Beauty's Worth

I didn't know when I watched Beauty's Worth that Baby Peggy was going to die and that I'd be blogging about a silent movie on the same day; it's just an odd coincidence.

Marion Davies plays Prudence Cole, a young Quaker woman who was born into a family with means but lives with the last surviving members of her family, two spinster aunts who are very conservative and think that the entire 20th century is a scandal. Poor Prudence is forced to dress in horrid outfits and have no fun.

Prudence had a childhood friend Henry Garrison (Hallam Cooley) with whom she thinks she's in love, and he and his mother are about to visit. Henry and his mom invite Prudence to the seaside resort they're going to be taking a vacation at, and the implication is that Henry might ask for Prudence's hand in marriage. Amazingly the aunts let her and the family maid go to the resort.

Of course, this is a fashionable resort for the well-to-do, and while Prudence meets Henry's friends such as Amy (June Elvidge) who has her eyes on Henry, Prudence is also all wrong for the place with that Quaker clothing. When the other young smart-set guests see what Prudence is, they make fun of her and think she doesn't belong.

The only one who doesn't is Cheyne (Forrest Stanley), but then, he doesn't really consider himself a part of Harry's set. He's an artist accompanied by his servant (played by a man billed as Thomas Jefferson Jr.; while no relation of the former president, his name really was Thomas Jefferson). Cheyne sees Prudence and sees that there's an inner beauty there that would come out if only she could be in the right clothes. And perhaps he can use Prudence to get back at those snooty guests.

Harry and his friends want to do "charades" (which turns out to be the sort of tableaux vivants we saw in Florence Foster Jenkins), and want Cheyne to come up with the charades. On top of that, they want Prudence to make the request to Cheyne since they know he'll turn them down if one of them makes it. Cheyne agrees on condition that he pick the actors; naturally he picks Prudence for the lead.

Everybody sees Prudence in the clothes Cheyne designs (how he can make them that quickly is beyond me), and everybody immediately realizes that perhaps Prudence might be beautiful after all. Harry is now ready to propose to her, although it's more because he likes the clothes than the brain of the person wearing the clothes. This leads Prudence to believe she might not be marrying the right man after all....

Beauty's Worth is an interesting movie. William Randolph Hearst, who was Davies' lover and who managed her career, wrongly thought that costume dramas were best for her, while Davies wanted to do comedy. Beauty's Worth seems in that mind like a sort of compromise, in that it's modern and mostly light drama, with some comedy mixed in. Davies, unsurprisingly, excels, and is at her best in the charade scenes. The other actors do an adequate job with the archetype roles. Prudence's maid and Cheyne's assistant get an interesting subplot.

Beauty's Worth is available on DVD in a restoration. TCM ran this print, which ran 76 minutes. IMDb and Wikipedia both claim that the movie originally ran 112 minutes. Since the movie was released in 1922 it's in the public domain and there are copies available on Youtube which do run 112 minutes. I haven't watched them, so I have no clue what's in the extra 36 minutes or how much of that might have to do with a different frame rate.