Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-Presented by Chicago Film Society

The flapper captured America’s imagination in the 1920s, and Hollywood gave the public what it wanted with It and Our Dancing Daughters. Leave it to low-budget independent Gotham Productions to deliver the most whole-hearted endorsement of the archetype in Bare Knees. With her modern fashion and penchant for cigarettes, Billie (Virginia Lee Corbin) sticks out from the moment she arrives in Portersville, Virginia, a marked contrast to her prim sister Jane (Jane Winton) and her district attorney husband (Forrest Stanley). Billie soon turns the sleepy town upside down with new uniforms for the women’s softball team and fresh insights into conservative hypocrisy. With no star egos to weigh down the proceedings, Bare Knees emerges as a fleet and crisp time capsule, crammed with clever wordplay and fiery setpieces.

35mm print courtesy of the Library of Congress

Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-Presented by Chicago Film Society

Ernst Lubitsch had already acquitted himself capably in bringing the wit of Oscar Wilde to the screen without the benefit of spoken dialogue in his version of Lady Windermere’s Fan, so why not adapt Sigmund Romberg’s famous operetta The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg without the music? As in Lubitsch’s best work, the perverse constraints of the set-up serve to elevate the emotional stakes and refine the visual grammar. Ramon Novarro stars as Crown Prince Karl Heinrich, a pampered brat whose life only becomes human-sized again when he and his tutor Dr. Jüttner (Jean Hersholt) take in the earthy pleasures of Old Heidelberg. Karl soon falls for Kathi (Norma Shearer), the waitress at a Heidelberg biergarten and a spunky antidote to the foreordained strain of royal responsibility.