Say It With Sables
Trad. let.: Dillo con lo zibellino; Sog.: Frank Capra, Peter Milne; Scen.: Dorothy Howell; F.: Joseph Walker; Mo.: Arthur Roberts; Scgf.: Harrison Wiley; Int.: Helene Chadwick (Helen Caswell), Francis X. Bushman (John Caswell), Margaret Livingston (Irene Gordon), Arthur Rankin (Doug Caswell), June Nash (Marie Caswell), Alphonz Ethier (Mitchell), Edna Mae Cooper (Maid); Prod.: Frank Capra per Columbia Pictures; Pri. pro.: 13 luglio 1928 35mm. D.: 2’ a 24 f/s.Bn. The film is lost, we have only the trailer
Film Notes
[Harry] Cohn first put the credit “A Frank Capra Production” on the July 13, 1928 release Say It With Sables. (…) Capra and Milne wrote the story of Say It With Sables, a throwback to the virulent misogyny of some of his Sennett films; the screenplay was by Columbia’s story editor, Dorothy Howell, the first of several she would write for the director. Margaret Livingston starred as a gold-digger with a penchant for expensive furs. Banker Francis X. Bushman dumps her to marry the more genteel Helene Chadwick, but years later she takes her revenge by seducing his not-very- bright son (Arthur Rankin). The mother shoots her, and a sympathetic detective lets the death go on the books as a suicide. It was a drearily puritanical “sins of the fathers” melodrama.
Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Simon & Schuster, New York 1992 (revised edition, St Martin’s Griffin, New York 2000)