Lilac Time

Lilac Time (1928)

SEE LIFE at its most magnificent moments---in the most magnificent spectacle the screen has ever given you!

In France during World War I, a charming farm girl keeps a squadron of English pilots in good spirits as best as she can. She falls for a handsome newcomer who is already engaged.

Date of release
1928-10-18
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 31m
Genres
War, Drama, Romance
Director
George Fitzmaurice

Casting

Interesting facts

Lilac Time is a 1928 American synchronized sound romantic war film directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Colleen Moore and Gary Cooper. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using the short-lived Firnatone process. After First National Pictures was taken over by Warner Bros. Pictures, the soundtrack was transferred to sound-on-disc Vitaphone discs and re-released in that format. The film is about young American aviators fighting for Britain during World War I who are billeted in a field next to a farmhouse in France. The daughter who lives on the farm meets one of the new aviators who is attracted to her.

Production

Lilac Time was shot on sets at First National's Burbank studio and on location in El Toro, California, where a working airstrip, full-sized French village and farm serving as a base for a fictional Royal Flying Corps squadron, were built. For some scenes, the deserted village in Allaire, New Jersey were used for backdrops.

The crash scenes in Lilac Time turned out to be particularly difficult and hazardous. One scene called for Grace to crash and flip upside down in an aircraft. The second crash scene involved a crash-landing where the aircraft pirouetted on its nose and nearly hitting Opal Boswell, Moore's double, who scampered out of the way at the last moment.

Looking for realism, many extras cast as soldiers in the film had been actual World War I soldiers, in the ranks they portrayed. The chief stunt pilot, Dick Grace, had only finished doing stunt work on the Paramount film Wings (1927) nearly two months earlier. Grace sustained a severe neck injury in a stunt crash while making Wings but recovered in time for Lilac Time.

Among those in the cast were Colleen Moore's brother Cleve (billed as "Cleve Moore") and her cousin, Jack Stone. Eugenie Besserer had played "Mrs. Goode," a mother figure in Colleen's earlier film Little Orphant Annie, the first film to bring Colleen a measure of fame.

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

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