Marion Davies became a movie actress thanks to media baron William Randolph Hearst, who fell in love with her when she was a chorus girl with the Ziegfeld Follies and financed her first movies, but it was her talent and charm that made her a movie star. Hearst wanted to feature the young beauty in costume spectacles and romantic dramas while she proved to be a natural comedienne with spot-on timing, talents she displayed in films like King Vidor's Show People and The Patsy (both 1928).
Sometimes the genres fortuitously came together, as in Little Old New York, a mix of period piece, romance and comedy starring Davies as a young Irish lass who poses as her brother to claim an inheritance left by their rich American uncle. The story, based on a play by Rida Johnson Young, is set in 1807 New York City and populated by such storied historical figures as business magnates Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor, author Washington Irving and engineer Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat.
Hearst created Cosmopolitan Pictures and built a studio in New York City to produce Davies' movies. It was well placed for Little Old New York, and Hearst spared no expense in recreating the historical city. A huge city street set, said to be the biggest ever built for a motion picture, was constructed at the 23rd Regiment armory in Brooklyn. A full-sized, working replica of Robert Fulton's first steamboat, the Clermont, was built and sent sailing along the Hudson River, retracing the route of the original ship's maiden voyage. Over 1,000 extras were reportedly used in one scene. Production was delayed when a fire tore through the Cosmopolitan soundstage, destroying costumes and a ballroom set filled with antique furniture and art. The losses were covered by insurance but filming shifted to other New York studios while Hearst rebuilt.
Meanwhile Hearst bought New York City's Park Theatre, rechristened it the Cosmopolitan, and hired Joseph Urban, art director of Little Old New York, to remodel it in time for the film's premiere. According to Davies, it wasn't quite ready for opening night; a massive $60,000 chandelier was only partially in place when Hearst ordered work to stop and to admit the audiences lined up outside. "I didn't look at the picture, because I was looking at the chandelier all night long," she recalled years later. "It was an enormous thing, and all the audience down below would've been killed if it had fallen." Luckily for all it held through the screening.
"Little Old New York and When Knighthood Was in Flower [1922] were very successful," Davies recalled in her autobiography. "They made money. The other pictures we made were not." Hearst lavished money on budgets and advertising, which her pictures didn't always make back. To promote Little Old New York, Hearst entered a Cosmopolitan float in New York's Jubilee Parade two months before its August 15 opening. Davies, however, was popular with audiences and Little Old New York was, according to film historian Jeanine Basinger, one of the films that secured her stardom. It was one of the top ten box office rentals for 1923, and The New York Times film critic Mordaunt Hall listed it among the top ten best movies of the year.
Sources:
Silent Stars, Janine Basinger. Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
The Times We Had, Marion Davies. Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1975.
AFI Catalog of Feature Films
IMDb
