Una gran señora

Norma Talmadge stars in a 'Madame X' story in which the lower-class Talmadge must give up her infant son for his own good and then spends the rest of the movie suffering. When Norma catches her husband cheating on her, he calls her 'a common trollop' -- no, I don't have that backwards -- and abandons her. After she gives birth and goes to work in a Marseilles boite -- surrounded by women who wear so little makeup they look like bad cross dressers -- her frozen-faced father-in-law appears on the scene with a court order for his grandson -- his son is dead. Desperate to make sure that her son isn't ruined as her husband had been, she gives him to an Anglican Minister's wife who looks a bit like Bing Crosby, since they are leaving their parish in Marseilles and returning to England. Miss Talmadge then spends the next couple of reels wandering around the streets of London, moderately barmy, and it all ends with a Surprising Revelation.

Now normally I have little use for this sort of tripe, but Miss Talmadge is simply wonderful in it. She is not tied down, as she so often is, by wearing expensive clothes and exotic hair styles. Instead, you get to see how beautiful she is and how she really inhabits a character and world where she believes this. As a result, I found myself weeping intermittently throughout the entire proceedings.

There are a couple of scenes missing from the version I saw -- the road show version seems to have been fifteen or so minutes longer -- and decomposition had struck the leaders and two sections of two or three minutes each -- but the point of this movie is to watch Miss Talmadge act, and that she does. Magnificently.