With its charismatic villain protagonist, political intrigue, and dark humor, Richard III is my favorite Shakespeare play, so it tickles my heart that a 1912 adaptation of it may have been America’s first feature film. I say “may have” because when it comes to film history, hard “firsts” are notoriously difficult to determine. So much of the silent era has become lost to the ravages of nitrate decomposition, but luckily Richard III has been preserved in excellent condition. The print was acquired by film projectionist William Buffum in 1960 and he rewound the film annually in order to prevent the materials from sticking together. It was only when he finally donated the materials to the American Film Institute that he learned of its historical significance.
The centerpiece of the production is thespian Frederick Warde, who plays the titular role. While forgotten today, he was a prominent stage tragedian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As film historian Tracey Goessel put it in her biography of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (who Warde helped get started as an actor), Warde was a second-tier stage star– not in the same league as a Bernhardt and sneered at by “sophisticated” critics, but popular with a mass audience eager for refined entertainment. English by birth, Warde extensively toured the United States, bringing Shakespeare to the general public outside of the major cultural centers like New York City and Chicago.
Many stage actors viewed motion pictures with disdain, but Warde was enthused by the new technology and sensed its potential as an art form. He would appear in multiple films in the 1910s and a few in the 1920s. Two of his Shakespearean roles were committed to celluloid: first Richard III in this 1912 film and then King Lear in 1917.
As with contemporary historical feature films like Sarah Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth or Helen Gardner’s Cleopatra, Warde’s Richard III was advertised as a major event, brimming with star power and spectacle. While the film industry was still dominated by shorts, features would quickly overtake the market because of the critical and commercial success of work like Richard III. Though Shakespeare’s language is at a decided disadvantage in the realm of silent cinema, reviewers were bowled over by the way motion pictures could expand the insular world of the stage, accommodating touches like large parades of extras on horseback and a full-scale boat on the water during the climax. Here was an epic sense of scope no proscenium could ever hope to capture.
So how does this Richard III play today? For most, it will only serve as a curio, but I think it’s one of the stronger early film features. It’s certainly hangs together better than even a slightly later feature like DW Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia, if only because the story has enough depth to justify its length. However, it isn’t friendly to non-Shakespeare fans. As with many early film adaptations of popular stage and literary works, Warde’s Richard III assumes its audience is familiar with the source material. Intertitles are mostly descriptive of what we’re about to see, occasionally sprinkling in some lines from Shakespeare’s text.
Though the throughline is simple enough (the ambitious Richard, Duke of Glocuester kills off his relatives and other inconvenient people so he can become King of England, only for his tyrannical behavior to undo him in the end), Richard III is a doozy of a play for anyone to adapt. As popular as it’s remained for almost five hundred years, the actual plot is suffused with dense historical context that can be super confusing to follow if you aren’t familiar with the chronology of England’s Wars of the Roses, which were a series of late medieval civil wars that lasted over three decades. And technically, the play is also part of a larger series of Shakespeare’s history plays about that conflict, preceded by the three-part Henry VI dramas.
David Garrick as Richard III, painted by William Hogarth in 1745. Image source: Wikipedia
Henry VI Part One starts with the funeral of warrior-king Henry V and focuses on the bloodshed following the loss of French territories he conquered during his brief life. The subsequent plays show how his heir, the gentle and religiously devout Henry VI, is unable to control the backstabbing nobles in his court, all vying for power. Eventually, Henry loses his crown to the York faction, led by the soon-to-be Edward IV and his younger brothers George and Richard (soon-to-be Richard III). These three plays have no protagonist, instead working as an ensemble piece with only the titular Henry VI and his conniving Queen Margaret playing major roles in all of them. Part Three is where we finally meet Richard, who quickly steals the show before getting his own play.
The Henry VI plays were popular in Shakespeare’s day, but they fell out of favor over the years and are seldom performed now. Therefore, Richard III is often performed as a standalone piece and heavily cut down to make it friendlier to audiences unfamiliar with the earlier plays. Later dramatists like Colley Cibber cobbled pieces of Henry VI Part Three into revised versions of Richard III, starting productions with Richard’s murder of Henry VI so audiences could quickly get a sense of what brings the Yorkists to power. Warde’s adaptation does the same, showing the arrest of Henry VI after Edward IV deposes him and then Richard’s grisly assassination of the former monarch in his cell.
This opening sequence is a marvel in terms of early cinematic technique. When you watch a great amount of films from the 1900s and early 1910s, you may think the film will present us with a static shot of Richard killing Henry before cutting to Edward’s coronation. However, this film does something clever, something that highlights the play’s themes and creates the illusion that the characters are inhabiting a greater world and not just a cramped indoor set. (Okay, it still looks like a cramped indoor set with the bricks painted onto the walls– but you get my meaning!)
Right as Richard pulls his sword out of the king’s body and assesses his latest kill, he crosses the room. Then, the movie cuts to a balcony. Entering from the right, Richard jubilantly leans over the edge and hails Edward IV’s triumphant procession as it passes, as though he wasn’t just putting holes in someone only seconds ago. What a creative illustration of not only Richard’s two-facedness, but the entire Yorkist regime. After all, Henry’s death is not just in Richard’s interest. The old king must be out of the way to legitimize Edward’s rule as well.
When you read the Henry VI trilogy before diving into Richard III, it becomes hard to see most of Richard’s victims as 100% guileless. A few are innocents (particularly his young nephews, who he has smothered to clear his way to the crown), but many of them are also ambitious, greedy, and unfaithful. Like many standalone Richard III adaptations, the 1912 film sidesteps this moral gray area, making Richard’s victims equally hapless since the majority of the audience won’t know any better, the Henry VI trilogy being so underseen.
This Richard III is a one-man show, with Warde stealing each and every moment with his gleeful wickedness and cunning. His joy in manipulation comes through in small gestures, like a sly smirk to the fourth wall as he woos the initially disdainful Anne Neville with false declarations of love to get her to marry him. However, he can be sinister as well. Later on, Anne’s poisoning at Richard’s hands– an act not shown in Shakespeare’s play– is dramatized in one of the film’s strongest scenes. Richard looms over the unconscious Anne as she lays in their unhappy marriage bed, ordering a physician to administer poison to her. The moody lighting casting Richard and his confederate in near-shadow is remarkable.
Not every scene is so eloquently presented. The famous nightmare sequence in which the ghosts Richard’s victims come back to haunt him the night before his final battle with Richmond is done without much imagination in terms of blocking. The double-exposed ghosts just stand off to the side of the sleeping Richard and point at him in one mostly indistinguishable mass. No matter. The film has enough striking moments to compensate.
A report on the film from Moving Picture World. Image Source: Internet Archive
Milestone films are not necessarily great films and that notion certainly applies here. It is not what I’d call a gateway silent film for the uninitiated, but those fascinated by early cinema and Shakespeare as I am will find it hits the spot. A transitional step between the more tableau-oriented early narrative film and the more sophisticated style of the 1910s, it’s a feast for any lover of cinematic history.
Sources:
American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations, edited by Charlie Keil and Ben Singer
The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks by Tracey Goessel
This post is for the Second Master of Suspense Blogathon hosted by Classic Film and TV Corner.
NOTE: Extremely mild spoilers for The Unforgiven and Wait Until Dark— like so mild that I was torn on including this note. However, I know some people are sensitive about any kind of spoiler for a movie they might be planning to see, so proceed with caution if that applies.
Of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s unfinished projects, No Bail for the Judge holds the greatest speculative allure. It would have involved the Master of Suspense making a thriller with sweet, dainty Audrey Hepburn. Not only that, the role he had in mind for her would have gone against the grain of her wholesome image, throwing her character headlong into a hazy labyrinth of psychosexual intrigue. Alas, the production was not to be and the cause of its demise has been hotly contested for over six decades now. What would the film have been like had it been made and why did it ultimately fizzle out?
No Bail for the Judge was a 1952 novel written by Henry Cecil, a barrister and judge who used his career in law as inspiration for his fiction. The story starts off with straight-laced judge Sir Edwin Prout getting hit by a car. Trying to walk off the injury, he is taken in by a kind prostitute named Flossie, who offers to let him sleep off the impact in her flat. When he awakes, the judge finds Flossie dead with a knife in her back. He has no recollection of what happened and so assumes he must be guilty.
While the press roars with schadenfraude over the respected judge’s apparent indiscretion, his daughter Elizabeth is unconvinced of his guilt. She recruits Ambrose Low, a petty thief raiding the Prout apartment for a rare stamp collection. She offers not to call the police on him if he helps her investigate the murder. Low’s snooping reveals Flossie was trying to blackmail the head of the prostitution ring, which led to her death. Ambrose manipulates the criminals involved, getting them to turn on one another and denounce each other in court. The novel ends with the judge’s freedom, and the implication that Elizabeth and Ambrose will become a couple.
The novel got on Hitchcock’s radar by the mid-1950s. He adored Cecil’s dry sense of humor and wanted to replicate that in a film version. The judge being falsely accused of a crime undoubtedly appealed to Hitchcock’s love for the “wrong man” trope. He initially reached out to Ernest Lehman to write a script, but when Lehman declined, Samuel Taylor got the job instead.
Hitchcock was rarely a stickler for adapting books to the letter and the trend was not to have been bucked for No Bail. Hitchcock planned on shifting the protagonist role from the thief to Elizabeth, with the thief only serving as a supporting character. In the novel, Elizabeth is on the periphery of the action. In Hitchcock’s version, she’d be the heart of the story– not only that, but a barrister to boot!
The identity of the villain would have changed as well. In the book, the mastermind is a garden variety crook named Sydney Trumper, Flossie’s landlord and pimp. Uninterested in such basic villainy, Hitchcock would have swapped him out for a respected society matron, an urbane antagonist cut from the same cloth as the Sebastians in Notorious, Tony Wendice in Dial M for Murder, or Phillip Vandamm in North by Northwest. The killer would be her playboy son Edward and his preferred murder weapon would be a necktie– a tool that would be reused to much nastier effect by sex-murderer Bob Rusk in Hitchcock’s pentultimate thriller, Frenzy.
The other big addition to the story would have been the usual dose of Hitchcockian psychosexuality. Elizabeth’s investigation involves masquerading as a prostitute in order to infiltrate the underworld, compromising her safety when she catches the unwanted attention of Edward. Hitchcock imagined Elizabeth as a woman self-possessed to the point of repression, her misadventures in the underworld forcing her to confront sexual passions.
What’s more, Hitchcock wanted to create a sense of moral ambiguity about Elizabeth’s actions. In the name of justice, she blackmails the petty thief into aiding her and then becomes willing to sacrifice him even after he does so. There is also the irony of Elizabeth’s disguise: she is not literally a prostitute, but has to use her body to glean information from Edward once she catches his attention.
This leads us to the most controversial part of Hitchcock’s conception of No Bail— the infamous Hyde Park sequence, often referred to as a rape scene. During a stroll with Edward in Hyde Park, Elizabeth uses the opportunity to try to get information about the murder out of him, but his lust-addled mind is elsewhere. In a bit of kinky foreplay, he uses his necktie to pull Elizabeth to him, then lowers her onto the ground before the screen fades to black. Throughout the sequence, Elizabeth is terrified, and only submits to Edward’s advances to keep her cover intact. The scene can be read in excerpt form at this link. This part of the plot would cause a great deal of grief throughout the project’s brief life. Paramount executives wanted it cut, while Hitchcock remained adamant that it needed to stay put.
The ending was apparently rough. Richard Franklin– an acolyte of Hitchcock’s and director of Psycho II— read the Sam Taylor script and felt the ending in which Edward gets drunk at one of his mother’s society parties, confesses to his crimes, and then falls to his doom lacked “the patina of Hitchcock,” though no doubt further refining could have led to a more inspired conclusion.
In this December 1959 issue of Paramount World, Hitchcock’s No Bail for the Judge is set to start filming with Hepburn during “mid-summer” of 1960. Image source: Internet Archive
Hitchcock already had casting for the three major parts in mind. He wanted Audrey Hepburn as the heroine, a combo-breaker to his usual preference for cool blondes. He chose Laurence Harvey as the burglar. (Had the movie gone into production, No Bail would have been one of the few films in which Hepburn was paired with a man her own age, as Harvey was only a year older than her.) John Williams was to play the judge. (This would have reunited Williams with both Hitchcock and Hepburn– he was Inspector Hubbard in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder and Hepburn’s chauffeur father in the Billy Wilder comedy Sabrina.) The film was to be shot in Technicolor and on location in London come 1960.
But 1960 came and went without a single moment of No Bail for the Judge committed to celluloid. It would never be filmed at all, in fact. Why?
Many a source claims the project died in 1959 and that its quiet death was the fault of Audrey Hepburn herself. Two reasons are offered up for Hepburn’s bowing out. The first is that she left due to being pregnant and not wanting to risk her unborn child’s safety OR that she was heartbroken from a miscarriage. The second is that the script was too violent for her tastes, particularly the contested Hyde Park sequence.
The many Hitchcock and Hepburn biographies out there form no consensus on what happened. Biographer Diana Maychick claimed Hepburn saw No Bail as the project that got away. She quoted Hepburn as saying, “I adored the script that Mr. Hitchcock sent over… I was so excited, I told Mr. Hitchcock to send over the contracts.” Alas, a subsequent miscarriage and overwhelming grief caused her to back out of the film. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan concurs with this, though he thinks Hepburn’s pregnancy with her son Sean was the reason for her backing out, citing Sean’s birth in January 1960 as proof. Hitchcock, having been disappointed by Vera Miles backing out of Vertigo due to pregnancy years previously, “read the writing on the wall” and bailed (pun intended).
Hepburn biographer Barry Paris would beg to differ. He interviewed Robbie Wolders, Hepburn’s romantic partner during the last decade of her life, and Wolders claimed Hepburn didn’t even like Hitchcock movies, finding them too cynical. There was also the claim that she was squeamish to violence. Even pre-Psycho, Hitchcock films were not without some fairly gruesome kills. The one that immediately springs to mind is Anthony Dawson’s demise in Dial M for Murder, where Grace Kelly stabs him in the back and then his subsequent fall jams the blades further into his flesh. Hence, why should gentle Audrey even THINK about appearing in such filth? Fellow Hepburn biographers Donald Spoto and Warren G. Harris concur, claiming Hepburn disliked the script’s nastiness. Harris even claimed Hepburn’s husband Mel Ferrer saw the sexual elements as “a sick joke” intended to mock Hepburn’s wholesome screen persona and that Hepburn used her current pregnancy as an “excuse” to get out of the project.
So who the hell is right?
First, let’s blow one of these arguments right to kingdom come.
Audrey packing heat in The Unforgiven. Image source: Pinterest
I’ve always felt the “Hepburn was too squeamish about violence” argument is total nonsense. It’s based more on popular perception of Hepburn as a dainty, delicate princess type rather than the reality of her screen work. Her filmography is not exclusively fluff and sparkles. During the talks for No Bail in 1959, she was filming The Unforgiven, a western in which she fatally shoots another character at point-blank range during the climax, hardly an anti-violent matter.
Now, you might argue shooting someone across a room isn’t that “grisly,” so Hepburn may have been comfortable with that and not the ickier strangling and underlying kinkiness of No Bail for the Judge. True, but if Hitchcock-style violence turned her off then why did she later appear in Charade and Wait Until Dark, both Hitchcockian thrillers with multiple murders in them? Charade‘s killings are particularly gruesome (if presented in a darkly comic way)– one character with a metal claw for an arm even attempts to take Hepburn’s head off. And then Wait Until Dark‘s script called upon Hepburn to stab a homicidal home invader while he attempts to assault her. And then 1979’s Bloodline featured a whole host of killings, with Hepburn’s character the central target of all the violence.
No, Audrey Hepburn totally wouldn’t appear in anything violent, where would you even get that idea? Image source: Cinematerial
So yeah, I don’t buy that Hepburn’s sensibilities were too delicate to be in a thriller. Her filmography doesn’t bear that out.
Hepburn and her son Sean in 1961. Image source: IMDB
When starting research for this post, I was most inclined to think Hepburn ultimately bowed out because of her pregnancy. If you know even the barest facts about Hepburn’s life, you’ll know how important motherhood was to her. Hell, her nine-year hiatus between 1967 and 1976 was the result of wanting to make sure the lion’s share of her energy was dedicated to raising a family.
So yes, I was willing to hitch my wagon to the “pregnancy” argument and leave it at that. And then I read something that completely changed my mind.
While looking for images to put into this post, I came across an article about No Bail for the Judge written by Swedish film scholar Fredrik Gustafsson. I expected it would be little different from any other history of the film’s failure to launch. Instead, I found an impressive bit of film scholarship that pointed out further holes in the many arguments surrounding Hepburn’s so-called departure.
Firstly, McGilligan’s argument that Hepburn was heavily pregnant in late 1959 because Sean was born in January 1960 falls apart when one learns Sean was actually born in the summer of 1960. Wikipedia claims he was a June baby, while Gustaffson references an official announcement reprinted in The Audrey Hepburn Treasures saying Sean was actually born in July. (At the very least, Sean’s IMDB page features the correct date.) That pretty much kills the idea that Hepburn bowed out in 1959 due to being in the middle of pregnancy.
Furthermore, film publications kept proclaiming the project’s existence well into the middle of the 1960s and including Hepburn’s involvement for years yet. Most fascinating of Gustafsson’s discoveries is that Hitchcock dropped out of the project before Hepburn ever did.
Come 1961, Box Office Barometer claimed Hitchcock was no longer involved with the film, but Hepburn and Harvey still were. Gant Gaither was set to produce (this was also reported in the April 1961 edition of Variety) and Hagar Wilde (best remembered as the screenwriter of Bringing Up Baby) was reportedly whipping up another draft of the script.
Come 1963, the same publication said the project was still set to go, but with no stars, producer, or director attached. So Hepburn dropped out two years AFTER Hitchcock left.
Come 1965, Lewis Gilbert (arguably best known for helming three James Bond films: You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker) was brought on to direct and Paramount wanted Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany‘s co-star George Peppard to star in it.
It is after that point that all mention of No Bail dries up. Here’s how Gustafsson lays the actual death of the production:
“After this Paramount apparently lost interest. In a recorded interview with Gilbert from 1996 4 he describes how Paramount tried to get him out of his contract but he insisted they pay what they owe him. The details are a little fuzzy, and are slightly different in his autobiography All My Flashbacks (2010, pp. 237-242), but the reason for Paramount’s decision to let Gilbert go and finally cancel the project was that the star they wanted as the leading man, George Peppard, had instead signed with MGM and was no longer available. (Peppard made Operation Crossbow (1965) for MGM in the UK.) This I was able to corroborate. Gilbert and Paramount then made a new deal whereby they would finance another film for him in England, Alfie (1966). This too seems accurate. It was fortunate for Gilbert as Alfie would become a big international hit, and a key film of British cinema of the 1960s, but it was the end of No Bail for the Judge. I have not found any further mentions of it.”
Box Office Barometer in 1961 claiming No Bail for the Judge is going ahead with Hepburn and Harvey, but no Hitchcock. Image source: Internet Archive
In the spring of 1963, No Bail for the Judge was still alive and kicking– albeit director- and star-less. Image source: Internet Archive
So it turns out that No Bail‘s demise was a rather banal matter, a dissolution not unlike that of many other unproduced Hollywood movies before and since. If anything, the manifold contradictions between the accounts of the fallout are far more fascinating than what appears to have been the reality. (By the way, I would highly recommend you read Gustafsson’s entire article on No Bail for the Judge. It’s marvelous scholarly detective work and it’s introduced me to Gustafsson’s other work, which is outstanding.)
It’s a shame the film was never made because the plot sounds so intriguing, a blend of suspense, dry comedy, and dark psychology. If Hitchcock could have won out against the censors, No Bail for the Judge might have been Hitchcock’s second-most subversive 50s film (I say second-most because I doubt it could have topped Vertigo in that regard). I can already imagine all the film studies thesis projects that could have been… But we did ultimately get Psycho instead and then The Birds, both highly iconic films that rank among Hitchcock’s finest work. As interesting as No Bail for the Judge sounds, I would not trade either of those movies for anything.
Sources:
Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris
Audrey Hepburn: A Biography by Warren G. Harris
Audrey Hepburn – An Intimate Portrait by Diana Maychick
The Audrey Hepburn Treasures by Ellen Erwin
Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto
Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan
I’ve often emphasized my love for a sense of grittiness in 1910s American cinema. Before the glitz and glamor of the big studio era, American films set in urban milieus lacked the fairy tale sheen characteristic of Hollywood’s later “Dream Factory” ethos. Raoul Walsh’s debut directorial effort Regeneration is a great example of this style. There is nothing romantic in its depiction of tenement squalor, urban crime, or the lives of the poor. The story itself is no rose-tinted look at the American city circa the 1910s and the ending packs a wallop even today.
Regeneration is a gangster film, albeit one lacking some of the tropes we’re accustomed to now. The protagonist Owen (John McCann as a child, Harry McCoy as a teenager, and Rockcliffe Fellowes as an adult) is raised in an environment teeming with violence, want, and substance abuse, and so he grows up believing the best way to get ahead is to be the toughest guy in the room. He isn’t an inherently bad person– his fits of temper are often aroused on the behalf of smaller, weaker people who can’t defend themselves from bullies. However, he has no model for a better life and so spends his days in a gang. Most of the gang members aren’t so bad, but the darker side of that world is well-represented by Skinny, an eyepatch-wearing creep.
Opposite Owen is Marie (Anna Q. Nilsson), a privileged socialite who initially sees a trip to the slums as a lark. However, when she sees the squalid living conditions of the underprivileged, like many of the middle and upper-class readers of Jacob Riis’ 1890 photojournalistic classic How the Other Half Lives, the sufferings of the poor become too vivid to be ignored. Marie becomes dedicated to improving the lot of that other half and less invested in the DA’s plans to merely be tough on crime.
It would be reductive to say Marie sweeps into Owen’s life and magically transforms it. The two have a profound effect on one another, both of them people who now have a purpose that keeps them going forward, hoping to forge a better future. Forces on both sides of the law threaten their burgeoning romance. The snobby DA feels entitled to Marie since he’s more “respectable” than Owen and Owen’s criminal cohorts aren’t universally thrilled about his desire to go straight.
On a technical level, Regeneration is a remarkable work, incredibly sophisticated by the standards of 1915. Walsh’s direction is assured, using techniques like the dolly shot for psychological purpose rather than mere experimentation. The most striking example of Walsh’s use of dolly shot occurs while young Owen’s adopted parents scream at each other during dinner. Owen is seated between them, cringing in fear at the sole model for familial bonds he has, and the camera closes in on a close-up of his anxious face. The long shot of the table is shorthand for the dysfunctional, poverty-ridden tenement and the close-up zeroes in on just one of the many innocent lives traumatized by that world.
Fun fact about me: I read the entire Bible when I was 13 years old. I can’t say it was for any reason beyond a blend of pretentious bibliophilic flexing and boredom.
Growing up in a Catholic household, our Bible included the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books, which are texts considered sacred by some Christian denominations and not others. Among these works is the Book of Judith, the tale of one badass Jewish widow’s quest to save her people from Assyrian invaders. Her home city of Bethulia beseiged, the titular character dresses in her best clothes, marches over to the enemy’s camp, and bats her eyes at Holofernes, the Assyrian general. He falls for her charms and hopes to bed her. Instead, she gets him drunk, chops off his head while he’s passed out, and throws the whole Assyrian camp into confusion, allowing her people to repel their enemies.
Teenage me was OBSESSED with the Book of Judith. It was up there with Final Fantasy X and all my favorite anime series as far as awesome went for my awkward, nerdy self. I re-read it dozens of times. I still love it and I’m hardly the only one. With its intense drama and heady blend of seduction and slaying, the Book of Judith has been catnip for creators throughout the centuries. Painters have reimagined the beheading of Holofernes over and over, sometimes with strong-armed and determined Judiths and other times with sexy, smirking ones. Dramatists and poets have retold the story as well, among them cinematic pioneer DW Griffith.
Stage actress Nance O’Neil as Judith in a turn of the century production of the biblical tale. Griffith worked as an actor in her traveling company before entering the film business. Image source: Library of Congress
Judith of Bethulia is significant in Griffith’s oevure because it was final film for the Biograph company. He had been with Biograph since 1908, churning out popular and influential short films. However, as the 1910s dawned, he grew interested in more complex narratives. He started creating longer shorts like his two-part adaptation of Enoch Arden or the half-hour long The Battle at Elderbrush Gulch. Biograph did not share Griffith’s ambitions, contented with the short films that still dominated the market. This would not be the case for long, as features were becoming more common by the early 1910s. Italian epics like Quo Vadis and Cabiria impressed audiences with their detail and scale. Griffith longed to make such an epic of his own and basically defied the Biograph studio bosses to make the four-reel Judith of Bethulia.
It’s easy to mock the Biograph company for their inability to see features as anything but a mere fad, yet they were not the only ones reluctant about longer films. Exhibitors were also wary, fearing a single major feature on the bill would destroy the diversity of the usual multi-short program. Variety was seen as key to the moviegoing experience, since film was often perceived as closer to vaudeville than the “legitimate theater.” The naysayers underestimated how features could be sold as an elevated breed of entertainment. As Eileen Bowser pointed out in her study of this transitional period, “Attending a movie theater where only short films were shown was an everyday affair, but attending a feature was a special event.” That is, a feature film could be an evening’s entertainment, much like a stage production.
With the need for more complicated narratives to fill out the runtime of these features, filmmakers turned to the stage for stories. For his first feature, Griffith chose Thomas Aldrich’s stage adaptation Judith of Bethulia as his subject. The play held personal significance for him since during his theatrical period, he worked in the theater company of none other than Nance O’Neil, a tragedienne christened “the American Bernhardt.” Among O’Neil’s major roles was the lead in Judith. Perhaps choosing Judith as a subject– beyond its potential for battle scenes and historical detail– was Griffith’s way of challenging the theater snobs with the growing power of cinema.
Image source: IMDB
Judith‘s production was a challenge for all involved. Extras were responsible for their own costumes and false beards, and often had to play multiple roles to create the illusion of teeming armies and massive crowds. Sweet’s flimsy costume couldn’t protect her legs when she was riding a horse. The non-imposing Henry B. Walthall was chosen to play the ferocious Holofernes, necessitating cameraman Billy Bitzer to arrange careful camera set-ups to achieve the desired effect. According to Griffith biographer Richard Schickel, the cast and crew bore everything with grace because they were excited to be part of such an epic production.
Filming was completed in 1913, but Biograph– alarmed by the hefty $36,000 price tag and Griffith’s insubordination– delayed release for a year. By that point, Griffith had left the company for more artistically fulfilling pastures, taking much of his personnel with him. As Sweet said in an interview for the 1980 Kevin Brownlow documentary Hollywood, the actors and crew’s loyalty was to Griffith, not Biograph. In the end, Biograph would barely outlast Griffith’s departure. By 1916, the company was no longer producing new material and they would close shop in 1918. Coasting off old successes, Biograph would re-release Judith with unused footage and additional intertitles in 1917, rechristening the production with the suggestive title Her Condoned Sin.
A poster from a 1917 re-release of Judith, retitled Her Condoned Sin. Image source: IMDB
Apart from the interesting context, how is the actual film? To be honest, handsome but underwhelming.
When I first saw it early in my cinephilia, I didn’t have much to compare it to in terms of pre-1915 feature films. Having since seen Cabiria and Griffith’s other early features from the 1913-1914 period, it doesn’t stack up as well. I can make a few allowances for it considering this was the first attempt at a feature for Griffith, but I do have issues with the film beyond technical quibbling.
Okay, some good things first. One element that sticks out about Judith is Griffith’s attempt to make Bethulia more than just a movie set plunked in the San Fernando Valley. The opening twenty minutes feature plenty of little scenes showing the townspeople going about their lives. These are not faceless pawns, but likable, vulnerable human beings about to be put in harm’s way by a foreign army. Several subplots are established in these early moments: the most prominent of these minor characters are a young mother with an infant (Lillian Gish) and a pair of young lovers (Mae Marsh and Bobby Harron). While Griffith could not replicate the exact scale of the Italian epics, he wanted to still make the conflict feel grand in scope by creating the illusion of a vibrant community in peril. Not exactly a breakthrough for Griffith– he did much the same in The Battle at Elderbrush Gulch— but still a point in the movie’s favor.
Blanche Sweet is also very good in the lead role. It’s crazy to think she was still in her teens when taking on such a mature part. She exudes the necessary zeal and courage… though the writing undercuts her work just a bit, but more on that later.
The battle sequences are less impressive. They’re overstuffed and messy. It’s impossible to tell what’s going on or who is who. The most emotion one gets from the fight scenes are reaction shots from Judith, teeming with rage and anxiety as she prays for victory. These are my favorite scenes of Judith’s, because they show the ferocity and passion simmering beneath her placid piety. This is the biblical Judith, the one you don’t mess with lest you end up inches shorter.
Unfortunately, this warrior side of Judith evaporates once she goes on her mission to slay Holofernes as the character’s motivation becomes muddied beyond belief. Taking cues from 19th century dramatists who saw the biblical Judith as a heartless monster that needed “womanizing” to be viable onstage, Griffith tries to make Judith more complicated by having her romantically tempted by Holofernes. While I personally don’t care for this idea, it could be done well– if you give Judith credible reasons for wanting some Assyrian hunk or make Holofernes himself a more nuanced character. Griffith doesn’t do either.
Even the rough condition of the print cannot prevent one from appreciating the beautiful composition and depth of many scenes in Judith.
Let’s examine how Griffith establishes his heroine’s characterization. Judith is a devout Jew and a maternal figure for her people. Her love of them is so fierce that she risks her life by going into enemy territory to seduce and kill the enemy leader. So far, so good.
But wait! When Judith meets Holofernes and he gives her free stuff (a tent, a eunuch to wait on her every need), he “becomes noble in her eyes.”
Noble? Giving hot women tents and a eunuch in a towel suddenly makes you “noble”? In what universe?
“You get a tent! And YOU get a tent!”
It would be one thing if Holofernes actually did something actually noble like, I don’t know, show mercy, even if only to a single person, suggesting some capacity for compassion. Or if he showed any remorse for his ruthless actions against Bethulia’s population. Or if he handed out kittens to an orphanage. I don’t know. I’m not an expert in the realm of romance, but surely a religiously devout woman who’s seen babies starving due to Holofernes’ orders wouldn’t have her head turned by a free tent.
Save the starving babies or save the shitfaced murderer man? A tough choice.
We get a lot of scenes of Judith wringing her hands over this incredible dilemma, intercut with Holofernes no longer able to pay attention to his mini-court of sexy dancers. There isn’t much chemistry between Sweet and Wathall, and Judith has no legitimate reason to “love” Holofernes, so much of the movie just drags. It’s true Griffith favored the broad strokes of melodrama even in his artier work, but here, there’s nothing compelling about any of the drama, even in the realm of potboiler passion. The feature never justifies its length, coming off as a two-reeler stretched to the breaking point.
Part of me fears I’m being too harsh. This was an early attempt at a feature film. That it’s an awkward effort is to be expected. To quote Richard Schickel, Judith represents “a noble ambition, not a fully realized one.” Or maybe I’m just too much of a Judith fangirl to be satisfied.
Violent maniac or squishy, squishy boy?
My meh view of the film tends to be shared by modern film geeks, but in its day, critics were impressed by Judith of Bethulia. It was a milestone in American feature filmmaking and contemporary audience response reflects that. One anecdote in particular always sticks out to me when I think about this film. Griffith’s old colleague Nance O’Neil came by when the cast and crew were filming interior scenes in Judith’s house. Blanche Sweet was about to do her big mourning scene in sackcloth and ashes. Griffith offered to show O’Neil what moviemaking was like and before the cameras started rolling, he whispered to Sweet, “Show her.” That is, show her the movies are as legitimate a form of art as the theater.
Judith of Bethulia was a major part of the collective effort of Edwardian era filmmakers to prove that and then some. While everyone involved would move onto greener pastures, it was a necessary transitional film and it remains an influential one, even if I prefer my Judith adaptations without Judith/Holofernes love stories in them.
Sources:
Adventures with DW Griffith by Karl Brown
DW Griffith: An American Life by Richard Schickel
Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (dir. Kevin Brownlow and David, Gil, 1980)
One of Anna May Wong’s favorite portraits of herself. Image source: Wikipedia
This post is for the Third Marathon Stars blogathon, hosted by The Wonderful World of Cinema, In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood, and Musings of a Classic Film Addict.
Anna May Wong was one of the first Asian-American movie stars. Born Liu Tsong Wong in 1905 to a San Francisco family of second-generation Chinese immigrants, she was an avid film fan as a child. Dreaming of stardom, she secured her first job as an extra in the 1919 Alla Nazimova film The Red Lantern. By the early 1920s, her name was known to film fans due to her distinctive screen presence and youthful beauty, but due to the racist attitudes of the time, Wong’s stardom was often stunted. Due to concerns about miscegenation, she could only kiss her leading man if he was the same race as she. Major roles she was perfect for often went to white actresses by default, even if the character in question was Asian. And often times the roles she did land were either small or stereotypical.
Wong has experienced something of a re-evaluation recently– she’s become the first Asian-American on US currency and several books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been published about her in the last few years– but she still isn’t universally known, even among classic film fans. When two fellow classic film fans I know in real life saw me reading a biography about her, they told me they’d never even heard her name. Some critics continue to disparage her as a “dragon lady” who took demeaning roles for a paycheck. Others see her as a trailblazer who fought as hard as she could for better onscreen representation of Chinese and Chinese-descended characters at a time when Hollywood felt no compulsion to offer such.
I’d been aware of Wong for years, though I never knew much about her life or work outside of a few key silent films. She often appears in movie magazines of the 1920s, presented as a madcap flapper in the latest fashions. For this marathon, I read biographical material on Wong while I went through my selected five films to give extra context to her work.
Image source: Wikipedia
Okay, I do have a confession to make. The maximum number of films you’re allowed to have seen with your selected star is three. When I signed up, I could only come up with three films I knew I had seen with Wong: The Toll of the Sea, The Thief of Bagdad, and Shanghai Express. I felt this blogathon would be a great opportunity to see some Wong pictures that had been on my watchlist for a while now, like Piccadilly and Daughter of Shanghai. It wasn’t until I combed through Wong’s IMDB page weeks later– after watching three of the five prescribed films and reading an entire biography– that I realized she was also in the 1924 Peter Pan, Mr. Wu, and Old San Francisco, three movies I vaguely recall watching as a college undergrad. And by vaguely recall, I mean I only know I saw two out of three of them because they’re logged on my IMDB account. As for Peter Pan, apparently she was Tiger Lily in that (I don’t recall a thing about her performance there), but all I remember from that film was that Ernest Torrance was Captain Hook and that the Darlings’ dog Nana looked like a Cthulu-esque abomination.
They say it eats children’s souls. Image source: Letterboxd
Ahem. Anyway, even if I don’t meet the hard letter of the “3 films max” rule, I still say I fit the spirit. I can recall exactly three performances of Anna May Wong’s, no more than that. I may as well have had those other films erased from my memory, except for…
OH GOD, MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT GO AWAY. Image source: IMDB
With that out of the way, here are the films I actually remembering seeing with Wong before the blogathon, as well as a brief overview of her life and career threaded throughout:
Image source: Wikipedia
The Toll of the Sea was not Wong’s big break as a movie star (that would belong to the anthology film Bits of Life, where she played opposite Lon Chaney), but it is the film that cemented her fame. The second Technicolor feature film, the movie’s story is nothing special, just a retelling of the Madame Butterfly story set in China instead of Japan. If anything elevates it above being a mere historical curiosity, it’s Wong’s tender performance as a seduced and abandoned young woman.
Wong was still in her teens when she made this film, so her performance is not as polished as her later work. However, she is still sensitive and touching, emphasizing the tragedy of Lotus Blossom’s situation as a woman shunned by her own culture for pursuing a relationship with a white man and similarly rejected by the white Americans for her ethnicity. Wong’s girlishly humorous moments in the first half of the movie only throw the constant grief and pain of the latter part into harsher relief. (At the time, Wong’s crying scenes were considered noteworthy both among critics and in Hollywood. As it turned out, Wong was one of a select number of actors who could cry on cue.) In the end, Wong walks away with the film, an impressive feat considering how young she was.
Unfortunately, a leading role in one hit film did not mean Wong was suddenly going to be headlining tons of movies. Throughout the 1920s, her Hollywood career largely saw her in supporting parts, many of them steeped in orientalist stereotyping. The Thief of Bagdad is considered among her more memorable roles in this period, even if it’s a relatively minor one in the context of such a grand fantasy epic and is still stereotypical in nature. Wong plays a beautiful Mongolian slave girl in the Bagdad palace. While she is supposed to serve the princess, she conspires with the ambitious Mongolian prince (Sojin) to overthrow the Bagdad royals. It’s not much of a part and a lesser actress would have been overtaken by the character’s crazy costume and hairpieces, but Wong lends a playful sensual dimension to the role, particularly in a sequence where Fairbanks’ thief has a knife at her back. Wong’s response oscillates between fear and flirtation, using erotic charm to get herself out of the situation, not realizing Fairbanks has already left the room.
Throughout the mid-1920s, Wong continued to act, though the roles weren’t getting any better. In the late 1920s, Wong grew weary of the situation and leapt across the Atlantic to seek better opportunities in Europe. Black Americans like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson had done the same, finding less racial barriers abroad. Like Robeson, Wong mostly worked in England after a brief stint in Germany. When the talkie revolution swept through the movie industry, Wong worked on her vocal delivery and was able to make the transition with little trouble. In the early 1930s, more famous than ever due to her European journey, Wong decided to give Hollywood another go. She landed a contract with Paramount.
Image source: BFI
One of the better roles she got during this period was the prostitute Hui-Fei in Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 potboiler Shanghai Express. Having rewatched the film recently, I have two conclusions: 1) this movie is absolutely style over substance and 2) Wong walks away with the entire thing. The actual main storyline about Marlene Dietrich’s Shanghai Lily and her devotion to the stuffy nitwit doctor played by Clive Brook is melodramatic boilerplate only elevated to classic status by Dietrich’s charisma and the smoky, glamorous atmosphere of Von Sternberg’s direction.
Of all the characters, Wong’s is the only one who measures up to Dietrich in any way. The two women play off one another well due to a shared sense of cynicism towards a world that looks down on them as “fallen women.” However, just as Lily’s self-sacrificial love for Dr. Harvey reveals nobility beneath her “bad girl” persona, Hui-Fei displays similar hidden depths. She has her own sense of honor and obligation, viewing the Eurasian rebel leader Henry Chang played by Warner Oland as a menace to her country (“The government has offered a price of 20,000 for his capture – alive or dead. It will be a great day for China when that price is paid.”) and ultimately killing him after he rapes her. When Lily thanks her– Chang was going to force Lily to become his mistress in exchange for her beloved’s life– Hui-Fei makes it clear she didn’t kill Chang for Lily’s sake, but for her own.
Unfortunately, Hollywood continued to be stingy with good roles for Wong. The greatest heartbreak of her career was being rejected for the role of O-lan in MGM’s The Good Earth, an adaptation of the Pearl Buck novel of the same name. The tale of the hard lives of Chinese farmers, this was a film that largely treated the Chinese with sympathy, yet the major roles were claimed by white actors. Wong was refused the part because her leading man would be Paul Muni (a Jewish actor who initially quipped “I’m about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover” when offered the role) and the Production Code forbade actors of different races from kissing on-screen. Luise Rainer got the role instead.
Wong largely worked in B-pictures as the decade wore on. In the late 1930s, she visited China, a longtime dream of hers. However, she was shocked when her reception in China was rather cool, sometimes even hostile. Chinese critics felt Wong was a disgrace, taking on stereotypical and sexualized roles that made Chinese womanhood appear loose and wicked. Wong understood the criticism– she shared it herself– but it still stung, especially since she often fought for better representation of Chinese and Chinese-American characters in Hollywood projects.
Anna May Wong planting trees. Image source: Wikipedia
During World War II, Wong appeared in propaganda films showing the Chinese in a heroic light and did all she could to support the war effort, but her stardom was on the wane. When her Paramount contract lapsed, it was not renewed and she was stuck making films for poverty row studios. Still, Wong worked hard and donated her salary to organizations like United China Relief.
Wong in the mid-1950s. Image source: Wikipedia
In the immediate postwar period, Wong stopped working in the movies for a few years. She converted her home into a series of apartments for rent. She returned to film in 1949, appearing in a small role in the movie Impact. Throughout the 1950s, she worked in television. This work was initially promising: Wong got the lead in her own series, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first TV program to feature an Asian-American protagonist. A mystery show, it lasted only ten episodes before cancellation. Like much early television, the program is now lost. For the rest of the decade, she had to settle for supporting parts.
Wong was unfortunately an alcoholic in her later life and this contributed to her early death of a heart attack at age 56. What makes her ultimate end so tragic is that she may have been on the verge of a comeback. She was offered the role of Madame Liang in the film version of Flower Drum Song, but had to decline due to her poor health.
My general impression of Wong from the above three films and my reading about her life is that she was a beautiful actress with great presence too often under-served by the material she was given. For my five films, I tried to select films from a variety of genres, as well as from different phases of her career in order to get a fuller picture of her talents and screen image.
Daughter of Shanghai (dir. Robert Florey, 1937)
Image source: Wikipedia
When antiques dealer Mr. Lang (John Patterson) refuses to aid a human smuggling ring, he and his daughter Lan Ying Lin (Wong) end up kidnapped by the villains. They shoot Lang dead, but Lan Ying Lin manages to escape. Swearing justice for her father’s death, she goes undercover to track down the smugglers’ leader, disguising herself as a dancer to infiltrate a dive on a Central American island. She crosses paths with Kim Lee (Philip Ahn), a G-man also on the trail of the criminal gang. The two become reluctant allies, all the while never suspecting the ringleader– and the one who most wants to see them dead– might be someone they know and trust…
By the late 1930s, Wong was mostly relegated to B-movies. While lacking the clout of A-pictures, some of my favorite movies from the classic period are B-productions as they often had more freedom to experiment or portray things you wouldn’t see in a more expensive movie that needed to be “safe” in order to return the hefty investment. Daughter of Shanghai is one of the most enjoyable B-movies you’re likely to find, not just for its delightfully pulpy narrative but also for its progressive depiction of Asian-Americans as heroes.
Wong plays a true badass in this movie. She’s smart, she’s independent, and she doesn’t take anyone’s crap. Wong herself was reportedly delighted with the role, happy to play a Chinese-American who wasn’t treacherous or shady, but openly noble and brave. She makes a great team with Philip Ahn’s G-man, and it’s also great to see her allowed to have a romantic relationship with another character that doesn’t end in misery and/or death.
The film itself is a delightful ride with all the pulp trimmings: near-death situations, last-minute escapes, dangerous traveling conditions, fistfights. The story is almost paced like a condensed movie serial and it’s never dull. Robert Florey was in the director’s chair, so there’s style to burn. Interestingly, though this film was made while the Production Code was in full force, it often has the feel of a pre-code melodrama due to its emphasis on seduction and potent danger.
There’s no denying this film is a low budget affair. Shot in a month, it’s hardly a Von Sternberg arthouse object. I don’t care. This movie is a hell of a lot of fun and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a great evening watch when they want to be entertained but don’t have two hours to burn. There are lengthy, expensive Netflix series which don’t have the entertainment value this thing does.
Daughter of the Dragon (dir. Lloyd Corrigan, 1931)
Image source: TCM
Exotic dancer Princess Ling Moy (Wong) discovers her long-lost father is none other than the notorious Fu Manchu (Warner Oland). Before they have time to do any normal father-daughter bonding activities, he is mortally wounded while killing his nemesis, Sir John Petrie, who he wrongly believes was responsible for the death of his family during the Boxer Rebellion. As he lies dying, Fu Manchu makes Ling Moy promise to kill the rest of the Petrie clan as revenge for their own slaughtered loved ones. Ling Moy swears to fulfill her father’s last request, but her quest for revenge will be complicated by her burgeoning romantic feelings for Petrie’s son Ronald (Bramwell Fletcher) and the efforts of Chinese detective Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa).
Daughter of the Dragon was Wong’s first movie under her Paramount contract. In terms of Asian representation, Daughter of the Dragon is the polar opposite of Daughter of Shanghai. This earlier film is far more negative, depicting Ling Moy as a seductress out to snap up clueless white men and murder/mutilate any love rivals without mercy. I cannot imagine Wong was too happy with this film, considering her dismay at the continued Hollywood-approved stereotyping of Chinese people as wicked deceivers.
Admittedly, the film does have camp value, not unlike the similarly orientalist The Mask of Fu Manchu with Boris Karloff. The production is dripping with over the top Chinese-inspired design and Ling Moy’s costumes are eye-catching. It’s clear the film’s main purpose is not exploration of character or theme, but providing the audience with vicarious thrills and chills as our “heroes” (I cannot put enough quotes around that word, since the so-called good guys are universally boring and mostly passive– also I do not get why Ling Moy is so into Ronald, he’s about as sexy as soggy fish and chips) evade gruesome yet creative death traps. This is certainly a case where the bad guys steal the show, simply because they have so much more drive and seem to be having so much more fun.
The best I can say about Daughter of the Dragon is that it never drags and Wong never phones it in, though the material is undeniably beneath her. Wong is able to give her character fleeting glimmers of melancholy. You get the sense Ling Moy’s wanted a father figure all her life and once she’s given one, she dedicates herself to pleasing him to fill that void– even if pleasing him means committing multiple murders. This makes Ling Moy a bit more human than she likely was on paper, but it’s not enough to really combat the nonsense in the script or to magically make the movie good. I can’t say I recommend it, but it has its moments in a so bad it’s funny kind of way.
Lady from Chungking (dir. William Nigh, 1942)
Image source: TCM
Kwan Mei (Wong) is the leader of a band of Chinese freedom fighters. Surrounded by the occupying Japanese on all sides, they bide their time in a peasant village. One day, a pair of American pilots are shot down near the village and captured by the Japanese. Seeing potential allies, Kwan Mei plans to rescue them as well as gather information about the plans of the invaders. Learning the Japanese leader General Kaimura (Hans Huber) has a taste for refined women, Kwan Mei poses as an aristocrat sympathetic to the occupiers in order to seduce any big plans out of him. Will she succeed?
During World War II, Wong was ardent about supporting the war effort, particularly through sending aid to the Chinese through organizations like United China Relief, participating in USO entertainments, and of course appearing in Allied propaganda. However, these films were for Producers Releasing Corporation, a poverty row studio. This effectively marked the beginning of the end of her movie career. The silver lining is that Wong got to play heroic figures.
While it’s no Casablanca, Lady from Chungking is a solid programmer, though nothing especially memorable. The comic relief is unbearably corny, such as when one of the American pilots narrates a baseball game in his sleep, much to Kwan Mei’s confusion. Characters are mostly underdeveloped and the story moves swiftly, which works for the movie’s adventure/thriller elements but less so for the interesting tensions that are left unexplored. General Kamimura is a fervent classist, sneering at the Chinese peasants and only taking an interested in aristocratic women as his bedmates. He loses all interest in Mae Clarke’s Russian opportunist when she reveals she is not a noblewoman in exile, but all but jumps onto Kwan Mei when she passes herself as a Chinese aristocrat. Playing on the general’s fantasies and sense of cultural superiority, Kwan Mei is able to charm information out of him, but this sexual entanglement also puts her at odds with her own people, who begin to wonder if Kwan Mei’s loyalty can be cancelled out by the luxury of being a Japanese officer’s mistress.
None of this goes anywhere interesting, but at only an hour, the film never overstays its welcome and Wong commands the screen easily. She cuts a noble figure and even gets an inspirational speech at the end. Her character is not a damsel needing to be rescued by the brave Americans, but an active heroine in her own right, as are the other Chinese characters. Plus, it’s always great to see Mae Clarke, another actress who deserved a better career than what she ultimately received.
When Were You Born (dir. William McGann, 1938)
Astrology expert Mei Lee Ling (Wong) finds herself flocked to during an ocean liner trip to San Francisco. Passengers react to her character readings and predictions with amazement and skepticism, but no one expects her most sensational prediction to come true: that one of the passengers will be dead within two days. When the very man turns up dead in that time frame, Mei is approached by the police. They suspect her, but instead she offers her aid in sniffing out the real culprit by using her knowledge of astrological signs.
When Were You Born was intended to be the start of a mystery film series starring Anna May Wong as a Zodiac expert who solves crimes by analyzing suspects based on their astrological sign. This would not come to be as the film didn’t make much of an impact. As much as I have come to love Wong during this marathon, I can see why the series never panned out, because this movie milks its gimmick dry before the slim runtime even ticks down. Much of the film is just Wong explaining everyone’s Zodiac sign and then telling the cops why this or that person did or didn’t do this or that crime because of that sign. The only things that held my interest was Wong’s lovely wardrobe and poised manner.
I don’t really have too much to say about this film. The camerawork is rote, the characters are one-dimensional, and it doesn’t help that I’m not that fond of mysteries as a genre. However, perusing reviews, I noticed that people who are into astrology tend to think this is a cute trifle, so your mileage will definitely vary.
Piccadilly (dir. E.A. Dupont, 1929)
London nightclub owner Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas) has a bit of a dilemma. His biggest draw is the dance team Mabel and Vic. The problem is that Vic has been harassing Mabel (Gilda Gray) to extend their partnership into the romantic realm, despite her constant rebuffs and entanglement with Wilmot. Called out for his unprofessional conduct, Vic quits before he can be fired. Mabel tries to go solo but Vic was the more popular of the two, meaning Wilmot needs a new act to reel customers back in. Enter Shosho (Wong), a young scullery maid with dreams of dancing. Her eastern-inspired act is a hit, cementing Mabel’s fall from grace. When it looks as though Shosho has a grip on Wilmot’s affections as well, Mabel becomes desperate. However, she finds Shosho is unwilling to give up her hard-earned fame and romance.
Modern consensus is that Piccadilly features Anna May Wong’s finest performance. Her final silent film, it is a great showcase for how technically dazzling late-period silents were. Though the top-billed star is Gilda Gray, the film is Wong’s show all the way.
On paper, the plot of Piccadilly is basic backstage melodrama: an older woman (and by “older,” I mean just past the impossibly ancient age of 25– Gilda Gray was in her late twenties when filming this, though she was made to look a bit older) with a waning showbiz career contends with a hot young thing looking to take her place in the limelight. However, the characters are given more depth than you’d expect and there are no clear-cut heroes or villains. Mabel’s career is threatened by ageist attitudes and the fickle tastes of her public while Shosho is up against rampant racism. Both women are sympathetic, and both are capable of pettiness and cruelty.
Shosho’s situation is handled with great delicacy. A less inspired movie would have made her a simple femme fatale, but Piccadilly emphasizes that Shosho is not a cold-hearted villainess but a young woman from a lower class background who craves luxury and excitement. Her introduction is one of the most brilliant quick-sketches of a character I’ve ever seen. Shosho dances slowly and sensually atop a table, mesmerizing her fellow scullery workers. When the camera lingers on her legs, we see her tattered stockings. This shot is not merely erotic, but also a keen insight into how dance is a brief escape from Shosho’s dreary everyday life. For a moment, she can transcend being a dishwasher. When she finally makes it big as a dancer and rapturously reads the positive reviews in the newspaper, Wong makes Shosho’s girlish delight so palpable that it’s impossible not to empathize with her.
Of course, Shosho is not a saint. As evidenced by her interactions with Mabel, she can be catty. She also strings along her boyfriend Jim (King Hou Chang), expecting him to be content with taking a backseat while she pursues a relationship with another man. Though she does seem genuinely fond of him, she certainly takes his loyalty for granted and is not above emasculating him, such as when she demands he model her skimpy dancer’s costume for Wilmont.
Shosho’s youthful beauty and appeal to the white British audience’s taste for the “exotic” is able to propel her to fame, but her ethnicity still provides roadblocks. Shosho and Wilmot share a mutual attraction, but dare not make their romance public. The two see a racially mixed couple shamed at a bar, a foretaste of what could happen to them should they take a chance on their relationship. Shosho’s dismayed reaction to the fiasco shows her interest in Wilmont is not merely that of a gold-digger.
Overall, Piccadilly is a fantastic film, almost a proto-noir with its shadowy aesthetic and complicated morality. The ironic ending is particularly a punch to the gut. If you’ve never seen a silent film before or if you’ve only seen silent comedy and want to dip your toes into silent drama, this is a great gateway title. But even more so, it’s a great gateway to Wong’s dramatic skills.
Conclusion:
Image source: Wikipedia
After this marathon, I came away with greater respect for Wong, both as an actress and as a person. Hollywood truly did this woman dirty. She could handle drama and comedy with ease. She had a lovely speaking voice. She had great command of her body and an expressive face. Top all that with her undeniable beauty and it’s a crime she was not offered the same opportunities as white actresses of similar caliber.
Of the five movies I marathoned, my favorite was probably Daughter of Shanghai due to Wong playing a badass who doesn’t have to die tragically and just the overall pulpy vibe of the film. Piccadilly is a close second with its noirish intrigue and complicated characters. Lady from Chungking is pretty good for what it is, while When Were You Born is forgettable and Daughter of the Dragon is a tough sell unless you’re looking for something to give the MST3K treatment.
Despite the limits the film industry imposed upon her, Wong took nothing lying down. I admire her for her steadfastness in fighting for better, less demeaning roles, even if she did not win every battle. She was often the high point of many a film and deserves her rediscovery.
Sources:
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Backwards and in Heels: The past, present, and future of women working in film by Alicia Malone
For International Women’s Day this year, I wanted to highlight my favorite Lois Weber film, Shoes.
A devout Christian concerned with the moral issues of her time, Weber saw film as a vehicle for social commentary. Her existing body of work tackles a great swathe of hot-button issues: poverty, religious hypocrisy, marital troubles, contraception, capital punishment, and the gap between the rich and the poor. However, don’t get the idea that Weber’s films are little more than dreary political tracts. She approached her subject matter with earnest compassion, even when she could have easily defaulted to lurid sensationalism.
Shoes is a great example of Weber’s approach. The plot is very simple, almost radically so: a young woman named Eva Mayer works for five dollars a week at a five and ten store. She is her family’s sole support since her father is too lazy to get a job, her mother has to hold down the home, and her siblings are too young to work. Struggling to pay the rent and buy groceries, Eva must keep putting off the purchase of a new pair of shoes. That may not sound like a big deal– until one sees that Eva’s shoes are barely held together. Every evening, she soaks her aching feet in warm water and fills out her shoe’s nonexistent soles with cardboard. It gets to the point where Eva’s shoes won’t hold together and she is forced to consider selling herself to buy the bare necessities.
One can easily imagine a melodramatic approach to this story, but Weber keeps everything grounded in unexceptional reality. There’s nothing whimsical about this film’s depiction of poverty: the Mayer flat is drab and the shots of Eva walking in the rain with her dilapidated shoes emphasize the cold and damp potently. Even most of the fleeting glimpses of luxury in this movie are not DeMille fantasies. For Eva, merely intact boots are a luxury.
Weber’s realistic approach is further bolstered by Mary MacLaren’s astonishing performance. Sixteen at the time of filming, MacLaren gives Eva a stoic front, and a simmering sense of resentment and fear. She never goes into the histrionics you’d expect from a film of this vintage. To say she is heartbreaking is an understatement and yet her performance never begs for audience pity.
WARNING: Spoilers from this point on down. If you haven’t seen the film and I’ve piqued your interest, stop here and watch it!
Ultimately, Eva does what she has to do to survive. Weber does not judge Eva for her decisions nor does she suggest Eva is now doomed to some sordid fate in a bordello or dead in a ditch. Life is allowed to go on for Eva, though what the future will bring is left ambiguous. The only hopeful thing about the ending is the tender understanding Eva’s mother shows her after she is informed of her daughter’s act. Eva’s father might be useless, but Eva’s mother is a reliable figure who will not cast her daughter away. At the end of the day, Weber asks this same compassion of the audience. Throughout the film, we are intimately linked with Eva’s day-to-day struggles, her hopes, her terror of poverty. When you’re allowed to so closely empathize with a character, harsh judgment becomes a far more difficult feat.
This post is for the 10th Annual Buster Keaton Blogathon hosted by Silentology. Go over to her blog for more Buster goodness.
Generally, no one has ever called Buster Keaton’s time at MGM the high point of his career. Depending on your opinion of his Columbia shorts, you may or may not rank it the worst, with the exception of a few films that range from pretty great (The Cameraman) to lowkey charming (The Passionate Plumber and Speak Easily). But then there’s also Free and Easy and What? No Beer!, two movies I consider absolutely painful to sit through.
Spite Marriage is hardly the worst of the MGM Keaton films, but its reputation has often been contested. His final silent feature, it represented a turning point for the star and not just in it being a farewell to the medium that cemented his fame. His creative control, maintained in The Cameraman due to the on-location shooting in New York City giving him some distance from the studio bigwigs, began to waver in earnest once the filming was situated closer to home. You can see that loss in quite a few places: the encroaching dimwittedness of the “Elmer” character as opposed to the awkward but resourceful underdogs Keaton tended to play, the cringe-inducing verbal humor (here limited to intertitles since this is a silent film after all), and a complicated plot encumbered by too many cooks hovering over the soup pot. And yet, the film also features some of the most iconic Keaton sequences of all time. It also has one of his most memorable leading ladies. It’s hard to overlook that.
Image source: Wikipedia
Spite Marriage‘s plot lacks the more natural, elegant construction of Keaton’s independent features. It is essentially a film of two tenuously connected halves. The first half is romantic farce, rooted in misunderstandings and petty behavior. Elmer (Buster Keaton), a lowly pants-presser, pines after stage star Trilby Drew (Dorothy Sebastian). Essentially a benign stalker, he “borrows” fine clothes from his well-to-do customers to follow Trilby at all her social outings, watching her from afar. He regularly attends her current hit play, a Civil War melodrama titled Carolina. The play is a mawkish thing in which a southern belle is forced to offer her virtue to a sleazy Union officer in exchange for the life of her Confederate sweetheart. However, Elmer treats it like the highest art, applauding every moment (at least, every one of Trilby’s moments– he sits out when the audience applauds the show’s hero) and memorizing all the dialogue.
Onstage, Trilby is noble and tenderhearted, a demure angel in white crinoline. In real life, she’s cold, calculating, and spiteful. Her leading man and offstage lover Lionel Benmore (Edward Earle) ditches her for a society woman, leaving Trilby in a rage. Having taken note of the smitten Elmer for some time now and believing he’s a millionaire, she proposes marriage to him to get back at her former beau. Elmer naturally accepts without hesitation. When Trilby eventually realizes she’s married a “nobody” with no money and no prospects (a realization that occurs offscreen for some reason), her agent arranges a quick divorce, leaving Elmer stunned and disillusioned.
While not typical of a Keaton film, the basics of this part of the story are pretty solid. Had you not told me this was a silent Buster Keaton vehicle, I’d think this could be a 1930s screwball comedy. The seeds are certainly there: the conflict between the haves and have-nots, belligerent sexual tension, farcical tropes. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t much milk the dynamic between Elmer and Trilby as much as it could have. You’d think Elmer would have to make more effort to hide the fact that he isn’t rolling in money, but this never happens. There’s no suspense, a quality not out of place in Keaton’s other classics, where tension heightens the comedy.
That’s not to say there’s nothing of value in the first half– far from it. The scene where Keaton stands in for a minor actor in Carolina is a hoot, with Elmer consistently undermining the drama of the onstage action. And then there’s the glorious “drunk bride” sequence, an iconic piece of Keatonian comedy if ever there was one. Trilby gets hammered when she sees her ex at a club, and then collapses when she and Elmer return to their hotel room after the disastrous event. Ever the gentleman, Elmer tries to maneuver Trilby into the bed so she can sleep the booze off, but physics conspire against him.
This scene is so classic that Keaton reused it in live shows with his third wife Eleanor in the 1940s and 1950s, and William Wyler would do his own variation of it with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. This makes it all the more shocking that MGM wanted the scene cut, finding it in poor taste. Given the situation, it’s easy to imagine a less innocent version of this sequence, particularly the moment when Elmer tries getting Trilby out of her clothes but can’t quite manage it. However, there is nothing perverse in that act, as it’s clear Elmer just wants his bride to nestle into a cozy slumber. The moment he’s satisfied with her position, he chastely kisses her forehead and leaves for his separate sleeping quarters. It’s a total inversion of the scene Elmer was asked to enact onstage, where he played a villainous figure that plants a lecherous kiss on Trilby’s character as she lies unconscious in his arms.
On a related note, Dorothy Sebastian deserves to be commended, not just for the physical ability she shows in this scene alongside Buster, but for her delightfully nasty performance in general. I know some people don’t like this character at all. Personally, I love the bitchiness. It’s refreshing. Keaton’s leading women have a bit more variety to them than critics claim, with some colder than others, but none have as explosive a personality as Trilby. Her goals reach beyond waiting for Elmer to prove himself and as with the best Keaton leading ladies, she is allowed to be a comic partner and not just a romantic goal to be won. The two have stellar chemistry as well, likely a by-product of the offscreen affair between the two actors.
After the highlight of the entire film comes the second half, what I like to call The Navigator Remix, as it also involves Buster and his leading lady stranded alone at sea. After Trilby leaves Elmer, he gets kidnapped by rum-runners in a rather contrived sequence of events. Briefly shanghaied by the criminals, Elmer falls off the ship when a yacht happens to be passing by. Elmer is rescued and gratefully accepts a post on the yacht, only to discover Trilby and Lionel are among the passengers. A fire breaks out in the boiler room and in the mad scuffle, everyone but Elmer and Trilby abandons ship. Elmer valiantly puts out the fire, unaware of the evacuation, and Trilby is passed out.
When the two reunite, Elmer is embittered and treats Trilby coldly, at one point even removing himself from her embrace out of heartbroken resentment. Dramatically, this is a fascinating moment because it’s rare to see Buster this hurt and vulnerable onscreen, let alone angry. The savage fight in Battling Butler is his fiercest moment in a film, but here, the anger is simmering and sour. As with the despairing sink to the sand in The Cameraman, this scene shows how good a dramatic actor Keaton was when given the opportunity.
The two are not left alone for long, as the rum-runners return and board the ship. Elmer tries to hide Trilby, but she is soon discovered by the captain and his interest in this unexpected guest is less than savory. Ultimately, it’s up to Elmer to rescue Trilby from the bad guys. Once again, what marvels about this climax is how angry Elmer gets. And here, the comparisons to Battling Butler are even more apt, as Elmer gets savage as he engages in fisticuffs with the villain. These dramatic flourishes are striking in what is otherwise a very silly farce. Keaton’s heroics here are also a great contrast to how shrimpy MGM chose to portray him in subsequent films. Much like The Cameraman, Spite Marriage offers up an alternate vision for the kinds of scenarios MGM could have put Keaton in, instead of the stagey farces and leaden Jimmy Durante team-ups they ultimately offered up.
Spite Marriage would prove a hit, with exhibitors reporting mirthful audiences and MGM satisfied with the box office intake. Today, Spite Marriage is easy to criticize and I’ve always felt it was a case of a movie with its parts being better than the whole. The narrative feels very disjointed and the overly broad pre-recorded soundtrack accompanying the film is annoying as hell in spots. However, the movie has a lot to recommend it. Sebastian is a unique leading lady for Buster and a lot of the humor still works in the classic Keaton mode.
Also, Buster is super sexy in that captain’s hat.
Like DAMN. Instantly the greatest movie of all time. Citizen Kane what? Jeanne Dielmann who?
Sources:
Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis
Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy by Imogen Sara Smith
A note: This column tries to avoid spoiling the films covered, but this review features some details that reveal a key turning point in the plot, so be warned. If you haven’t seen the film, please go watch it before reading this piece. It’s a great crime thriller from arguably the greatest filmmaker who ever stood behind a camera.
While not the most celebrated Kurosawa film, High and Low is my favorite of the great director’s work. People often describe it as Hitchcockian because it’s a fantastic suspense-thriller, but I don’t think that adjective quite fits. It’s an intimate thriller that morphs into a police procedural, sprawling out over a tense two and a half hours. Normally, I say thrillers should not be in excess of two hours. High and Low is an exception. It goes beyond keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. It’s an exploration of an entire social milieu, both the privileged uppercrust and the bleak, poverty-ridden underworld.
The story was adapted from an Ed McBain novel titled King’s Ransom. Kurosawa keeps the central premise: a rich businessman is approached to pay a ransom when he believes his young son is kidnapped, only to find out it’s his chauffeur’s son that’s been taken. The ransom will wreck him financially, so he wonders if he should pay the sum since it isn’t his kid’s neck on the block.
High and Low is a great example of a film adaptation outclassing its source material. In the novel, the businessman is a nasty guy who gets to sidestep the central moral dilemma at play, while Kurosawa does not let his protagonist off the hook. King Gondo, played by Toshiro Mifune in his most underrated performance, clawed his way from poverty to power, becoming one of the most lucrative shoe producers in Japan. He is not a bad person or a caricature of masculine dominance, but a man proud of his achievements and intent on keeping the integrity of his brand intact. He wars with a faction within the company only interested in short-term profit: they want to make fashionable but flimsy shoes, while Gondo is all for modernization but not at the cost of quality. This means less instantaneous profit and in order to secure the long-term future of the brand, Gondo plans on secretly buying out control of the company.
When the chauffeur’s son is kidnapped and the ransom demanded, Gondo truly has a moral dilemma. He will be financially destroyed if he pays the money and his company’s future will be jeopardized. He’s spent years building up power and it’s implied it was a minor miracle for him to have ascended Japan’s set-in-stone social order as much as he did. His wife and son will be negatively affected as well. And yet, is all of that worth the life of an innocent child?
Gondo ultimately decides to pay the ransom and unlike his novel counterpart, he pays dearly for the decision. In the novel, the character doesn’t pay the ransom and for all the hemming and hawing by his loved ones who claim they will never respect him again, they come crawling back anyway, and his public image isn’t stained much at all. No fuss, no muss, and the kid gets rescued anyway. What luck. Kurosawa shows that Gondo loses much of what he built up in exchange for following his conscience. Even though he is determined to continue in the shoe business and finds a lower-paying but more satisfying position at a rival company, there was no guarantee of that safety net when he made his decision.
The film does not end with the money exchange, however. The second half is a police procedural in which a team led by Tatsuya Nakadai’s Inspector Tokura tracks down the kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamazaki). It’s easy to imagine a version of this movie where this section isn’t as engaging as the more intimate first and yet it’s every bit as fascinating. While the opening half is set in the world of the rich, the second takes the audience to the despairing world of the poor, where addiction and crime are spawned from want. When we finally encounter the criminal behind the plot, he is a desperate creature, calculating and smart but hiding his class resentment and rage behind a cold-blooded persona. The post-climactic confrontation between Gondo and the kidnapper is among the most memorable endings in all of cinema, chilling and heartbreaking all at once. Every time I see it, that ending never fails to move me deeply.
Merely competent thrillers lose some of their edge with repeated acquaintance, but High and Low remains a rich, intense experience with every viewing. As with the best of Kurosawa, it’s human, entertaining, and thought-provoking. It practically demands repeat screenings.
When I started doing these “greatest hits of X year” posts in 2021, I expected to only make one a year going forward. However, these are so much fun. I just love looking at what movies drew audiences in the past and looking into how they hold up over time. By this year’s end, I might have several of these on the blog. I can’t hold myself back.
This time, we’re looking at 1924, the year in which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came into being. Often considered the most glamorous of the Golden Age studios, in 1924 it was still a ramshackle operation and its days of dominance would not kick into high gear until the start of the talkie era. Regardless, they scored two major hits in 1924, one of which cemented the stardom of Lon Chaney Sr. and the other which launched the stardom of matinee idol John Gilbert.
Some familiar faces will be present on this list. Cecil B. DeMille continues to dazzle Jazz Age audiences with his tales of bad behavior and moral redemption among the young and beautiful. Harold Lloyd continues to be the most lucrative screen comedian, landing two hit features. Douglas Fairbanks’ landmark fantasy epic The Thief of Bagdad is also a big hit, though numbers don’t quite match up to his previous effort, Robin Hood.
New faces appear as well. John Gilbert’s steady rise to legendary sex symbol begins in earnest here. Young Mary Astor appears opposite John Barrymore at the start of her own stardom. Norma Shearer appears in He Who Gets Slapped, the first MGM film put into release– an oddly fitting detail since for much of the 1930s, she would be dubbed the Queen of the MGM lot.
Let’s waste no more time. Onto the post!
My usual note: It is difficult to get 100% accurate box office information from the silent era and this list is based on the top ten films offered up by Wikipedia as the big hits of 1924. Box office numbers can vary depending on the source (and here, I just stuck to the Wikipedia numbers for consistency’s sake), so just keep that in mind as we forge ahead.
#10 – HIS HOUR
Image source: IMDB
Release date: September 29, 1924
Box office (est.): $197,000
Summary: Prim British noblewoman Tamara Loraine (Aileen Pringle) is drawn to wildPrince Gritzko (John Gilbert), a dashing Russian with a long list of conquests. However, she has enough self-control to hold off his advances. Circumstances propel Tamara to Gritzko’s lodge, where he aggressively tries to get her to submit. Can these crazy kids find love despite Gritzko’s caveman ways?
Elinor Glyn is a key figure in early 20th century pop culture. A novelist who specialized in torrid, exotic romance, her books were equally controversial and popular for their sexual content. Her most famous novel was Three Weeks, the passionate tale of a love affair between a British youth and a mysterious temptress who turns out to be royalty. The masses saw the Glyn universe as one of glamorous, racy escapism. Allegedly more discerning readers sniffed at Glyn’s work as trash.
Actor John Gilbert was among the critics, but he was roped into making a film version of Glyn’s novel When the Hour Came by fledgling studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Producer Irving Thalberg concurred with Gilbert that the material was trash– but the public had a taste for trash and were willing to pay good money for it. Gilbert’s reluctance to take the lead was not allayed when he met Glyn in person. A powerful force in Hollywood (several of her books were turned into films and she was given a lot of sway over casting decisions), Glyn was a celebrity in her own right, her bright red hair wrapped in elaborate turbans and her demeanor the height of Jazz Age camp. When she was introduced to Gilbert, she is said to have called him “the black stallion,” much to his embarrassment.
At the time, Gilbert was not the superstar he would become by the mid-1920s and his name was overshadowed by Aileen Pringle. Pringle had just come off her lead part in an adaptation of the more famous Three Weeks, which catapulted her to stardom and made her a natural casting choice for His Hour. Pringle is only remembered in silent film buff circles today, but she appears to have led a fascinating life. While a bit snobby and aloof with her co-stars, her wit and intelligence made her popular with intellectuals like HL Mencken, and would later marry crime novelist James M. Cain of The Postman Always Rings Twice fame, though the union lasted only two years.
Whatever its stars thought, His Hour was a hit and King Vidor’s lush direction singled out for praise. However, the eroticism was apparently too hot to handle for many moral watchdogs, particularly a scene in which Gilbert caresses, kisses, and bites Pringle’s hand while she feigns sleep. Regardless of the pearl clutchers, the film was Gilbert’s first for MGM and helped cement his reputation as one of the great silent screen lovers.
His Hour exists in a print with Czech intertitles but is currently unavailable to view anywhere. Gilbert biographer Eve Golden claims it’s unimpressive, hampered by Gilbert and Pringle’s lack of chemistry, and Gilbert’s Russian prince being “little more than a stalker and rapist.” Ouch.
Sources:
Dark Star: The Untold Story of the Meteoric Rise and Fall of Legendary Silent Screen Star John Gilbert by Leatrice Gilbert Fountain
John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars by Eve Golden
#9 – BEAU BRUMMEL
Image source: TCM
Release date:March 30, 1924
Box office (est.): $453,000
Summary: George “Beau” Brummel (John Barrymore) and tradesman’s daughter Margery (Mary Astor) are madly in love, but her parents oppose the union due to Beau’s lack of money or title. Margery is compelled to marry a lord, embittering her former love. Beau intends to have his vengeance upon high society by becoming one of the most popular members of the smart set, befriending the dissolute Prince of Wales (Willard Louis) and seducing many a married lady. However, through it all, Beau is haunted by his love for Margery and his simmering anger at the elites eventually compromises his good standing with the prince. Will he and Margery ever find a way to be together, or are they destined to forever be apart?
While John Gilbert was just getting in his footing as a contender for top Hollywood matinee idol, John Barrymore was still enjoying plenty of success as a swoon-worthy thespian. During the 1900s and 1910s, Barrymore fangirls packed the theaters to hear his lovely voice and see his handsome face. While the medium of silent film could not capture Barrymore’s voice, his acting chops and good looks still came through.
The 1924 Beau Brummel was among Barrymore’s greatest hits of the 1920s. Based loosely on the life of the infamous 19th century dandy of the same name, Beau Brummel is a tragic romance. George “Beau” Brummel is unable to be with the noblewoman he loves due to class interests, so he plunges himself into a life of hedonistic dissolution, seducing married women, spending hours on perfecting his appearance, and partying it up with the equally amoral Prince of Wales. Much of the movie covers Beau’s society balancing act, charming the elite while covertly treating them with contempt. However, his enduring love for Margery gives his character considerable sympathy.
Margery was the first major role of Mary Astor, who is absolutely, hauntingly beautiful throughout the film. She looks like a fairy tale princess come to life. Her relationship with Barrymore was as intense offscreen as it was on. The two had a sexual relationship during filming, even though Barrymore was over 40 and Mary Astor was only 17. Though she viewed Barrymore through rose-tinted lens during this time, Astor later said learned a lot about acting from observing Barrymore’s methods onset:
“I was impressed by the keenness of his analysis and interpretation of character. He was the first actor I ever heard speak of a character in the third person. Instead of saying ‘I will do this’ or ‘I will make my entrance when a certain event occurs,’ Jack would say, ‘I don’t think the guy would do that. I think he’s so mad he wouldn’t even bow to the king.’ He was thinking of the character as a real being, with an intrinsic character that would cause him to react in ways quite different from the way he, as John Barrymore, would react.”
The part of Lady Margery isn’t terribly complicated, but Astor’s expressive face elevates what is otherwise a standard ingenue role. Her real life feelings for her co-star shine through all their scenes, intense and all-consuming.
I have to say the most interesting dynamic in the film is between Beau and the Prince. The jovial energy between Barrymore and Willard Louis is palpable. According to Astor, the two told dirty jokes in their scenes together, believing that since they were making a silent film, no one in the audience would be the wiser. Alas, deaf patrons and others adept at lip-reading caught every nasty line and sent in their complaints to Warner Bros.
As far as Barrymore goes, the film is as much a showcase for his versatility as the more famous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We get to see Beau progress from besotted soldier to witty rake to disgraced old man living in madness and poverty. The gradual transformation is heartbreaking, making the film’s famous final scene all the more touching. I won’t spoil that ending in case you haven’t seen the film, but it does allow the film to conclude on a sentimental but powerful note.
Sources:
My Story: An Autobiography by Mary Astor
This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age by Gaylyn Studlar
#8 – HE WHO GETS SLAPPED
Image source: TCM
Release date: November 9, 1924
Box office (est.): $493,000
Summary:Scientist Paul Beaumont (Lon Chaney) sees his life fall apart when his wealthy patron, the Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott), plagiarizes his work and steals away his wife Marie (Ruth King). Humiliated before a panel of academics and spurned by Marie, Paul begins to see the world as cruel and absurd. He leaves his former identity behind when he joins a circus as a clown named HE. Gaining fame for his masochistic comedy act, HE finds love anew for the circus’ gentle bareback rider Consuelo (Norma Shearer), even though her heart belongs to her handsome co-performer Benzano (John Gilbert). But when Consuelo’s impoverished father Count Mancini (Tully Marshall) seeks to use her beauty to curry finances and favor with Baron Regnard, HE plots a dastardly revenge to defend the woman he loves.
I’ve always found it hilarious that He Who Gets Slapped—a grim drama about a masochistic clown bent on revenge against the lecherous aristocrat who cuckolded him—was the first work wholly produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the one classic era studio you’d think most likely to shy away from such material. This is one perverse film in which humanity is marked out as collectively predatory and cruel. There are some glimmers of hope, true, but they are oh so faint.
He Who Gets Slapped is based on a 1915 Russian play still much revered in its country of origin. The film takes only the most basic ingredients from its source—the bitter clown, the impoverished Count Mancini’s desire to wed Consuelo to the Baron, the downbeat view of the human condition—but otherwise changes it from a talky, philosophical piece to something like a Jacobean revenge tragedy. The blend of the tragic and the ridiculous reminds me a bit of something like Oldboy, to be honest.
The sinister tone, circus setting, and presence of Lon Chaney might lead one to assume this is a Tod Browning project, but the director was Victor Sjostrom (billed Seastrom in the film itself), a Swedish filmmaker and actor enticed to Hollywood by Louis B. Mayer. He Who Gets Slapped was his second American project and he would go on to direct several great silent classics, like The Scarlet Letter and The Wind. After the talkie revolution, Sjostrom returned to his native Sweden and stuck to acting exclusively, becoming a mentor to a young Ingmar Bergman and starring in one of Bergman’s greatest pictures, Wild Strawberries. During the 1920s, Sjostrom relished his time with Chaney (the two would make two films together), calling him the greatest actor working on screen or stage.
Chaney was certainly on the up and up in 1924. He’d become a bonafide star after the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 and his celebrity would remain undimmed until his untimely death in 1930. Chaney’s performance as HE is among his finest work. The way he channels his pain and rage into his bitter clown act is downright chilling. And yet, flickers of compassion pulse through the performance, allowing one to hope that perhaps something of HE’s faith in humanity can be renewed.
At its heart, He Who Gets Slapped is about how unfeeling people can be when it comes to the pain of others. HE’s act is a recreation of the worst day of his life in which he was humiliated before a scientific committee by the Baron: he announces basic facts only to be slapped repeatedly by his fellow performers. The skit culminates in HE having a felt heart ripped from his chest by another clown, who proceeds to stomp it into the ground before giving HE an irreverent clown funeral. I doubt anyone who’s ever watched this film has ever found this “comic” act funny, yet the onscreen audience howls with sadistic mirth. They look positively obnoxious in those crowd shots, and one wonders what HE gets out of his act. Is it his way of exercising control over a situation in which he was so powerless? Is it an undetected gesture of contempt towards all humanity?
Even the kindhearted Consuelo, played by a luminous Norma Shearer, is guilty of a certain level of thoughtlessness. When HE confesses his love to her, Consuelo reacts with disgust then laughs, the very thought of this middle-aged clown being enamored with her too absurd a concept to be true. She even slaps him for good measure—a gesture that’s intended to be playful, but only devastates HE. On one hand, it’s hard to blame Consuelo’s reaction—I don’t know how I would react if a co-worker I viewed as a casual friend randomly and passionately swore their love for me—but because we understand HE’s alienation and pain so keenly, it’s hard not to empathize with his rejection.
The dynamic between HE and Consuelo is more fascinating than the usual Chaney/Unrequited Love Interest deal because HE isn’t just in love with Consuelo. He arguably sees her as a double, for both of them have been objectified by the wealthy. Consuelo’s father treats her as a commodity that can be used to buy his way back into aristocratic society. When we first see her, she’s being appraised by the ringmaster as though she were a thoroughbred horse. She turns in a circle, eyes downcast, utterly dehumanized. But one of the most chilling scenes in the film occurs when Count Mancini is trying to convince the Baron to marry Consuelo. Disgusted by Consuelo’s show business profession, the Baron initially refuses. However, Mancini begins to spin his sales pitch, asking the Baron to “Imagine what a bride she will make.” We don’t get any more intertitles specifying what else the Count is saying, but his leering manner and the Count’s suggestive fondling of a set of pearls tell us everything. When HE moves in to save Consuelo from being used as a sexualized bargaining chip, it isn’t because he thinks he’ll win her heart. At that point, she’s already rejected him. Instead, it becomes a means of making sure history does not repeat itself and the Baron will no longer be able to use other humans as his playthings.
For all its nastiness, He Who Gets Slapped is not so much a nihilistic horror show as a cathartic call to compassion. The ending scenes are among the most moving in all film. I always find my heart aching when the drama ends, no matter how many times I’ve seen it and it remains one of my all-time favorites of the entire silent era.
Summary: King Garnet (Rod La Roque) is a no-good wastrel, ignoring the canning factory he inherited and shirking every responsibility he can. Anna Land (Leatrice Joy) works in the factory to support her struggling family, but dreams of a singing career. Both characters face trials a-plenty, particularly King when he learns that due to a secret will, he has to take direct control of the factory or else he’ll lose his ample inheritance to his illegitimate brother William Silver (Victor Varconi), who happens to be the factory manager. Also, there’s a Romeo and Juliet flashback somewhere in there because this is a silent DeMille film after all and we need our period costumes, damn it!
Cecil B. DeMille followed up his mammoth production of The Ten Commandments with more modest (at least, by DeMille epic standards) Jazz Age potboilers, but they seem to have pleased 1920s audiences. The first film in a three-picture contract DeMille signed for Famous Players-Lasky, Triumph brought back DeMille favorites Leatrice Joy and Rod La Roque for the lead roles. Zasu Pitts, fresh off Von Stroheim’s Greed, is in a supporting comic relief part. Like the modern story of The Ten Commandments, Triumph was designed as a Jazz Age morality play about the idle rich and the importance of hard work, putting its flawed leading man through the ringer so he could earn his happiness.
I don’t have much to say about this one. Prints of Triumph survive, but like His Hour, it remains unavailable for viewing. Contemporary reviewers seemed to universally concur it was good enough if a bit too long for what it was and certainly nothing that would make you forget The Ten Commandments anytime soon. On the flip side, DeMille biographer Scott Eyman has seen the film and his impression isn’t so favorable: “The setting is outlandish, the plot defies synopsis let alone rational analysis, and DeMille’s filmmaking carries authority but no energy until the end, when he puts together a rousing fire sequence that looks dangerous and probably was.”
Sources:
Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood by Robert S. Birchard
Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille by Scott Eyman
The Films of Cecil B. DeMille by Gene Ringgold
#6 – FEET OF CLAY
Image source: IMDB
Release date: September 28, 1924
Box office (est.): $904,383
Summary: Kerry Harlan (Rod La Roque) is a poor boy. Amy Loring (Vera Reynolds) is a rich girl. After he saves her from drowning, the two marry, but complications ensue. Firstly, Kerry has to stay off his feet due to a shark bite that occurred while he was rescuing Amy. Secondly, his married sister-in-law Bertha (Julia Faye) wants him as her boy toy and aggressively pursues him. When Bertha dies due to an accidental fall from a balcony, scandal haunts the young couple, who decide to form a suicide pact. However, their subsequent trip to the afterlife is cut short when they’re brought back to life and then…uh… yeah, the plot synopsis kind of confuses me.
Feet of Clay was DeMille’s second picture for Famous Players-Lasky, though it was a project for which he had little enthusiasm. Jesse Lasky insisted DeMille make a film from Margaretta Tuttle’s novel (originally a magazine serial) of the same name, but DeMille wanted to make an adaptation of the Sutton Vane play Outward Bound. Outward Bound is about a group of passengers on a ship who slowly realize they are all dead and en route to the afterlife. The spiritual angle suited DeMille’s interests, but Lasky was insistent on Feet of Clay and so DeMille decided to make the best of it by combining Tuttle’s story with elements from a 1914 play called Across the Border, which involves out-of-body experiences.
DeMille tried subtly inserting elements from Outward Bound into Feet of Clay‘s script, but Vane sniffed them out and sued Famous Players-Lasky. The studio ended up settling with Vane out of court and the whole affair soured their view of DeMille, though Adolph Zukor was already felt somewhat threatened by DeMille, whose loyal staff viewed themselves as more beholden to the director than to the studio. Lasky and Zukor flaunted an upcoming contract with DW Griffith as a means of putting DeMille in his place– he wouldn’t be the only prestige director on their payroll now. Ultimately, DeMille finished out his contract with The Golden Bed in 1925, then left to start up his own studio.
Regardless of the behind the scenes misery involved, Feet of Clay was a profitable film, grossing three times its budget. Reviews were favorable too. Writing for The Motion Picture News, Frank Elliott claimed, “The plot packs a good moral and swings the observer along through moments of the wildest jazz, the strongest drama, real heart appeal, and passionate lovemaking.” Alas, Feet of Clay is a lost film, so I cannot offer any opinions of my own.
Sources:
Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood by Robert S. Birchard
Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille by Scott Eyman
The Films of Cecil B. DeMille by Gene Ringgold
#5 – HOT WATER
Image source: IMDB
Release date: October 26, 1924
Box office (est.): $1,350,000
Summary: This movie takes place during a brief period in the life of Hubby (Harold Lloyd) and Wifey (Jobyna Ralston), joyful newlyweds living in a cute little home. That home is about to be invaded by Wifey’s relations: the domineering pro-Prohibition moralist mother Winnifred (Josephine Crowell), and her two sons, the grown-up deadbeat Charley (Charles Stevenson) and the underage brat Bobby (Mickey McBan). As much as Hubby tries to make the best of things, the trio are an unholy pain and the sooner Hubby can get rid of them, the better.
Harold Lloyd’s features come in two flavors: “character pictures” with more developed emotional throughlines and “gag pictures” with loose plots and a laugh a minute. Nineteen-twenty-four saw Lloyd offer up one of each: Girl Shy would be the character picture and Hot Water the gag picture. In fact, Hot Water was designed as a response to critics of Girl Shy (which we’ll discuss later in this post), a “character film” deemed overlong. So, Hot Water only runs for an hour and consists of three episodic vignettes following a young newlywed’s day from hell when his insufferable in-laws come to visit.
The first vignette concerns his trip to the grocery store, where he wins a prize turkey in a raffle drawing and has to try to carry it home without causing a riot on the public transport. The second introduces the annoying in-laws. They come by for a visit, usurping Hubby’s house and his attempt at a romantic drive in his new car with Wifey. Their family outing goes about as well as any attempt at a peaceful drive in a silent comedy. The final vignette involves Hubby trying to shut Winnifred up through a discreet use of chloroform, only for him to believe he’s killed her. When her “ghost” starts stalking through the house and the police appear outside the door, hijinks ensue.
Critics and fans often find Hot Water lacking compared to Lloyd’s other features. It’s not uncommon to see it deemed “a weaker effort.” I beg to differ: Hot Water is damn funny and one of my go-to silent comedies when I want to laugh out loud. I love the dysfunctional family element, maybe because it’s just more relatable the older I get.
The visual storytelling is also brilliant. My favorite example is when Hubby slowly realizes his in-laws are in the house. He gets hit by a spitball—a sign that Bobby is there. He sees cigarette smoke rising above the back of an armchair—a sign that Charley is there. And then he sees his own pipe in a trash can—a sign that Winnifred is on the prowl for vices to cure.
Lloyd’s expressions throughout are what kills me most. Anytime he realizes he has to deal with his irritating relations, the light dies in his eyes and his jaw becomes firm, an excellent and accurate manifestation of everyday misery. Though a master of mugging when a scene called for it, these subtle reactions are hilarious and show how wonderfully expressive Lloyd was as an actor.
If I have a complaint about Hot Water, it’s that these characters are all so good that I wish they were in a more developed film story. Like, imagine irritated Harold Lloyd having to lug his wife and her awful family to some vacation spot—Harold Lloyd goes to Wally World! Man, I would have LOVED to see that. Such a shame silent comedians didn’t really go for sequels. These characters just begged for it.
Sources:
The Harold Lloyd Encyclopedia by Annette M. D’Agostino
#4 – THE THIEF OF BAGDAD
Image source: Letterboxd
Release date: March 18, 1924
Box office (est.): $1,490,419
Summary: Set in a mythical Bagdad, the story follows Ahmed (Douglas Fairbanks), a cocky young thief with no compunctions about taking what he wants, be it a piece of bread or a beautiful princess (Julanne Johnston). Disguising himself as a prince, Ahmed plans to kidnap the Princess, but instead falls mutually in love with her. His charade discovered by the Princess’ enraged father, Ahmed must win his lady love’s hand by finding a priceless treasure. In time, he will also have to save both princess and Bagdad itself from a conniving Mongolian prince (Sojin Kamiyama).
Douglas Fairbanks was riding high after the smash success of his Robin Hood, which was the number one box office attraction of 1922. A grand epic colored by romantic chivalry and good-humored action, what could possibly top it? During the pre-production phase, Fairbanks jumped from project to project with his usual creative abandon. Maybe he’d make a pirate movie? Or an epic set in Ancient Rome? Or an adaptation of Monsieur Beaucaire?
Ultimately, Fairbanks set his heart on an epic mash-up of the stories of The Arabian Nights, intending to outdo himself with an array of action, romance, and immersive fantasy. As a result, The Thief of Bagdad is undoubtedly the artiest film of Fairbanks’ career. The Three Musketeers and Robin Hood were elaborate spectacles, but their visuals still had some grounded qualities. The Thief continually leaves any sense of realism behind in just about every facet of its creation, conjuring an uncompromised storybook world in which rippling fabric stands in for a raging ocean and the William Cameron Menzies sets are an Art Deco dream of the dangerous yet wondrous world of The Arabian Nights.
Boldest of all is arguably Fairbanks’ performance. He was always ebullient and energetic, but here, his acting takes on balletic dimensions. Influenced by Vaslav Nijinskiy and the Ballets Russes, Fairbanks all but dances through this part, throwing both arms up when surprised, hopping from place to place like a Mario Brother, or rubbing his belly in large circles when intoxicated by the aroma of fresh bread. Non silent film afficionados will assume this is just silent movie overacting with no artistic thought put into it (“hur, hur, people couldn’t act before Brando hur hur”). Fairbanks biographer Tracey Goessel is more on the mark when she says, “[Fairbanks] was trying to make a film as universal, as primarily symbolic, as dance.”
The Thief was a box office success and most of the critical notices were positive, but this triumph would be mixed. For one thing, the movie was so expensive that its profits were not as substantial as previous Fairbanks spectaculars. The Thief also wasn’t as popularly received as Robin Hood. While it played well in the cities, small town exhibitors claimed their patrons were less keen on this artier Fairbanks. In a few years, the critics would concur, calling the film a pretentious misfire. It’s clear Fairbanks had succumbed to the desire to make ART! How dare he!
Years ago, I was with these critics, finding the film beautiful but ponderous, but my most recent viewing of The Thief changed my mind. As opposed to watching Fairbanks’ opus on a tiny laptop in crappy YouTube quality, I had on the latest bluray release, splashed across my sizeable flat screen with Carl Davis’ gorgeous Rimsy-Korsakov-inspired score blaring. Presented in good quality (while my phone was in another room), The Thief became an engrossing experience, a competitor with Fritz Lang’s two-part Die Niebelungen as the greatest fantasy film of the 1920s.
Sources:
The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks by Tracey Goessel
#3 – SECRETS
Image source: IMDB
Release date:March 24, 1924
Box office (est.): $1,500,000
Summary:Sitting patiently by the sickbed of her husband John (Eugene O’Brien), elderly Mary Carlton (Norma Talmadge) looks back on their life together. In her teens, Mary abandoned a life of ease and wealth to elope with penniless John. They made a life in the American West, facing physical danger and heartbreak together. In middle age, John’s infidelity threatens the union, but the relationship survives due to Mary’s patience. However, can it survive John’s illness?
Secrets presents superstar Norma Talmadge at the height of her illustrious career. Her part is an actor’s dream come true: a single character we see over different phases of a long life. In this movie’s case, four phases. And I have to say, Talmadge’s work in differentiating the different versions of the same character is masterful. I would not be shy calling this her best performance– at least, among the scant Talmadge oeuvre readily available for viewing.
A frame story in which the elderly Mary Carlton (Talmadge) sits beside her ill husband’s bedside as she remembers their long marriage bookends three flashbacks showing the evolution of their relationship. What’s most striking is how convincing the old age makeup on Talmadge is in these scenes. Even now, it’s difficult to age up younger actors without making them look abominable…
I swear to God, whoever did the makeup on Hermione wasn’t even trying. Image source: Hollywood Reporter
…Ahem. But the make-up here is fantastic, as it remains throughout the film as we go through this woman’s long life and marriage. The old age make-up alone is great.
Each section feels like its own mini-movie, each with a different genre and tone. The first of the flashbacks takes place in 1865 when Mary was a young, lovestruck girl. John is a penniless employee of her father’s, making him an unsuitable option for Mary’s hand. Her parents desire a more socially advantageous match for their daughter, but Mary’s unmarried aunt– who was forced to give up the man she loved due to his low standing– urges the girl to follow her heart. This first section is slow but charming, playing almost like farce towards the end when Mary has to hide John in her room. While the visual metaphor of elaborate undergarments representing the limited social standing of Victorian women is a cliche by now, it works well here, with Mary almost laughing at the ridiculous amounts of layers she asked to put on for her first ball.
The second section sees the movie morph into a western. Mary is now a frontier wife with an infant son. She and John live in a humble house, but are happy. However, John runs afoul of a murderous gang and they ambush his house. We get a big shoot-out scene, in which the couple defend their home and Mary tries to console their ill baby. The sequence is both exciting and sentimental, once again emphasizing Mary’s devotion to the relationship and her iron will.
The third section is the weakest. Mary is now a comely matron and John a successful politician. They’ve two grown children and a beautiful home. Even Mary’s parents are no longer estranged from their daughter, coming by to visit her. However, Mary’s contentment is destroyed when she learns John is having an affair with Estelle, a gorgeous widow intent on breaking up the marriage. What makes this section suffer is John’s weak motivation. He tells Mary the affair was only born of short-lived lust and he has no plans on divorce. And right away, crisis averted, as Mary takes the repentant lug back, even though he also admits they’re penniless again. The adultery is treated like a minor inconvenience.
Is this poor writing or the result of missing footage? Indeed, it’s hard to properly evaluate Secrets, as it exists in incomplete condition. As it stands, the film’s success largely relies on Talmadge’s virtuoso performance. If I have a major issue, it’s that the husband character is underdrawn and colorless, making you wonder what makes him worth so much devotion and sacrifice. For me, this prevents the movie from having the emotional impact it should have, but regardless, it’s still an entertaining melodrama, one I wish was in better, more complete condition.
Summary: Tailor’s apprentice Harold Meadows (Harold Lloyd) is hardly a ladies’ man. He stutters around women and has never had a girlfriend. This does not prevent him from writing a how-to book about wooing all the different sorts of women out there, from flappers to vamps. During his quest for publication, he meets Mary Buckingham (Jobyna Ralston), a Los Angeles heiress. The two fall mutually in love, though Harold only wants to ask for her hand if he can make a good living from his book. When the book is rejected as too absurd, Harold breaks off the relationship… that is, until he learns the nefarious secret of Mary’s other suitor, the greedy and callous Ronald DeVore (Carlton Griffin), and becomes determined to save Mary from him.
It’s difficult for me to pinpoint the “best” Harold Lloyd film. Safety Last! is the most iconic, sure, and The Freshman is truly masterful, but Girl Shy is an astonishing piece of work. Of all the silent Lloyd features, I find it the most satisfying. It’s very funny. It has satire. It has sweet romance. It has one of the most action-packed climactic chases in all silent comedy. All around, it might be Lloyd’s best career-best effort.
Lloyd’s first independent production, Girl Shy is a landmark in other ways as well. Some consider it a key title in the development of the cinematic romantic comedy. The last third involving Harold’s chase to stop his beloved’s wedding to another man, inspired two other major films. The first was the 1925 Ben-Hur. Director Fred Niblo was inspired by the shot in which the camera appears to be run over by the horses Harold utilizes to rush to the rescue. Niblo used a similar device during the chariot race in Ben-Hur. The second film is Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. There’s a direct link between Harold rescuing Mary from her unwanted nupitals and Dustin Hoffman crashing Katharine Ross’ would-be wedding, as Nichols was inspired by the earlier film.
All this aside, what sticks out most to me about Girl Shy is how it walks the fine line between genuine sentiment and broad comedy, but without devolving into sappy goo or mood whiplash. The romance between Harold and Mary is very touching. They’re both in situations in which they are not fully appreciated by the other people in their life: Harold is mocked as a joke and Mary is valued only for her money. With any movie, it is vital that the audience intensely care for the characters and desire their happiness. I am not a big fan of romantic comedy, but Girl Shy is so special to me because Lloyd and Ralston are both so likable and so sweet together. It would be a kind of death if their characters did not end up together.
The satire of Jazz Age lovemaking also plays well still. The excerpts from Harold’s book show him assuming the roles of masculine indifference or total dominance when dealing with a “vampire” and a “flapper.” These scenes lampoon conventions of romantic drama so prevalent in popular culture at the time, particularly the idea of the “cave man” who takes what he wants and won’t be ordered about. Even if the stereotypes of “vampire” and “flapper” are dated to the 1920s, terrible romantic advice based on goofy perceptions of women sure isn’t and these scenes remain highly amusing.
Girl Shy is just such a pure lark of a film. It moves quickly, it makes you feel for the characters, it leaves you feel so, so good. It’s easy to see why audiences so readily took to both it and Lloyd himself.
Sources:
The Harold Lloyd Encyclopedia by Annette M. D’Agostino
#1 – THE SEA HAWK
Image source: IMDB
Release date: June 14, 1924
Box office (est.): $2,000,000
Summary: English baronet Oliver Tressilian (Milton Sills) is a decent man with a bit of a temper. Knowing it bothers his intended Rosamund Godolphin (Enid Bennett), he promises to cool it down, even if her brother Peter (Wallace MacDonald) is an antagonistic moron who wants to pick a fight with the Tressilian family any chance he can. Unfortunately, self-control comes far less easily to Oliver’s half-brother Lionel (Lloyd Hughes), who kills Peter during a duel. Afraid of being executed for murder, Lionel pins the blame on Oliver and has him kidnapped by the wily Captain Jasper Leigh (Wallace Beery), who takes the baronet to sea. When Jasper’s ship is captured by the Spanish, Oliver is forced to become a galley slave, but he escapes with the aid of the Moors. Converting to Islam and taking on a new name, Sakr-el-Bahr, he swears vengeance on those who wronged him, making his swift way back to English shores…
Though a massive hit in its day, The Sea Hawk is among the most underrated silent films, often overshadowed by its talkie remake with Errol Flynn. (Though “remake” is a bit inaccurate in relation to the talkie version since other than the title and Elizabethan setting, the two stories have nothing in common.) Adapted from a 1915 novel of the same name by Rafael Sabitani (also responsible for Captain Blood and Scaramouche), this is the kind of rip-roaring adventure story Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. Family betrayal! Romance! Kidnapping! Daring escapes! Naval battles! Pirates! Faraway lands! With the exception of some orientalist stereotyping, the film has held up very well.
The spectacle on display is still breathtaking now, maybe even more so in an age saturated with green screens and CG. You see, director Frank Lloyd didn’t want to use miniatures to stage the naval battles since 1920s audiences were sophisticated enough to sniff out silver screen fakery. He insisted on full-scale ships, which he got with the aid of Fred Gabourie, a technical director who helped construct props and sets for Buster Keaton’s films. The effort more than pays off and the battle footage was considered so impressive that it was repurposed for other movies even into the 1930s and 1940s. Combined with rich historical atmosphere, this is one good-looking film.
The Sea Hawk also benefits from a great leading actor. Milton Sills is one of those movie stars whose name only rings a bell with silent movie geeks, largely because he died at the dawn of the talkie era, yet he is a revelation in this. I heard Rudolph Valentino was considered for this role. Given the antagonistic romance between Oliver and Rosamund for much of the film, I can imagine him in the part (particularly when Oliver kidnaps Rosamund and carries her away to his ship bridal style). Being older and less smoldering, 42-year-old Sills brings a wholly different quality than the 29-year-old Valentino would have. There’s a different sense of drama to a mature man having his world turned upside down compared to a much younger man’s. With Valentino, Oliver’s reversal of fortune might have come off like a coming-of-age adventure in the vein of Moran of the Lady Letty. With Sills, it comes off like a settled man having to reinvent himself amidst adversity and a new culture.
(This isn’t to say Sills lacks erotic appeal. There’s a scene where he strips down before a judge to prove he couldn’t have killed Peter Godolphin since he hasn’t any injury, and what we see is pretty impressive, if I’m going to be objectifying about it.)
By and large, this is an adventure yarn with all the trimmings and a wonderful supporting cast. Enid Bennett just came off a big hit with Douglas Fairbanks’ 1922 Robin Hood, where she played Maid Marian. She gets more to chew on with Rosamund, who struggles to despise Oliver after she believes he killed her brother. For his part, Beery comes close to stealing the show from everyone. He is hilarious as Jasper Leigh, willing to promise anything to save his own skin and promoting himself in a rather Falstaffian fashion. Altogether, this is a great, great movie. If you haven’t seen it, then you’re in for a real treat.
Greetings, movie lovers! This is a blog update post, going over a change I made on the index page and announcing some upcoming blogathons I’ll be participating in during March.
1. I added a section for the Greatest hits of [X year] series on the index page. I plan on doing more than one a year because it’s so much fun. Considering the scope of this blog, my hope is to go from the 1920s through the 1970s.
2. I’ll be participating in the 10th annual Buster Keaton blogathon and the 3rd Marathon Stars blogathon. In the former, I’ll be reviewing Buster’s final silent film, Spite Marriage with Dorothy Sebastian. It’s a film with a complicated legacy. Depending on your perspective, it’s either Buster’s last good film or the beginning of the end.
The Marathon Stars blogathon has participants picking a movie star they’re not that familiar with, watching five films of theirs they haven’t seen before, and then blogging about the experience. I chose Anna May Wong, who I’ve only seen in Shanghai Express, The Toll of the Sea, Peter Pan, Mr. Wu, Old San Francisco, and The Thief of Bagdad. That might sound like a lot, but she only has substantial parts in the first two. The others feature her in more minor parts, some of which I barely remember her doing, so I’ll be selecting films in which she had starring roles.
3. I’m hoping to fulfill my long-time dream of posting video essays soon. In 2022, I finally recorded my first audio commentary track and while it was a challenge, it was an exhilarating one. I was hoping to dip my toes into video essays in 2023, but a LOT happened in my personal life that year and my laptop also crapped out, leaving me no way of recording anything until I got a new one. Fingers crossed, I’ll get to add more to my YouTube channel this year, starting with a video review of the underrated 1964 thriller Night Must Fall with Albert Finney.
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