Norma Shearer’s LADY OF THE NIGHT on Turner Classic Movies
September 24th, 2006 by Andre Soares
"The surest way to get people to resist the idea that they’re about to see a great movie is to announce they’re about to see a great movie. It raises expectations through the roof and can even instill a ’show me’ attitude in the viewer. Yet without someone saying, ‘This is great, this is special, this is a very big deal,’ how many people would go out of their way to see Lady of the Night, a 1925 masterpiece that makes its TV debut tonight on Turner Classic Movies?"
That’s Norma Shearer fan and film reviewer Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. In his article "Quite a ‘Lady,’" LaSalle urges readers to check out the little-seen (in the last 81 years) Lady of the Night, a 1925 silent film directed by the utterly forgotten Monta Bell, and starring Shearer in a dual role — poor, little girl and rich, little girl.
In addition to the venues listed in LaSalle’s article, Lady of the Night was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1990, when a Norma Shearer retrospective was held to coincide with the publication of Gavin Lambert’s excellent Shearer biography. I saw Lady of the Night at that time, and I remember finding it a perfectly watchable, unpretentious movie with only Shearer’s outstanding performance(s) and some good double-exposure special effects (one twin-sisterly hug inside a car is amazingly photographed) to recommend it.
That said, I may change my mind about Lady of the Night the second time around. Another silent that failed to impress me in that retrospective, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, in which Shearer co-starred with Ramon Novarro, is now one of my favorite silent films.
By the way, whenever you see the back of one of the Shearer twins, you’re actually looking at Joan Crawford, then still (little) known as Lucille Le Sueur. As per the IMDB, Crawford appeared in bit parts in two more 1925 Shearer vehicles, Pretty Ladies and A Slave of Fashion. The two actresses would share the screen again — under radical different circumstances — fourteen years later in the comedy The Women.
Now, if you’re in the U.S. go set up your VCR/DVD recorder. Lady of the Night is just about to start.
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2 Responses to “Norma Shearer’s LADY OF THE NIGHT on Turner Classic Movies”
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Lady of the Night was a great film and Norma Shearer plays a dual role.
The ending is melodramtic in that it is an elongated Griffith last minute rescue.
I can’t remember the ending, though I did see bits and pieces while it was on a couple of Sundays ago. The restoration looked gorgeous. I don’t recall the film looking that good when I saw it at LACMA back in 1990.
Anyhow, I’ll be checking it out one of these days.