Lilac Time [Love Never Dies] **** (1928, Colleen Moore, Gary Cooper, Eugenie Besserer) – Classic Movie Review 5487

Director George Fitzmaurice’s sweet, simple and strong 1928 romantic drama is a silent movie with a musical score and sound effects, featuring the song Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time, and has attractive performances from two appealing young stars in Colleen Moore and Gary Cooper. A costly production at $1 million, it moves confidently and effectively from slapstick comedy to intense romance to spectacular aerial fighting and back to romance.

Eugenie Besserer plays the widow Madame Berthelot, whose farmhouse in France is surrounded by British fliers of the Royal Flying Corps billeted in the next field during World War One.

Moore plays her daughter, lovely young French woman Jeannine Berthelot, who meets aviator Captain Philip Blythe (Cooper) by the lilacs. The complications are that at first do not get along as he finds her a nuisance and she doesn’t want to be seen as the corps tame mascot, and also that Blythe has got an aristocratic fiancée back home, Lady Iris Rankin (Kathryn McGuire).

However, love eventually blooms in lilac time, and when he departs on a mission and promises to return, she says that she will wait for him.

This joyful if melodramatic romance, based on a 1917 Broadway play by actress Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin, which they adapted from a novel by Guy Fowler, is very well acted – especially by the two appealing stars – and still engaging.

With a dashing young Cooper shooting to stardom in a lustrous performance, this is a vintage silent movie curio treat for film buffs.

Also in the cast are Eugenie Besserer, Burr McIntosh, Arthur Lake, Kathryn McGuire, George Cooper, Edward Dillon, Cleve Moore (Colleen Moore’s brother), Emile Clautard, Jack Stoney (Colleen Moore’s cousin), Phil McCullough, Paul Hurst, Harold Lockwood, Eddie Clayton and Nelson McDowell.

It runs 100 minutes, is released by First National, is written by Adela Rogers St Johns, Willis Goldbeck and Carey Wilson, is shot in black and white by Sid Hickox, is produced by George Fitzmaurice and John McCormick (Moore’s husband), is scored by Nathaniel Shilkret, and is set designed by Horace Jackson.

Many extras playing soldiers were World War One soldiers, cast in their actual ranks. The chief stunt pilot, Dick Grace, got a severe neck injury in a stunt crash while making Wings only two months earlier, but recovered in time for Lilac Time.

The film is restored in a 35mm print, which was screened at the New York City Museum of Modern Art in September 2014.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5487

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