The fashionable set is always the first to name a trend. So if you know you know, but if you don’t know you need to know that 2024 is the year of Coquette Core, a prettified aesthetic that can be boiled down to: put a bow on it. That’s technically a beribboned bow with a lower-case b, not a Clara Capital-B-Bow, but the difference is only nominal. At this year’s Hippodrome Silent Film Festival we celebrated the age of the flapper, with all things frilly, feminine and flirtatious.

If you wanted to keep up with the new womenswear trends in the 1920s and 1930s, the cinemagazine Eve’s Film Review would have been your bible, and one of my favourite events at this year’s Hippfest was Jenny Hammerton’s presentation on these witty and inventive female-interest dispatches. Here, every cinemagoer could truly learn how to be “a modern”, and more specifically, how to save your stockings from mud-spatters, advice that all of us in Bo’ness could truly use.

Hammerton’s lecture braced us for the full impact of this weekend’s flapper tag team: Clara Bow and Joan Crawford. First, on Friday night, Bow dazzled us with her relentlessly irresistible charms as Alverna, the pathological flirt who causes havoc in the great outdoors and breaks the hearts of Ernest Torrence and Percy Marmont in Victor Fleming’s Mantrap (1926). There really is no one to beat Bow at her best for va-va-vivacity, and I believe she never looked lovelier on screen than she does in this movie, notwithstanding the tattered and town wilderness ensemble she was constrained by for much of the running time. This is the true meaning of glamping. Kate Moss at Glasto could never. But then she doesn’t have the benefit of Neil Brand pouring out joy on the piano throughout. Apparently the source novel by Sinclair Lewis is terribly bleak, but you have to search hard inside this film to find that darkness. Simply put, Bow dazzles.

Joan Crawford was only starting out in the silent era, but you’ll remember that Margot Robbie played a hard-edged Bow-Crawford hybrid in the recent Babylon so we have been recently reminded of the strong connection between the two women, who fought their way out of similarly tough backgrounds to hit the Hollywood heights. And on Crawford’s birthday, we watched her embody “Dangerous” Diana in the flapper ensemble drama Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928) alongside Dorothy Sebastian and Anita Page cavorting on super-sized art deco sets courtesy of Cedric Gibbons. There’s a moral in this story, about saving yourself for love, the sancitity of marriage and about honesty in all things, but they sure have a good time proving it’s bad to be bad. Diana is a delight – she dances close to the edge, but she does not fall. I cannot say the same for Page’s captivatingly wicked Ann, whose downfall was raised the loudest gasp – and cheer – of the day.

The same night, pert Marie Prevost played a similar modern minx in Howard Hughes and Lewis Milestone genre-defining gangster piece The Racket (1928), but this time she weaponised her wiles to do her bit for the war on crime. Which I can’t say Diana would have done, but when you see the way Alverna eats that Mountie alive with her eyes at the end of Mantrap, you know she could have given it the old college try. Prevosts’s primary victim was a cub reporter, wet behind the ears and ripe for the picking, one of many enjoyable press-pack characters in this city-wide study of complicity, corruption and crime. The Racket I had long wanted to see but not had the chance, and it was every bit as snappy and cynical as I hoped, with Milestone’s camera launching right into the thick of the big-city action, skidding across nightclub floors and exposing a gun under every table – and even hat. Mike Nolan and Frank Bockius jazzed it up a treat, and did not miss a beat, nor a gunshot.

There’s more to life than fluttering your eyelashes, sadly – sometimes we’re dabbing away the tears instead. This weekend, when we weren’t flirting we were hurting, and the flipside to all this racy action was some pitch-perfect melodrama. The 2023 festival celebrated the art of Hollywood screenwriter extraordinaire Frances Marion – and I gave a lecture on her work ahead of the festival.

As I write this report in the airport the FOMO is very real – tonight Bo’ness hosts the world premiere of the new restoration of one of her many masterpieces, the new restoration of The Wind, starring Lillian Gish and directed by Victor Sjöström (1928). However, I was lucky enough to introduce both Stella Maris (Marshall Neilan, 1918) with Mary Pickford playing an orphan and an heiress in love with the same man, and the exquisitely paced Fannie Hurst adaptation Just Around the Corner (Frances Marion, 1921). The latter co-starred Lewis Sargent, as our heroine’s boisterous brother and his flexible features reappeared the next day as Noah Claypool in Frank Lloyd’s Dickens adaptation Oliver Twist (1922) starring Jackie Coogan as surely the most spirited, and funny take on that character in film history. I do enjoy this one (and Neil Brand makes it twice as much fun), although it slightly collapses under the weight of too much plot in the latter stages. But that is the great Victorian novel for you.

Two films that I had never seen before counted among my very favourites of the festival and I am always grateful for the consistently adventurous strain of the Hippfest programming, which brings gems from international archives to our shores. They were also the first film I saw and the last, one about children and another about an old man clinging on to his life’s passion. Adventures of Half a Ruble (Aksel Lundin, 1929) was a simply revelatory Ukrainian drama about a group of poor children playing in the dirt, but facing the real consequences of a deeply unequal society. A humble coin can be a lifeline to a child in peril, a covetable trifle to a miserly landlord and nothing at all in the face of a more serious loss. The children in this film are fantastic, grubby trousers and expressive faces, shot at the same low angles that ennoble many an admirable peasant worker in Soviet films of this period, and the film contains an ice-floe sequence that Pudovkin might admire. Thanks are due to John Sweeney for such sensitive accompaniment, which brought of the joy of the children’s escapades in mud and snow, as much as their suffering.

In the poetic Czech drama The Organist at St Vitus Cathedral (Martin Fric, 1929) the elderly protagonist brings joy to the city, and meaning to his own life with his playing. So when tragedy strikes in his home he makes a terrible choice to protect his precarious existence. When Klara, a young nun, falls into his life, both of their worlds become larger, and yet danger lurks around the corner. Gosh this is beautiful, with impressionistic imagery and sensitive characterisations. I found myself contemplating the meaning of a floundering fish as I climbed the steep hill back to my hotel last night, but this gorgeous, perceptive film will linger with me far longer. Klara is not coquette, but her face was compelling, and beautiful, with wimple or without.

That Maud Nelissen accompanied this film so superbly, on piano and electric keyboard, as well as Just Around the Corner and Our Dancing Daughters, is testament to the breadth of her talent. And she’s an evangelist for this film, which is truly the Lord’s work.

Farewell Bo’ness for another year, and farewell too to a festival that always charms and disarms me. Honestly, I think Hippfest is flirting with me.

• Bo’ness may be a small place, but I am not the only blogger in town. Check out the excellent dispatches from Paul and David too.
• Programme notes for the whoe festival are online here.
• Next year’s festival takes place 19-23 March 2025.
• Silent London will always be free to all readers. If you enjoy checking in with the site, including reports from silent film festivals, features and reviews, please consider shouting me a coffee on my Ko-Fi page.