One Romantic Night (1930)

The matriarch (Marie Dressler) of a dethroned family of minor Germanic royalty hopes to marry her daughter (Lillian Gish) to a crown prince (Rod La Rocque) but when she pushes for her daughter to use her brothers' tutor (Conrad Nagel) to make the prince jealous, things don't go quite as planned. Based on the play THE SWAN by Ferenc Molnar (remade in 1956) and directed by Paul L. Stein (THE LOTTERY BRIDE). Regarded as the greatest actress of the silent era, this was Lillian Gish's first sound film. She's delightful but the movie itself suffers from the stiffness and stagnation that affected many early talkies. It doesn't help that Conrad Nagel as the tutor is charmless, something that was remedied in the 1956 film where Louis Jourdan was much more sympathetic. Of cinematic importance as Gish's first sound film and as such, she made the transition to sound smoothly. With O.P. Heggie and Billie Bennett.