F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poet laureate of the Jazz Age, ascribed the loosening of American sexual mores to teen-agers’ acquisition of automobiles during the First World War. But it took Hollywood another decade to depict those new freedoms, and movies featuring a new generation of actresses who incarnated them—and of the directors who showcased them—will screen in Film Forum’s series “It Girls: Flappers, Jazz Babies & Vamps” (March 11-24).
One of the earliest films in the series, Ernst Lubitsch’s silent comedy “So This Is Paris,” from 1926 (screening March 12), showed what a German émigré could teach Hollywood about sex. It stars the vivacious actresses Lilyan Tashman and Patsy Ruth Miller, as pleasure-seekers whose attentions stray to each other’s husband. Suzanne Giraud (Miller), the wife of a prominent doctor and a…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 7, 2016