Films of 1920: The Flapper and The Love Expert

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Oh my goodness, where do I even begin with Flappers?

Today the word conjures up a stereotypical jazz age dame: young, short-haired, uncorsetted, wildly dancing the Charleston and swilling martinis.

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However, in 1920 the word “flapper” meant something a little different. It gradually evolved into its current meaning over the course of the decade.

Depending who you listen to, “flapper” could have referred to a number of things:

a) the braided pigtail that flapped on the back of young teenage girls
b) the trend of leaving galoshes unbuckled, to flap when they walked
c) the trend of leaving one’s coat unbuttoned, to flap open as they walked
d) the “flapping” elbows of a girl energetically dancing the Charleston

Its origins go back to 17th century Britain, when a “flap” was a prostitute. By 1890, “flapper” could refer to a very young prostitute or simply a lively mid-teenage girl.

The term reached America in the first years of the new century. The New York Times defined a flapper as “a young lady who has not yet been promoted to long frocks and the wearing of her hair ‘up'”.

“What are ‘flappers’? Why, they are the young girls with their hair still hanging down their backs. They are the sort that can climb up ropes hand over hand and pose at the top.”

(from a New York Times interview with English comedy actor George Graves, February 3, 1907)

By 1910 the term was commonly used for any mischievous, flirtatious young lady, especially a lively tomboyish type.

After WWI journalists began writing about the independent women who had joined the workforce during the war and who had adopted new, alarming habits like smoking, drinking, and going about sans chaperone.

The alarm caused by these carefree girls speaks volumes about the restrictive gender roles of the times. They did what they liked, they had their own money to spend as they saw fit, and they did not care in the least what society thought. In addition, the less curvy, boyish look of the latest fashions shocked older folks to the core. There were even gynecologists who cautioned that women were less “marriageable” if they were less “feminine”.

Over the course of the 1920s the media pinned the term “flapper” on these modern women, probably in order to paint them as foolishly juvenile. Voilà! In no time the word evolved into the meaning it has to this day: a pleasure-seeking, frivolous, scantily-clad, jazz-loving, irresponsible party girl.

The Flapper

Watching this 1920 film, you can see that here the word is meant in it’s earlier sense: a lively, precocious young girl. The tagline on one poster reads: “The spirit of a grownup in the body of an elf.”

In this film Olive Thomas plays Ginger, a wealthy young girl bored to tears with her small town. After she (gasp!) goes off to the soda fountain with her boyfriend without asking permission, her father decides she is getting too wild and sends her off to a strict boarding school. Naturally, once there she proceeds to run amok. This involves disobeying school rules, crushing on an older man, and sneaking out at night to attend a grownup dance.

Ginger is ruled by her romantic notions. After hearing the man she idolizes refer to her as a foolish child, she reacts melodramatically, planning a beautiful suicide, as she strews flowers around the room and loops a silken cord around her neck. Before she can affix it to a chandelier, however, she is distracted by a ruckus in the corridor. One of her classmates has eloped, and robbed the school safe on her way out the door! Ginger cheerfully tosses the cord aside, reflecting that there are still plenty of adventures to be had in life.

On her way home for the holidays Ginger takes a detour to New York, enticed by a mysterious letter. She discovers it was sent by the classmate who robbed the school. She and her boyfriend are fearful of the police and need a ‘goat’ to carry the suitcase of stolen jewels out of the hotel for them.

Ginger is easily talked into staying for a night at the hotel, where she tries grownup life on for size. Spotting the object of her former crush, she grabs a cigarette, intending to show off, though it sends her into a coughing fit.

Her classmate: “That kind of man likes only women of experience.”

Ginger: “Well I’m getting it as fast as I can.”

The thieves give her with the suitcase full of stolen money and jewels to take back to her hometown for them. Far from being alarmed at the situation, Ginger is thrilled. She decides to play a joke on everyone back home by inventing a new identity for herself. Using the jewelery as props, she returns to her hometown as a femme fatale, shocking everyone she encounters. Her father and friends assume the worst, that she is a ‘fallen woman’.

“Is it too late?” she is asked.

She poses dramatically. “Too late!”

“Tell me his name.”

She says she’ll never tell, then goes a step further: “I shall probably become a dope fiend – to forget.”

After having a good laugh at everybody she blithely lets her hair down, puts on her old, frilly dress, and sends the stolen goods to the police. The thieves are arrested and Ginger reassures her poor old father and bewildered boyfriend that it was all a joke. She remains unrepentant, but by the end of the film she is clearly glad to return to her old life in her sleepy hometown.

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This was a new, and very modern kind of heroine, a teenage girl blithely embarking risky adventures, and emerging from them unscathed! As we saw in my last post, it was far more common then for films to lecture women, demonstrating how the slightest moral misstep could ruin a woman’s reputation, thus condemning her to a lifetime of hardship and despair. In stark contrast, The Flapper makes it clear that a young girl, no matter how foolish and self-absorbed, can be disobedient and have a little fun without penalty, much like young men could!

The actress Olive Thomas was herself quite a wild child. From humble beginnings, she was working in a department store when she was “discovered”, winning a magazine contest as the “Prettiest Girl in New York”. She became an artist’s model and showgirl in the Ziegfield Follies, and gained notoriety for high living before entering motion pictures.

I found this film quite funny, and the characters engaging, thanks to a terrific script by Francis Marion, Mary Pickford’s frequent collaborator, who became the most prominent female screenwriter of the era.

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The Love Expert

Another early film flapper was Constance Talmadge, who starred as a daring, wild young thing in several silent comedies. Many of them, The Love Expert included, were written by another female screenwriter, Anita Loos, who had previously written a number of very successful films for Douglas Fairbanks, and who in later years was most famous for writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

This film is even frothier than The Flapper, and the title cards are really funny. An accomplished comedienne, Constance Talmadge had a run of popular films before giving up her career at the advent of talkies. (Her sisters were in movies as well: Norma had great success in serious roles, and Natalie was only in a handful of films but she did marry Buster Keaton.)

In The Love Expert Connie decides to study love rather than her school subjects, and is soon expelled for her efforts. She goes around shaking the hands of various men and then checking her pulse to see if she is in love with them. When she gets a positive result from a handshake with her aunt’s fiancé, well that’s a little awkward, until she discovers the two are not exactly on fire with passion, having been engaged for five years. Connie steers her aunt toward another suitor she likes better (confirmed with the heart rate test), then sets about removing all obstacles between her and the object of her affections, who is prevented from marrying by two unwed sisters and an elderly aunt he must take care of.

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Connie: “Do you really have to wait until your family marry – or die – or something?”

He: “They need me, you know.”

On her way out she stops to ask the elderly aunt, “Your health isn’t very good, is it?”

The die is cast. Connie must somehow find suitors for the two, very plain sisters. And when the old lady’s health suddenly improves, she has to find a husband for her as well.

The snappy title cards keep things moving along. In one scene Connie hollers into the elderly aunt’s ear trumpet: “How long is it since you had a thrill?”

Another gem:

“He isn’t much to look at, but when you get him alone in the dark, you’d be surprised!”

Another scene I appreciated: after being lectured by her father about her reputation, she turns this back on him, setting him up in a scandalous situation that causes him to scramble to keep his own reputation intact!

In the end, Connie is victorious on every front, everyone is happily paired off, and she wins her man as well.

Film companies were beginning to realize the consumer power that young women held – they loved picture shows – and young women were increasingly bored with lectures on how they should or shouldn’t behave. Producers then made the smart move of hiring women screenwriters to pen these pictures, which were very successful. Old-fashioned Way Down East (see last post) may have been the biggest box office hit of 1920, but youth-driven pictures like these were the wave of the future, and throughout the decade many young actresses rode the “flapper” wave to enormous success. As personified by Joan Crawford, Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, the flapper grew older and jazzier over the next few years, until, as a cultural archetype, she crashed along with the stock market in 1929.

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There’s a lot more that could be unpacked here, regarding the flapper phenomena, both in the reframing of gender roles, and as the first instance of youth culture as a significant market force. Suffice to say that, in 1920, movies like The Flapper and The Love Expert introduced a brand new kind of heroine, one who was young, clever, headstrong, and shockingly vivacious.

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Just like in my last post, I’m afraid I have to include another tragic postscript. After starring in The Flapper and four other pictures in 1920, 25-year-old Olive Thomas and her husband – Mary Pickford’s younger brother Jack – went to Paris in September for a well-earned vacation. Late one night, returning to their hotel room after a party, Olive accidentally took bi-chloride of mercury, mistaking the french-labelled bottle for a sedative. She collapsed immediately and died four days later in a Parisian hospital, the same week Bobby Harron died in New York.

Olive Thomas was one of four young motion picture stars memorialized in a ceremony later that September, along with Clarine Seymour, Bobby Harron, and Ormer Locklear, a stunt pilot who crashed while shooting a scene for a motion picture.