The Love Expert (1920)

Romantic comedies were ever thus—silly puff balls. You can find a dust bunny under the bed with more substance than The Love Expert.

Constance Talmadge is Babs Hardcastle, a young woman who is so mushy on the subject of love she makes Lydia Languish look like Miss Havisham. Tossed out of boarding school due to her determination to make romance her major, she heads for home in time to accompany her father (Arnold Lucy) on a business trip to Palm Beach. But when dad realizes that Babs can’t think of anything but romance, he sends her to visit her Aunt Emily (Marion Sitgreave) in Boston instead.

The punishment becomes fun when Babs discovers that Aunt Emily is engaged to businessman Jim Winthrop (John Halliday)—and has been for six years, with no wedding date yet on the calendar. It seems that he can’t get married until his two dull sisters and his Aunt Cornelia get married, too. To make things worse, Babs falls for Winthrop herself. It is, as the titles tell us, “a domestic problem that would have made Ibsen green with envy.”

So the whole gang ends up in Palm Beach where Babs hunts for suitable mates for the sisters. And everyone else in the picture, not to mention a couple of people in the audience.

The object of Babs' affection is Jim Winthrop (John Halliday), but before they can wed, he has to find suitable mates for his two plain sisters, Dorcas (Natalie Talmadge, Constance's real-life sister and future wife of Buster Keaton, whom she would come to detest) and Matilda (Fanny Bourke) -- and Winthrop's elderly aunt (Nellie Parker Spaulding). To speed things up, Babs takes it upon herself to find them all men. Babs’ cruel exploitation of people’s emotions is softened somewhat when we see that she isn’t really stealing her aunt’s beau because he admits he never loved her and Aunt Emily realizes that she really loves her friend Professor Blecker (Edward Keppler).

One source thinks the film is based on a story by Mary Roberts Rinehart, but I haven’t been able to find support for this claim. It may come from the fact that a three-film series featuring a character named “Babs” was released in 1917, although it had nothing to do with Rinehart or Talmadge. Another says The Love Expert was based on a story by scenarist Anita Loos. Anyway, the picture was produced and written by Loos and her husband John Emerson. It was directed by David Kirkland and shot by Oliver T. Marsh for Paramount.

Loos said about Constance Talmadge that she was "one of the few genuine femme fatales I have ever known" and Irving Berlin said she was “a virtuous tramp.” Constance Talmadge, or as she was known in the family, “Dutch,” gave up the movies when talkies came in. Thirty years later, theatrical producer Leonard Stillman asked her to appear in a Broadway show and her response is priceless: “Are you kidding? I couldn't act even when I was a movie star.”