When Warner Bros declined to renew Prevost’s contract, the star signed with Metropolitan Pictures in January 1926, but it was agreed she could first appear for the Christie Film Company in the bedroom farce Up in Mabel’s Room. The film was adapted by F. McGrew Wallis (later sources list Tay Garnett as a collaborator, but this is unconfirmed) from the 1919 stage hit by Wilson Collison and Otto Harbach, and was remade in 1944, directed by Allan Dwan. It’s a saucy comedy of remarriage in which Prevost plays fashionable young lady Mabel and Harrison Ford is architect Garry, the “hotsy hubbie” she divorced over a misunderstanding – now “posing as a bachelor” among his new friends in New York. In Garry’s opinion, the Paris wedding, as one of Walter Graham’s witty intertitles confides, was “like a vaccination.… it hadn’t taken”. Mabel thinks otherwise, so she pursues Garry to New York with fiercely flirtatious, not to say predatory, determination. In pursuit of her man she deploys some fancy footwork, a provocative wink and a lavishly modish wardrobe.
The source of Mabel’s confusion was the purchase of an embroidered camisole, an item she is wont to flaunt quite breezily but is otherwise so unmentionable that the male characters, including Garry’s valet Hawkins, gleefully played by William Orlamond, can only splutter out references to a “feminine doo-dad”, “the indescribable”, and endless other euphemisms. Prevost’s close friend Phyllis Haver plays Sylvia, a swinging singleton “unmarried… but not unwilling” who complicates Mabel’s strategy. The ensemble cast includes Maude Truax, Arthur Hoyt, Harry Myers, and Carl Gerard, all of whom escalate the comic scenario with gusto, to create a panicky mood of lingerie-induced hysteria. In the El Rey nightclub scene, do look out for a gymnastic appearance by the Marion Morgan Dancers: a vegetarian, Christian Scientist troupe directed by the woman who would soon meet director Dorothy Arzner on another film set, and live with her for the rest of her life.
Up in Mabel’s Room was shot in April 1926, and released in July alongside a tie-in with Maiden Fair Lingerie that saw hundreds of 22-inch cut-outs of Prevost in American shop windows, clad in miniature chemises. Larger stores featured windows dressed as lingerie-strewn boudoirs, with “a life-sized portrait of Miss Prevost peeping around the edge of a doorway from a bathroom”. Some U.S. critics were unamused by the film’s hi-jinks, but Motion Picture News praised the enjoyable “mock-seriousness” of the cast, and one newspaper called it “a tower of absurdities, built up with the single idea of making people laugh, and its one purpose is achieved”. The film was very well-received in Italy, where the critic for Cine-Gazzettino (21.01.1928) enthused: “A very amusing comedy, wittily devised, gracefully performed, and neither licentious nor unseemly. The leading lady is the celebrated actress Marie Prevost, whose admirable performance offers new and invaluable proof of her delightfully pleasing and lively talent.”
Prevost’s time with the company had already been marked by tragedy when her mother died in a car driven by Christie. That was in February 1926, soon after she and her actor husband Kenneth Harlan (see the note for Bobbed Hair) lost their Warner contracts and their marriage began to falter. Prevost’s decline, leading to her death in 1937, aged only 40, is often traced back to this point. Her presence in charming comedies such as this one is a reminder of the vivacious talent lost to illness.

Pamela Hutchinson