Though all but forgotten today, Billie Dove was once considered such a threat to the career stability of silent film stars Marion Davies, Clara Bow, and Mary Pickford that Pickford insisted on doubling Dove in her love scenes for The Black Pirate (1926), lest her rival's leading man - Pickford's husband Douglas Fairbanks - get any ideas. The first Hollywood actress to receive a Technicolor screen test, Dove retired at the height of her career (following a three-year tryst with Howard Hughes). One of her last projects was the early talkie One Night at Susie's (1930), a First National-Warner Brothers crime melodrama that suggested to Depression era moviegoers that randy Broadway producers were as great a threat to the moral fabric of the nation as racketeers, mobsters, and bootleggers. Dove plays a chorus girl who kills her boss (John Loder) during an attempted rape and allows her lover (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) to take the fall; in prison, Fairbanks writes a sure-fire hit play that could make Dove a star, if she can only excite the interest of a new producer. Dismissed by the critics of the day, One Night at Susie's did little to advance the careers of its players but director of photography Ernest Haller would establish himself as a top-flight cinematographer, shooting such prestige pictures for Warners as Captain Blood (1935), Dark Victory (1939), Mr. Skeffington (1944), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?.

By Richard Harland Smith