KIKI
Starring Norma Talmadge and Ronald Colman
MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE
July 1926
Here is a rattling good number for Norma Talmadge. While the star does not quite come up to expectations in the role made famous by Lenore Ulric on the stage, she, nevertheless, shows that she is a good girl as well as a first-rate comedienne. The piece is "gagged" more than the original stage version. But it is so filled with situations, slap-stick and laughs that there's no chance for it to fail.
Norma goes Normand or Fazenda in the way she falls over couches, gets kicked out in the alley, kicks a valet around and carries on like a roughneck -- and there is so much doing that one doesn't think how trifling is the plot.
The piece follows the original in all of its essential points and presents the love of a street gamine for a theatrical manager. It calls for the play of quick wits on Kiki's part, but she gets away with it -- because she is a good girl. The supporting cast is good -- with Ronald Colman, Marc MacDermott and others contributing first-rate performances.
KIKI
Starring Norma Talmadge and Ronald Colman
PHOTOPLAY
June 1926
Norma Talmadge is a comedienne now. And a comedienne of such charm and whimsicality that you are going to love her even more than you did in "Smilin' Through" and other lachrymose dramas.
She is funny and sad and gawky and gay all in one.
And once in a rare while, just to show you she still can cry, she allows you to see a glistening tear about to descend. But it's gone in a moment, and the new Norma struts across the room in a form-accentuating skirt and hastily thumbs her nose at a pursuing landlady. She even slides down the banister and indulges in a hair-pulling fight with Gertrude Astor, with whom she battles for Ronald Colman's cinema love.
Norma, you see, is Kiki of the widely-seen stage success. If you do not know the story, it's all about an awkward little Paris street gamin with theatrical inclinations, fanned to a fervent flame by love for a Parisian theatrical manager, admirably played by Ronald Colman. But Ronald is enamoured of Gertrude Astor, his leading lady, and before Norma wins Ronald, she battles Gertrude, succumbs momentarily to the able wiles of Marc McDermott who plots with Gertrude, and finally lapses into a tremendously funny mock fainting spell from which Ronald is called upon to revive her.
It's from the French farce by Savoir - with a script by Hans Kraely - and the cast is excellent, which means funny George K. Arthur, too.
That Clarence Brown of splendid "Goose Woman" fame directed it, speaks for itself. Invite the children over eighteen to go with you.
For more information, see "Kiki" as our "Feature of the Month"