Review of Fine Manners

FINE MANNERS was the last film of Gloria Swanson's contract with Paramount which had built her from an obscure Mack Sennett actress to one of the greatest stars in the industry, perhaps second only to Mary Pickford among women. La Swanson could play it all, from a moneyed diva to an earthy little broad and in FINE MANNERS she ends up playing both in one role! Gloria is a gal named Orchid who meets a Prince Charming on New Year's Eve. He's Eugene O'Brien, a socialite bored with the way the rich celebrate the Holiday who decides to go out and mingle among the hoi polloi. He is charmed by the beautiful but somewhat uncouth Orchid and they fall in love. When he announces his plans to marry the girl to his stuffy aunt who is aghast at his choice. She reluctantly agrees to try to polish up the girl while O'Brien is out of the country for months. When he returns he is horrified that his unpolished gem has turned into a frosty snob just like the social set he had abandoned.

This is a pleasant if unmemorable film, rather sharply divided with the first half a comedy and the second half a drama. Gloria is always a delight but I couldn't help but feel her performance had undercurrents of slumming, as if she couldn't wait to get out away from Paramount and move to projects she had more control over. Eugene O'Brien is reasonably good, he was a rather colorless leading man of the era and few of his films circulate now. Gloria went on to some of her biggest triumphs in the years after this film and more than twenty years later she finally returned to the Paramount lot for another movie, the name of which escapes me for the moment -not lol!!!