Broadway showgirl Marion Davies became a movie star through the dedication (and pocketbook) of her paramour and patron William Randolph Hearst. Yes, Davies was the inspiration for Susan Alexander Kane, the talentless opera star foisted heedlessly upon the world in Citizen Kane — but that gloss shortchanges Davies as an actress and an artist. One impediment to appreciating Davies’s range was often Hearst himself, who decreed that her world-historical beauty and vivaciousness would be commemorated in costume-heavy period pictures that had all the spontaneity of a high school history textbook. Davies’s admiration for The Big Parade inspired her to request that film’s director, King Vidor, to oversee The Patsy, a fleet, modern comedy about a woman striving to assert her own personality in a world of male indifference and imbecility. Davies stars as Patricia Harrington, the neglected younger sister of a social butterfly (Jane Winton) who barely bothers to keep track of her own beau. But Pat is no Patsy — she’ll land upon a luminous, boy-friendly personality through careful study of books and the silver screen. Though based on a successful Broadway comedy, Vidor had the good sense to ask Hearst, “Why don’t we forget the play that’s written and let Marion do as she does?” The result, in the words of film scholars Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, is a performance where “her vitality is her healthy defense against Kane-styled pretensions in high society and art.” 

35mm from Library of Congress