Just Another Blonde (filmography page)

  Just Another Blonde is a romantic drama about two small-time gamblers and the two Coney Island girls they romance. For the film, Louise Brooks was loaned out by Paramount to First National. Of the four principals, Brooks has the smallest part, playing a supporting role as the brunette to blonde Dorothy Mackaill, the star of the film. Nevertheless, the critic for the New York Sun reported, “… Louise Brooks, although nearly crowded out of the picture, is almost as good as she was in Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em,” which had also just been released.

A number of scenes for the film were shot on location in Luna Park, an amusement park on Coney Island in Brooklyn. During production, stories emerged of the excitement generated by the making of the film. The New York Evening Post reported that stars mingling among the crowds generated too much attention, so much so excited visitors threatened to demolish the dance hall were one scene was set. Director Alfred Santell was forced to wait until the park closed, and then recruited 200 extras and “kept them busy dancing for the rest of the night.”

Despite its local setting and promotion as a “dainty, dazzling, golden glorification” of a “thrill packed tale of love and romance,” Just Another Blonde fared poorly among NYC newspaper critics. To capture local interest, the film was shown in-and-around the metropolis as The Girl from Coney Island. But even this local angle couldn’t spare the film from the barbs of local critics. The New York Telegram was the most blunt, “The Girl from Coney Island, the so called feature picture, is interminable and stupid.” Dorothy Herzog of the New York Daily Mirror was less cutting, “Dorothy Mackaill, as Blondie, and Louise Brooks, as Blackie, enter in celluloid during the second reel. Apparently most of them was left on the cutting-room floor to permit the sub-titler a chance to resurrect jokes so old that even Cleopatra would have been prompted to justifiable murder.”

Some criticized what they saw as a rather slight story. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote, “The new film at the Strand Theater in Manhattan, The Girl From Coney Island, appears to be an excellent example of the common practice in Hollywood to stretch two-reel screen materials in to so-called feature productions. This mildly amusing picturizatlon of Gerald Beaumont’s story, ‘Even Stephen,’ would, I daresay, have made a fairly interesting short-reel movie. In its padded state of six or seven reels the drama falls considerably short of maintaining its pace beyond the very earliest sequences…. And so The Girl From Coney Island wallows along, a mawkishly sentimental narrative heavily burdened with lengthy subtitles.” Eileen Creelman of the New York American was a bit more forgiving, “Santell has taken a fifth rate plot, surrounded it with first rate atmosphere and a couple of amusing characterizations, and turned out a picture.”

What critics did appreciate was the acting, and Brooks. The Atlanta Constitution wrote “Although Miss Mackaill and Mr. Mulhall’s parts are listed as the leading roles, the acting of Louise Brooks and William Collier, Jr., as second roles, has a vital part in the picture and must be given due credit. Their acting was unusually good throughout.” Moving Picture World stated, “Jack Mulhall and Dorothy Mackaill are well cast in the leading roles and the same is true of Louise Brooks and William Collier, Jr., as their pals each give thoroughly creditable interpretations of their roles and add materially to the entertainment value of the picture.”

The Cincinnati Post went a little further, “Jack Mulhall is assisted in this bit by William Collier Jr., and two really good-looking girls, Dorothy Mackaill and Louise Brooks. Somebody told us Brooks was ‘Miss America’ a year or two ago. At any rate, she will knock your eye out and Mackaill will attend to the other one.” The Cedar Rapids Republican gushed, “Louise Brooks, who is said to be Clara Bow’s only rival as cinema’s most ravishing flapper, is a convincing argument in favor of modernism.“

After all was said and done, the film received a good number of positive reviews. Moving Picture World called it a “pleasing little romance of two Twentieth Century Couples.” Elsewhere, the editor of Exhibitor’s Herald said, “Dorothy Mackaill is the blonde of Just Another Blonde, but Louise Brooks is the young woman whose personality makes the somewhat light incidents of it seem reel and important. Jack Mulhall and William Collier, Jr., are the young men whose courtship of the very modern gals portrayed form a basis for what takes place. What takes place is a lot of quite probable incidents highlighted by a plane wreck which looks more real than anything like it in years…. The picture’s another of those likely little stories which seek not to decide all the vital issues with which mankind is concerned but rather to provide theatergoers with pleasant pastime. It does this very well, better, I think, than nine out of ten current efforts in kind.”

Despite sometimes middling reviews as well as the coming of sound, Just Another Blonde had legs. It continued to be shown regularly in small town America into the summer of 1928, when interest began to wane. One late screening in the United States took place in April, 1929 when the Fox California in Venice, California paired it with the Greta Garbo film, Wild Orchids, under the headline “Special Revival Feature.” Later that same year, the film was revived for brief runs in Atlanta, Georgia and Fargo, North Dakota. [Throughout 1928 and 1929, the film also remained in circulation in other English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, England and the Union of South Africa.] Its last documented public screening anywhere was in Brazil in 1930. Today, Just Another Blonde is considered a partly “lost” film. Additionally, a trailer is known to survive.

• What the Critics Said
• NY censorship documents
• Location shooting
• Scrapbook page
• Bibliography

DATABASE LINKS:

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• AFI catalog
• All Movie Guide
• BFI website (uk)
• Česko-Slovenská filmová databáze (cz)
• Fdbl (pl)
• Filmweb (pl)
• IMDb
• Kinorium (ru)
• Letterboxd
• MUBI
• San Francisco Film Preserve
• SilentEra.com
• Swedish Film Database (sv)
• TCM.com
• TMDB
• Wikipedia

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STORY SYNOPSIS:
“Jimmy O’Connor, employed in a gambling establishment, is so honest that he is offered a banking job at any time; and for his sake, Scotty, his protegé and pal, decides to go straight. The boys go fifty-fifty in everything until Scotty falls in love with Diana, who operates a shooting booth at Coney Island. Jimmy declares that he disapproves of all women–except his mother–and Scotty despairs until he schemes to have Jimmy meet Jeanne, Diana’s girl friend. It is only when they expect to be killed in an airplane crash that Jimmy tells Jeanne he loves her, but later he feigns indifference. Jeanne is heartbroken; Scotty explains that he can’t marry Diana until Jimmy is safely engaged; and with that both boys are reconciled to their respective sweethearts.” (For an extended description of the film’s story, see the First National document, Synopsis from script.)

PRODUCTION HISTORY:
Production began under the title The Charleston Kid. Filming took place beginning July 19 and ran through August 30, with location shooting done at Luna Park in Coney Island, in Edgemont district near Scarsdale, and at the Curtiss airfield in nearby Mineola (on Long Island). The First National Studio was located in Manhattan, though a newspaper reports noted interiors were shot at the old Biograph studio in the Bronx.

ALTERNATE TITLES:
Under its American title, Just Another Blonde, documented screenings of the film took place in Australia (including Tasmania), Bermuda, Canada, China, India, Ireland, Jamaica, New Zealand, South Africa and the British Isles (England, Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales). When shown in and around New York City, Just Another Blonde was promoted under the title The Girl from Coney Island. In the United States, the film was advertised under the title Just Another Blond (Portuguese-language press). The film was also shown under the title The Charleston Kid in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia.

Elsewhere, this motion picture was known to have been shown under other-language titles including The Charleston Kid and Una de Tantas (Argentina); Die Braut am Scheidewege (Austria); The Charleston Kid (Australia); The Charleston Kid and Entre a Loura e a Morena and O Garoto do Charleston and Laços de amor (Brazil); The Charleston Kid (Cuba); The Charleston Kid and Pouze jiný svetlovlasý (Czechoslovakia); Den blonde fares (Denmark); Le Danseur de Charleston and Marchands de Beaute (France); Die Braut am Scheidewege (Germany); Girl from Coney Island (Hungary); Blonde Piker and Sommerflirt (Norway); Caixeiro Viajante (Portugal); Una de Tantas (Spain); and Den blonda faran (Sweden).

STATUS:
A trailer and an incomplete print of the film has been preserved at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. What remains are fragments of various lengths from 5 of the 6 reels (specifically parts of reels 1-4, and 6); each are incomplete, with “all reels missing footage, some severely.” Some 5000 ft. of the film are now preserved as a b&w 35 mm. safety preservation dupe negative, though some of the footage reportedly has a “light amber tint.” In 1996, some of this surviving film, which includes footage with Louise Brooks, was shown at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. I saw that presentation, and later had the chance to review the surviving footage in early 2024. The surviving footage is currently undergoing preservation, with a run time of 32 minutes at 22 frames per second.

[Another copy of the film may exist or may have existed. In 2016, I was told by an unimpeachable source that a print of the film was privately screened in London by a collector in the early 1960s. This private collector has since died, and it is not known what became of his print. The person who saw the film in the early 1960s admitted “it isn’t very good.” But still, who wouldn’t want to see it even if it ain’t half-bad?]

RELATED DOCUMENTS, PROGRAM NOTES, etc…:
— Synopsis from script (First National, 1926)
— Thematic cue sheet (George Eastman Museum)
— Editorial image by Al Hirschfeld (December 13, 1926)
— Book excerpt by Harry Waldman (Missing Reels, 2000)
— “Louise Brooks and Early Radio” by Thomas Gladysz (LBS Substack)