Getting Gertie's Garter (Silent) (DVD)

Beautiful blonde flapper Gertie Darling keeps all the men at arm's distance...but she does accept gifts. One of her admirers, high-powered attorney Ken Walrick, presents Gertie with what he thinks is a necklace bearing his portrait, but is, in fact, a very expensive garter. The lawyer eventually tires of Gertie's fickle nature and proposes to wholesome Theodora Desmond. Realizing his new fiancee would never understand why he gave lingerie to a promiscuous girl-about-town, Ken attempts to retrieve the garter from Gertie. His former flame is having none of it, however, and tortures him by threatening to tell Theodora all about his gift. As they play cat and mouse, Gertie's long-denied feelings for Ken bubble to the surface. She might just let him take that garter off, after all.

Getting Gertie's Garter is based on the long-running Broadway play by Wilson Collison and Avery Hopwood. It stars the lovely Marie Prevost, who get her start in motion pictures as a Mack Sennett "Bathing Beauty" in 1917. She really hit the big time when she was signed to Warner Brothers in 1922. It was at Warners that she became a favorite of Ernst Lubitsch, who cast her in The Marriage Circle (1924), Three Women (1924) and Kiss Me Again (1925). However, by the time Getting Gertie's Garter was filmed, Marie's life had taken a downturn. Her mother had died in 1926, and her marriage to dashing leading man Kenneth Harlan fell apart the following year. She had also started drinking heavily and binge eating, explaining her decidedly curvier figure in Getting Gertie's Garter. Afterwards, roles came few and far between. In 1937, Marie was found in her apartment, dead of acute alcoholism at the age of 38. Kenneth Anger stated in his notorious book Hollywood Babylon that Marie had been partially eaten by her pet dachshund, but most other sources claim that the dog only bit her a few times on the leg. Appearing as Prevost's demure rival is, ironically, Sally Rand, during her days as a bit player for the studios. In a few years she would move into the much more lucrative world of burlesque and exotic dancing. She became famous for her "bubble dance", in which she performed with a strategically placed balloon covering her nudity. Also featured is beloved character actor Franklin Pangborn, best known for his "camp" comedic roles in scores of films in the 30s and 40s. Getting Gertie's Garter was remade in 1945 with Dennis O'Keefe and Marie McDonald.

• silent