13 Washington Square

Melville W. Brown's 13 Washington Square, from Leroy Scott's 1914 play, is a late-silent class farce in which every character is in the wrong clothes. Aristocratic Mrs. de Peyster (Alice Joyce) tries to ship her son to Europe before he can marry a grocer's daughter. When he skips the steamer, she swaps outfits with her poor cousin, hides in a boarding house with her maid (ZaSu Pitts), and is mistaken for a crook by Deacon Pyecroft (Jean Hersholt), an art thief casing her own townhouse. All of them converge on the shuttered house. Universal, 1928. Joyce had been a Vitagraph ideal of dignity since the 1910s; here dignity is the gag.