Category: movies

This is the story of three women who live to have fun. Sometimes that means they steal each others lovers, but that’s never more than a slight annoyance. The story constantly changes into whatever requires them to stand around in their underwear.

…and the word the Greeks had was apparently hetaira.

Walk of Fame: Ina Claire

Ina Claire plays Jane, the wildest of the three. In her first scene she hits on a stranger and convinces him to pay her bar tab (that’s somewhere around $900 in 2025 dollars). One of her signature subtle moves is to accidentally lose her dress.

In the 1920s she was popular enough to have a recognizable signature hairstyle.

Today’s fake poster started with me trying to find another movie with a title of similar length. I don’t know if anyone will recognize it without seeing the original, but I think it works pretty well!

This movie has an all-female cast, is over two hours long, and still somehow never manages to have a single conversation that isn’t centered around men. The message of the movie: if you love your husband, don’t mess things up by complaining about a little cheating.

Also: this movie is in black and white, except for a shift to color in the middle that probably would have seemed much cooler if The Wizard of Oz hadn’t come out two weeks before this.

Mary Boland’s acting niche was apparently “older woman who takes young lovers.” She has a pretty hefty part in this as Countess DeLave, a woman who helps the lead character find the strength to give up her pride and fight to win back her cheating husband. Girl power, I guess!

Today’s fake poster is completely based on the title of the movie being two words, with the first one being “the.”

Fun mindless nonsense. Not afraid to go full screwball. Also, apparently Tarantino loves this movie.

Pola Negri was an actor who was also an opera singer. She plays an opera singer in this, but the twist is that she’s playing a bad opera singer. Gotta love someone unafraid to poke fun at themselves.

Today’s poster is all about doubled words. Today’s poster is all about doubled words.

thought I was past the point of laughing at people making silly faces, but Marion Davies made me giggle. This is a “small town girl goes to Hollywood to make it big” movie, and it’s full of references to and cameos of stars who have faded from public memory. At one point Peggy (Davies) gets excited and yells “That’s John Gilbert!”, and I had to look him up to see if he was a real person or made up for the movie (he was real). I did recognize Charlie Chaplin, though.

This movie is a sort-silent film. There’s no recorded dialogue, but it came with a soundtrack record. Trying to keep them synchronized must have been a nightmare for the projectionist.

Walk of Fame: Karl Dane

Much like Mona Barrie and Syncopation, I picked this movie specifically to see a Karl Dane performance, and he’s barely in it. He does a thirty second bit as himself at a luncheon. I probably should have gone with The Red Mill.

Dane is one of those successful actors who had their career killed by sound pictures; He had a thick Dutch accent, and no one could understand him. He looked for other work, but ended up broke. He died from suicide, and only received a proper funeral when MGM was shamed into paying for it.

Today’s poster is all about the people. It’s also my second attempt at reasonable handwriting in a week. I need more practice.

Syncopation needs to pick a lane. It starts out looking like it will be about the evolution of jazz from slave music, then about the parallel struggles of a black boy and a white girl struggling to be accepted as musicians at the start of the swing era, before (mostly) settling in to a story about a couple of white people saving jazz (as white people do in movies).

Mona Barrie has a small part in this movie, which doesn’t seem to surprise Wikipedia. Their page about Barrie says “her lack of a glamorous beauty resulted in her generally being cast in important but secondary roles.” Rude.

Even though her part is small, I made sure to mention her on today’s fake poster.