Wine of Youth
Source: Sammlung Cinémathèque suisse, © 1924 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Mary Hollister has two suitors. Unlike her mother and grandmother, she doesn’t want to just marry as a matter of course; she wants to choose her husband wisely. So Mary decides to go on a camping trip with both men and another couple to try out a kind of “test marriage”. At home, the plan meets with rabid disapproval from the family. But Mary flouts the interdictions, triggering a serious crisis in her parents’ marriage … Wild parties, fast cars. Boasting all the emblems of the youth culture of the era, Wine of Youth opens as a resounding celebration of the Jazz Age, whose mavens seem to know no moral bounds. But because the film attributed to Mary a high sense of responsibility, it also showed that not everyone who fell in love primarily while doing a polka or a stately waltz is necessarily a tyrannical, hopeless old fogey or a hypocrite. Sporting none of the alluring trappings of a flapper, Eleanor Boardman, who would later play the epitome of a modern woman in The Crowd, proved to be ideal casting in King Vidor’s generational drama, playing a young woman with an inquiring mind and a desire for freedom. She proved the admiration was mutual in 1926 by marrying the director.
With
- Eleanor Boardman
- James Morrison
- Johnnie Walker
- Niles Welch
- Creighton Hale
- Ben Lyon
- William Haines
- William Collier Jr.
- Pauline Garon
- Eulalie Jensen
Crew
Director | King Vidor |
Screenplay | Carey Wilson |
Story | Rachel Crothers Mary the Third: a Comedy in Prologue and Three Acts (1923) |
Art Director | Charles L. Cadwallader |
Assistant Director | David Howard |
Producers | King Vidor, Louis B. Mayer |
Produced by
Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp.
Additional information
Print: From the collection of the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY