Mary Pickford, in an Oscar-winning performance that was due more to the fact that her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, was president of the Academy than to any particular talent on her part, plays Norma, a flirty young southern teenager (Pickford was 37 when the film was shot) whose running around and multiple boyfriends leads to MURDER!!! She is juggling Stanley, a Nice Guy Bob who loves her despite the fact that she ditches him, and Michael, a tough young hick from the hills who vows his love and gets into street fights. Norma's father, a southern gentleman in every sense of the word, both good and bad, forbids Michael to see Norma again. Despite this, the two fools love each other, and one ill-advised night at Michael's cabin in the woods sends Norma's pa out on the warpath with his pistols, with tragic results.

While I wouldn't recommend this film as a film per se, it is an interesting portrait of the problems that plagued sound films in the years following the advent of sound over silent films. First of all, the early microphones were not directional, so you couldn't have ambient noise if the characters were talking, and vice versa. Second, they had a limited range, so the actors had to huddle around a hidden or suspended microphone and deliver their lines. Third, they picked up everything within that range, and the early motorized cameras were noisy, so they had to be placed in soundproofed booths called "iceboxes," limiting camera movement considerably. Fourth, and finally, the actors who learned their skill on silent films often had difficulty adjusting to the new format, which no longer required the broad pantomime and exaggerated motions that they had learned. This is evident most of all in this film with Mary Pickford. She was the veteran of dozens of successful silents, and this was her first foray into talkies. She only made three others before realizing that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and she retired.

What this ends up looking like is what my friend Shane views as the "before 1939" effect. The film is very stagy, the characters don't move around a lot, there is little editing within the scene, and the actors overact. It looks stagy, because, as a result in their imperfect understanding of the new technology, it was stagy. The art form that had been the silent film, as practiced by such geniuses as Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith, had to go back to square one as a result of this novelty, sound. It took filmmakers in general another five to six years to rediscover the art of film, although there were a few who were able to make great films during this readjustment.