Twinkletoes

An example of an improbable genre, this silent musical, released for Christmas 1926, makes an agreeable light entertainment, at least until it collapses into a subplot of virginity threatened. As a vehicle for Colleen Moore, who personified flaming youth in a series of jazz-age comedies, it illustrates how this star's image sidestepped the sexual challenge of contemporaries like Clara Bow and Joan Crawford.

Here, in a project that she guided herself, she goes blonde as an aspiring dancer, devoted to her dear old Dad, tempted by an unhappily married local boxer, but targeted by a leering seducer. Throughout this plot, set in Cockney London, her working-class heroine remains good-hearted, relentlessly perky, yet fundamentally innocent. She leaps into a street melee, climbs ladders, rescues a child from a beating, and slugs a disbeliever in her stardom. (Throughout four dance numbers, Moore neither disgraces nor distinguishes herself.)

Director Charles Brabin works up some flavorful Limehouse atmosphere, staging a spirited street brawl for the opening. However, only one sequence- a romantic scene on a stairway when Moore realizes that she loves the boxer -reveals distinctive cinematic choices. The visual sophistication seen in Brabin's MASK OF FU MANCHU in 1932 is absent, apart from some prism shots to express a state of tipsiness.

Among the routinely sentimental figures, Gladys Brockwell hits a strikingly realistic note as the hero's snarling drunken wife, but the character of "Roseleaf", the producer who threatens Moore's virtue, has an anti-semitic subtext that seems borderline offensive (Warner Oland would redeem his role the next year by playing Al Jolson's rabbi father in THE JAZZ SINGER).