Coquette

Mary Pickford won her only Academy Award here playing against type as Norma Besant, the flirtatious Southern belle from a wealthy family who falls for working-class boy Michael (Johnny Mack Brown) against the wishes of her widower father (John St. Polis). When her reputation is tarnished after visiting Michael alone in his home, her father avenges the family honor and Norma is encouraged to lie to save her father at the ensuing trial. Based on a play by George Abbott and Ann Preston Bridgers, the story is pure family melodrama—a respected old doctor kills a lad who is beneath his daughter’s social station—with moral lessons that were creaky even in 1929, when the Jazz Age was inspiring more daring content in the movies. Pickford, who produced her own pictures, chose Sam Taylor to direct her first talkie but he failed to overcome the technical challenges of the early days of the all-talkie era. Coquette is stagebound and stiff, with a largely static camera and formal dialogue spoken in the awkward, over-enunciated manner of the early sound era before movies found their own voice. Sequences play out in long shot with characters entering and exiting the scene like it was a staged play, and the film concludes with a courtroom scene that gives Pickford a big emotional spotlight. She’s the best thing in this film that is otherwise badly dated in almost every way. Optional. (S. Axmaker)