The Frisky Mrs. Johnson

A champagne-bubble of a film, now dissolved into the ether, once shimmered with the mischief of Billie Burke’s fluttering gaze. Clyde Fitch’s 1903 stage farce—about a society matron who fakes her own flirtatious scandal to jolt her complacent husband—was transposed to the screen as a giddy pantomime of matrimonial brinkmanship. Burke’s Mrs. Johnson, all ivory gloves and conspiratorial dimples, stages an illicit correspondence, drapes herself in chiffon intrigue, then pirouettes through drawing-rooms where whispers travel faster than ticker tape. The camera, drunk on her porcelain cheekbones, lingers as she feigns elopement with a mustachioed art dealer, sparking a domino rally of mistaken identities: a spinster cousin (Emily Fitzroy) brandishes a revolver like a parasol; a moonstruck clerk (Robert Agnew) chases shadows down Fifth Avenue; a bemused husband (Lumsden Hare) discovers that jealousy can be purchased by the yard at Bergdorf’s. Intertitles, lettered in lavender ink, trumpet aphorisms on the high cost of virtue and the bargain price of scandal. The final reel—lost, alas—reportedly frosted the chaos with a snow-storm of confetti outside St. Patrick’s, where Burke’s laugh, silent yet somehow audible, detonated like a soap-bubble full of silver dust.