Screen Mirror (Jun 1930 - Mar 1931)

M Screen Mirror * For June It eel tlie FI o rod orcfe Clirls by eleanore packer night life. Thus the traditions of the Floradora girls are upheld. “It must have been a lot of fun, being a real Florodora girl,” Miss Davies sighed one day as a half-dozen pairs of helping hands fastened the hundredodd hooks of her other-century ball gown. “I don't know why, but people today don’t seem to have the real fun of the gay nineties. “I can’t say that I prefer a hansom cab to a limousine or oil lamps to electric lights. But there was a genuineness to that atmosphere which we don't find today in our modern world, where there is artificiality in almost everything except breathing. Every detail of that color and merriment, which gave to the “gay nineties” its name, has been faithfully brought to the screen in “The Florodora Girl,” this backstage story of the maidens who thrilled and fascinated our grandfathers and brought consternation and dismay to the hearts of our grandmothers. • Wasp waists and towering pompadours. Demure maidens escorted and wooed by gallant gentlemen in checkered trousers and bat-wing collars. Oil lamps and bicycles built for two. “Tell Me, Pretty Maiden,” waltztuned in gas-lighted ballrooms, blared by the bands at the horse races, and hummed through the exciting moments of desperate battles of croquet. All these glories of the Gay Nineties, and many more, have been hauled forth from the dusty closet, brushed off, and restored briefly to their pristine splendor in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s romance of America’s golden age, “The Florodora Girl.” For two and a half hours the magic of the talking screen turns back the calendar to the days of thirty years ago, the heyday of long-haired, noseguarded football players, of ruffled, all-concealing swimming suits, of mustaches, of “Sweet Adeline,” “In the Good Old Summer Time,” merry Oldsmobiles, and hansom cabs. The famous Florodora sextette, which somehow has managed to remain a vivid name and memory through several generations of Follies, Scandals, and Vanities, lives again. Even the old Casino Theatre, where trilled and twirled these darlings of the tired business men of the nineties, has been reconstructed. Hollywood’s Florodora girls are Marion Davies, Patricia Caron, Ethel Sykes, Vivian Oakland, Lenore Bushman and Ilka Chase. Old-timers sigh that they are even more beautiful than their far-famed predecesosrs, Marie Wilson, Agnes Wayburn, Marjorie Helyea, Vaughn Texsmith, Daisy Green and Margaret Walker. The 1930 Florodoras are blonde with the one exception of the brunette Miss Chase. With an average height of five feet and five inches, and an average weight of one hundred and twenty-five pounds, the screen sextette is taller but weighs less than the auburn-haired, five-feet-four-inch and one-hundred-and-thirty-pound Casino beauties. Marion Davies, in her puff sleeves and daintily demure flounces, plays Daisy, the only one of the sextette to remain unattached. Finally she, too, dances from the footlights of the old Casino into the arms of Lawrence Gray, dashing scion of Fifth Avenue, racing stables and glittering New York A And on your left, ladies and gentlemen, is the celebrated Florodora Sextette «« a pulchritudinous group of ladies at that, , considering how little of them saw the , light of day. On your right is Marion Davies herself, sports clothes and all «« about forty years out of date as to dress, but strictly modern as to charm.