Padlocked. 1926. USA. Directed by Allan Dwan. Screenplay by Rex Beach, Becky Gardiner, James Shelley Hamilton. With Lois Moran, Noah Beery Sr., Louise Dresser, Richard Arlen. Restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, from a print held by the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic. 70 min.
Lois Moran is largely remembered for having a brief affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald and inspiring the character of Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night, but as her films of the 1920s are rediscovered, she has come into focus as a particularly fresh, natural performer, whose easy, unaffected manner suggests the stars of the 1930s more than contemporaries like Norma Talmadge and Gloria Swanson. After her film debut in Stella Dallas (also screening in this series), Moran appeared in a few films at Paramount’s Astoria studios, including this 1926 melodrama directed with great formal skill by Allan Dwan, who here beautifully exploits the moving-camera techniques he played a large part in inventing, with the sublime collaboration of cinematographer James Wong Howe. Like many films of the flapper era, Padlocked is an explicitly feminist story of personal liberation, with Moran as the dutiful daughter of a massively repressive Wall Street patriarch (Noah Beery); her escape route leads her into the clutches of a disturbingly Epsteinesque playboy and his female recruiter.