back

Wine of Youth

Retrospective 2020
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.
by King Vidor
with Eleanor Boardman, James Morrison, Johnnie Walker, Niles Welch, Creighton Hale, Ben Lyon, William Haines, William Collier Jr., Pauline Garon, Eulalie Jensen USA 1924 English intertitles 72’ Black/White

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