"Sensation Seekers" (1927) is, frankly, a genuine potboiler, but...it's a great potboiler! Starring absolutely gorgeous Billie Dove who gives an outstanding performance and is someone the viewer cannot takes eyes off of while she's on screen, her co-stars are Raymond Bloomer, Huntley Gordon, Peggy Montgomery (no, not the child star), Will Gregory, Edith Yorke, Helen Gilmore, Phillips Smalley (director Lois Weber's ex-husband!), and others. Near the end, look for a hammy looking, mustachioed, young Walter Brennan as a yacht hand. One last person in the film needs to be recognized. He's not mentioned in the credits, but he plays a major part near the end, and that's Tom Ricketts as the new minister's bishop.
Newly released by Kino-Lorber on Blu-Ray, this is one of the last films directed by Lois Weber, and it was her last for Universal Studios where she'd been a top director, if not their top director, since the early and middle 1910s. Weber's works nearly always spun a moral of some sort. Here we see a twenties flapper, Dove, become infatuated with the new minister. We also see the new minister become infatuated with - Dove. Dove is seen early on going to a local jazz club (where a jazz band number is played out behind a screen in silhouette!!) and finding her father there with a woman not his wife - evidently a nightly habit - and then a raid occurring where Dove and the rest of the place, minus a couple of those in her crew whom she saves by taking their illegal flasks of booze, are carted off to jail. She's bailed out none the less by the new minister! Here begins the moral story. Rather than going through the shenanigans of the middle of the film - some of which is stretched just a tad too long...
The ending is a wowzer! Dove and her supposed fiancé, Huntley Gordon - a fiancé who is verily soused - are on a yacht going to another town to elope. They're on the yacht during a tremendous storm, one where any right minded individual would not attempt to weather in any small yacht. One of the crew who is captaining the wheel takes his eyes off of what he's doing for about twenty seconds and collides the yacht with a boat. It damages the yacht beyond repair. Meanwhile, the minister is in pursuit of Dove. A magnificent scene plays out with the weather, the sinking yacht, the imperiled Dove and crew, and the pursuing minister and the crew driving his "rescue" boat. Superb ending. And the film, for the record, ends rather abruptly, but it's a perfect ending for what has preceded it.
Highly recommended. Yes, it's a potboiler, and if you're offended with the patter of moral feet chasing the story you may not like all that you see, but it's done with some genuine talent and spiritual feeling. Weber definitely had her eye on the box office as well, and because of that, this still plays with lots of entertainment value. Dove is glorious to watch.
One last note: I've seen Huntley Gordon in several films over the years, and he always reminds me of a combination of William Boyd (Hopalong) and Reginald Denny. He looks exactly as if they'd collided and become a new individual!
