The show business love triangle was a standard setup in silent-era Hollywood, but have you ever seen that story unfold among the cosmopolitan artistes of the Imperial Vaudeville of Moscow, who nonchalantly tour America as if the Czar were still ensconced at the Winter Palace? Florence Vidor and Clive Brook star as Vera Jenova and Ivan Norodon, “Russia’s Sovereign Conjurers,” whose magic act provides an ethereal dollop to a variety show otherwise dominated by El Brendel and his bespectacled goose. Brook “politely keeps out of the romantic life of the woman he loves, just doing his job throwing knives at her, until she needs him,” in the moony phrasing of film historian Jeanine Basinger. Leave it to rich heel Lowell Sherman to intervene and make an unscrupulous bid for Vidor. Director William A. Wellman generally affected a he-man air and earned his sobriquet “Wild Bill” with a series of hard-edged projects (Wings, The Public Enemy), but he was also capable of a sophisticated touch, evoking the insular camaraderie of professional performers with casual ease. (The script is based on a scenario by Ernest Vajda, the Hungarian writer who’d go on to contribute to many of Ernst Lubitsch’s musicals.) A beautifully designed and costumed production, You Never Know Women is a Fabergé egg among the run-of-the-mill gewgaws of contemporary romantic melodramas. (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society)

35mm from the Library of Congress

Preceded by: “The First Circus” (Tony Sarg, 1921) – 6 min – 35mm from the Library of Congress