Mabel normand

This Goldwyn feature with Mabel Normand is founded on George Ade‘s story of the same name and is full of magnificent sets and backgrounds, all beautifully photographed. In fact, George Webber, who took these pictures, is the real star of them. He caught some difficult action, too, and did the job just right, and while the comedy didn’t get any particular laughs out of the crowd at the Capitol Sunday evening, the produces needn’t fear to splurge on the expense and effect of the production. Victor L. Schertzinger directed, showing little imagination, but getting fair and average results. His attempts to work in forced slapstick comedy produced the chief faulty effect, and it was out of harmony with the richness and splendor of the settings.

The action when it finally developed was quick and moving and excited interest. The story may be dimly remembered as a farce set to music with Elsie Janis starred. It concerns the attempt of a young American to carry off and marry the slim Princess Kalora. No one in her own country wants to marry the Princess, where woman are supposed to grow more beautiful with every meal, that is to say, fatter. The fatter the woman, the more desirable she is in the eyes of the Morovenians, but Kalora is not fat and never has been. A revengeful tutor helps keep her thin by feeding her pickles, but in order to marry her off they insert inflated rubber bags in her clothes. She spoils this delightful effect by stepping on a cactus. Then a young American who has never in this country seen any slender women of the type he admires, spies her and makes a dead play for her. Why he should climb a wall to go to a formal garden party is a question, but his breaks into the harem later on are properly made in that manner. His winning of the girl completes the story.

This is by long odds the handsomest Goldwyn product in some time. Mabel Normand adds to it her good humored and attractive presence and is really very winning and a drawing card. Tully Marshall and Russ Powell give cleverly exaggerated portraits and Lillian Sylvester was fat enough to have tempted any Morovenian. (Leed.)

There undoubtedly were some attractive features about the mythical Oriental country which George Ade discovered in his literary expedition, but it would be a bad place for the writer of “Eat and Grow Thin” to ply his trade. For be it known that the standards of feminine beauty in that strange land were based almost entirely on avoirdupois. The hand picked beauties who have made Mr. Ziegfeld and Mr. Sennett famous would probably have been laughed at in Morovenia.

Mabel Normand, according to the scenario, is unfortunate enough to be a lady of this land. In fact, her father is Governor-General. But the hard part of it all is that, according to the laws of the land, no younger daughter may be married while she has an unmarried older sister. Now Mabel happens to be an older daughter and her younger sister is a vision of elephantine loveliness.

When her father receives a most advantageous offer for her hand, he is up against the problem of getting Mabel married off first. But no one would look at Mabel’s sylph-like ugliness, so she is dressed in a rubber suit and made guest of honor at a huge garden party. Things go beautifully until her costume is punctured and she is revealed as thin.

Of course she is disgraced and her father’s plans are spoiled. But while she is mourning in the garden a young American of great wealth chances to be passing the palace walls, and for reasons best known to himself chooses to enter the royal domain. Here he is surprised and delighted to come upon a real girl, one whose proportions are more in keeping with the styles he is used to in the well known U.S.A.

It is not unnatural then that he should immediately fall to work trying to convince the lady that his affections are undying. It is far from strange also that Mabel should be pleased at his attentions. But the servants of the household interrupt the tête-à-tête and drive the young lover away. Not before he has sworn to return and win her, however.

Eventually he works up the courage to speak to father. Father is not overjoyed, because unfortunately the President of the United States is not in the habit of granting lands and titles to his subjects. Such a state of affairs seems very queer to the Governor-General, and even at the risk of not finding a husband for his ugly duckling, he cannot give his consent to such a marriage.

Such a little thing as parental disapproval, however, does not please the young American and he remains determined to win his lady. Of course he does it too. The doing of it involves a trip to America for Mabel where needless to say she shines as a beauty, and generally has the time of her life. But when she returns she is no heftier than she ever was, and after much fuss and many altercations the romance ends as all romances should end.

Miss Normand is very funny as the slim princess, and pictorially leaves nothing to be desired.
* from Los Angeles Evening Express, July 3, 1920

Mabel Has Pickle Passion

Mabel Normand use to dislike pickles immensely. Sour, sweet, dill, mixed, none of the varieties made hit with her at all. Now all is changed. She specializes on this article of foodsome diet. Cranks declare pickles are not a food, but never mind that -- and she finds they agree with her, hence her sudden onslaught on the pickle market. All which goes to prove that a lot of things people dislike improve acquaintance.

It came about through the fact that some of the scenes in Mabel’s latest picture, “The Slim Princess,” which comes to the California tomorrow, required her to eat pickles. She had to eat them whether she like them or didn’t like them. For in this picture she is the slim princess in a land where a woman is considered beautiful in proportion to her weight. Her family are very desirous that she increase her avoirdupois. But her tutor, who cherishes an old grudge against her father, sees his opportu­nity to get even and feeds her pickles to keep her thin.

When they opened the first bottle of sour dills on the set and handed it, with a fork, to the star, her face was a study in disgust. But she has never yet been bluffed by any stunt demanded in her pictures and she proceeded to eat the pickles with much avidity as though she really liked them. She was rather aston­ished when she found her-self between scenes one afternoon, abstractly munching one of the hitherto despised things and liked it.

After which time they had to keep the pickle bottle out of her sight or have no pickles for the taking of the scenes.
* from Boy’s Cinema, July 3, 1920

[captions to pictures accompanying piece: This extraordinary machine¹⁵⁹ was built by D. E. Hunt, a mechanical engineer of California. It whistles, rings a bell, and naturally attracts considerable attention when it steams up the street. Mabel was the first girl to drive this funny machine, which will do nearly 100 miles an hour…If you wan to write to her, address your letter: Mabel Normand, Goldwyn Studios, Culver City, California]

Mabel Normand, the popular and dashing film comedienne, was born in Boston.

She worked under Mack Sennett, the well-known producer of film comedies, for several years, and soon became an international screen favorite.

Later Mabel left Keystone Comedies, and organised [sic] her own company, but after a while she gave up this venture, and worked for Goldwyn.

Some of Mabel Normand’s most notable recent productions are “Joan of Plattsburg,” “Peck’s Bad Girl,” “Sis Hopkins,” “The Pest,” “When Doctors Disagree,” and “Upstairs.”

Mabel’s latest picture deals with an imaginary place call Morovenia, where only stout women are considered beautiful.

Mabel, however, is slim, and according to the accepted standards of beauty obtaining in that land, she had to make herself stout somehow.

For this reason her producer obtained a rubber suit for Mabel to wear. During the filming of the scenes of this picture, Mabel appeared at the studio each morning, her own dainty, mischievous imp of activity.

Then, when the rubber suit was put on with the assistance of her maid, the two men gripped the handles of the pump attached to the suit, and worked strenuously for some minutes.

Dainty Mabel soon became very plump, and as they kept working at the pump she grew more portly every minute.

She became so fat in the end that if she sat down she couldn’t get up without assistance, and if she lost her balance, she was helpless until picked up by someone.

You will agree that this picture is one of the funniest which Mabel Normand has yet appeared in.

Mabel is very enthusiastic about her art, and she believes that there is more real hard work in making a comedy picture than in any other.

“The fact is,” she says, “that everybody, or nearly everybody engaged in a comic film must be a real humorist, or the film will be sure to fall flat.

“It isn’t enough for the principal player to be funny. All the minor characters, such as hotel servants, porters, tram-conductors, and so on, must also be able to raise laughs.”

Mabel’s childhood days were particularly happy ones, and this fact no doubt had a good deal to do with her present lively and joyous disposition.

There is no one on the screen quite like this fascinating artist.

It is not generally known that Mabel Normand was for some time an artist’s model.

Her beauty and charm made her in great demand at most of the studios, but this work was not sufficient to satisfy Mabel’s ambitions, and she decide to go on the stage.

Her first engagement was as a chorus girl, and incidentally this was also the last part she played on the legitimate stage. For one day she met her friend Alice Joyce, and Alice persuaded her to go with her to the old Biograph Company, where she was then engaged in film making.

This Mabel consented to do, and her producer at once recognized the possibility of Miss Normand’s beauty and vivacity, and he at once gave her a long engagement.

Many of this favourite artist’s earliest screen successes were made with that irresistible comedian, Roscoe Arbuckle, who is known to you all by the name of Fatty.

“Fatty” and “Mabel” together had a world-wide reputation for laughter-making.

Mabel Normand has some funny likes and dislikes.

The things she is most fond of, she said on a recent occasion are “dark windy days, and chocolate cake, and storms when houses blow down.”

She was quite serious when she made this statement, although there was just a hint of mischief in the famous Mabel Normand eyes.

It is really impossible for Mabel to be very serious.

Her lovely eyes, which are dark brown are even more beautiful in real life than the screen discloses.

Mabel Normand, like most other screen artists, is very superstitious, and she always carries a tiny ivory elephant as a lucky charm.

She owns many wonderful and valuable jewels, although she rarely wears them on the screen.

If Mabel ever has time enough to spare from her screen work she intends to go to Paris for a long stay. This has been her one desire for a considerable time.

 May Markson

If you ask any movie star what picture he or she likes best of those in which he or she has appeared, the answer will inevitably be, “The one I’m making now.”

It’s always the last picture that’s the best to a real actor, and Mabel Normand is not the exception that proves the rule.

It occurred to me that movie fans who will see her in her latest release, “The Slim Princess,” at the California next week, might like to know something about the personality of the vivacious star, so I went out to the Goldwyn studio to have a little chat with her.

She was just finishing a scene in her new production, “Head Over Heels,” an adaptation of the play in which the winsome little musical comedy star, Mizzi Hajos, took Los Angeles by storm at the Mason a number of months ago.

On Mabel’s head rested a little flat black sailor. Her hair hung in two thick pigtails down her back. She wore a green short skirt with white stripes, and black and white striped stockings with heavy brown cowhide shoes.

There was no make-up on her face, except that her eyelashes were beaded. She looked like a ludicrous little character that might have stepped out of an east side tenement in New York.

“Your paper did a splendid thing in getting after these fake movie schools,” she remarked as soon as she knew who I was. “Everyone connected with them should be run out of town, and sent to the pen if they ever come back. I thought those articles were fine.”

I decided right there that Mabel Normand was a young lady of intelligence, as well as beauty, and we got on intimate terms right away. The way to a newspaper man’s heart is through boasting his paper, which applies to newspaperwomen, as well.”

“Now tell me something about Mabel Normand,” I demanded. “I’ve come here to turn you inside out for the benefit of the public, and I don’t want to disappoint ‘em.”

“Oh, I’ve got an appointment with my dressmaker, and I’ve got to go right away, truly I must,” Mabel exclaimed in a panicky voice.

After assuring her that the operation would be harmless, she consented to sit down beside me on a bench for five minutes, and I extracted the following:

She believes the world is in a condition now where people need to be amused rather than instructed.

She prefers the kind of parts she is playing, to any other type of character.

She goes to church every Sunday.

She likes to read.

When she finishes a picture she makes a bee-line for New York, even though she can be there only two or three days, in order to be with her mother and sister.

She likes to swim and ride and climb trees.

Sometimes she gets frightened at the stunts she is called upon to do, but she does them anyhow.

And she assures you that you’ll laugh yourself into convulsions over, “The Slim Princess,” but just wait until you see “Head Over Heels.”
* from Wid’s Daily, Sunday, July 4, 1920

Star’s Work Stands Out in Weak Comedy Story

Mabel Normand in

“THE SLIM PRINCESS”

Goldwyn

AUTHOR: George Ade

SCENARIO BY: Gerald C. Duffy

CAMERAMAN: George Webber

AS A WHOLE: Very weak comedy plot made fairly entertaining by star’s work

STORY: Little to it

DIRECTION: Has handled comedy sequences skillfully and given entire picture tasteful

production

PHOTOGRAPHY: Very good

LIGHTINGS: Effective

CAMERA WORK: Very good

STAR: Gets over very good comedy business but story doesn’t give her opportunities.

SUPPORT: Tully Marshall registers some laughs; Hugh Thompson is leading man

EXTERIORS: Contain good “mythical kingdom” atmosphere

INTERIORS: Same

DETAIL: All right

CHARACTER OF STORY: Troubles of slim princess in country where to be beautiful is to be fat

LENGTH OF PRODUCTION: About 5,000 feet

“The Slim Princess“ gets over as a fairly entertaining comedy because of Mabel Normand’s very capable work in a few sequences where she is given opportunities for the type of horseplay, which she can do so well. The story of this is very weak as slim as its leading character in fact and doesn’t hold up the interest at all times the way a good comedy should.

However, the work is aided considerably by the rather fanciful production given it. The exteriors, the majority of which are laid in one of those mythical kingdoms, Morovenia in this instance are attractive and the interiors no less tasteful. As a result, “The Slim Princess is always appealing to the eye and now and then to the visibilities.

The best sequence in the entire picture comes when the heroine, the slim princess; who has the misfortune to live in a kingdom where to be beautiful is to be fat dons an inflated rubber suit and endeavors to match her ample sister before the eyes of admiring swains. A subtitle which uses the line...”a full blown woman” also adds to the gayety. There are also some good bits in this sequence between the star and Tully Marshall who appears as her tutor.

The plot is simple in the extreme. Kalora, the slim princess, is unfashionable because she is under weight. Under the law of the kingdom, her younger and exceedingly stout sister cannot marry until she is disposed of. The rubber suit is tried on Kalora and things are going famously until she bumps into a plant with sharp leaves. Thereupon she actually shrinks before the horror-stricken eyes of the young man who previously admired her.

Kalora meets Pike, an American, who is the first one to admire her for her lack of fat. Later Kalora is sent to America by her father, who thinks possibly that some new-fangled health food will improve her. She again meets Pike there and their romance develops. There is a good laugh when Kalora returned home decked out in all the latest styles with her tutor wearing checks in his suit. And then they conclude with another good sequence when Pike comes to ask for her hand. The father mistakes which daughter he means and trots out fat one at first but matters are finally straightened out and everyone is happy.

They have left this story just about as George Ade wrote it and certain it is that he never wrote it for a picture. The rest of the cast including Hugh Thompson, Russ Powell, Lillian Sylvester, Harry Lorraine and Pomerny Cannon performs averagely but evince small comedy spirit.

Very Good Possibilities for Exploitation Here

Box Office Analysis for the Exhibitor

You will be able to get by with this with the average crowd while before admirers of Mabel Normand and those who have a fondness for George Ade’s stuff; you ought to make a very good impression. It seems that they have adhered to the original plot pretty strictly. A more liberal course embracing a few changes and additions might have been advisable. They have changed better known stories and plays than. “The Slim Princess.”

The premise of the picture offers you amusing advertising possibilities. Use a line such as “In Morovenia THIS was considered Beauty and THIS ugliness. Above the first “this” a picture of the fattest woman your artist can draw, above the second something as shapely as Mabel Normand. Any other ideas on this line will prove attractive. Play the star big and don’t forget the author’s name.

 Louella Parsons

Tully Marshall insists that it is true, but when he told it out of the Goldwyn studio there wasn’t a person on the lot who would believe it. He says that whereas he never played a part until he was 19 he began working in the theatre at the age of 5. What, if he didn’t play a part, did he do at that age? Well, he says he was not only call boy, but prompter. “Why not make it a really good story?” asked Mabel Normand. “I’m surprised that you don’t claim to have been stage manager at least.”

You can’t always sometimes tell -- even the shrewdest guess wrong. When “Mickey” was offered State-right buyers a couple of years ago J. Frank Hatch, one of the cleverest of state-right purchasers, offered $8,000 for “Mickey” for Ohio, refusing to raise his bid. He could have bought it for $9,000. Harry Grelle, of Pittsburgh, paid $12,000 for Ohio and $10,000 for Pennsylvania for three year’s lease of the picture, which still has a year to go. Up to this date Grelle has cleaned up a profit of $323,000 on Ohio and Pennsylvania, the bulk of which was made in Ohio. At the conclusion of his lease of “Mickey” Grelle will retire, satisfied with his accumulated “pile.”

We accused Lucy Huffaker of faking the story about Mabel Normand and the song. But here is what Grace Kingsley has to say about it in the Los Angeles Times, so Lucy may be right after all.

“Even if you’re a deacon you’re not going to be able to make your feet behave! That is if you happen to hear the latest Tin Pan Alley sensation. The song is entitled ‘A Musical Jekyll and Hyde,’ and serve to put Mabel Normand, picture star, in the song writing class. In fact the ditty is the brain child of ‘Ma’ Mabel Normand and ‘Pa’ Victor Schertzinger. Miss Normand’s clever director having written the music.

“The composition is being published by a well-known Eastern firm, but we’ll beat ‘em to it by publishing the chorus, which is all about a girl who loved to dance. It envisions the little shimmie kid the cafe hounds all know so well.”

“She didn’t care to stop for air.

When a saxophone would moan.

And ‘pon my soul she’ll lose control

When she’d hear a slide trombone.

When the jazz clarinet starts squealing,

She’ll roll her eyes and look appealing.

Then, she’ll shiver, boy, she’ll quiver.

She loved each shimmie they’d give her.

A big base drum would make her numb

From her head down to her toes,

And a violin would make her given,

To any step her partner knows.

But when she’d play the organ up in the choir,

You could see the angels sitting there by her,

And they’d swell with pride as they sang beside

This musical Jekyll and Hyde.”

With Mabel Normand’s next production, “What Happened to Rosa,” ready for distribution the comedienne is now engaged in making another picture. It is “Head Over Heels,” an adaptation of Edgar Allen Woolf’s play in which Mitzi was starred.

Having felt that a close communication with her New York modiste was absolutely necessary to her happiness, Mabel Normand, Goldwyn star, left yesterday for the eastern metropolis where she will spend her vacation between pictures.

Mabel Normand is coming East and there is general rejoicing among her friends in general and in particular in the Goldwyn staff, with whom she is a great favorite. Miss Normand is coming to town for a holiday, the idea of heaven among motion picture stars being to be let loose in New York shops and to have the theatres of the metropolis at their disposal. Miss Normand left Los Angeles the day before yesterday and the Goldwyn offices are planning to send a delegation to the station to welcome her and bring her to the home office where an informal reception will be held in honor of the popular little star.

Mabel Normand perplexed the purchasing department at the Goldwyn studios the other day by ordering the scenario of “Head Over Heels,” on which she was working, bound in leather. That in itself, of course, was not so surprising. The puzzling thing was that she asked to have two blank pages inserted in the front of the book. Everyone asked questions, but Mabel would vouchsafe no explanations -- until the book came from the binders. Then, with the fresh leathery smell still upon it, she presented it in turn to each member of “Head Over Heels“ company, with a sweet command to write something in it. They all did, of course, from Hugh Thompson, her leading man, down through the whole cast.

Miss Normand says she is going to do the same thing with each picture in the future.
* from Los Angeles Herald, September 13, 1920