Miss DuPont is worth watching for the poise and vulnerability she brings to Foolish Wives. Her Helen Hughes gives us welcome company beside von Stroheim’s Count, though the director’s interest in his own character leaves her too little room.
Fi1m perspective
In Foolish Wives (1922), Miss DuPont’s Helen Hughes is an American diplomat’s wife vulnerable to the attentions of a fraudulent count. DuPont gives her a poise that makes her more than a convenient target for him. We felt relief in Helen’s company because she gave us someone to attend to besides the film’s compellingly unpleasant Count. This is capable acting, worth noticing even when the director is busy encouraging us to look at himself.
Erich von Stroheim directs and plays the Count, and his attention to that character becomes a limitation for the rest of the cast. DuPont and Rudolph Christians, playing Andrew J. Hughes, have enough presence to hold our attention when it turns their way. Neither needs to displace the leading man for us to want more time in their company. Our reservation is with a director who seems less curious about Helen than we are, despite having cast someone capable of making her worth watching.
Her early work included Lombardi, Ltd. (1919), in which she was credited as Patricia Hannan. Foolish Wives brought prominence and a run of starring roles at Universal through the mid-1920s. The recurring parts were elegant or wealthy women, often vulnerable in romantic or society intrigue. Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (1925) and her supporting appearance in Mantrap (1926) belong to that pattern. It is a useful context for Helen: DuPont’s poise suits a character whose social position does not protect her from being deceived.
DuPont’s own hope for Foolish Wives was plain: “I worked over a year on it — and I want people to see it, because then maybe they’ll remember me.” There is no need to make grander claims on her behalf than the performance supports. Helen earns our attention even when the director is looking elsewhere. Begin there, provided the film’s slow pace and prolonged moral discomfort sound like reasonable terms for an evening.
Biography
Miss DuPont was an American actress. Credited variously as Patricia Hannan, Patty Du Pont and Patricia Dupont, she appeared as Helen Hughes in the 1922 film Foolish Wives.
Born Patricia Hannon in Frankfort, Kentucky, in April 1894, she made her screen debut in 1919 and appeared in a number of silent films through the 1920s. She was married to Sylvanus Stokes and died in Palm Beach, Florida, on 6 February 1973.
