By 1926, the studio system with its assembly-line like production of celluloid products was firmly in place. Critics and historians love to celebrate visionary, passionate filmmakers, but the studio system thrived for a reason, as Poker Faces demonstrates. It’s a well-crafted, comic programmer with a strong ensemble cast, a subtly subversive storyline, and the bonus of comic genius Edward Everett Horton in the lead. Not half bad for a factory product.
One strength of the studio system was its army of veteran actors who worked like a giant stock company of types. In Poker Faces, Tom Ricketts is the company boss (he also did wealthy uncles, aristocrats, and sometimes butlers) while perennial heavy George Siegmann plays Dixon, the out-of-town client (his next roles included a bootlegger and Simon Legree). Even small roles are filled by top-drawer talent. Dorothy Revier, “the Queen of Poverty Row,” plays the hero’s wife-for-a-night, while her boxer husband is Tom O’Brien, post his success in The Big Parade.
Edward Everett Horton and Laura La Plante as the feuding couple were also playing types, as trade magazine Exhibitors Herald made plain: “Here’s Laura La Plante doing the same sort of wife she’s been doing for Reginald Denny, but doing it for Edward Everett Horton. Here’s Horton doing the same sort of business office man and doing it at least as well.” La Plante with her flapper-style blonde bob had graduated from Universal westerns to playing adventurous madcaps and professional women in films like Excitement and Dangerous Blonde. At twenty-two years old, and newly married to director William Seiter, her star was on the rise and, in 1929, Film Weekly touted her as “one of the most highly paid artists in the film industry.” Horton was a relative newcomer to movies, but he’d started with a bang as the lead in 1922’s Too Much Business, three years after coming west to join the Majestic Theatre company. “I got to play all light-comedy parts in pictures,” Horton remembered, while performing dramatic leads on stage.
Poker Faces was one in a series of light comedies Universal produced in the mid-1920s and was designed to cash in on the success of Skinner’s Dress Suit (1926), which costarred Reginald Denny and Laura La Plante. The film takes the basic situation of the earlier hit—the wife pushing hubby to get a raise, the husband in hot water at the office, the business deal that will solve all their problems—and this time makes it about a mutinous wife and modern marriage. It starts small: Jimmy Whitmore (Horton) and wife Betty (La Plante) bicker over replacing a worn-out rug. Which leads to Betty marching out to earn her own money. Which means Jimmy has to find a substitute wife when his boss invites the couple to dinner with an important client. From there complications escalate into a frothy spun-sugar confection of misunderstandings and mistaken identities that finally collapses of its own weight, restoring harmony at work and home.
Working wives—what a shocker! No self-respecting (white, middle-class) man in the 1920s would ever permit such a state of affairs—except when they did. Wives with jobs pop up on both sides of the camera. Poker Faces director Harry Pollard preferred that his wife, actress Margarita Fischer, retire from her career, but only after many years of a double-income marriage. Fischer and Pollard were married and broke when they entered films because they couldn’t find “legit” acting jobs. That real-life situation is mirrored in the film by the actress Jimmy hires to play his absent wife, who, along with her husband, is waiting for work in a theatrical agent’s office when Jimmy phones in his order.
Pollard was once mentioned in the same breath as King Vidor and Paul Leni and when he died of a heart attack in 1934 the Hollywood Reporter described him as one of Universal’s “ace” directors. By the time of Poker Faces, he’d already directed a number of successful comedies with Reginald Denny, who, despite the success Pollard made possible, preferred Skinner director William Seiter. “Pollard was all for the broad comedy,” Denny told historian Kevin Brownlow, “and I was for the lighter.” Poker Faces is filled with broad slapstick, from Jimmy’s first pratfall over the worn-out rug to the beating he takes from Dixon who throttles him, forces him to strip, and locks him in his room.
Unlike Denny, Horton was not choosey about directors. Film was always secondary to Horton’s work in the theater. He even confessed in an interview late in life that he couldn’t take movies as seriously: “I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it.” In Poker Faces the future king of mugging is the poker face of the title, nicknamed for his inscrutable expression—which disintegrates along with his control over events, as when La Plante gets hired by Jimmy’s boss as his new, after-hours stenographer. She’s no poker face either and spends much of the second half of the movie alternately glaring daggers at Horton and dimpling at Dixon. Betty refuses to back down, even if it means taking late-night dictation in Siegmann’s bedroom. “She could put over this deal single-handed!” says Jimmy’s boss. Is Betty the better businessman?
Costar Horton, it must be said, is Poker Faces‘ main attraction, whether he’s ricocheting from one indignant woman to another like a pinball or flapping his hands to shush his hysterical boss. It’s hard not to watch Horton without a sort of double vision, seeing in his performance flashes of his supporting roles for films in the ’30s and ’40s. There’s that simpering smile accompanied by a peacocky-waggle of the head, or the alarmed, wide-eyed stare and self-protective shoulder hunch. Yet it’s also possible to catch a glimpse of Horton’s other abilities before he solidified into a comic fussbudget. There’s real camaraderie and tenderness in Jimmy’s scenes with wife Betty. In the middle of the third act, when all the parties concerned are creeping around the boss’s big mansion, Jimmy worms his way into his wife’s room and they share a moment of truce in this battle of the sexes. Betty gradually leans into Jimmy, who delicately wraps her in an embrace. One theater owner reported to the Exhibitors Herald: “When Horton first poked his hungry mug into the picture all the flappers were pouting, ‘Gee! I don’t like him,’ and inside of five minutes they were squealing, ‘Gracious, isn’t he good!’”
Historian Megan Boyd describes how the shift from slapstick to light comedy made space for female heroines who rejected the cult of Victorian domesticity that hung like a pall over the 1920s. “Rebellious types ranged from uncouth hoydens to wealthy madcaps, baby vamps, and young wives hoping to gain new rights within their marriage,” she writes. Poker Faces reflects this shift with its deliciously complicated mix of messages and comic styles. The witty, lunchtime spat that opens the film is Lubitsch-like, while Dixon’s constant manhandling of Jimmy is more like the Three Stooges, but with better lighting. The supposed motivation for all this rough and tumble is to safeguard Betty’s virtue: Dixon beats up Jimmy to save the stenographer from that “depot Romeo” and Jimmy fights back to keep his wife safe from big, bad Dixon. The women find all this fuss amusing. When Jimmy virtuously forbids Dixon from compromising an innocent young girl, his wife-for-hire cracks up (she’s the one with worries, trapped with a fake husband in a strange house); and Betty stops crying to burst into laughter when she sees her supposed protector wearing a fur-trimmed leopard skin coat over his underwear after his latest bout with Dixon. Variety’s reviewer praised Pollard’s “extremely clever directorial maneuvering,” writing, “Pollard … has skillfully jumped over all offensiveness without losing one whit of the suggestiveness. That’s a trick.”
“Remarriage plots regularly explored how couples could adapt to make their marriages more companionate,” writes Boyd. Poker Faces’ couple splits up and gets back together in a single day, snugged together in a pre-Code bed in such companionate harmony that they deliver the final line of the film in beaming unison. Best of all, there’s no breast-beating on Betty’s part or promises to be a better wife. Betty’s original threat after all was to return to work. The woman has experience. A paying job is still a possibility.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by the Guenter Buchwald Quartet