Too few people remember just how funny Marie Prevost really was. Watching Up in Mabel’s Room should put us all on to the truth about her short but brilliant career. Ontario-born Prevost was discovered in her late teens by Mack Sennett when she was working as a secretary in a law firm in 1915. She started her film career as a Keystone Bathing Beauty, and she ended it with a trail of bit parts in the 1930s. However, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, Prevost briefly reigned as one of Hollywood’s most modern, mischievous leading ladies.
Her cute and perky comic style, not to mention her shapely silhouette, made her a favorite with the public, and she made a big impression on Hollywood. When Prevost left Keystone and signed for Universal, she burned her bathing suit in a stunt funeral pyre of publicity stills on the beach at Coney Island to symbolize her transformation. After a run of light comedies for that studio, Prevost was snapped up by Warner Bros., where she starred in an adaptation of The Beautiful and the Damned with Kenneth Harlan. The two were lovers and were due to raise publicity for the film by marrying on set when the papers got wind of the fact that Prevost had neglected to get a divorce from her first husband—a brief relationship from her Keystone days. This faux pas enraged Jack Warner, but Prevost got great reviews and she soon became a favorite of Ernst Lubitsch, appearing in three of his films, including his 1924 comic masterpiece The Marriage Circle as well as Three Women (1924) and Kiss Me Again (1925).
Harlan and Prevost had a much quieter wedding in the end, after the paperwork had been filed, and continued to work for the studio until 1926 when Warner Bros. decided not to renew either of their contracts. Prevost signed a deal with Metropolitan, but before starting work for them she was engaged by the Christie Film Company, a studio specializing in situation comedies, spiced up with scantily clad ladies, run by two brothers from Ontario, Charles and Al. Up in Mabel’s Room, directed by E. Mason Hopper, was much trumpeted in the trades as Prevost’s first starring role with the studio, and it looked likely to be a hit as it was adapted (by Tay Garnett and F. McGrew Wallis) from a Broadway smash of 1919, written by Wilson Collison and Otto Hauerbach (as Harbach). Collision was a drugstore clerk in Columbus, Ohio, when he wrote this, his first major success. He appeared to have a taste for titillating subject matter, pivoting several of his early efforts around the boudoir, and the lingerie drawer in particular. He later wrote the play Red Dust, which had the distinction of closing after just eight performances, but became box-office dynamite for Clark Gable in both 1932 and 1953.
Despite these portents of box-office returns, Prevost’s involvement with the Christie studio got off to an inauspicious, even tragic start. In February 1926, her mother Hughina was killed in a car crash in New Mexico. The driver of the car, who walked away with some injuries, was Al Christie. This loss was understandably a terrible blow for Prevost, who was simultaneously going through a rough patch in her marriage to Harlan following their dismissal from Warner Bros. She sued him for divorce a year later. According to her close friend Phyllis Haver, this period marked the beginning of Prevost’s heavy drinking and the alcoholism that eventually took her life.
You’d have no inkling of such tragedy from Up in Mabel’s Room, which is a hoot from start to finish: a farce garlanded with innuendo and slapstick galore. It’s a saucy comedy of remarriage in which Prevost plays fashionable young lady Mabel and Harrison Ford is architect Garry, the “hotsy hubbie” she divorced over a misunderstanding now “posing as a bachelor” among his new friends in New York. In Garry’s opinion, the Paris wedding, as one of Walter Graham’s witty intertitles confides, was “like a vaccination … it hadn’t taken.” Mabel thinks otherwise, so she pursues Garry to New York with fiercely flirtatious, not to say predatory, determination. In pursuit of her man she deploys some fancy footwork, a provocative wink, and a lavishly modish wardrobe.
The source of Mabel’s confusion was Garry’s purchase of an embroidered camisole, an item that continues to cause embarrassment. Not for Mabel, who seems to delight in flaunting it. It’s the male characters who find it so unmentionable that they, including Garry’s valet Hawkins, gleefully played by William Orlamond, can only splutter out references to a “feminine doo-dad,” “the indescribable,” and endless other euphemisms. Phyllis Haver plays Sylvia, a swinging singleton, “unmarried … but not unwilling,” who complicates Mabel’s strategy. The cast includes Maude Truax, Arthur Hoyt, Harry Myers, and Carl Gerard, all of whom escalate the comic scenario with gusto, creating a panicky mood of lingerie-induced hysteria. Thanks to the strength of this ensemble, Up in Mabel’s Room maintains the energy and inventiveness of the best comic two-reelers in a feature-length caper. The intertitles are especially delectable, packed with double-meanings and Jazz Age slang.
Up in Mabel’s Room was adapted once more and very well in a 1944 film directed by Allan Dwan, but the Production Code did this story no favors. The silent version is far more lascivious in its own free-spirited way and it makes for a picture postcard of Roaring Twenties humor, hipness, and hedonism. This is a romp through contemporary sexual mores (couples celebrating their six-month wedding anniversary just so as to be sure to have one) in much the same vein as Anita Loos’s novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, published the year before. In the El Rey nightclub scene, do look out for a gymnastic appearance by the Marion Morgan Dancers: a vegetarian, Christian Scientist troupe directed by the woman who soon met Dorothy Arzner on another film set and lived with her for the rest of her life.
Up in Mabel’s Room was shot in April 1926 and released in July, promoted as “a merry mix-up of husbands, wives and sweethearts in a riotous farce,” alongside a tie-in with Maiden Fair Lingerie that saw hundreds of twenty-two-inch cutouts of Prevost in American shop windows, clad in miniature chemises. Larger stores featured windows dressed as lingerie-strewn boudoirs with “a life-sized portrait of Miss Prevost peeping around the edge of a doorway from a bathroom.”
Many critics were unamused by the film’s hijinks, perhaps a little disapproving of the adult humor, with Billboard critic Elias E. Sugarman confessing that much of the material “smacks of the risqué spirit of illustrated Parisian magazines.” Variety’s Sime Silverman felt it would please only the feminine half of the audience: “To a man it’s very wearying, but the flaps and the mams seemed to enjoy it.” However, Motion Picture News praised the enjoyable “mock-seriousness” of the cast and one newspaper praised it as “a tower of absurdities, built up with the single idea of making people laugh, and its one purpose is achieved.” Even that fainthearted Billboard critic announced that Prevost’s “sterling performance” proved that she was “fast becoming the queen of cinema coquettes.”
Thanks in part to lurid and discredited claims in Kenneth Anger’s notorious Hollywood Babylon, Prevost is better remembered for her decline and her early death in 1937 at age forty, than for her glorious heyday. It is fortuitous then that we have the evidence of her captivating presence in charming comedies such as this one. Up in Mabel’s Room offers both a glimpse of the liberated spirit of the age and a welcome reminder of a vivacious talent sadly lost to illness.
Expanded from Hutchinson’s essay first published in the 2022 catalog of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.
Presented at SFSFF 2023 with live musical accompaniment by the Guenter Buchwald Ensemble (Guenter Buchwald, Frank Bockius, Ross Eustis, Sascha Jacobsen, and Sophie Powers)