Louise stars with James hall in Rolled Stockings
| Four months later, she was teamed with her fellow "Paramount Junior Stars," James Hall and Richard Arlen, in the campus-centered comedy-drama Rolled Stockings. As the flapper romantic object of two rival brothers, Louise reclaimed her familiar "black helmet" and looked her most striking. As Variety's "Rush" noted: "Miss Brooks, who has done several excellent things, here finds a role for her demure charm with tis tricky suggestion of mild sophistication." Blonde starlet Nancy Phillips added balance to the movie's chief romantic couplings, initiating a brief Hollywood career that went nowhere. Brooks later recalled that a sweating Richard Rosson directed Rolled Stockings with a "trembling" script. ("There wasn't enough Bromo-Seltzer to float him out of his chair".) The third of her four 1927 films found Louise as a gunman's honey named Snuggles Joy in the tough gangland melodrama The City Gone WIld. Again, hers was the secondary female role, billed after long-forgotten Marietta Millner (as the innocent "nice" girl). But it was Brooks, playing opposite veterans Thomas Meighan and Fred Kohler, who made the greater impression with the substance of her double-crossing moll. She, in turn, was most impressed by their seasoned director, James Cruze, whose main claims to fame were The Covered Wagon (1923) and Old Ironsides (1926): "He was fascinating. The strangest man I ever knew...He almost never talked and he drank from morning till night. Cruze was a wonderful man. I don't know what ruined him. I don't think it was booze, because it never changed him at all." |
Copyright: McKenna W. Rowe, 1997-2006