It seems fair to point out that, as outrageous as the plot gets, her part isn’t devoid of truth, as she did indeed fail her first screen test, only to get hired anyway and become a star, quicker than her fictional counterpart she did indeed marry a director, albeit King Vidor rather than Frank Claymore and she’s still remembered a century on, if mostly for her role in The Crowd rather than for this picture. In this take on that cliché, the star was at least played by a nobody, Eleanor Boardman, who had won a contract with Goldwyn Pictures, the G in the future MGM, in a New Faces of 1922 contest. Of course, it’s a rags to riches tale of a young lady who finds her way to Hollywood, onto the screen and into the hearts of millions. Novelist Rupert Hughes did what he could to calm the backlash down in his 1922 novel, Souls for Sale, and again in his own adaptation of it in 1923, a large pool of talent lending their names to his cause in a string of cameos. Those three happened in the three years between 19.

It’s a Hollywood movie all about Hollywood movies, an attempt to defend an industry that had so recently endured so many scandals: the overdose of Olive Thomas, the Fatty Arbuckle trials and the murder of film director William Desmond Taylor. To my discredit, it does, but many of these names drifted quickly away from the limelight. I’m far more versed in silent cinema in 2023, so I was eager to see if that would hold true today. I first saw it on TCM in 2006 and failed to recognise many of the “thirty-five famous stars” that it boasts alongside its leads.

I took this viewing of Souls for Sale as a kind of test.

Souls For Sale by Rupert Hughes