Quality Street

he doesn’t just re-invent “Phoebe”, she creates a younger version: her neice “Livvy”. It isn’t just him whose head is turned, though. There are plenty of other dashing young men now paying court to this revamped lady and she is soon ably playing them all off the increasingly jealous “Brown”. Of course, it being a small middle-class English community, there are no shortage of nosey-parkers watching everything that is going on and they are enjoyably epitomised by spinster “Willoughby” (Flora Finch) who could give you a running commentary on the grass growing in an house two miles away! Basing a silent film on a book, and a Sir J.M. Barrie book at that, was a risky venture and does rob the story of it’s verbal flightiness and some of it’s mischief, but there’s still quite a lot of chemistry on display from Nagel and a very engaging Davis who does the doubling-up role in a way that wouldn’t fool anyone, and Sidney Franklin manages to keep all of this moving along with an entertaining skip in it’s step.