Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Delicious Little Devil (1919)

The barely-remembered Mae Murray turns in a cute little comic performance as a dizzy girl who supports her extended family by taking a job as a dancer in a roadhouse, appropriating the reputation of a notorious vampire. Rudolph Valentino is featured as the playboy son of a wealthy building contractor who becomes fascinated with the incognito dancing girl.

This spare comedy features the requisite amount of imposture, bad reputations, class separation, misunderstandings and exposure for this stock premise. Of course, the budding romance is threatened by circumstance, assumptions, exterior forces and a wolfish ‘duke,’ until the whole shebang degenerates into a parody of melodramatic chase films. All is well, as is expected, as soon as the truth comes out.

Mae Murray’s manic but winning performance is reminiscent of the comical performances of Mary Pickford and Mary Miles Minter, with her pouty, silver-lidded makeup and her mugging, girlish mannerisms all played to the hilt. Valentino is nondescript in this stock role that predates his success as a mysteriously foreign ladykiller. We really enjoy the spare comic performance of Mary’s roadhouse maid, played by an anonymous actress.

— Carl Bennett

The film is accompanied by a fine music score composed by Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum that is performed on piano, violin, cello, acoustic guitar and banjo.

Supplemental material includes audio commentary by film historian Gaylyn Studlar; a filmed introduction to Blood and Sand (1922) by Orson Welles from Paul Killiam’s The Silent Years television series (17 minutes); newsreel footage of Valentino’s funeral (3 minutes); and a vintage theatrical trailer for Blood and Sand (2 minutes).

This is our recommended home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region A Blu-ray Disc edition is also available directly from . . .

This DVD edition has been mastered from a good to very-good 35mm print at sound-film speed, resulting in action that moves far too quickly, which cranks Mae Murray’s frantic performance to a speed that is maniacally comical. While the video transfer is very-good, holding much of the remaining visual details (particularly when viewed on an upscaling high-definition system), the print itself is at times contrasty with lost highlight details and some exposure fluctuations, with persistent white spotting from beginning decomposition, dust and long vertical scratches.

Some portions of the print show signs of beginning decomposition at the left and right edges of the picture, and some shots in the print are only of good quality. Some shots are missing from this nearly-complete, export-version 35mm nitrate print held by the Eye Film Instituut Nederland, with new video-based English-language intertitles replacing the surviving Dutch intertitles. Our video scoring would have been higher had the surviving print material ben in better condition.

The film is accompanied by an excellent music score compiled by Rodney Sauer, based on cue sheets from 1922, and performed by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

For our notes on the accompanying film, Beyond the Rocks (1922), see our Beyond the Rocks on home video page.

We really would have liked the video transfer rate of this edition to have been slowed down to a something like a natural pace. The running speed is so fast that viewers don’t get much opportunity to savor Murray’s performance. Whenever we view this film today, we use a personal computer with software capable of fractional playback speeds to slow down the action. Still, we are thankful to have any opportunity at all to experience this Universal programmer with its early Valentino appearance and still recommend this DVD home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition is also available directly from . . .