In his recent New Yorker profile of Louise Brooks, Kenneth Tynan reports this reaction to a recent viewing of Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, one of Brooks' earliest available films:
“Evelyn Brent is the nominal star of Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, a slick and graceful comedy about Manhattan shopgirls, but light-fingered Louise, as Brent's jazz-baby younger sister, steals the picture with bewitching insouciance...especially when she dons a white top hat to go to a costume ball (at which she dances a definitive Charleston). The plot calls for her to seduce her sister's boyfriend, a feckless window dresser, and she does so with that fusion of amorality and innocence which was to become her trademark.... What images do I retain of Brooks in Love 'Em and Leave 'Em? Many comedic details; e.g., the scene in which she fakes tears of contrition by furtively dabbling her cheeks with water from a handily placed goldfish bowl, and our last view of her, with all her sins unpunished, merrily sweeping off in a Rolls-Royce with the owner of the department store. And, throughout, every closeup of that blameless, unblemished face.”