes, one-time Arrow Collar model), and if they remain, she has chosen Saltonstall Adams (John Roche) instead.
If this confection sounds like a satire on 1920s flapper fiction, that’s because it’s the fruit of a literary jape, serialized in Collier’s Weekly. Twenty authors, including Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, collaborated chapter by chapter on an action-packed caper of a novel, ripe for adaptation into a movie, which Michael L. Simmons of Exhibitors Trade Review (07.11.1925) described as almost collapsing under the weight of too many plot-twists: “anti-climaxes fairly swarming all over the story, and action so crowded with incident and detail as to bewilder the ordinary mind”. This seems accurate: among the sadly missing reels are “smashing brawls, dashing auto chases, and splashing water fights”, not to mention an appearance by another Keystone alumna, the wonderful Louise Fazenda (“with her slap-stick bag of tricks”) and a dog named Pal who appears to have contributed a scene-stealing turn. Variety (04.11.1925) reported that in New York it was preceded by a stage presentation about hair-bobbing by “Robert”, an “artist de coiffeur”, and the paper’s critic Fred Schader described the film as “a thriller without much attention paid to plausibility”.
Surviving footage, which appears to include most of the first reel and some later elements, showcases Prevost as a coquette, surrounded by visions of her rival lovers in the wing-mirrors of her vanity table. In a later scene, she uncoils a glittery turban to reveal her new hairstyle – a cut destined to be cruel to at least one of her suitors.

Pamela Hutchinson