Why Be Good?
About Why Be Good?
Winthrop Peabody Jr. goes out for a last night before he starts work at his father's department store. Peabody Sr. tells him to stay away from the women on the staff. Pert Kelly, a salesgirl who has just won a dance contest, meets him at the nightclub The Boiler. He takes her home and makes another date, not knowing she works in the store. On that date he tests how far she will go. She refuses. They marry the same night and face his father with the marriage.
Cast & crew
More about Why Be Good?
William A. Seiter directed Colleen Moore and Neil Hamilton. John McCormick produced. Paul Perez and Carey Wilson are credited on the script. Warner Bros. Pictures distributed it. There is no spoken dialogue.
Themes
Look
Sidney Hickox photographed the department-store and nightclub scenes for a picture that plays with a Vitaphone track and intertitles, not spoken dialogue.
Music
A Vitaphone score carries sound effects and some synchronized singing. The characters' speech is on title cards.
Preservation
Long treated as lost apart from its discs, the film was restored in 2014 from a Cineteca Italiana print and the Vitaphone soundtrack.
Notes
- Bodil Rosing, John St. Polis, and Edward Martindel are in the supporting cast. Martindel plays Peabody Sr.
- For years only the Vitaphone discs were known. A 35mm print turned up in the late 1990s at the Cineteca Italiana.
- Warner Bros. and the Vitaphone Project paid for a restoration finished in 2014.
- The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences premiered that restoration at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theater on September 6, 2014.
Scenes
- Pert meets Peabody Jr. at The Boiler after winning a dance contest.
- She refuses his test, and they marry that night.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Why Be Good (1929) by William A. Seiter.webm)
