IMDb wrongly claims that Ethel Sykes (1906-61) made her screen debut in Into Society and Out (1914). She would have been eight years old at the time, making this unlikely.
Sykes’s actual first film was The Complete Life (1926), a Fox short based on an O Henry story. The busiest period in her career was 1934-35, when she was in seventeen pictures, including the two John M Stahl classics Imitation of Life (1934) and Magnificent Obsession (1935). Most of her appearances were without credit.
Sykes played a chorus girl alongside Marion Davies in The Florodora Girl.
Mary Marie Sittlow (1904-88) appeared in a couple of dozen pictures between 1927 and 1936. She played a couple of leads for minor studios in 1929, but was generally uncredited.
In 1930, Caron played one of the Florodora Girls in The Florodora Girl.
Lenore Konti Teresa Bushman (1913-88) was the daughter of silent star Francis X Bushman, and made her first screen appearance aged 12 in one of her father’s pictures, The Masked Bride (1925).
Aged 17, Bushman played one of Marion Davies’s fellow chorines inThe Florodora Girl.
Her screen career was short and sporadic, and Lenore Bushman made her final film in 1938.
Anita Louise Fremault (1915-70) was one of those rare child performers who went on to an adult career in acting and exhibited no major trauma.
Louise made her debut on Broadway aged seven, making her first film appearance in the same year for an east coast company.
By the mid-thirties, Anita Louise was playing leading roles, perhaps most notably as Titania in Max Reinhardt’s star-studded version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). She was generally the second female lead in the bigger pictures, supporting stars like Olivia de Havilland and Norma Shearer. Her final big screen role was in Joseph H Lewis’s evocatively-titled Retreat, Hell! (1952), but she continued working one-and-off on television until 1970.
In The Florodora Girl, Anita Louise, aged 15, played the hero’s younger sister.
Jane Neave Keithley (1908-44) was a local beauty pageant winner who gave up university to have a go in Hollywood.
After playing a chorus girl for Paramount, and then a small role in Metro’s The Florodora Girl, she changed her name to Jane Keith and secured the lead in Fox’s Jack London adaptation, The Sea Wolf.
Unfortunately, this was a false dawn in her career, and she made only two further appearances. The silver lining, however, was her marriage to the director of The Sea Wolf, Alfred Santell. By all accounts a story relationship, it produced four children, which makes her untimely death at the age of 36 even sadder.
Robert Joseph Edney (1859-1937) was a British actor who relocated to America and made his first films for the Chicago-based Essanay Company.
Bolder eventually took up residence in Los Angeles and, by the end of his career, had made around 120 pictures. He was a regular performer in Wallace Beery’s Sweedie series.
Bolder played the Commodore, a stage doorman, in The Florordora Girl.
Samuel B Hardy (1883-1935) abandoned his studies at Yale to go on the stage, later signing with the Biograph Company in its post-Griffith years to make pictures.
Hardy had a preference for comedy, even though he played Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1918) for Famous Players-Lasky, and in The Miracle Woman (1931) he was the promoter who exploits Barbara Stanwyck’s religious fervour. His best-known role, however, was as the agent Weston in King Kong (1933).
Hardy only appeared in one MGM musical, as the gambler Harry Fountaine in The Florordora Girl.
Hardy was taken ill while shooting a film with his friend Eddie Cantor and did not survive emergency surgery.
Vivian Ruth Andersen (1895-1958) began performing in a vaudeville act with her sister, and later worked on Broadway. She made one film on the east coast in 1915, but her Hollywood career started in 1924.
Oakland did a lot of work for the Hal Roach studio, and at different times played the wife of both Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel. She also played Edgar Kennedy’s wife in a series of shorts. Most of her pictures were shorts and programmers, though Oakland did have a small role in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
In The Florodora Girl, Oakland was Maud, in a double act with Ilka Chase as Marion Davies’s friends.
So sings Chip in On the Town, reading from his forty-year-old New York guidebook. He has to miss out, unfortunately, but a glimpse of the show can be caught in The Florodora Girl, a fictional tale about one of the original six chorus girls in the Broadway production of Owen Hall and Leslie Stuart’s Florodora.
The show opened on Broadway in 1900 the film, as its subtitle ‘A Story of the Gay Nineties’ makes clear, is set in the late-Victorian period. This is certainly the period of most of The Florodora Girl’s songs. The then-ubiquitous Stothart-Grey partnership only wrote two numbers for the picture, with the assistance of Andy Rice. The rest are popular songs from the period. But the new songs blend in comfortably as pseudo-Victorian, especially ‘Pass the Beer and Pretzels’, which is part of a three-minute medley performed by Marion Davies and chorus.
Daisy (Marion Davies) throws herself into a performance of ‘Pass the Beer and Pretzels’
Robert Barrios suggests that the film’s music is “present less for its own sake than to provide atmospheric upholstery”. There is a degree of truth in this, but it is not the whole story. For example, ‘Don’t Wake Me Up, I’m Dreaming’ (which may have a third set of lyrics by Clifford Grey or Andy Rice), is sung over, and mirrors, Daisy’s yearning looks at Jack after she refuses his flowers. And ‘Tell Me Pretty Maiden’ not only involves Jack’s intrusion into the on-stage performance, but the lyrics and movements of the singers are utilized to become Daisy’s half of their conversation.
This reflects Harry Beaumont’s growing comfort with the musical. His staging and framing is much more inventive than in his earlier efforts, especially in the sequence at the Bowery slumming ball.
Dancers at the Bowery slumming ball
Marion Davies is clearly more comfortable as Daisy than she had been as Marianne, and her lively performance won deserved praise from critics. And as the film’s producer, she benefited from having a star who happened to own a private beach suitable for shooting a lengthy portion of the first half. Davies’s staff were able to provide catering that was a cut above what the cast and crew were used to in Culver City.
James Davis (1853-1907) was a solicitor who allegedly chose the pen name Owen Hall because it sounded like ‘owing all’, reflecting his frequently bankrupt state.
Hall achieved greater success as a librettist, helping to write some of the most successful British musical comedies of his day. Amongst these was Florodora (1899), for which he provided lyrics to Leslie Stuart’s music.
The show’s breakout song, ‘Tell Me Pretty Maiden’ is performed by Marion Davies and chorus, with interruptions by Lawrence Gray, at the end of The Florodora Girl.
