Pat O'Brien once said, "I don't just want to be a fast-talking Charlie all my life." That's exactly what he is in "Page Miss Glory"--a flimflam man who is always looking for an angle. As Click Wiley, he pairs up with Eddie Olson (Frank McHugh), a photographer whose lens is in hock. They are about to be ejected from the hotel where they have been squatting when a new scheme falls into their laps. Marion Davies plays a naive rube (Loretta) who comes to New York City. Her search for the perfect guy mostly centers around celebrity crushes, like the daring self-promoting stunt pilot, Bingo Nelson (Dick Powell). Davies' performance is the highlight of the film, but it is worth seeing the film just for the bevy of talented supporting actors.This light-weight comedy clocks in at 93 minutes, and it feels like an adaptation of a play (which it is), but its screwball story serves up plenty of fun and feels like a cultural artifact from the mid- thirties.

This movie is a good caper comedy that stars Marion Davies, Pat O'Brien and Dick Powell, with a fine supporting cast. The premise is a good one, and novel for the time. A small town girl arrives in the Big Apple by train. She doesn't have a job and she has nowhere to stay. But she has brains, so she heads for the top hotel to get a job as a chambermaid. One wonders if the writers for the 2002 movie, "Maid in Manhattan," didn't get their ideas for their plot from this 1935 film. Davies plays Loretta (aka, Dawn Glory later). O'Brien is Click Wiley, a half of a promoter team that more often than not comes up with a con game of some sort to strike it rich. The other half of the team is Ed Olson, played by Frank McHugh. His fiancé is Gladys, played by Mary Astor. And the idol of Loretta is that dashing, if dangerously daring pilot, Bingo Nelson, played by Dick Powell. Some other actors add character to the story, which otherwise would be very thin. This isn't a laugh-a-minute film, based on a script of witty dialog. It has some of that, but mostly it's a comedy of situations that are most funny with errors on the part of Click and Ed. "Page Miss Glory" is one of the last movies Marion Davies made. After 49 films dating to 1917, she retired at age 40 in 1937. Apparently, her star was dimming although her later co-stars were among the top leading men of Hollywood. Since 1930, she appeared in films with Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Leslie Howard, Robert Montgomery, and O'Brien and Powell. I've enjoyed all of her several films that I've seen, but I note that her performance varies in those from good to excellent. She was at her best in comedy, for which she was best known. In those films especially, it's hard not to like this actress, or to appreciate her talent. The ebullient Davies is a delight. She always seems to have something to be cheerful about. And, she had a winning smile and sparkling eyes that just endear her that much more. Her fading from stardom at such an early age was probably due to several circumstances. Her long-running affair with the married William Randolph Hearst probably figured in somewhere. Hearst had promoted Davies aggressively in his magazines, when she was popular. His own Cosmopolitan Productions company starred Davies in more than one- third of its films over its 20-year life – which just happened to coincide with Davies' film career. But Hearst's empire was crumbling during the Great Depression. Davies was drinking heavily during this time, but the couple stayed together another 14 years until his death in 1951. After Hearst's death, Davies married actor Horace Brown, and they stayed together until her death from cancer at age 64 in 1961.Davies wrote the script of the first movie she made, and then in 1918-19 her next four films were produced by her own company. She was not wealthy on her own, so the financing for the kick-start of her career came from somewhere else – most likely Hearst. Davies wasn't among the great actresses of the silver screen in her short career. But she was very good and entertaining in most of her pictures. One can't help but ask the familiar questions that always seems to surface in discussions and writings about Davies. What might she have become? How might her career have developed if she had not met and taken up with the married mega-millionaire Hearst at the start?

One of Hollywood's persistent myths is that Marion Davies was a dismal actress who received starring roles only because her longtime lover was Charles Randolph Hearst. Page Miss Glory disproves that notion. She was an adroit comedienne -- and here, she breathes life into a screwball plot that would have been pretty lame without her. She's a naive newcomer to New York working as a chambermaid at a hotel where con artists Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh haven't paid the tab for a month. How they turn her into the mythical temptress, Dawn Glory, and her romance with flier Dick Powell -- who's just as delightfully dopey as she is -- take up most of the film. You can probably chalk up the negative comments about Miss Davies to Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" in which Dorothy Commingore played Kane's mistress, a Davies-like actress known for her wooden performances. But catch "Page Miss Glory" -- or any one of several other movies she made before she quit the screen to look after Hearst -- and you'll discover just how much fun she was.

After William Randolph Hearst took his Cosmopolitan Pictures off the MGM lot and onto Warner Brothers, Marion Davies for her first film was given the title role in Page Miss Glory. The film is based on a Broadway play that ran only 63 performances during the 1934-1935 season.Press Agents Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh concoct a phony beauty by taking facial features from several known movie stars to create the perfect American beauty. When asked to produce her, our intrepid duo is stuck, but when hotel chambermaid Marion Davies comes in to make up the room, it seems like a prayer has been answered.O'Brien and McHugh are playing roles that they've both done dozens of times alone and together at Warner Brothers in the Thirties. I think Pat O'Brien pulled more cinematic cons than any other player on record. Davies has some very funny moments and I know she wished she could have done more films like this one.Dick Powell plays a Charles Lindbergh like aviator with a nice tenor voice who sings the song Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote for the film Page Miss Glory. It's done during a dream sequence when Davies still thinking like a chambermaid, imagines herself being swept up romantically by Powell.Page Miss Glory is one of Marion Davies better sound features and still worth seeing today.