Why Be Good?

A young shopgirl falls, without meaning to, for the boss’s son. She is a girl of nineteen twenties New York who goes to dance contests and lives her days to the full. The man’s family, meanwhile, begins to talk about her reputation. The film is about how fragile a thing reputation was for young women in that period. The false opposition set up between having fun and being taken seriously is the real matter. The gap between the generations becomes visible both at home and at work. It comes from the vein of American cinema of 1929 that told the youth of the jazz age. Colleen Moore takes the lead in William A. Seiter’s eighty four minute American film, completed in 1929.