Olive Thomas plays a feather-brained teen who wants adventure, excitement, danger, and soda pop in equal measure. She gets more than she bargains for when she lies about her age and ends up tangled with a burglary gang.
Home Media Availability: Stream from Milestone.
The Twenties Roar
If one term is synonymous with the Roaring Twenties, it is “flapper.” You know, fringe mini-dresses, long black gloves, fishnet stockings, a huge ostrich feather planted on their foreheads, never mind that fringe dresses for everyday civilians were considerably longer, gloves were for the opera, stockings were shiny silk, and hair ornaments included glittery barrettes and Grecian ribbons.
And flapper? It was coined decades before and was adopted into American slang before the First World War and was helped along by Bunker Bean, a 1912 novel by comedic author Harry Leon Wilson. He refers to his heroine simply as “the Flapper.” The novel was adapted as a popular play and then made into a movie several times, the first in 1918 and starred Jack Pickford. Flappers were there to stay.
The Flapper was released in 1920 and is sometimes credited for popularizing the phrase but, in fact, flappers were well entrenched and the picture was meant to play into an established fad rather than blaze a new trail. That being said, I think it’s best that we let go of the notion that a silent film has to be the first at something in order to be worthy of notice. Popular entertainment done well is always worth a look.
Olive Thomas plays Genevieve the sheltered sixteen-year-old daughter of a senator. She bristles at her quiet life in Orange Springs and longs for adventure, excitement, love. Bill (Theodore Westman, Jr.) is a teenage military academy cadet who dreams of danger and manly feats of derring-do. The pair sneak away for sodas together, if you can imagine such vice, and Genevieve’s father decides to send her to boarding school.
The school is conveniently located alongside Bill’s military academy but Genevieve has set her sights on bigger game. Richard Channing (William P. Carleton) rides by the school every day. A tall man in his thirties is catnip to the girls, who decide he must be a criminal, a professional gambler, a wife-beater (this was when “he hits you because he cares” was mainstream), and have terrible crushes on him.
Genevieve longs for Richard but also enjoys antics with Bill, who is trying to impress her with his own manly ways. Her boy crazy escapades earn her the nickname “Ginger” and things get even wilder when she goes on a sleigh ride with Bill, he loses control, and she faceplants in the snow just as Richard is passing by. Ginger claims she is a woman of twenty and he invites her to a dance.
Note: As I was watching this film, I quickly realized that my final enjoyment would depend on one major factor: would Ginger end up with a man old enough to be her father? Since I actually found this to be a distraction, I will offer the answer in Pig Latin, should you feel the way I do and want a heads up. So, does Ginger end up with Richard? E-shay oes-day ot-nay, ank-thay oodness-gay.
Needless to say, the school’s staff is not amused by this latest exploit, they publicly expose Ginger’s deception, revealing her true age, and Richard is left shaking his head at the ditzy kid. Meanwhile, charity student Hortense (Katherine Johnston) steals every valuable at the school and escapes with her boyfriend, Tom the Eel (Arthur Housman).
Hortense and the Eel hide out in New York City but are afraid of being caught with the goods. They do not know that the school has not reported the theft and has covered the student’s losses in order to avoid scandal. The pair decide to pin the blame on Ginger, inviting her to their apartment and telling her that they returned all the stolen goods and this was all a joke.
Meanwhile, Richard is in New York and is concerned about Ginger’s shady new friends. She takes his paternal attention to be romantic and decides the best way forward is to pretend to be a fallen woman. Hortense and the Eel force Ginger to take the cases full of loot but she isn’t entirely sad because the splendid clothes and jewelry inside give her an idea. She borrows them to deck herself out as a vamp and returns to Orange Springs in style, horrifying both Bill and Richard, who fear for her safety.
But what will happen when the police realize Ginger is wearing stolen goods? How will she get out of this pickle? See The Flapper to find out!
Variety declared, not unkindly, that The Flapper was “the fluffiest sort of fluff” and that hits the nail on the head. This picture has no particular danger, emotional or physical, very little suspense, and it is designed to deliver the maximum dose of teenage antics via Olive Thomas’s charm, plus the peppy direction of young Alan Crosland (who had only been directing for a bit under three years), bubbly scenario by Frances Marion, and charmingly animated title cards. Fluffy fluff indeed but welcome if you’re in the mood for something feather-light.
I personally prefer a few more teeth in a flapper film– the genre was used to address feminism, divorce, single motherhood, the sexual double standard, and more– and I wish that Ginger’s classmates had been fleshed out a bit more but Thomas is very cute in the leading role and genuine teenager Theodore Westman, Jr. plays the swaggering immaturity of his character well. While their silliness is given some movie gloss, it is not presented as aspirational. (Spoiler) For all her schemes, Ginger ends up back at square one: Orange Springs eating ice cream treats with Bill and happy to be there.
If you are unfamiliar with flapper films of the silent era, you may not understand why I was concerned that The Flapper would marry its heroine off to Richard. You see, when Clara Bow hit it big at Paramount, she was immediately cinematically paired off with Clive Brook, Percy Marmont, and Antonio Moreno, each one of them with an 1880s birthdate. The lost flapper film Flaming Youth set up Colleen Moore with Milton Sills, another 1880s gent. There were youthful leading men but there were no real cinematic boy flappers at the same level as the ladies and studios seemed to have no interest in creating them, serenely confident as they were that women in their teens and twenties longed for men old enough to be concerned about prostate health.
So, with all this in mind, I was beyond relieved that The Flapper turned out to be an ode to the silliness of youth that also allowed its ridiculous young heroine to pair off her with age-appropriate, equally ridiculous opposite number so they could enjoy being ridiculous together, as only teens can, and eventually grow up. And I appreciated that Richard’s attentions immediately turned paternal once he discovered Ginger’s true age.
The Flapper’s creative team did not have such good fortune in real life. Olive Thomas famously died from accidentally ingesting her husband’s topical medication soon after the release of The Flapper, a tragedy that was milked for scandal especially since that husband was Jack Pickford, the screen’s original Bunker Bean, brother of the famous Mary. Theodore Westman, Jr. returned to the stage and enjoyed a successful career but died suddenly of pneumonia at just twenty-four in 1927. Alan Crosland and William P. Carleton died from injuries sustained in automobile accidents in 1936 and 1947, respectively. Arthur Housman succumbed to tuberculosis in 1942. Katherine Johnston bucked the trend, retiring from the screen when she married and passing away in 1969.
The Flapper is a fun and stylish little picture with a strong supporting cast (Housman was the go-to bounder of the silent era before his turn as a comic drunk at Hal Roach), it showcases the charm of Olive Thomas and embraces teen years in all their ridiculousness. It doesn’t have anything deeper to say on the subject but it also never claimed that it did.
Where can I see it?
Released on DVD as part of the now out-of-print Olive Thomas collection from Milestone. Available to stream.
☙❦❧
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