The American Venus

The American Venus (1926)

A lost film - Mary Gray, whose father manufactures cold cream, is engaged to sappy Horace Niles, the son of Hugo Niles, the elder Gray's most competitive rival in the cosmetics business. Chip Armstrong, a hot-shot public relations man, quits the employ of Hugo Niles and goes to work for Gray, persuading Mary to enter the Miss America contest at Atlantic City, with the intention of using her to endorse her father's cold cream should she win. Mary breaks her engagement with Horace. When it appears that she will win the contest, Hugo lures her home on the pretext that her father is ill, and she misses the contest. Chip and Mary return to Atlantic City, discovering that the new Miss America has told the world that she owes all her success to Gray's cold cream. On this note, Chip and Mary decide to get married.

Date of release
1926-01-31
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Frank Tuttle

Casting

Interesting facts

The American Venus is a 1926 American silent comedy film directed by Frank Tuttle, and starring Esther Ralston, Ford Sterling, Lawrence Gray, Fay Lanphier, Louise Brooks, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. The film was based on an original story by Townsend Martin. The scenario was written by Frederick Stowers with intertitles by Robert Benchley.

Production

Before shooting began, the film became the subject of a minor controversy when the New York Graphic, a newspaper known for its use of yellow journalism, claimed that the film's distributor, Paramount Pictures, had "fixed" the Miss America pageant.

Fay Lanphier was the first Miss America winner to star in a feature film. While the film was a popular draw upon its release and played in theatres for two years after its initial release (mainly due to the heavy publicity and the inclusion of two sequences that were shot in two-strip Technicolor), The American Venus received mixed reviews and Lanphier's contract was dropped.

Production took place in the fall of 1925, beginning around August 24 and ending around November 10. The film was shot in part in early September at the Miss America beauty pageant on Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and later at Paramount's Famous Players–Lasky's Astoria Studios on Long Island, as well as on the Coney Island boardwalk in Greenwich, Connecticut (in the vicinity of Round Hill and Banksville), and “near a swimming hole”…

The American Venus was privately screened at the Atlantic City Ambassador Hotel as a benefit under the auspices of the Atlantic City Shrine Club on December 26, 1925. A benefit screening of the film also took place at midnight on December 31, 1925, at the American Theater in Oakland, California—the hometown of star Fay Lanphier. The film premiered on January 11, 1926, at the Stanley Theater, Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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