The Love Expert - 1920 - Constance Talmadge - The silent movie star - A delightful romantic comedy
“
The Love Expert”,
1920, is very funny movie ( a comedy silent film) , played delightfully by
Constance Talmadge. She is majoring in
Love, while her friends concentrate on gymnastics or intellectual pursuits. She warns her friends that if they want to get married their husbands will soon grow bored with them constantly talking about their own interests, while she,
Babs, will concentrate on making her husband her primary focus in life and so therefore they will always be happy.
Because of her constant man-crazy ways her father grows exasperated with her and when even the local minister is turned on by her pretty flirtatious ways he knows it's time to ship his daughter to boring
Boston to stay with a maiden aunt for
the summer.
However things don't quite work out the way the father intended because Babs falls for her maiden aunt's own fiancé. For the rest of the movie we watch Babs play matchmaker for all the women in the picture so that she can get them out of the way and secure the love of her life, her aunt's intended, played sweetly and shyly by a very young
John Halliday.
Constance Alice Talmadge (
April 19, 1898 –
November 23,
1973) was an
American silent movie star born in
Brooklyn, New York. She was the sister of actresses
Natalie and
Norma Talmadge. Constance was born on April 19, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York to poor parents,
Fred and Peg Talmadge. Her father was left them when she was still very young. Her mother made a living by doing laundry. When a friend recommended that Constance's mother use older sister
Norma as a model for title slides in flickers, which were shown in early nickelodeons, Peg decided to do so. This led all three sisters into an acting career. She began making films in
1914, in a
Vitagraph comedy short, In Bridal Attire (1914). Her first major role was as
The Mountain Girl and
Marguerite de Valois in
D.W. Griffith's
Intolerance (
1916). So popular was Talmadge's portrayal of the tomboyish
Mountain Girl, Griffith released in
1919 the Babylonian sequence from Intolerance as a new, separate film called
The Fall of Babylon. He refilmed her death scene to allow for a happy ending.
Her friend
Anita Loos, who wrote many screenplays for her, appreciated her "humour and her irresponsible way of life". Over the course of her career, Talmadge appeared in more than 80 films, often in comedies like
A Pair of Silk Stockings (
1918),
Happiness à la
Mode (1919),
Romance and
Arabella (1919),
Wedding Bells (
1921) and
The Primitive Lover (
1922). Talmadge, along with her sisters, was heavily billed during her early career. According to her 1923
Blue Book of the
Screen biography, she was "5'5" tall,
120 lbs, with blonde hair and brown eyes, was an outdoor girl who loved activities."
When Talmadge was asked by a writer for
Green Book Magazine what sort of stories she wanted to do in 1920, she said: "Although no less than sixty manuscripts are submitted to me every week, it is exceedingly difficult to get exactly the kind of comedy I especially want. I want comedies of manners, comedies that are funny because they delight one’s sense of what is ridiculously human in the way of little everyday commonplace foibles and frailties – subtle comedies, not comedies of the slap stick variety."
With the advent of talkies in 1929, Talmadge left
Hollywood. Her sister Norma did make a handful of appearances in talking films, but for the most part the three sisters retired all together, investing in real estate and other business ventures. Only a few of her films survive today. Along with her sister Norma,
Mary Pickford, and
Douglas Fairbanks, Talmadge inaugurated the tradition of placing her footprints in cement outside
Grauman's Chinese Theater. She left a trail of five footprints in her slab.
Director:
David Kirkland
Writers:
John Emerson, Anita Loos
Stars: Constance Talmadge, John Halliday,
Arnold Lucy
Production Co: Constance Talmadge
Film Company
Filming Locations:
Palm Beach, Florida,
USA
Ressources:
Wikipedia.org, imdb.com
Soundtrack, special effects and dubbing:
Cinema History Channel
The soundtrack is a derivative work of
Ashton Manor,
Night on the
Docks,
Continue Life,
Starry,
Ernest, Winter Chimes,Moonstone, On the Passing of
Time,
Long Stroll,
Sovereign,
Sancho Panza gets a latte, Heartbreaking, Pverure,
Promises to keep, Rains will fall, Starry by
Kevin MacLeod (
http://www.incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ ), licensed under
CC BY 3.0 licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
3.0/. No changes were made to the original music.