Silent Film Quarterly Issue 10

The Silent Film Quarterly Volume 3

Winter 2017-18

Issue II

The Silent Film Quarterly • 3

The Silent Film Quarterly

—————————————————————————— Volume III, Issue 2 Winter 2017-18 Table of Contents Editor’s Message 4 The Greatest Silent Film of All Time:

Charles Epting

6

Coming Attractions: Lewis Walker

8

A Trip to the Moon: Charles Epting

10

Silent Film Quarterly Attempts To Solve an Unsolvable Question A Round-Up of New Releases

A Review of Flicker Alley’s 2018 Reissue of a Méliès Classic

Silents in Review: Claire Inayat Williams

12

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Day of Silents 2017

Daring Youth:

Gabriela Hernandez

17

Makeup in the Silent Film Era

Getting Away With Art, Part II:

Mark Pruett

23

Charles Epting

30

The Unsung Allies of Maurice Tourneur

Searching for DeMille’s Egypt:

A Trip to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center

The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful For Hollywood:

35

An Interview with Author Sherri Snyder

Theda Bara’s Lost Cleopatra: 44 An Interview with Filmmaker Phillip Dye

Bill Hart and “Charlie”:

Paul H. Conlon 46

The Famed Cowboy Trades in Fritz for a Monkey?

Just Rolling Along:

Eleanor Barnes

Making People Laugh:

Chester Conklin 52

Loretta Young—She’s Not Only Young but Pretty

The Man Behind the Moustache Explains His Craft

49

The Silent Film Quarterly • 4 Editor’s Message As I type this message, I’m making travel arrangements to attend my first San Francisco Silent Film Festival. There are, by my count, 20 feature films being screened, and while I’m sure that all have their merits there are some titles which I am particularly looking forward to. Here are my personal top five, the films which I will not miss under any circumstances: 5. No Man’s Gold (1926) Although Tom Mix’s career spanned nearly the entire silent era, he was arguably at the height of his powers in 1926. Mix inspired an entire generation of cowboys; any chance to see one of his Fox features on the big screen should be met with excitement.

4. A Throw of Dice (1929) So extravagant that it has often been compared to Cecil B. DeMille, A Throw of Dice presents two of India’s earliest movie stars in one of India’s greatest silent films.

Although it has been owned by the BFI for decades, it has only been shown stateside in recent years.

3. The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924) Mauritz Stiller is an undisputed master of early Swedish cinema, Lars Hanson was a heartthrob on both sides of the Atlantic, but who are we kidding: the main attraction here is Greta Garbo in her first starring role. Well-worth the 3-hour-plus runtime.

2. People On Sunday (1930) Full disclosure: People On Sunday is one of my favorite silent films ever made, and I have begged dozens of people to purchase the Criterion Collection DVD. Seeing this on the big screen will undoubtedly be a personal highlight for myself.

1. Mare Nostrum (1926) This film was the personal favorite of both Rex Ingram and Alice Terry, and its beautiful locations and early special effects will certainly make it interesting. But let’s be completely honest: what I’m really, truly excited about is the introduction by Kevin Brownlow, who is celebrating his 80th birthday this year. This has potential to be the most poignant and important moment of the festival.

Beyond the screenings, though, I am looking forward to the SFSFF as an opportunity to catch up with people I rarely see in person (like Silent-ology’s Lea Stans) and meet people who I know only through social media (such as SFQ regular Claire Inayat Williams). This is an event I have wanted to attend for many years, but work conflicts have always prevented me. Expect a full recap in the next issue.

Issue 11 will feature an interview with my favorite post-punk-guitarist-turned-silentfilm-composer, as well as several other exciting interviews and articles. Stay tuned for more information on www.silentfilmquarterly.com in the meantime!

—Charles Epting, editor

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The Greatest Silent Film of All Time: Silent Film Quarterly Attempts To Solve an Unsolvable Question

by Charles Epting The quest for the “greatest” silent film ever made. It seems like a futile challenge--and in all honesty, it probably is.

But ever since the earliest days of cinema, critics and fans alike have obsessed over ranking and rating films in order to create some sort of hierarchy.

I’ve long tried to figure out the best method for Silent Film Quarterly to have a go at determining the greatest silent film. I’d considered everything from a simple popularity poll where readers submit their favorite picture, to more creative methods like a college basketball-style bracket. These strategies, however, seem to have weaknesses that cannot overcome their strengths; ultimately, I decided that the quest to find the greatest silent film was a fool’s errand.

It was only after discovering the website “All Our Ideas” that I decided to revisit the idea of ranking silent films. All Our Ideas features a unique strategy for ranking items; it pits two random selections against one another in a head-tohead battle. By examining the frequency with which each item wins its matchups, it can then determine the probability of each choice winning against a random opponent.

To explain this better, I will use real-life examples. I fed approximately 100 film titles from the silent era into All Our Ideas (users are also allowed to submit their own films if they were not amongst my initial selections). The website then begins feeding the user questions: Intolerance or The Gold Rush? Metropolis or Wings? The Sheik or Sunrise? Again, these matchups are generated randomly, so the odds of being asked the same question twice are exceedingly low.

I devised several rules when it came

to selecting films to include in the poll.

Obviously lost films were out, regardless of how beloved and desired they might be (so no London After Midnight or Cleopatra). I also decided to exclude short films, as I feel it is unfair to compare Kid Auto Races At Venice to The Kid, or One Week to Three Ages. Beyond that, all silent feature films are eligible for inclusion.

I do not intend for this to be a static ranking of films; rather, I hope that readers will continue to cast their votes so that the list becomes dynamic and evolving. At the time of writing, approximately 22,000 votes have been cast. I’d love to see the list change considerably as that number grows over time.

1919 newspaper advertisement for...The Heart of Humanity? Opinions as to the greatest film of the silent era obviously depend on who you talk to.

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Silent Film Quarterly’s Top 50 Silent Films As Voted On By Our Readers 1. The Wind 2. Orphans of the Storm 3. Sunrise 4. City Lights 5. The General 6. Intolerance 7. Broken Blossoms 8. Wings 9. The Cameraman 10. Way Down East 11. Greed 12. The Birth of a Nation 13. The Passion of Joan of Arc 14. Die Nibelungen 15. Safety Last 16. 7th Heaven 17. The Last Laugh 18. Man With the Movie Camera 19. The Circus 20. The Man Who Laughs 21. The Thief of Bagdad 22. The Docks of New York 23. Hearts Of The World 24. Nosferatu 25. Sherlock, Jr.

26. The Scarlet Letter 27. Lucky Star 28. It 29. Ben-Hur 30. Four Sons 31. True Heart Susie 32. The Last Command 33. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 34. Street Angel 35. Steamboat Bill, Jr. 36. The Phantom of the Opera 37. Our Hospitality 38. The King of Kings 39. The Gold Rush 40. Sadie Thompson 41. The Kid 42. Sparrows 43. Judith Of Bethulia 44. He Who Gets Slapped 45. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 46. Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler 47. The Lodger 48. The Hunchback of Notre Dame 49. The Navigator 50. Napoléon

To cast your votes, visit www.allourideas.org/silentmovie.

Regular updates will be provided in future issues.

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Coming Attractions: A Round-Up of New Releases

by Lewis Walker So far 2018 has been rather dry in terms of silent film releases, seeing the usual re-releases of well known silent films. While some of these new editions were a welcome surprise (Fritz Lang: The Silent Films and Flicker Alley’s A Trip to the Moon being two examples), I’ve been crying out for some deeper delves into the back catalog of some of the most familiar faces of silent cinema to expand our appreciation of their work. The good news is that it looks as if I will be able to get just that with a slew of recent releases.

First we have two films directed by Allan Dwan staring Gloria Swanson—Manhandled (1924) and Stage Struck (1925).

Both films offer a chance to see Swanson in her prime, and following from last years release of Zaza (1923) I can only hope that we see more restorations of Swanson’s films from the silent era. Kino Lorber have released these two and continue to make Allan Dwan fans happy

with a double feature starring Douglas Fairbanks: The Half Breed and The Good Bad-Man, both from 1916. Coming at the very beginning of Fairbanks career, the set offers us a great chance to see the actor hone his craft and build towards the swashbuckling hero that he became synonymous with. Both editions come with audio commentaries by Tracey Goessel and Robert Byrne. Goessel, of course, wrote the fabulous biography on Fairbanks and I’m sure her commentary will be fascinating.

Kino Lorber continue a stellar year with a release of The Holy Mountain form 1926 and starring Leni Riefenstahl, who is best known for her direction of the Nazi Propaganda films under Adolf Hitler. Kino Lobber released this title in 2003 on DVD and this will be a welcome upgrade, boasting a 2K restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, who have been integral in getting some

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sought after German silent films restored and out into the world. It comes with a commentary by Travis Crawford and some interview footage of Riefenstahl. It offers a chance to see an example of the “mountain film” genre that became famous in Germany, but also gives a look at film history being made with Riefenstahl in her most notable acting role.

Flicker Alley continues a tradition of releasing important cultural films with the upcoming release of The Ancient Law or Das Alte Gesetz from 1923, which is toted as an important film for Jewish-German cinema. Directed by E.A. Dupont and starring Henny Porten and Ernst Deutsch, it tells the story of Baruch Mayr, who decides to break the family tradition to become an actor (much to the displeasure of his father who is an Orthodox Rabbi). A film that shows the problems that arise when tradition is challenged, it

is offered in its most complete form since its release in 1923, and it is shaping up to be one of the most important releases of the year.

On a personal note, however, the most exciting release comes from Cinemuseum who have announced a Blu-Ray release of Roscoe Arbuckle’s The Round Up (1920), Fatty’s first feature film.

Recently I have been hoping for a resurgence of appreciation for the works of Roscoe Arbuckle.

Too often any discussion around Arbuckle centers around his offscreen scandal and instead the only glimpses we get are on Buster Keaton collections. I can’t wait to get my hands on this release, especially with the news that Cinemuseum have The Arbuckle Anthology in the pipeline, including 50 films starring and directed by Arbuckle.

Nearly 100 years after The Round Up was released its time we appreciated this giant of silent comedy and re-evaluate his work.

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A Trip to the Moon: A Review of Flicker Alley’s 2018 Reissue of a Méliès Classic

by Charles Epting I was introduced to A Trip to the Moon in a somewhat unconventional manner.

In 1996, the Smashing Pumpkins released a music video for their song “Tonight, Tonight” clearly inspired by the work of Méliès. The first time I saw the video, I was captivated—the period costumes, the vaguely Victorian instruments the band plays, and the phantasmagorical story of a couple transported to the moon on a zeppelin. I was not surprised to learn that lead singer Billy Corgan, a pop-culture enthusiast who constantly incorporates references into his work, was emulating the style of a pioneer filmmaker (an earlier concept for the music video featured a Busby Berkeley-style production). In fact, it was after listening to the first Smashing Pumpkins album— titled Gish—that I became aware of the work of Lillian (who Corgan recalled was a favorite actress of his grandmother). It was clear to me that Billy Corgan had a fondness for silent cinema, and as a fan of his I felt compelled to explore the works of Georges Méliès.

Flicker Alley’s Georges Méliès: The First

Wizard of Cinema was my first-ever silent film purchase, so it seems somewhat poignant to be reviewing the current reissue of A Trip to the Moon. I immediately began devouring all five discs. In a somewhat unusual progression, it was only after watching the films of Méliès that I discovered Chaplin, Keaton, Pickford, and Fairbanks.

As brilliant as many of Méliès’ films are—I challenge anyone to not be enraptured by The Impossible Voyage, The Kingdom of Fairies, or my personal favorite, The Conquest of the Pole—there is still something that sets A Trip to the Moon apart from its contemporaries. Maybe it is the Victorian cultural obsession with lunar expeditions that makes A Trip to the Moon so fascinating today (the film fits neatly alongside the works of Verne and Wells).

Or perhaps it’s the otherworldly Selenite costumes, the steampunk aesthetic, or the now-famous shot of the rocket crashing into the moon’s face. Whatever the reason, A Trip to the Moon has become one of the few silent movies still recognizable to modern audiences.

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The 2018 Flicker Alley reissue of A Trip to the Moon is in many ways similar to its 2012 predecessor. A score by the French band Air has been replaced by two new scores by Jeff Mills and Dorian Pimpernel, and the packaging has been overhauled (a 23-page booklet with photographs and an essay about the making of the film is a wonderful inclusion). The news scores are, to be honest, not for ev-

eryone—purists of the silent era will find the most enjoyment in Serge Bromberg’s piano score (with Méliès’ narration), but those who enjoy the likes of the Alloy Orchestra will appreciate what both composers bring to the table.

There is something inherently strange about such a lavish release for a film that runs a mere 15 minutes. It would be tempting to assume that such a release is redundant or nonessential, especially since A Trip to the Moon is available numerous places online for free. I would urge people who feel this way to reconsider. The quality of the print, the brilliance of the original tinted colors, the variety of scores and narration, and the bonus features included more than justify the re-release of this collection.

A Trip to the Moon is not just a milestone in the career of Méliès; it is a cornerstone of cinema in general, sparking entire new genres and captivating viewers 116 years after its original release.

The version Flicker Alley presents here will be the definitive version for many years to come. Even if you’ve seen the film before, do yourself a favor and revisit Méliès’ masterpiece.

A Trip to the Moon is now available from www.flickeralley.com and all major retailers.

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Silents in Review: San Francisco Silent Film Festival Day of Silents 2017

by Claire Inayat Williams Silent Film Quarterly contributor Claire Inayat Williams is back again with coverage of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Day of Silents, held December 2, 2017. As always the SFSFF presented a program that was both obscure and mainstream, domestic and international in scope.

Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed a.k.a. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) Release date: July 2, 1926 Director: Lotte Reiniger Cast: None (animated) • • • Exquisite in its intricate simplicity, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a pioneering masterpiece of early cinema, the oldest surviving feature animation and the eighth project of German-born Lotte Reiniger. The story is adapted from the collection of Middle Eastern folks tales One Thousand and One Nights (what we more commonly know as Arabian Nights), primarily inspired by The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribasnou. Reini-

ger’s unique form of animation evolved from putting on shadow puppet plays as a child. Her method involved frame-byframe manipulation of silhouette cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead, a technique similar to what we now call stop-motion. Countless painfully patient hours went into her work, Prince Achmed alone took over three years to complete. Purists have claimed that several key scenes from Prince Achmed were directly stolen by Disney and can be found in their 1990s animation renaissance. Their adaptation of Aladdin has a memorable scene in which the Sultan’s advisor, Jafar, reaches for the magic lamp as Aladdin struggles to get out of the collapsing Cave of Wonders. “First get me out!” Aladdin cries, and Jafar responds, “First give me the lamp!” The scene is practically a shot-for-shot remake of a scene in Prince Achmed, even the dialogue is verbatim. Disney’s 1994 critically hailed The Lion King is controversial in its striking resemblance to a1960s Japanese anime series, Jungle Emperor (or Kimba the White Lion in the USA), but Simba’s growing up montage during “Hakuna Matata” can be traced back even further to Prince Achmed as well. Personally, I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt and consider these examples as homages to Reiniger’s exceptionally innovative work and contribution to animation.

Her talent and ingenuity are often mind-boggling. It’s hard to convey through writing how long delicate fingers or the

The Silent Film Quarterly • 13 shrugging shoulders of a black silhouette could pack the same emotive punch as a Pixar character, such a thing must be seen to be believed.

The Last Man on Earth (1924) Release date: November 2, 1924 Director: John G. Blystone Cast: Earle Foxe as Elmer Smith, Grace Cunard as Gertie, Gladys Tennyson as Frisco Kate, and Derelys Perdue as Hattie • • • In a world that is constantly redefining gender roles and definitions, it could be all too easy for a modern audience to watch J.G. Blystone’s The Last Man on Earth with a hypercritical eye. As with any film that challenges our belief systems, especially ones that invite us to glimpse into history as silent film does, it’s important to remember the context.

The rules were much different, dare I say simpler, in 1924. The Last Man on Earth is a Sci-Fi comedy very (very) loosely based on Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man. At its core it’s a love story, beginning with our protagonist Elmer Smith (Earle Foxe) as a star-crossed eight-year-old who has his sights set on Hattie (Derelys Perdue). Theirs is a country bumpkin youth, where the “village cut-up” goes to the school picnic in a pig-drawn carriage and an accidentally dropped pie will get you a serious lickin’. We jump ahead several years, and when a now teenaged Elmer still can’t win Hattie’s affection he vows off women forever and disappears into the woods for a decade. During his hermit years a plague known as “masculitis” kills every other fertile man on Earth over the age of 14, leaving the women to take over and the things somewhat unbalanced. It’s a world where bartenders mix a drink by strapping a cocktail shaker to their chests and shimmying away, where political parties get a little distracted by handheld mirrors sometimes, and

athletes have to pause mid-game to powder their noses. While all the best minds still strive to find a cure, a group of “skirted thugs” known as The Tea House Gang stumble upon Elmer’s hiding place and bring him back to auction him off to the highest bidder. His return causes absolute havoc and the stock market to reopen after ten years. The Last Man on Earth urges us to laugh at our society— and ourselves—and I would encourage viewers to “just keep your brassiere on” and do just that.

Tol’able David (1921) Release date: November 21, 1921 Director: Henry King Cast: Richard Barthelmess as David Kinemon, Gladys Hulette as Esther Hatburn, Walter P. Lewis as Iscah Hatburn, and Ernest Torrence as Luke Hatburn • • • Henry King’s Tol’able David is a sweet, accessible film based on a short story by Joseph Hergesheimer. David

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Kinemon is the youngest son of a small family of farmers in West Virginia. The Kinemon’s are idyllic; happy and loving, hardworking and poor, but wanting for nothing. Older brother Allen (Warner Richmond) drives passengers and collects mail on his hack, a position David identifies with manhood itself. His greatest wish is to prove to everyone that he is no longer a boy, most especially to Esther Hatburn (Gladys Hulette) who lives nearby with her grandfather. Such a perfectly serene life as theirs is never left unmeddled, and in true film fashion things quickly go south. Three seriously no-good cousins move in with the Hatburn’s uninvited, and when the neighborhood tries to handle things the good country folk way—with vigilante justice—it results in terrible loss for the Kinemon’s. David must step up and be what he believes he already is: a man. He finds he has much more to prove. The brilliance of King’s film lies in its many layers. On the surface David becomes a man the minute he has to and we take

it for granted that he is what he needs to be. He always tries to do what is right and accepts his position as protector of his family and Esther with bravado. But over and over the film reminds us of David’s clinging boyhood: when he shields his eyes with his hat while Esther puts her shoes back on, dances alone outside of a schoolhouse dance because he’s too nervous to ask her, worships his older brother, disappears into daydreams of his future. It’s not until a final altercation at the very end of the movie that we see how small he actually is, and we realize that through some magic of Silver Screen storytelling he has only grown up through his actions and our own imaginations. Tol’able David was a box office smash, adored by critics, audiences, and peers. Mary Pickford and John Ford both named it as one of their favorite films, and today it is still heralded as a masterpiece of cinema. Even a first-time silent viewer will find Tol’able David easily approachable and a wonderful watch.

The Rat (1925) Release date: February 1, 1926 Director: Graham Cutts Cast: Ivor Novello as Pierre Boucheron, Mae Marsh as Odile Etrange, and Isabel Jeans as Zélie de Chaumet • • • Ivor Novello plays Pierre Boucheron, a rakish thief on the wrong side of respectable with an almost obsessive charisma and Fonzie-level coolness. People— women especially— are drawn to him with crazed infatuation, he lures them in effortlessly with a smirk that is somehow both charming and slimy. He lives with his “little pal” Odile (Mae Marsh), a plain, wistfully naïve girl of conviction and faith who takes care of him. Their relationship is symbiotic; Pierre brings home the bacon and Odile cooks it. She relishes his attention when she gets it like everyone else but is the only person

The Silent Film Quarterly • 15 who encourages him to behave; wash your hands before dinner, no shoes on the couch, say your prayers. In exchange Pierre protects her from the world as best he can, his front is as tough with her as anyone but it’s tough love. He’s the king of a Parisian underground gin-joint called White Coffin Club. Here women fight dirty over which one of them Pierre likes the most, rolling around on the floor pulling hair and hurling insults.

Glamorously bored socialite Zélie (Isabel Jeans) and her rich, older lover/meal ticket Herman (Robert Scholtz) swing by the club on a lark, and she too finds herself intrigued by Pierre. Meanwhile, Herman finds himself just as enamored with the pure innocence of Pierre’s “common flower” and determines to make her his next conquest. Through introduction into this new world of money and possession, a devastating incident tears apart their lives and forces the two friends to not only confront their true feelings for each other but confess them. The film’s authenticity struck a chord with audi-

ences. The Rat (which is based on a play

by Novello and Constance Collier) was hugely successful in the box office and with critics and spurred two sequels: The Triumph of the Rat in 1926 and The Return of the Rat in 1929.

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) Release date: December 26, 1925 Director: Ernst Lubitsch Cast: Ronald Colman as Lord Darlington, May McAvoy as Lady Windermere, Bert Lytell as Lord Windermere, and Irene Rich as Mrs. Erlynne • • • Any opportunity to enter the irreverent world of Oscar Wilde should be taken and reveled in. Lady Windermere’s Fan is perhaps his most acclaimed piece of work; adapted for film, television, and stage no less than nine times across the globe and boasting both a medical syndrome and a mathematical term named after it. At the time of its premiere in 1892 Wilde’s own world was beginning to crash down around him. He would be

The Silent Film Quarterly • 16 imprisoned for homosexuality less than three years later, leading to his death in 1900 at only 46-years-old. It’s no wonder that Lady Windermere’s Fan is more thoughtful than some of his other writing, exploring the sacrifices we make for love in a contemplative and sincere way.

Mrs. Erlynne (Irene Rich) strives to rectify the greatest mistake of her life—chasing a frivolous love affair to the abandonment of her infant daughter—who we meet as the now adult Lady Windermere (May McAvoy). The societal confines of a disgraced woman won’t allow her to introduce herself directly, so she corners her son-in- law Lord Windermere (Bert Lytell) for information on her long-lost child. A Shakespearian misunderstanding prompts Lady Windermere to unwittingly very nearly make the same mistake, and without her mother’s selfless intervention she would have. Mrs. Erlynne is infamous in the finer circles; unabashedly gawked at through opera glasses, flocked by men and scorned by women.

Wilde must have felt much like his character: a spectacle, all at once desirable and repulsive, rejected from society because of his part in it, frightened but defiant. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” His most famous and arguably most beautiful line of writing is a testament to his struggle as both a human being and an artist. It elevates Lady Windermere’s Fan from a dramady-of-errors to a heartbreaking memoir, a confessional even, mixed in with all of Wilde’s own impertinent charm.

Geschlecht in Fesseln a.k.a. Sex in Chains (1928) Release date: October 24, 1928 Director: William Dieterle Cast: William Dieterle as Franz Sommer, Mary Johnson as Helene Sommer, Gunnar Tolnæs as Fabrikant Rudolf Steinau, and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski as Alfred

• • • Life is tough and money is tight for our protagonist Franz (William Dieterle) and his wife, Helene (Mary Johnson), but despite their struggles they are genuinely in love and happily married. The dutiful husband pounds the pavement every day trying to sell vacuums, while his young bride is forced to take a job as a cigarette girl (much to his dismay). When a customer becomes physically inappropriate Franz immediately comes to her defense, and the ensuing altercation leads to the assaulter’s death. Franz is sentenced to three years in prison, where conditions are so abysmal that he quickly realizes just how good his life really was. “I’ve lived to see someone unman himself just so he could sleep,” one seasoned prisoner tells Franz. “It’s hell in here.” He shares a cell with several other men including a successful businessman, Steinau (Gunnar Tolnæs), who is soon released. Honoring a promise he made to Franz, Steinau employs Helene and develops a close friendship with her through their shared experience. As their attraction to each other grows on the “outside,” inside his iron cage Franz begins to find comfort in the company of fellow inmate Alfred (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski). The film follows husband and wife equally as their separation continues to drive them deeper and deeper into an isolated madness. Dieterle’s filming techniques are somewhat rudimentary; panning back and forth in a conversation, sticking almost exclusively to wide and medium portrait shots. Sex in Chains is advertised as “gay-themed,” and while the silent era of German cinema was undeniably remarkably progressive in content, in this case, the description is a touch misleading. Homosexuality is certainly an element of the story, but the exploration of loneliness and the profound and lasting psychological effects of incarceration for all those involved is where Dieterle truly excelled here.

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Daring Youth: Makeup in the Silent Film Era an Interview with Gabriela Hernandez of Bésame Cosmetics Bésame Cosmetics was founded in 2004 by Gabriela Hernandez, a cosmetic historian and artist. Bésame’s brand is unique in that Hernandez recreates vintage cosmetics from the 1920s through 1950s in painstaking detail. Bésame products have been featured everywhere from Elle to Vogue, and the company has a devout following of vintage enthusiasts around the world. Hernandez’s 2011 book, Classic Beauty: The History of Makeup, is a definitive guide to makeup through the ages. Part-historian, part-scientist, her passion for vintage beauty is apparent in everything she does.

Silent Film Quarterly recently had the chance to visit Gabriela Hernandez at her Burbank, California boutique.

The showcases near the entrance are a veritable museum of historic cosmetics (Hernandez is a collector as well as a his-

torian). Behind the counter are rows of her meticulously-recreated lipsticks, mascaras, and face powders. Another wall is lined with her “Decades of Fragrance” line of perfumes, each one inspired by a different decade from the 1910s to 1960s.

Vintage hats and a World War II uniform contribute to the vintage atmosphere.

The entire experience feels like taking a step back in time to a department store counter 90 years ago.

Silent Film Quarterly wanted to speak with Gabriela Hernandez about the role of makeup in silent films, as well as popular looks for moviegoers during the 1920s. Makeup was in its infancy at the time, and many cultural tropes exist regarding what was fashionable. Her insights into the era are fascinating and, more importantly, help to dispel some of the most common stereotypes of the era.

Gabriela Hernandez at her Burbank, California boutique.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 18 The Practical Basis for Makeup “The reason that the eyebrows were drawn in, especially with actresses like Clara Bow, was because they needed to express feeling without talking. So a lot of it had to do with facial expression.

They would use the way that they shaped their eyebrows as part of a character. If it was an ingenue character they’d put them higher on the face. If it was supposed to be someone who was sad, they would be going down. They would shape them according to what they wanted to say.

“Darkness around the eyes is to make the eyes stand out in the film. A lot of the makeup that you see in silent movies was done because makeup. The makeup was used as part of the character development, and then people started copying it. Actress would do it for practical reasons, and it influenced fashion.

“When film started, makeup was designed to fix the shortcomings of the film.

Film stock was very low resolution, it had low sensitivity, so they had to over-light things. The makeup had to make up for the over-lighting. Shadows had to be put in, because there weren’t shadows. The makeup was fixing those problems. A lot of the time in early film, the makeup is coming in to fix things that you couldn’t do with the films.

“The makeup they did wouldn’t look good live. If you saw Clara Bow in person you would be scared, because it would not look natural in the least. But it would photograph well.

“It was meant to highlight and make sure you saw the features of the actor, instead of losing them in the lighting. The cheeks had to be put in so you could see them. The lips had to be really dark, or else you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were there. Silent film makeup was more refined than theatrical makeup, but it was basically the same thing. You had certain limitations on the film and the

Clara Bow’s eyebrows were styled to convey emotion.

lighting, and you needed those features to ‘pop.’”

Makeup for Consumers “At the beginning, people weren’t intending on these things actually impacting the consumer. At this point they didn’t even sell makeup, necessarily, to consumers. That started in the 1930s.

But in the 20s, they weren’t selling that much makeup that you saw on film.

The earliest things were mascara cakes, to highlight the lashes, but they certainly weren’t selling the look. It wasn’t an industry yet. They didn’t say, ‘Here, buy these products and make yourself look like Clara Bow.’ Most of the makeup sales at that time were really on skin care. Creams, powders, things like that.

But not color.

“Makeup depended on social class.

That’s the thing a lot of people forget.

When you talk about makeup, it’s easy to say, ‘Well, everybody looked like that,’ but that’s not quite right. You had people of different classes. The flappers who ac-

The Silent Film Quarterly • 19 tually went to the clubs, these were people with money. They went to parties, so they put on makeup all of the time, but these were the leisure class. They weren’t people working—the people working did not look like that. These were the equivalent of the Kardashians now, or people who go to fashion shows in New York. Those were the ones that you see photographed.”

Everyday Girls and Makeup “Most of the girls who had jobs as a clerk in a store, or secretarial jobs, they didn’t make much money. They really wore very plain things, including makeup. If they

Screenland, December, 1927

Screenland, June, 1928

had lipstick, that was a lot.

People didn’t have money to buy all of these things.

“They didn’t necessarily want to look like those actresses. They might have styled their hair like that, because it was “in,” but as far as makeup looks, it wasn’t necessarily something everybody copied.

It wasn’t something that was acceptable in all areas of society. The most high-fashioned people could do this, people in the arts, people in New York.

“Most people had lipstick and some blush. A lot of people had a pencil, but if you didn’t you could fake it.

Some people who didn’t have eye makeup would use lamp-

The Silent Film Quarterly • 20 black, mixed with a little oil, and they’d rub that on. People might have darkened their eyes, their lashes, their brows. But if someone was going to invest in makeup it would be lipstick and powder. They might have had some rouge, and if they didn’t they’d use their lipstick for both.

“Makeup buying was out of reach for a lot of people, until mass-marketing of makeup started in the 1930s and 40s.

That’s when you saw it in the five and dime, that’s when it became affordable.

Before that makeup was only in department stores, and only people with money went to department stores.”

Flapper Stereotypes “Some things are fantasy and some things are more realistic. People like to make a cartoon out of different time periods, but when you actually look at the people it’s not really a cartoon. It’s more

complex than that. You can’t distill it to one look and say ‘This is what everybody looked like.’”

“Makeup was still kind of a taboo.

You came right out of the Victorian era, when nobody even wanted to buy makeup. It was way in the back of the store with the feminine products, because people would be embarrassed to buy it in public.

People didn’t decide that because it was 1920 it was suddenly okay. Not everyone was convinced of it.

“Film played a huge part in convincing girls that makeup was okay. As these ladies became more and more popular, and men thought that they were attractive, then obviously girls would mimic the actresses to be attractive to men. That is the whole idea. If you look at advertising from this period, it’s all about how to get a guy to like you. And makeup had a lot to do with that.”

An assortment of Bésame’s vintage-inspired lipsticks.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 21 Gabriela Hernandez’s Tips on Silent Film-Era Makeup Eyebrows “Most people don’t have very thin eyebrows anymore, so you could just leave them as they are. If you wanted to draw them in, do more of a theatrical look, you could obscure them. You could take a gluestick and put it on top of your eyebrows, and it kind of flattens them down. And then you basically put makeup over them, powder them, and then you can draw them in however you want.

It’s not foolproof, but it works, and some people do it.”

Eyes “People didn’t have the range of shadows we have today. To say that you wore shadow meant that you wore one shade, or two shades. You had blue, green, brown, and black, but that was it.

You’d just use that, and maybe a brown or black pencil.

“Basically you’d darken up the lash

line, and a little bit underneath. You’d use a lot of mascara, or use fake lashes so your lashes were really long. Lashes were definitely something that they used. Usually they were made in Japan at the time, and they were human hair. They didn’t have synthetics. They were very long, and a lot of actresses used them because they added to a character. Eyelash beading was very popular. You’d melt the product, and then use a little wooden stick to apply the little dots. All the actresses wore fake lashes. It wasn’t easy to apply them. They were straight, so you had to curl and shape them, and then apply glue and put them on. It wasn’t easy like it is today.

“Shadow was an optional thing. Maybe people would use a little bit in the evening, but it wasn’t something that most consumers bought. In this period of time they darkened the whole eyelid, they didn’t just do the crease like we do now.

It was just one color and it was around the whole eye. Sometimes they would put vaseline on their eyelids because they wanted them to look shiny at night. They wanted them to have a sheen, and they were very resourceful.”

Lips “The darker tones of lipstick would definitely work more towards your advantage. If you’re talking flapper-wise, they wanted to be really dramatic, so they did use very dark lipsticks. The flappers wanted to be out-there, so they used those colors. Other people used lighter reds.”

Blush

Darkened lips and eyes translated well on low-quality film stock.

“Of course the high blush on your cheeks was very popular. The skin had a pallor to it, because the powders that were preferred were very light. There was a lot of contrast between the pale

The Silent Film Quarterly • 22

Bésame’s face powders (above) and fragrances (right).

skin and the dark eyes and lips.

The powder would be a gardenia white, very light, or on the pinker side. It wasn’t until the 1930s when you saw more shades of powder, into the tan colors. But not necessarily everyone wore it, because if you did wear it people would be able to tell. It wasn’t covert, it wasn’t a natural look.”

Fragrance “If you look at the 1910s, you have basically Victorian fragrance preferences.

They were starting to be sold in department stores. But fragrances in this period were very demure and shy. They were one-tone fragrances of florals, like a lemon or orange flower, or a rose or gardenia. It was meant to be very light and soft.

“As you more into the 20s you get these

people who do want that smokiness. You see a lot of violet and suede, myrrh and amber and musk, things that weren’t in earlier fragrances. And that’s because of the influence of prohibition, the speakeasies. It mirrored what people were doing. These were more daring fragrances.

If you were wearing this, people would notice. A lot of actresses were definitely using these stronger fragrances to be daring.”

Visit www.besamecosmetics.com for more information or to shop Bésame’s extensive range of products.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 23

Getting Away With Art, Part II: The Unsung Allies of Maurice Tourneur

by Mark Pruett A librarian needs to be posted on the week’s program of the nearby theatres, for she is sure to be asked for almost any book that is shown on the screen. If movie and book appear under the same title and the library has plenty of copies of the book, all goes well. The Count of Monte Cristo, the Three Musketeers, and the Prisoner of Zenda have always been popular stories, but since they appeared in the movies, libraries have had to buy many additional copies.

—“Movies and the Library,” The Educational Screen, December 1922 Might they be good Cristo, and Jane Eyre, citfor us? Movies? But the ed by the writer Mary Supreme Court had alDay Winn as “further ready defined them as proof—if proof were mere entertainments needed—that the right exhibited solely for sort of moving pictures profit, unworthy of inspire both young and protection as artistic old to read.”1 expression and deThe recognition serving of censorship that motion pictures to prevent their being could be a source of used for evil. public enrichment was That movies were having an impact on Film Fun, January 1921 encouraging people to the industry even as read more was a relacensorship proponents tively recent perception, one that went pushed for stricter regulation. Of particagainst the prevailing assumption that ular importance were magazines like The the moviegoing habit was spawning a Educational Screen, which urged that movnation of illiterates. At the beginning of ies be integrated into school curricula at the 1920s, as dozens of state legislatures every level. were debating whether to establish film When Louise Prouty’s “Movies and censorship boards, many writers and the Library” appeared in the magazine educators saluted the movies for having in December 1922, The Educational Screen invigorated reading, particularly among was busy announcing the takeover of its children. Irving Hart of the Iowa State only significant rival, Moving Picture Age. Teachers’ College named a hundred Both magazines were dedicated to exworks of fiction published before 1920 ploring the role of movies in education, that were most in demand at libraries and both touted their independence nationwide. Hart wrote that “two prefrom the commercial interests of the dominating influences” determined the movie industry. Despite occasional lapslist: “the ‘movies’ and required school es in objectivity (several articles by Cecil readings.” The top ten included Treasure 1 “Your Child and the Movies,” Film Daily Island, Tom Sawyer, The Count of Monte Year Book 1925.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 24 B. DeMille were particularly self-serving), Moving Picture Age had a handson practicality that complemented The Educational Screen’s intellectual pretensions. The Screen lived up to its pledge, stated in its first editorial a year earlier, to wade through each month’s theatrical films (“even at the risk of our sanity”) and publish reviews of the select few that “seem best worth viewing by intelligent persons.” However pompously expressed, the belief that taste went hand in hand with sensitivity and high-mindedness was merely conventional wisdom.

But the final sentence of the editorial went further, giving a reassuring nod to the opponents of film censorship: “The motion picture can never go far toward becoming an art unless it is encouraged by those to whom the word ‘art’ has meaning and significance.”2 • • • Maurice Tourneur, who directed his first motion picture in 1912, had been a painter, an illustrator, and a sculptor’s assistant in France (the sculptor was Auguste Rodin) before he was drawn to the stage and ultimately to the movies. He had long thought of himself as an artist, and he credited his interest in “impressionistic” filmmaking—using stylized staging to convey the psychological truth of a scene—to the work of Edward Gordon Craig, a theatrical designer and theorist, whose 1911 book On the Art of the Theatre Tourneur had studied carefully.

Announcing the director’s signing with Jesse Lasky in 1917, Motion Picture News mentioned his work with Mary Pickford in that year’s widely praised Poor Little Rich Girl: “Mr. Tourneur has a gift in handling light fantastic subjects for the screen…and mainly to this may be attributed his success.”3 The Educational Screen, January 1922.

“Lasky Engages Maurice Tourneur for One Year,” Motion Picture News, March 24, 1917.

Maurice Tourneur.

What Tourneur thought of being pigeonholed as a director of “light fantastic subjects” went unrecorded (though he would go on to adapt Maeterlinck’s fantasy The Blue Bird to great acclaim in 1918). He had tackled crime in Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) and class divisions in Pickford’s The Pride of the Clan (1916), but neither film had particularly risked censure. Tourneur’s ambition was to remain independent. As the director (or “artist-director,” a term he liked), he saw himself as the final arbiter of a film’s look, tone, action, and composition. By treating motion pictures as vehicles for artistic expression, he was aware, one might run afoul of the Supreme Court’s declaration, in the ruling that had animated state and local censors since 1915, that movies were unprotected speech.4 But Tourneur was not driven to flout convention. Like Gordon Craig, his concerns were chiefly aesthetic, his style, in his own words, “an expression of the individuality” of the filmmaker. 5

2 3

Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230.

5 “Stylization in Motion Picture Direc4

The Silent Film Quarterly • 25 But if he did not go looking for controversy, neither did he avoid material that might provoke it. For there was another side to Tourneur. Four months after the Supreme Court’s Mutual decision, he told the New York Dramatic Mirror that “a new sort of creative literary brain must develop for filmdom. There must be a better and a more natural showing of human nature in which the conflicting sides, both good and bad, are shown in their true combination.”6 This was a plea for realism, but not as the term was commonly applied to movies in 1915.

Tourneur had little use for photographic realism, achieved by shooting on location, building extravagant sets, or furnishing interiors with real marble and polished wood. What he hoped to put onscreen was emotional authenticity, “a more natural showing of human nature” that would do justice to the complexity of his source material.

For the most part, Tourneur’s sources were literary. “Whether acknowledged or not,” he told the Mirror, “everything worth while in the pictures is an adaptation of a book, a play, a poem.” Like the editors of The Educational Screen, Tourneur believed that modern film audiences were fully capable of grasping the intricacies of character and motivation common to all great narrative art. They could accept humanity’s dark side, its cruelty and violence toward itself, without losing faith in its potential for redemption. It was time for the movies to grow up.

Six years later, an article in Photoplay would declare that they had. The writer, Frederick Van Vranken, began by conceding the absurdity of “happy-ever-after” scenarios: One of the chief arguments with which the literary elite have sought to tion,” Motion Picture Magazine, September 1918 6 “A Gift From France,” June 30, 1915.

disparage motion pictures has been based on the fact that no producer, however courageous, would dare murder the hero, or poison the heroine, or by some other act of diabolism, separate the lovers at the final fadeout.

During the late ‘teens and early 1920s, Van Vranken believed, the steady maturing of the motion picture art had helped to change audience expectations.

Audiences were savvier now. They had become accustomed to grittier portrayals and less tolerant of romanticized resolutions.

• • • Up to a short time ago there were few, if any, films which ended in gloom or catastrophe…But this state of affairs no longer exists in the films…In fact, many pictures—among them some of the most successful feature films—have had unhappy endings—that is, endings which were more or less logical, natural and intelligent…7 Tourneur had expressed his impatience with formulaic endings in a 1918 interview with the writer Dorothy Nutting, asserting that “a classic such as The Blue Bird, A Doll’s House, or Prunella should not be changed. Nor should there be a dragged-in, illogical ‘happy ending’ to replace the author’s conclusion.”8 With Victory, released late in 1919, Tourneur seemed to have ignored his own advice. The Joseph Conrad novel on which the film was based ended with the death of every major character, good or bad. Tourneur’s version killed off the malefactors but preserved the life of the protagonist (Jack Holt), allowing him to save, for the second time, a young woman (Seena Owen) with whom he had fallen in love. The concluding scene, which “The Unhappy Ending,” Photoplay, December 1921.

8 “Monsieur Tourneur,” Photoplay, July 1918.

7

The Silent Film Quarterly • 26

Victory (1919).

confirms the lovers’ survival, is so brief and unconvincing—and its single intertitle so glib—that we are left to wonder whether Tourneur showed up for work that day. Did he simply lose interest? Or did he worry that the graphic violence in the film might scuttle its chances of success at the box office?

He was well aware of the censors’ power to damage—or to ban altogether—any film, no matter how artfully constructed. At World Film in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he had worked with his compatriot and mentor, Emile Chautard, on Human Driftwood (1916), a film that flirted with incest—or, more accurately, with the mere suspicion of incest. The Chicago Board of Censors banned the film, phrasing its decree in the vaguest of terms: “Permit denied because the film portrays immoral, disorderly and unlawful scenes.”9 “Official Cut-Outs Made by the Chicago Board of Censors,” Exhibitors Herald 9

The violence in Victory is more explicit than that in Irvin Willat’s Behind the Door, released a week after the Tourneur film. Frederick Van Vranken had mentioned a “grisly and repelling” scene in Behind the Door, but whether he was referring to the rape or to the vengeful murder it provoked is unclear. Both horrors were perpetrated off-screen. In Victory, a man is shot to death in front of a campfire and pitches forward into the flames. We watch as his hair is set alight, then his head, the fire blazing up around his still-staring eyes. The victim’s brother later consigns the shooter to a similar fate, tying him to a chair and tipping him headfirst—and alive—into a roaring fireplace. (Tourneur spares us the closeup this time.) These and other grim scenes —including shootings, a knife-throwing, an attempted rape—earned the picture a mostly dismal reception. The manager of the Palace Theatre in Wichita, Kansas said that Victory “left a bad taste in the mouth of all who came to see it.”10 The reviewer Hazel Simpson Naylor, who had kind words for the actors, cautioned that Victory was “far from a pretty bon-bon picture.”11 One review that might have resonated with Maurice Tourneur was printed in Wid’s Daily on the day of the film’s release. Victory, said Wid’s, “deals with brutal elemental emotions and is an attempt to make the brutal artistic.” Several repetitions of “artistic” prepared the reader (the prospective exhibitor) for a shrewd bit of advice: This is the first Joseph Conrad book to be adapted to the screen, and that is the thing that you want to lay the most emphasis on. Make your appeal for business among the more intelligent element and Motography, August 10, 1918.

10 “What the Picture Did For Me,” Exhibitors Herald, March 20, 1920.

11 “Across the Silversheet,” Motion Picture Magazine, June 1920.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 27 in your community. Reach out and try to get the ones who are not regular patrons.

Circularize all the clubs of a literary nature and let them know that you have a Conrad picture coming.12 A Conrad picture! This was the same approach—one part snob appeal, one part sincere admiration for “the classics”—adopted by The Educational Screen when it undertook to review films that “seem best worth viewing by intelligent persons.” Tourneur didn’t need educators and librarians to sell him on the value of classic literature—he had been filming it for years. But prior to Victory, his films had typically been criticized for letting beautiful imagery and artful tableaus do the work of fast-moving narrative. A much-anticipated 1920 release would silence most of those critics for good, but it would also open him to renewed charges of excessive violence.

And he had already come within snapping distance of the censors’ shears.

The Last of the Mohicans (1920) can unnerve viewers even today. Tourneur’s adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, set during the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War), has a ferocity unmatched by any of the director’s earlier pictures. The centerpiece of the film is the massacre by the Hurons of the British as they attempt to flee Fort William Henry. At more than seven minutes in length, the sequence is a ballet of butchery. Terrified women are pursued, flung to the ground or dragged from horses, and killed. Running for their lives, a whole family is slaughtered in a matter of moments, the children and mother tomahawked and the father scalped before our eyes. The most notorious scene depicts a young mother, her swathed infant in her arms, hiding in the recesses of a wrecked covered wag“Tourneur Produces First Conrad Book to Be Picturized,” Wid’s Daily, December 7, 1919.

12

The Last of the Mohicans (1920).

on. Alerted by the baby’s cries, a Huron brave climbs into the wagon and drags the mother, still clutching her child, outside. With fiendish glee he snatches the baby from her grasp and, to her horror— and ours—flings the bundle skyward.

Two things strike us upon viewing the massacre sequence today: the unremitting savagery of the events depicted, and the undeniable beauty of their cinematic presentation. Tourneur’s chaos has been expertly—and artfully—composed, imposing meaning on the mayhem. When the Hurons trap the fleeing British within the stockade, the panicked horses recoil and, with wagons in tow, begin running in circles. Their agitation parallels the frantic behavior of the turncoat Captain Randolph, on foot inside the stockade, when he realizes that his betrayal of the English means nothing to the Hurons, who will not spare him from a hideous death. Mad with terror and confusion, he begins running helplessly in circles, his effort to escape as futile as

The Silent Film Quarterly • 28

Scenes from The Last of the Mohicans (1920).

that of the horses. The horses are driven by natural fear, the captain by his own cowardice.

In the covered wagon sequence, Tourneur’s camera traps us with the young mother and makes her claustrophobic terror our own. When we first see her inside the wagon, she is squeezed into the lower left corner of the screen.

After showing us the Huron’s stealthy approach, the camera returns to her, this time for an even tighter closeup. She holds her cheek to the baby’s, trying to quiet him. The shot is intimate and tender. The next shot, no less intimate, is terrifying. We watch from the mother’s point of view as the Huron, a knife between his teeth, climbs into the wagon and lurches closer and closer to her—to us. The climb culminates in the most extreme closeup in the movie: the Huron’s face fills the screen, his eyes burning with malice, inescapable.

Tourneur’s artistry (and that of his assistant Clarence Brown, who took over direction when Tourneur was injured) was invisible to D. Walter Potts, censorship advocate and superintendent of schools of East St. Louis, Illinois. Potts called his 104 teachers together to watch the film and to pass judgment on its “gruesome scenes.”13 Such scenes both“Teachers to Review Tourneur Production,” Exhibitors Herald, February 19, 13

ered some exhibitors as well. At least one found the film too gruesome for children; another pronounced it too gruesome for women. The Tribune cautioned theatergoers to expect “some perfectly hair-raising fights,” while the Post lamented that “the director has lopped away everything but the sensational.”14 But these were ripples of discontent within a tidal wave of praise. Exhibitors Herald, an early and powerful supporter of the film, called The Last of the Mohicans “one of the most valuable features ever brought to the screen.” In a “masterful manner,” wrote Irma Frances Dupre, Tourneur has “conjoined science with history and art.”

• • • It has a vast intrinsic worth in its loveliness of lighting and excellence of photography, the capability of its cast and the minute care taken with every detail…

But it has also a value which must be far-reaching in the proof it offers that the events of the past in American life can be made to live so really on the screen that young America’s educational advantages have here an unlimited medium for their advancement.

In 1920, when the above was written, fewer than 17 percent of eligible stu1921.

14 “Newspaper Opinions,” Wid’s Daily, January 3, 1921

The Silent Film Quarterly • 29 dents graduated from high school. The clamor for “advancement” in education throughout the popular press suggested an unfocused longing for culture and erudition that the public schools had so far been unable to satisfy. Dupre was asking exhibitors to sit up and take notice: “The wise exhibitor will make his exploitation of this feature elaborate and will direct it chiefly at the high grade patronage and in cooperation with schools.”15 A high grade patronage was assured for the film’s opening engagement at the Strand Theater on Broadway. Tourneur’s film was welcomed as a cultural event, its setting designed as much to flatter patrons as to entertain them. A program of music and tableaus imbued with ersatz “Indian themes” preceded the screening. Selections from Victor Herbert’s unpopular opera Natoma were followed by “a beautiful scenic” with the title “An Indian Summer.” A prologue to the movie was sung by Joseph Martel and a male quartet, and after the film Kitty McLaughlin performed “The Bird Song” from Pagliacci.16 The appeal to an educated elite did not end with the Strand engagement.

Two months later, in an article headlined “Theatres Gain Local Prestige Following Exploitation of ‘Last of the Mohicans,’” Exhibitors Herald extolled “pictures that bring the exhibitor into direct contact and harmonious co-operation with local personages of importance.” Those personages, the writer noted without irony, “‘Last of Mohicans’ Fine Achievement,” Exhibitors Herald, December 4, 1920 16 “At Broadway Theaters,” Wid’s Daily, January 5, 1921 15

are the same ones “ordinarily most active in censorship and kindred agitation.”17 Schemes to cooperate with schools were also panning out, with teachers bringing students in droves to line up outside neighborhood theaters for special showings of the film. Exhibitors across the country discovered gold dust amid the chalk dust. “Don’t miss booking this one,” said an exhibitor from Brooklyn. “Schools will back it to the limit.” Similar reports The Last of the Mohicans (1920). came in from Durant, Oklahoma (“…All the schools turned out to see it”); from McGehee, Arkansas (“Good picture to handle in conjunction with schools”); from Des Moines, New Mexico (“Tied up with schools and received wonderful advertising through this source weeks in advance”); and from Portland, Oregon (“Made some money. Could be made a knockout in the box office if you could line up with the schools.”18 The Last of the Mohicans was triumphant, we must remember, in the same year that censorship forces were gearing up to thwart any serious and daring attempt to produce lasting cinematic art.

Maurice Tourneur received heroic support from librarians, teachers, writers, and editors—the people who, with no agenda but the public-spirited mission of their respective professions, insisted that movies could be good for us. Like other busy directors of his time, Tourneur may have taken their unassuming voices for granted. We should not.

March 12, 1921 “What the Picture Did For Me,” Exhibitors Herald, January 15, January 29, April 9, December 17, 1921 17 18

This is Part 2 of a two-part article. Mark Pruett’s articles on Baby Peggy and Ford Sterling appeared in the Summer and Fall 2016 issues of Silent Film Quarterly.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 30

Searching for DeMille’s Egypt: A Trip to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center

by Charles Epting, including an interview with Dunes Center Executive Director Doug Jenzan Cecil B. DeMille was a director whose work was rarely understated. Although he worked in nearly every genre imaginable, DeMille is best-remembered today for the lavish epics he created over the course of his entire career. Foremost amongst these is 1923’s The Ten Commandments, one of the defining films of the silent era. With sets that rivalled those Griffith had constructed for Intolerance, audiences around the world were dazzled by the film’s depictions of Ancient Egypt. For someone as demanding as DeMille, there was to be no trickery, no small-scale models intended to deceive audiences.

DeMille wanted Egypt to be shown in all of its grandeur, and there was no alternative to actually building the land of Ramesses II from the ground up.

Stories differ as to the fate of DeMille’s sets. Some say they were intentionally destroyed in order to prevent competing production companies from reusing them. Others contend that the ever-changing sand dunes merely swallowed them up, creating something of a time capsule beneath the surface. Whatever the case may be, filmmaker Peter Brosnan was inspired by a cryptic quote in DeMille’s autobiography to search for the ruins of Ancient Egypt along the Central California coast. What resulted was a decades-long journey that resulted in the release of a documentary titled The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille (more on that in a future issue).

On a recent trip to San Luis Obispo I was able to visit the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, which has become a repository for artifacts uncovered from DeMille’s set. Located in downtown Guadalupe, an agricultural community

The Silent Film Quarterly • 31 of 7,000 people, the Dunes Center highlights the ecology and cultural history of the nearby Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes (the second largest in the state of California). The entire front room is dedicated to DeMille’s work in the area, with portions of a surviving sphinx on display.

The Ten Commandments was not the only film to utilize the unique scenery of the dunes; a display lists other silents shot nearby, including The Sheik and The Thief of Bagdad. On another wall, medicine bottles recovered from the dunes suggest a sordid tale of Prohibition-era debauchery. Even for those with no knowledge of DeMille’s epic, the displays do a wonderful job of conveying the importance of the excavations the Dunes Center has undertaken.

After my visit to the Dunes Center I was able to speak to Executive Director Doug Jenzen, who gave me more information about the ongoing archeological work and what people can do to aid future excavations.

What was it about the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes that attracted Cecil B. DeMille to the site?

From what I understand there were several options for filming. Most of them were in the desert, and they were looking at filming during May and June. The weather here was a lot more pleasant to work in than in the desert.

What can visitors to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center see when they visit?

Currently on display we have the left portion of a sphinx, as well as a reconstructed head where we’ve incorporated broken fragments of a face, and a front right paw. In July [2018] we’ll be unveiling the face of the sphinx, as well as its chest and front leg. That excavation took place in October and November of 2017.

Do you believe there’s still much more waiting to be excavated?

That’s the big question as far as archeology is concerned. You never know what you’re going to find until you find it. One of the big questions we have is the tent city that housed all of the staff who worked on the film. We have an idea of where it was located, but there’s no remnants of it left at that location. So we’re not 100% confident. That’s one of the big questions we have, because we know where everything from the movie set is located. It’s essentially in the same formation it was in during filming.

We would have to do more exploration in order to find out what is still intact from the main portion of the movie set. The problem is that given that it was 12 stories tall, anything that we excavate would need a building that size to house

The “tent city” constructed to house the cast and crew of The Ten Commandments.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 32

Above: Workers construct the City of Rameses II in the summer of 1923.

Below: A largely intact sphinx is excavated in the fall of 2017.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 33

The left side of a sphinx’s body (above) and a front right paw (below) on display at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center

The Silent Film Quarterly • 34

A reconstructed sphinx head greets visitors as soon as they enter the Dunes Center.

it. That’s why we chose to focus on the sphinx, because that is something that can fit inside of a building.

didn’t hold up to the elements. And we know of the one that we excavated. So as far as we know, this is the last one.

What happened to the sphinxes after filming was completed?

What are your plans for the site moving forward?

The sphinxes were kind of all over.

Two of them were taken and put at the entrance to a local country club. Several of them were taken to local ranches and used essentially as elaborate lawn ornaments. One of the local families has a story that their house was used as a staging area for DeMille, so after filming DeMille asked if they wanted anything, and they said, “We’ll take a sphinx.” We actually have photos of this ranch with two men wearing tuxedos next to the sphinx, so it must have been a wedding or something.

So several of them were moved off-site, which makes it a bit more complicated when trying to figure out if any of them are left. We know there’s piles of rubble where sphinxes used to be, and they just

Unfortunately during this last excavation the weather didn’t cooperate with us. First it was 100 degrees, and it was too hot and dry and the statue was crumbling, so we had to rebury it. Then we exposed it again and it rained on us. It set us back and we ended up having to leave the right side of the sphinx still buried.

We need about another $150,000 to mobilize the team of archeologists and art restorers and even Native Americans to monitor the site. So we’re looking at potentially regrouping after unveiling what we found in the past. As soon as we raise the money we’ll go back and get the rest of it, which will enable us to have a complete sphinx when we move into our new museum in a couple of years.

For more information or to make a donation, visit www.dunescenter.org and www.lostcitydemille.com. Silent Film Quarterly will provide updates on the “Lost City of DeMille” in future issues.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 35

The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful For Hollywood: An Interview with Author Sherri Snyder There are certain silent film stars whose reputations precede them. Clara Bow is the “It Girl;” Rudolph Valentino is the “Latin Lover;” and Barbara La Marr is the “Girl Who Was Too Beautiful.” These nicknames can serve as both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand they help to immortalize actors for decades after their deaths, while at the same time creating a stereotype that can oftentimes overwhelm the nuances of an actor’s life and career. When someone is simply known for being “too beautiful,” it can be difficult to remember their humanity--their struggles and their successes, their loves and their losses. For too long Barbara La Marr has been defined solely by her looks, and as a result generations of classic film lovers have missed out on one of the most fascinating stories of early cinema.

Actor and writer Sherri Snyder has fortunately filled this void for an expertly-researched and captivating look at La Marr’s life, from her turbulent developmental years to her untimely death at the age of 29. Snyder’s experience as an actress--and specifically the one-woman performance piece she wrote about La Marr--gives her greater insight into the actress’s life than most authors are capable of. Her friendship with La Marr’s son, too, makes Snyder a uniquely qualified biographer. The result is one of the most fascinating silent film biographies in recent memory.

Silent Film Quarterly was able to discuss Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood with Sherri Snyder, who talked about her creative process and what it was like to tell the story of one of early Hollywood’s most mythical (and misunderstood) figures.

Many people today know Barbara La Marr simply as “the girl who was too beautiful.”

Do you think this moniker has at all detracted from the artistic nature of her career, or has it simply helped to ensure her longevity?

Although Barbara eventually yearned to break free of her sex-symbol typecasting, I believe her “too beautiful” title enhances her mystique, piquing interest in her life story and prompting an exploration of her films and contribution to cinematic history. People are often amazed to learn of her extraordinary talent—as a celebrated cabaret dancer, a headlining vaudevillian, an adept writer (she authored six stories and titled various films for the Fox Film Corporation, wrote poetry, and had an uncredited hand in multiple film scenarios), and a highly versatile, acclaimed actress.

Incidentally, Barbara earned her moniker in January of 1914; she was sev-

The Silent Film Quarterly • 36 enteen-year-old Reatha Watson then, living alone in Los Angeles against her parents’ wishes, seduced by what she termed “thrills and bright lights,” and indulging her fondness for “drinking…and other mad escapades.” Her frantic father implored juvenile authorities to intervene.

An investigation ensued; Reatha, relentlessly followed by men, was deemed “dangerously beautiful” by the chief juvenile officer and threatened with arrest should she fail to return to her parents in El Centro, California. The officer’s pronouncement was broadcast nationwide, appearing beneath such newspaper headlines as “Too Beautiful for City, Girl Sent to Country for Safety.”

Shortly thereafter, Reatha declared to a reporter that beautiful girls, despite facing greater dangers in life, have greater opportunities to succeed. Indeed, she began receiving her first major breaks as a film actress while working as a storywriter for the Fox Film Corporation under the name Barbara La Marr in 1920, a time when the film magazines noted the trend among producers to be for “striking and stunning” women. In 1922, she started work on her first lead, a sinister sorceress who cruelly manipulates men like pawns, in director Rex Ingram’s Trifling Women—a role she credited with having made her. Barbara’s beauty, Ingram acknowledged, impacted his decision to cast her in the film; he thought it would make his villainess more appealing to audiences. After Barbara signed a contract in 1923 to make starring films with Arthur Sawyer and Herbert Lubin’s Associated Pictures, Sawyer, capitalizing on her exotic looks and sex appeal, steered her into roles that cemented her typecasting as a vamp, a brazen seductress who uses her femininity to exploit men. Barbara reveled in her typecasting at first—as well as the fame it brought— remarking that part of the fun in being a woman is to entice men.

While Barbara’s beauty certainly

Motion Picture Classic, February 1925.

caused her a good amount of trouble, it factored significantly into her success as an actress—in many instances providing her with a platform to showcase the depth of her artistry, rather than detracting from it—and her moniker further endows her with that alluring, mythical quality characteristic of the silent era’s legendary icons.

How difficult is it to transition between writing about La Marr creatively (your cemetery performance piece, for example) and academically (your biography)?

As an actress and a writer with a passion for history, it thrills me to bring different historical figures and periods to life for audiences and readers alike.

Researching is as exciting for me as performing and writing. I love examining the prevalent attitudes and psychological, societal, and environmental forces governing distant eras; to be able to take on such conditioning through roles I play is especially enjoyable. Whether acting or writing, I take particular care

The Silent Film Quarterly • 37 to depict my subjects as honestly as possible, underscoring their beauty and strengths, and accepting their shortcomings and struggles as part of the human experience.

Being cast as Barbara La Marr in Channeling Hollywood, a Pasadena Playhouse and Pasadena Museum of History production, in 2007 was one of the highlights of my life and the beginning of an amazing journey. The production, centering on the life stories of five luminaries connected to the Pasadena area, entailed each actor researching and writing their own part in monologue form; the five monologues were interwoven to create a play. (Though Barbara passed away in nearby Altadena [and is thus technically not connected to Pasadena], the producers, intrigued by her incredible story, nonetheless included her in the show.)

Donald Gallery (a.k.a. Marvin Carville La Marr), Barbara’s only child, attended the play’s final performance and subsequently asked me to author Barbara’s biography—another of my life’s great-

est joys. I adapted the Channeling Hollywood script I wrote about Barbara into a one-woman piece. For years, I have performed this piece beside Barbara’s crypt at Hollywood Forever Cemetery each October as part of the Los Angeles Art Deco Society’s annual celebration of Old Hollywood’s most illustrious residents. I have also been fortunate to perform this piece in other venues, including at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre and festivals honoring the silent era.

My overriding goal when I wrote my book and performance piece, and while continuing to portray Barbara in my performance piece, is the same: truth and accuracy. For this reason, I found it fairly simple to segue between writing the performance and the book.

An initial challenge, however, insofar as portraying Barbara in the telling of her own story is concerned, arose from her tendencies to fictionalize her biographical details and conceal her notorious past. (She claimed, for example, that her biological parents—William Watson, an itinerant newspaperman and irrigationist, and Rose Watson, a homemaker and seamstress—adopted her, alternately purporting her birth parents to be assorted persons of loftier origins, including European nobility.) The trick, therefore, was to write my performance piece and craft my enactment of it in such a way as to convey both Barbara’s fanciful nature and the underlying reality. In the end, I appreciated the interplay between writing a book about Barbara and portraying her, as it allowed me to examine her through different lenses, offering me greater insight into her behavior, deepest longings, and sorrows.

Is there a commonly-held misconception about Barbara La Marr that you’d like to see corrected?

La Marr by Milton Brown, ca. 1922.

Time and again, Barbara admitted to feeling woefully misunderstood. My

The Silent Film Quarterly • 38 predominant intention in telling her story was to reveal the woman beneath the provocative screen image, sordid scandals, and shocking headlines. Specifically, I sought to go beyond her demons to the inherent strength that drove her through her life’s tragedies and onward to her impressive accomplishments.

Those close to Barbara readily extolled the truth of her character as they knew it. Journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, a friend of Barbara’s, insisted that no one could have known Barbara and not loved her. Another of Barbara’s friends recalled that when Barbara was at the top, she was at her sweetest and most lovable. Ramon Novarro, Latin lover of the silent screen and Barbara’s costar in three of her films, spoke of Barbara’s steadfast loyalty as a friend.

Barbara’s encouragement, according to film star William Haines (whom Barbara romanced in 1923, his homosexuality notwithstanding), bolstered him during his days as a struggling bit player, helping him to believe in himself. Director Fred Niblo contended that no one in Hollywood was kinder to all of the film extras than Barbara. (Barbara even helped further one such extra’s career by dressing the girl in a ravishing outfit, introducing her at a party as a famous New York stage actress, and convincing two producers to offer her screen tests.) Actor Ben Lyon, romantically linked to Barbara in 1924, believed that “Barbara is best expressed in one word—generosity.” In addition to donating large sums of money to charities, friends, and others in need, Barbara gave of the little spare time she had (among other things, arranging monthly parties and outings for the children at the Hollywood Orphans’ Home). Reporters and columnists commented on Barbara’s honesty and sincerity—and how different she was from the maleficent women she frequently played on the screen.

Throughout the ten-plus years I have

worked on Barbara’s story, I have often been asked what I admire most about her. I always answer that it is her strength.

That she managed to rise through the staggering adversity that marked her life, and went on striving, in her words, “to make something of myself...to give vent to this passion of expression...this pent up restless force that continually urges me on”—in spite of the constant danger of losing everything to scandal and, in the end, death—inspires me. I similarly appreciate the courage it took for her to defy the rigid conventions of her time and remain true to her own inclinations; she looked to herself to determine her place in the world and encouraged others to do the same. For one, her success in multiple professions stood as a powerful example to the increasing numbers of American women seeking liberation from a future of compliant domesticity.

“Barbara’s weaknesses were all of the flesh,” her friend, writer Willis Goldbeck, stated. “Her virtues were of the mind and spirit.” My hope for Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood

Picture-Play Magazine, February 1924.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 39 is that it eradicates the inaccuracies enveloping Barbara’s legacy, clarifies her tribulations, and gives readers a genuine sense of who she was as a person and an artist.

Was there anything you came across during your research that you think readers would find particularly surprising?

Truly, Barbara’s entire story— dubbed by newspapers (following the complete exposure of her turbulent past from a widely publicized blackmail attempt against her) a “Wilder Life Story Than [She] Ever Helped to Film”—is astounding. Her publicist, Bert Ennis, attested, “There was no reason to lie about Barbara La Marr...Everything she said, everything she did was colored with news-value. A personality dangerous, vivid, attractive; a desire to live life at its maddest and fullest; a mixture of sentiment and hardness, a creature of weakness and strength—that was Barbara La Marr.”

A self-confessed incurable dreamer, Barbara dreamed big dreams from a young age. Her childhood desire to be “a great tragedienne and wield a dagger” led her to the stage at age eight; she spent the duration of her childhood appearing in stock theater productions as her family, owing to her father’s newspaper work, moved throughout the Pacific Northwest and, later, to Fresno, California. After vowing in 1915 to become a famous dancer, she performed with notable success, exhibiting barefoot, interpretive solo dances, classic waltzes, and other paired numbers in some of the nation’s finest cabarets and on Broadway. She then ventured into vaudeville as the female component of headliner Ben Deely’s three-person comedy skit. When dancing injuries and frail health forced an end to her two-year vaudeville career in 1919, she turned to her writing talent, authoring her first story, submitting it to

Los Angeles film studios, and attaining a $10,000 (around $138,000 today) contract with the Fox Film Corporation; the six stories (five original stories and an adaptation) she wrote for Fox in 1920 were seen in theaters worldwide. Unable to extinguish her intrinsic yearning to act, Barbara next determined to achieve stardom as a film actress. Her rise to fame, soon culminating in her starring contract (worth over $42 million in today’s terms) with Associated Pictures, was meteoric; she appeared in twenty-six credited films in five short years and was revered as one of the silent screen’s leading sex sirens.

All the while, the shadow of her undisclosed, disreputable past as Reatha Watson and her stormy private life threatened to ruin her. Her first brush with infamy came in 1913 at age sixteen when she accused her much older half-sister and her half-sister’s married lover of kidnapping her, a charge that spawned a massive manhunt, ongoing headlines in several states, and the eventual contradiction of her allegation during the case’s preliminary hearing. In 1914, another barrage of headlines reported on her bigamous marriage to garage owner Lawrence Converse and its tragic aftermath; she had wed Converse to escape her protective parents’ authority—unaware, she said, that he was already married. Los Angeles film studios, fearful that her so-called lurid escapades would provoke entanglements with film censors, banned her from appearing in their films, temporarily foiling her efforts to launch a film career and ultimately causing her to begin dancing professionally under the name Barbara La Marr. Later, as an adult and a film star, Barbara’s serial relationships (one of these affairs resulted in a hidden pregnancy and her adoption of her own son to avert a career-damning scandal), manifold marriages, and tumultuous divorces recurrently striped newspaper and magazine columns. Behind the scenes, the pres-

The Silent Film Quarterly • 40 sures of stardom, her declining health, and her worsening alcoholism plagued her. A scandal clause in her starring contract with Associated Pictures, stipulating that immoral behavior of hers must never come to light, was repeatedly tested to the limit. A weight clause in the same contract mandated that Barbara remain below a set weight limit; she resorted to extreme dieting measures—involving, her publicist professed, the ingestion of a tapeworm pill—to lose weight and maintain a slender figure.

Incredibly, Barbara’s fervent love for life, although challenged many times, never left her. Refusing to abide regret or remorse, she claimed, not long before her death at age twenty-nine on January 30, 1926, from pulmonary tuberculosis and nephritis, that she would not change one aspect of her life; the totality of her experiences, she said, had made her who she was.

What was the most exciting part of your research process for this book?

One of the most rewarding aspects of my research process was the many wonderful people who graced my life.

Donald Gallery (Barbara’s son), Donald’s wife, Patricia, and Laura Gordon Riebman, Paul Bern’s great-niece—to name a few—became dear friends.

Writer, director, and producer Paul Bern, Barbara’s close friend, confidant, and onetime lover, encouraged Barbara’s career endeavors; sought to protect her during her oftentimes troubled love affairs; and paid her medical and funeral expenses when indebtedness prevented her from paying them herself. Paul dutifully accepted when Barbara, aware of her impending death, asked him to watch over her son, then three years old.

Paul kept his promise, regularly visiting the boy after his adoption by actress ZaSu Pitts and her husband, actor and boxing promoter Tom Gallery. It was sus-

Barbara La Marr, 1924, as pictured in an ad for Richelieu Pearls.

pected by some, including Paul’s good friend, actress Leatrice Joy, and Donald’s lifelong friend, Leatrice Gilbert Fountain (daughter of Joy and actor John Gilbert), that Donald was Paul’s son. Over time, Donald suspected it, too.

So did Laura Gordon Riebman.

When Laura entered my life, she had recently begun a mission to memorialize Paul’s character and professional accomplishments, both of which were obscured in the wake of his sensationalized death—an alleged suicide—in 1932, two months after he wed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s biggest star, platinum bombshell Jean Harlow. (Laura’s goal is for Paul to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame). The most interesting part of my research process for Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood occurred when Donald (not long before his passing in 2014 at age ninety-two), Patricia, Laura, and I decided to verify, via DNA testing, whether Paul was Donald’s father—but I’ll not

The Silent Film Quarterly • 41 spoil the suspense for readers of the book by divulging anything more here!

If you could recommend one or two films as a gateway into La Marr’s career, what would they be?

Given Barbara’s range as an actress and the diversity of characters she portrayed, it’s difficult to choose just two! Fortunately, though all of the films she wrote and many she acted in are currently presumed to be lost, some of her most noteworthy work has been preserved.

Alexandre Dumas’s epic romantic adventure The Three Musketeers (1921), starring gallant action hero Douglas Fairbanks Sr., features Barbara in the supporting role of the treacherous spy Milady de Winter.

A worldwide sensation in its day, The Three Musketeers— as well as Barbara’s greatly lauded performance in it— shone a brighter spotlight on Barbara than ever before, causing her to fear the exposure of her identity as infamous Reatha Watson. Compounding Barbara’s misgivings throughout filming was the disapproval she received from Ben Deely (her husband at the time) and others close to her; advised by them to give up acting and stick with writing, she became disheartened. Four years later, at the height of her fame as a screen actress, Barbara credited the encouragement she received from Fairbanks and director Fred Niblo on the set of The Three Musketeers with preventing her from quitting and fueling her determination to succeed as an actress. The Three Mus-

Sherri Snyder as Barbara La Marr.

keteers may be viewed for free online (via the Internet Archive) and is available on DVD. The Prisoner of Zenda, directed by Rex Ingram, was hailed as a triumph after its release in 1922. Barbara, appearing in the film in the supporting role of a castoff woman who helps defeat a coup by betraying her deceitful lover, likewise garnered praise. Period trades commended her heartfelt, “remarkable characterization,” proclaiming her one of the screen’s most beautiful women and an actress of rare ability, and declaring that she alone was worth the admission price. The Prisoner of Zenda, also featuring

The Silent Film Quarterly • 42

Sherri Snyder as Barbara La Marr.

Lewis Stone, Alice Terry, Stuart Holmes, and Ramon Novarro, is available for home viewing on DVD, or on site by appointment at the Academy Film Archive in Beverly Hills, California, and the Film and Television Archive, University of California, Los Angeles.

Two other films I highly recommend (and hope to view myself) are Thy Name Is Woman (1924) and The Girl from Montmartre (1926). Both showcase Barbara in leading, multidimensional, “human” roles that enabled her to defy her vampy typecasting. Unreasonably hard on herself and typically disdainful of her work, she was actually quite proud of these

films and received considerable praise for her performances. She considered her heartrending role as a Spanish peasant—trapped in a loveless marriage to a criminal and longing to escape with her soldier lover—in Thy Name Is Woman, opposite William V. Mong and Ramon Novarro, to be the most challenging, yet gratifying part she ever played.

In The Girl from Montmartre, a film she selected herself as a desperate attempt at a career comeback after a series of flops, she plays a formerly notorious dancer, worried that the discovery of her background will prevent her marriage to her aristocratic beau. Seriously ill with incipient pulmonary tuberculosis during the making of this film, Barbara concealed the extent of her suffering behind a cheery front, barely completing the picture before being forced into isolation to rest. Before her death, she stated her wish to be remembered by The Girl from Montmartre. Her producers, however, wary of the public’s inclination to avoid deceased stars’ films in the 1920s, originally removed her name from all billing when the film was released on January 31, 1926 (the day after her passing), instead promoting Lewis Stone, her costar.

Remarkably, Barbara’s fans, undeterred by her death, flocked to theaters to view the film; the film broke box office records around the country; theaters not playing the film received innumerable phone calls from filmgoers, asking that it be shown; and Barbara’s name was reinstated in the film’s title and promotional materials. Surviving prints of Thy Name Is

The Silent Film Quarterly • 43

Woman and The Girl from Montmartre, currently held in archives and regrettably inaccessible to the public, will perhaps be screened at festivals and shown on Turner Classic Movies in the near future.

Now that the book has been published, how do you hope to continue honoring La Marr’s legacy?

I enjoy honoring Barbara’s legacy any way I can and am grateful for the many opportunities I have to do so.

As mentioned, I created and maintain a tribute website. Along with Biography and Filmography pages and a blog section, the site features an extensive array of film stills and portraits. I also have a tribute page on Facebook.

I continue portraying Barbara in the aforementioned performance piece I wrote about her life. The publication of my book has additionally opened the way for me to present lectures about Barbara’s life, ca-

reer, and impact upon the film industry and culture of her day. I think it would be wonderful to make a film about her.

I was recently honored to have been asked by a British design team to provide photos of Barbara for a postage stamp, one of six stamps that were created for the Isle of Man Post Office to pay homage to renowned British novelist Hall Caine. The set features Barbara La Marr, Pola Negri, Anny Ondra, Richard Dix, Conrad Nagel, and Norman Kerry—silent film stars who appeared in adaptations of Caine’s works. Barbara’s stamp commemorates her starring role in The Eternal City (1923), a film based on Caine’s bestselling 1901 novel of the same name. (A portrait, not an image from the film, was chosen for Barbara’s stamp). The stamps are available at the Isle of Man Post Office and on the post office’s website through January 2019.

Sherri Snyder’s Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood is available through the University Press of Kentucky and all major retailers.

Visit Snyder’s website at www.barbaralamarr.net and her Facebook page, “Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood.”

The Silent Film Quarterly • 44

Theda Bara’s Lost Cleopatra: An Interview with Filmmaker Phillip Dye Ask any silent movie buff what the most sought-after lost films are, and certain titles are certain to come up. London After Midnight and The Way of All Flesh probably top the lists of many people, as does Hitchcock’s The Mountain Eagle. But no discussion of lost films is complete without mention of Theda Bara’s defining film, the 1917 epic Cleopatra. All that survives today is a few tantalizing seconds of Bara performing a seductive dance—a clip which does nothing but leave the viewer wanting to see more of the immensely-popular production—and several hundred still photographs.

Filmmaker Phillip Dye has been collecting these images for more than 20 years now, and what began as a quest to write an article about Bara’s life has developed into a virtual recreation of Cleopatra. By placing the photographs in chronological order and reconstructing title cards, Dye has managed to give modern audiences the most comprehensive look at the film in a century. Silent Film Quarterly attended a screening of Lost Cleopatra in Newport Beach, California (the filming location for the famed “Battle of Actium” scene) and was able to discuss the making of the film with Dye. How did you first become aware of Theda Bara’s Cleopatra?

There was a book I had, I was given many years ago by my grandmother, called A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen [Daniel Blum, 1953], and that’s where I first heard about Theda Bara and saw some of the stills from Cleopatra. I got interested in the story of Theda Bara, and her fabulous, phony biography—“born in the shadow of the Sphinx”—so I

thought that was very amusing. I was originally just going to write an article about her for some magazine. I went to the Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick] Library and found 200 stills from Cleopatra, and I’m saying, “Well, someone could put these together and have a pretty good idea of what the movie looked like.” Because in books, you only see one or maybe two stills from Cleopatra. You don’t get an idea of what the movie looked like. But

The Silent Film Quarterly • 45 if you had enough stills put together, you could see what an epic it was.

If you could see any scene from Cleopatra, which would it be?

The Battle of Actium is still a mystery to me, because the descriptions in the scenario are so specific, of all of these things that are going on in the battle.

The final scene where they burn the fleet at night—no stills survive of it, so I’m still curious about that, of course.

What do you think it is about Cleopatra that makes it so sought-after compared to Bara’s other films?

It is the Theda Bara movie, because so much was put into the production.

It was a huge financial success. It pretty much defined her career. She had been in “vamp” roles before that, and Fox started spending more money when she was making movies like Camille, Madame Du Barry, and Under Two Flags. She was getting meatier roles. But she really wanted to do Cleopatra, it was a dream of hers to perform it on the stage. She didn’t think about movies at first. And when she made it, it became the defining role for her. Because it was such a major film, it’s considered the “Queen of the Lost Movies.” Yes, you maybe want to see Salomé, or Madame Du Barry. But Cleopatra—the stills, the images from that, just grab you in immediately. You say, “What is going on here?”

Everyone knows the story of Cleopatra. We’re familiar with the movies, whether DeMille’s [1934, with Claudette Colbert] or the famous Fox version from the 1960s with Elizabeth Taylor. Everyone knows the story somewhat, and it is sort of the ultimate femme fatale, and that’s part of why it was such a major film as well. There’s been bigger epics, like Birth

of a Nation and Intolerance, but this really hinted at the glamor that was very “Hollywood.” Hollywood still was not really the term for American cinema at that point.

But with production moving to California, movies like Cleopatra cemented the idea of Hollywood as the glamor capital.

What is your next project, now that Lost Cleopatra is completed?

I was considering doing Salomé, or The Queen of Sheba [1921, with Betty Blythe], as sort of follow-ups. But I’ll probably just move on to another type of project. I do other historical documentaries of subjects I’m interested in. I’m interested in the territorial period of Kansas as a documentary. I want to make other films, I don’t just want to be known as “the guy who made Cleopatra.”

What made you feel so strongly about this project that you devoted a significant portion of your life to it?

There’s supposed to be a quick way to make a buck, but it turned into a 20year ordeal. I just thought it was an important thing to do. I think the tragedy of lost films is important. When we hear that a lost film is discovered, we think that they’re all eventually going to be discovered. I think that in making Lost Cleopatra, I underlined the point that some of these films are never going to be seen.

What’s next for Lost Cleopatra? How will fans be able to view it, outside of public screenings?

I’m going to output the final version of Lost Cleopatra for release on DVD and also as a download, hopefully available through Amazon. I have a publisher for my book now on the making of the movie, so it’s time to move onto my next project basically.

For more information on Lost Cleopatra, visit www.lostcleopatra.com.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 46

Bill Hart and “Charlie”

by Paul H. Conlon Originally published in Pantomime, February 25, 1922 “In the good old summer time, in rying tor weeks about his pet story, bethe good old summer time—” cause his staff had scoured Los Angeles Not softly, but irresistibly the hauntfor the certain kind of monkey needed, ing strains of the old melody were wafted and none could be found. There were through a studio window, penetrating to highly intelligent chimpanzees and oththe consciousness of a man who paced er species, but the story required just a steadily to and fro. The man’s step fallittle South American monkey, such as tered; he listened intently. The tune conalways appeared with the old-fashioned tinued, over and over. It could mean but organ-grinder years ago, to delight the one thing, this ancient music. children. And prohibition in Los AngeAn organ-grinder and—a les extends also to harmless monkeys on monkey! the streets. Therefore, the Hart staff Bill Hart was galvanized were having a discouraging search. into action. He leaped to the But city ordinances could not window threw aside a curtain apply to this organ-grinder who anand peered down at the swers to the usual name of Tony, and street below. his simian friend, Charlie. They had “Hello-o! Meester Beel come to Los Angeles hunting work Hart!” sang out the cheery in the movies. voice of a happy-go-lucky Could Charlie perform the Italian musician, who, howcute little tricks that were alever, never ceased cranking ways part of the repertoire of his organ. A slender, gracethe wandering entertainers ful little monkey doffed his in the old days? Charlie could, hat many times in greeting, and he did. He went much further. and then waved it about his After Bill Hart had encouraged both head. Like a small boy, the monkey and master with the neceserstwhile serious Western sary coins, the inimitable Charlie star was down stairs, and proceeded with character portrayout on the street in less als of such amusing but remarkable moments than there were mimicry that he was engaged on the steps. spot.

A recipe never looked From Tony’s comfortable pockbetter to a home-brewer ets Charlie fished a quaint felt hat, a than the little monkey did pair of spectacles, a clay pipe and a suit to Bill Hart. Why? Because of clothes. His master handed him a he had written a story in cane and a small mirror. In a jiffy this which a pet monkey plays long-tailed actor had donned the a most important part. In coat and trousers. Then, seated fact, a monkey was absoupon his large and useful tail, lutely necessary to the Charlie made up. Behold If Charlie could just talk, he’d plot. an old gentleman! Using probably say something harsh. He Bill had been worsaid tail for a chair, Charlie looks like he’s good and sore.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 47 smoked his pipe and read the morning paper with the aid of the specs. And, in response to the applause of Bill and the crowd, he arose and with the aid of his cane, ambled off with all the rheumatic gait of an old man.

Many more tricks did Charlie perform that day, but he had already done enough to bring joy to the screen star’s heart.

No doubt it sounds like “much ado about nothing,” but I can assure you that the acquisition of this little pet monkey meant a great deal to William S. Hart.

Of the nine special productions that he made for Paramount release, five of the stories were written by the star himself.

Each was a pet story which he had treasured for some time, awaiting the day when he would put everything he possessed into their production. And, each of these has proven to be better than the one before. The first four which alternated with other productions were The

Toll Gate, The Testing Block, O’Malley of the Mounted, White Oak, and Travelin’ On. Having engaged Charlie on the spot.

Bill invited the wanderers into his office where their names were listed and business transacted. Evidently Charlie had heard of the fortunes to be made in motion pictures. It was a case of “take me, take my master,”—and so Tony and Charlie were each guaranteed four weeks’ work at a salary of $100 per week. The “papers” were duly drawn up and signed by the “party of the first part” and the “party of the second part.” Some contract for a monkey actor—but as was subsequently proved, Charlie was worth it.

Attired in black frock coat, gray check trousers, and black felt hat, in imitation of the gambler villain of Travelin’ On—Charlie holds as much quaintly amusing, but pathetic appeal on the screen as he did behind the scenes. And, he worked very hard, did this little monkey, even in the terrific rainstorm scenes.

Bill and li’l Mary Jane seem interested in the book—but Charlie seems rather bored.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 48 Can you imagine big, serious Bill Hart going into a thunderstorm to catch a runaway monkey? Yet this old touch supplies one of the biggest dramatic situations of the story.

In the role of J.B. the star spends half the night pursuing the terrified monkey through the storm, not only because he promised a dance-hall girl that he would act as “guardian” to her pet, but because he had come to care for the strange little animal. While J.B. is gone someone steals his Pinto pony and holds up the stage. And there you have a most peculiar situation.

Even the intelligent Pinto likes little Charlie—which is extraordinary, because as a rule Bill Hart’s horse is extremely jealous of his master. Any attention he may bestow upon another animal is likely to result disastrously for the offender.

The Pinto formerly had but two pals, ’Lizabeth, a funny giant mule, and

Cactus Kate, a bronco. But, strange to say, after a few days of doubtfulness, Fritz even allowed Charlie to sit in the saddle on his back.

Charlie enjoys this accomplishment—making friends with Fritz—more than anything else he does. He appreciates the fact that the Pinto is a hard animal to get acquainted with, and because the little horse shows a genuine liking for him Charlie never jokes with him.

Nothing could be more dignified than the way the little monk sits in the saddle, and one sure way of keeping him out of mischief is to place him atop of Fritz. As long as he is there he is as quiet and as serious as a little boy in a girl’s Sunday School Class.

Some monkey! He ought to go into politics. Or are there too many monkeys in politics already?

Charlie has an effective way of stopping Bill from talking too much.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 49

Just Rolling Along: Loretta Young—She’s Not Only Young but Pretty

by Eleanor Barnes Originally published in Screenland, August 1928 Loretta Young is arriving. She is now who is lucky. (Sally is called Sally Blane in on her way. Two big parts in two good the movies.) pictures—Laugh, Clown, Laugh, and The “Then, too, we’re perfectly honest Magnificent Flirt. So much in demand with each other. Maybe Polly Ann won’t that First National, with whom she is unlike the way I wear my hair and she’ll der contract, hardly has a chance to use spend an hour or so experimenting with her in its own pictures, it’s been so busy it to see how she can improve my looks. ‘lending’ her to other companies.

“But we never get lonesome. When Yes, this little girl has been getyou have a big family you naturally make ting a good hand up. your home headquarters for your amuseHas it gone to her head? ment and because we did want a nice Are her Leghorns larger than place to bring our friends, so mother they used to be? could get in on our good times too, “No!” said Loretta the we bought a new home. other day in her dress“It’s costing us much ing-room. “Wouldn’t more than we thought it I be silly to take mywould, but Sally and Polly self seriously? I’ll nevand I think it is worth it. er get high-hatty no mat“When we get it all ter what happens. Being the paid off, we’re going to buy a middle-one of a big family swell big automobile and we’re going makes it almost impossible to take turns driving it. We’re going to go out into the world to check off our days to run it on the with any fancy airs. The calendar, and we’re going to have a first sign of importance mean-looking bus, a limousine with and the rest of the gang seats enough in it for all of us to go stand up on their hind out in at once.” legs and yell at you.

If you’d listen to this blue-eyed “Big families are young beauty romancing about wonderful, though. family fortunes, you’d feel like There isn’t one of us I wishing for an Aladdin’s could spare. They get behind you Lamp so you could rub solid, but oh boy, if you think they them her way. stand for any dizzy ideas of self-ex“I think Georgipression, you’re crazy! anna—that’s the baby—will “You learn to divide your be ready to go into pictures luxuries when there is a flock of soon, too,” said Loretta you. You learn to wait—if Sally naively. “Georgianna has wants to wear our prettiest evebig blue eyes, oh, much ning wrap to a party and I bigger than Sally’s or The skating days had hardly ended want to wear it, we simply mine, and she’s awfully when the limousine days began. match coins to determine cute. You’d like Georgi-

The Silent Film Quarterly • 50 anna,” she continued—her manner indicating that perhaps Georgianna and myself could get together on Remy de Gourmont or other important topics.

“Georgianna—she’s not old enough to go to school, but she’s awfully smart.

She understands everything you say to her and she isn’t afraid of anybody. I know that if a director would see her and talk to her he’d be surprised.

“Families are funny, though,” reminiscently pondered Loretta. “There are so many things they don’t understand.

Even mother didn’t understand at first why I should sit in front of the glass and make faces at myself for more than an hour at a time. It looked silly. Mother said: ‘Why, Gretchen’—for that is my honest-to-goodness name—‘you are going to get wrinkles frowning so much!’

“I explained that I was learning to express myself and my emotions through following Mr. Lon Chaney’s advice.”

Loretta is beautiful. Her hair, a soft, light brown, now reaches to her shoulders in ringlets, enroute to the fashionable mode of ‘doing up’ length.

She smiles a broad, generous smile, the frank Jackie Coogan smile that is more youthful than feminine. This smile is almost boyish in its simplicity.

Her teeth, large, creamy and sparklingly healthy, give added animation to a face that seems to gaze upon life for the first time.

Her eyes, of course, were the big talking point before the camera and casting directors. They are blue of corn-flower shade, and they take on various hues as her moods and her modes dictate.

Loretta was once Baby Gretchen, a child star. She was educated in a convent, and when she came out she and her parents realized that she could no longer trade upon any reputation she had acquired as a child actress, and she had to begin all over again. So ‘Baby Gretchen’ was left far behind and a rather chubby, lively little extra girl began to be noticed

Loretta Young is Sally Blane’s sister. Do you see the resemblance?

The Silent Film Quarterly • 51 around Hollywood. She started in sixyear-old roles at the age of four. The only parts she remembers now came several years later—The Primrose Ring, in which she played a fairy queen, and White and Unmarried, with Tom Meighan.

At four, she was a six-year-old in size.

At nine, she looked at least twelve. So she hied herself back to the convent to wait until the awkward age had passed. Exercises helped to develop her body and helped to do away with

Larry Kent and Loretta Young in an off-stage moment during the filming of The Head Man at the First National Studios.

some of the awkwardness.

“You know,” she says today, “I like to think of emerging from Baby Gretchen like a butterfly emerges from its cocoon.

The convent was the cocoon. And I suppose now I’m the butterfly—anyway, something fluttery! My sisters sometimes call me Dizzy!

“One of my first bits was in Colleen Moore’s picture Orchids and Ermine. Miss Moore noticed me, liked my work, and had them enlarge the part somewhat.

She encouraged me and gave me advice, which was so helpful that I secured several other small parts. Then First National offered me a contract—not as a leading woman, but just as a little ingenue stock player. They happened to need one, and I was right there, under-foot!

“Of course you know that my first big chance came in Lon Chaney’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh. As it happened, I didn’t get that through any influence whatsoever. I was working at First National and met Alice Joyce and her brother. “‘You’re like that dream girl Lon Chaney is searching for, for the lead in his next picture!’ they told me. ‘Why don’t you send him your tests?’

“First National Studio sent various film tests, and I was chosen for the role. It was a wonderful picture. Mr. Chaney was so kind, and helped me so much with my part. So was Herbert Brenon, the director. They told me I was a real actress, and no mistake. I fairly flew to Miss Moore to tell her that, and she said, ‘Ah, ha! Didn’t I tell you?’ She’s such a dear, and her faith in me meant so much!”

The Silent Film Quarterly • 52

Making People Laugh

by Chester Conklin Originally published in Picture-Play Magazine, June 1916 The average person’s idea of a comedian is a man who is continually enjoying himself and who can get fun out of anything from a discarded shoe to a shaky aeroplane. That idea is excellent—for any one but a comedian.

The comedian’s idea of himself is a man who has to work harder than any one else in the world—whose business it is to discover the spot where the people are ticklish, and then to tickle them. Being a comedian, I am rather willing to admit it, not through conceit, but through love of food, for I depend on my tickling qualities for a living. I am of the opinion that the latter description is far nearer correct.

People go to see comic pictures— they go to be amused—and then it is the hardest thing I know of to make them laugh, despite the fact that such is the primary reason for which they go.

No comedian that I am acquainted with has gained success merely through the fact that he was born funny and that his natural antics brought him laurels.

We all have to be more or less psychologists, and every laugh that our work— emphasis on the “work”—provokes is the result of study. For instance, the pictures have lately been subject to much unfavorable comment for the alleged

degrading element of slapstick comedy. I make no claim that we have elevated the minds of the people through this form of humor, but I emphatically deny that we have done anything to degrade them.

The slapstick, like every other form of comedy, is the result of study, and for a long while was one of the most successful methods employed in making people laugh. Some one—probably most of the credit is due to Mack Sennett—noticed that when a man’s hat blew off in a crowded street nearly every one who witnessed the incident smiled.

If the unfortunate person happened to be carrying an armful of bundles and his foot slipped, scattering his load in all directions, those who saw him laughed out loud. Then this was, in an exaggerated manner, reproduced on the screen. The people fairly howled—and the result was slapstick comedy. It did nothing to lower the minds of any one—it merely gave the public what was wanted. That was one form of comedy, and a form that was the hardest work for the comedian, for he had to be continually devising new things to do. Without a doubt, the one person who has been most successful with this way of making people laugh is Charlie Chaplin, and his recent contract, which is said to bring him nearly seven

The Silent Film Quarterly • 53 times the income of the President of the United States, proves his success. Mr. Chaplin is deserving of all the credit he receives—he is the most successful public tickler in the world.

Beyond study, there are other things that a comedian must do. The main one is work. Riding in automobiles and picking our teeth with broom handles aren’t the hardest work we do. Perhaps the best and most interesting way I can impress you with the art—or, as I have said, being a comedian, I should rather call it work—of making people laugh, will be to give you incidents that have actually occurred to comedians I know, including myself.

My experiences in working at the fun emporium of Mack Sennett have been many, and I have numerous bruises and injured feelings as remembrances of those sad occasions when I have attempted to make other people laugh.

Mr. Sennett always has his plays fairly well planned before we leave the studio, and we know, in a general way, what he expects of us. We always do our very best to carry out all his instructions—and add more fun wherever we can. Mr. Sennett supervises the directing of every Keystone photo play, and, although he has but very little time to direct a picture himself, every once in a while he manages it. He is the key of Keystone.

Some of the dare-deviltry that is invented at our studio would make people shudder, should they see the very same thing in a drama. In a comedy, the thrilling feats are soon forgotten, for the public, as a whole, is convinced that they are some trick of the camera, and think no more about it. But put the very same piece of work in a drama, such as hanging onto the edge of a roof by your hands, with your body dangling dangerously over the side, struggling to get back on the roof again, and it will take a mighty long time before it was forgotten by those who saw it. Incidentally, it

is never forgotten by the actor who did the deed.

The hospitals in the vicinity of the Keystone plant do a rushing business, and you can always find a surgeon on hand at the studios, although it would be a hard matter to spend much time with one—they are usually very busy.

There is not an actor or an actress at our studio who has not at some time risked his or her life in the filming of a picture. Probably the most daring comedienne in the motion-picture business is little Mabel Normand. There is nothing that she will not undertake to make a scene a success, and the spirit of fearlessness with which she does her feats such as is not always manifested by we menfolks. As a result, there is many an accident that she can give an account of that has occurred with her playing the leading role. Only recently, Mabel recovered from a nervous breakdown which was caused by her being hit with the heel of a shoe during the filming of a Keystone production.

One of her many daring “stunts” was to jump from an aeroplane just before it crashed into a tree. She blames me for the narrowness of the escape, for I was driving the machine; but I was even less fortunate than Mabel, for, being seated at the wheel, it was impossible for me to escape at all, and. after hitting the tree, all that I remember of the wreck was how I felt when I awoke, lying on a soft bed in the Keystone hospital and being attended by Keystone nurses. A scar on my head reminds me of the incident. Notice “incident”—that’s all it is to a comedian.

During the taking of The Submarine Pirate, the scenario called for Syd Chaplin, who was playing the lead in the feature, to be chased by the famous Keystone police force along the edge of several roofs, twelve stories from the ground, thence along an iron girder separating two buildings of equal height, and from there he slid down a rope to

The Silent Film Quarterly • 54 the top of a passing automobile. It cost the Keystone Company just ninety dollars to insure each one of the police and Chaplin for the two minutes it took for the roof scenes. Luckily no one was injured, although many close calls were experienced.

These scenes created much laughter when they were shown on the screen, but the people did not stop to think what a dangerous task it really was. If they had, they wouldn’t have laughed—that’s all.

It seems to us comedians that scenario writers strive to fill their scripts with material with murderous intent, and that the directors gloat and add a thrill here and there throughout.

Although the actor does not grow enthusiastic over the idea, nevertheless he carries it out in every detail, at the director’s instruction—for that is his business. When it is thrown on the screen, the scenario writer, director, and the general public enjoy a hearty laugh,

while the poor player heaves a deep sigh of relief, thankful that he is still alive and able to witness what he “got over.”

One of the closest calls that a member of the Keystone police ever had was in Raffles, the Gentleman Burglar, when, during a chase along a very high roof, one of the force turned his ankle and all but pitched over the edge. Those who witnessed the accident gasped, but the “cop” held on with his hands and was pulled back to safety by a man running in back of him. He has never been the same to this day, and admits that this unnerved him. Those who were lucky enough to have seen this two-reeler will no doubt remember this “thrill”—or have they forgotten it? The night I saw this particular picture, the “cop’s” slip brought forth a scream of laughter, and a man sitting next to me ventured his opinion to the young lady he was sitting

Chester Conklin is quite a different young man when he shaves off the mustache that causes him to be called “Walrus.”

The Silent Film Quarterly • 55 next to in the theater. “Looks thrilling, doesn’t it?” he inquired. “Well, it was a cinch for those cops. They were all tied to wires, so they couldn’t fall off.” “But suppose the wires should break?” the girl inquired.

“That only happens in press notices,” he replied. Think of that!

It goes to prove my statement about the public’s viewpoint. Here was the camera shooting up at the roof from the street, and there was absolutely nothing above the police but the sky, so how any sane person could have figured out that wires were attached to them is more than I could figure out. Still, I know that many left the theater—and other theaters where it was shown—convinced that there had been some trick employed to filming the narrow escape.

Speaking of close calls on roof edges, I will never forget one experience that I had. I was supposed to be an unwelcome suitor for the girl’s hand—that is to say, unwelcome in the eyes of the girl’s father. When I refused to part with the fond parent’s daughter, he drew a revolver and began firing at me, and, in accordance with the scenario, I took to the rooftops to escape his wrath. But the father was intent upon riddling me with bullets from his weapon, so up he came after me. I started off along the very edge of the roof, looking back every few feet to see how close he was. Well, to make a long story short, I slipped, and all but went over the edge to the street, eight stories below. I certainly was a frightened young man for the moment. I was sure my end had come, and I shut my eyes, expecting to feel myself plunging through space to the hard pavement below. But fortune kept me on that roof; I cannot tell to this day how. Quickly I realized that my life was still my very own, and, getting back to safety—that is to say, comparative safety, for every one knows that the edge of a high building is a very unsafe place—I continued through the

scene, although somewhat dizzily.

It took some little while before I got over the effects of that close call. I told no one about it, but during the rest of the scenes in which I took part during the day, I remembered my escape of a few hours previous. How I ever managed to get through that day’s work will always remain a mystery to me. I know that I went to a show that night to try to get my mind off the harrowing escape that I had been through; but I can’t say truthfully that I enjoyed it very much, even if it was pretty good, according to Charlie Ray, the Ince star, who accompanied me. I went right home after the show, and tucked myself up in bed, and prepared “to sleep it off.” I tossed around for quite a time, but found I could not sleep; so I got up, dressed, and went out and walked about the streets until late. When I returned and finally managed to get to sleep, it was not a very restful slumber. It seemed that I hardly dozed away when my alarm clock roused me again, announcing that it was time to hurry to the studio for another day of—well, to please the fans, I’ll call it comedy this time.

I drove my car as fast as the Los Angeles speed laws will allow to the studio, and would probably have gone a little faster, for it was late, except for the fact that it is said that my license number is on file in the automobile drivers’ rogues’ gallery. They say at the studio that every policeman has learned to know the smell of my gasoline.

When I reached the studio yard, Mack Swain—“Ambrose,” we all call him—greeted me.

“Hello, Chester!” he called. “You’re just in time to see yesterday’s stuff run off in the projection room. Come on in!”

My heart gave a bound—or maybe it sank; I don’t know which—when I realized that I would soon see the scene that nearly brought a sudden close to the career of one Chester “Walrus” Conklin.

Presently Mr. Sennett, most of the

The Silent Film Quarterly • 56 players, the writers, and directors assembled to see the pictures shown. Mr. Sennett always makes it a point to attend these showings, and then tells us exactly what he thinks of our work—again emphasis on the “work.”

When my picture was at last shown, I watched it intently, and was sitting thinking of my close call when I suddenly realized that some one was speaking to me.

I turned to look into the face of Mr. Sennett, and heard him say: “Couldn’t you have done that a little better, Chester? It should have been made more natural. You’ll have to retake that scene.”

I started to splutter an explanation about it’s being as natural as if I had fallen to the sidewalk, but he turned and had walked away before I could make him understand.

That afternoon, I went to my camera man and told him to retake the scene then, so as I could have it over with and get a good night’s rest. He laughed and walked away; and then, for the first time, it dawned upon me that Mr. Sennett had taken the accident as a joke and was merely trying to worry me for fun. Later, I found that he had learned from Charlie Ray about how the accident had troubled me, and saw an opportunity for a good laugh—at the expense of a comedian.

Some of the adventures of Keystone players are humorous, even when they are happening. One of these was when Al St. John, then a member of the “police force,” was almost suffocated in mud. He was in a rowboat with several others of the company when the lake was suddenly drained, leaving the police boat stranded on the mud. One of the boys fell overboard, and, in attempting to climb back, upset the boat. Al St. John was the first to land in the mud, and he did it in a very realistic manner. His foot slipped, and the result was a perfect dive, headfirst, into the soft mud, policemen on top of him.

There was a loud roar of laughter from where the director and camera man stood, but when the policeman managed to get up, St. John was still lying, his head covered, in the mire. The director was the first to realize the seriousness of the situation, and called to the others to help him. A rope was thrown out and fastened about Al’s body, and then he was drawn ashore, where it was some time before he was revived.

The camera man took the scene of him being dragged through the mud and a place was found for it in the picture. Things like this are considered too valuable to miss. St. John maintains to this day that it was the closest call he has ever experienced—but he is still very young.

Probably the most talked-of experience of mine was the time when I was blown many feet through the air by a premature explosion of the big Keystone tank. So great was the force of the explosion that it blew the concrete bottom of the tank out completely, and flooded the entire studio. The worst part of it was the force upset camera and all, and the scene was lost, so far as the screen was concerned. I certainly looked as if I had been through the war when I emerged from the hospital, some time later. I was bruised, cut, and stitched until I felt that I must look like a sawdust doll which had been ripped by a dog, and which some clumsy child had tried to patch up again.

It was several hours after the explosion before I realized just what had happened—then some one had to explain it to me in detail.

Some of the professional steeplejacks whose names may often be found gracing the pages of newspapers may think that they take chances, but just let them try their luck and pluck against the battery of Keystone scenario writers and directors—that is my challenge.

Of course, you all are aware of the large proportions of Roscoe Arbuckle,

The Silent Film Quarterly • 57 better known to picture followers as “Fatty.” On account of a forced change in the ending of The Village Scandal, one of the early Triangle releases, he had to find a new finish with a punch to it, so he decided to roll off the roof of the country hotel, which was one of the buildings in the complete village erected for this picture.

Right under the roof that he planned to roll off was a watering trough, just exactly large enough for him to get into without the use of a shoehorn, so he decided to fall into this. A miscalculation would mean several weeks the hospital, but this did not faze Roscoe one bit. He climbed out on the roof, and, after a hard tumble, rolled right off the edge and into the trough. His only remembrance of this occasion was a badly bruised hip.

Of course, it looked great in the pic-

ture, therefore got a tremendous laugh, and that was all Roscoe cared about.

One of the strangest things that has happened to me occurred when I was playing in Walter Wright’s aeroplane comedy, Dizzy Heights and Daring Hearts.

We had an aeroplane especially constructed for this film by Keystone’s thriving young inventor, Joe Murray. My role was that of “Count Walrus,” a purchaser of aeroplane supplies for a foreign nation, and. after having tried my best to run away with the aeroplane maker’s daughter, action in the scenario called for me to escape in one of the aeroplanes. Running to the machine, I tried to start it by turning the propeller. As this was too hard a task for me,

This should prove conclusively that Chester Conklin is well qualified to write of the unhappy side of making people laugh.

The Silent Film Quarterly • 58 I threw my whole weight on one of the blades—and it started. This inspired the director, and he ordered me to do it over again, making one complete turn with the propeller and then substituting a dummy to whirl around. When I went through the action the second time, I made the complete turn—and several more—before the machine could be stopped and the dummy put in my place.

Nothing serious resulted, but it took me some time before I could get my bearings again, for playing the role of a propeller is not the hardest way to get dizzy.

In the same picture, one of the last scenes called for a high chimney to fall— apparently on me. Of course, the bricks that found a resting place on my head were of papier-mâché and could do no damage. But flour and plaster were used as mortar, and when the avalanche of bricks took place my eyes were filled with the dusty powder. Luckily this was one of the final scenes, or I should have been forced to delay the picture, as I could not see well enough to work for several days after.

I have mentioned the foregoing incidents merely to point out to the people whom we are trying to coax to laugh by means of the screen just what we have to go through as a daily routine. It has been found—I cannot say whether it was found fortunately or unfortunately—that the life-risking form of humor is one of the most successful. This is used a great deal in making the present-day films, although it must be interspersed with other kinds of laugh provokers.

Perhaps one of the best—and safest—means of making people laugh is by the sudden reversal of a situation. Exactly what I mean by this may be seen from the accompanying illustration, in which Mack Sennett plays a valet and Raymond Hitchcock the employer. By a sudden change, making Mr. Hitchcock the valet and Mr. Sennett the employer, a ticklish spot was immediately touched.

The art of making people laugh, as is shown by the incidents of which I have spoken, is far from being a life of continuous pleasure. It is real hard work, and work that is not always appreciated by the public. There are very few people who see the pictures and sit in judgment of a player’s ability, who go so far as to think of the amount of study that the player has done before he ever went before the camera to do the actual acting.

How many people figure what method of drawing laughs that the various comedians employ? Or does the average outsider know that there are any different methods?

The variations of comedy are numerous—in fact, so numerous that almost every successful player has something all his own, although the general style may be in common with that used by others.

Take for instance myself. While I appear almost entirely in comedy of the slapstick variety, I do many little things along lines that are untouched by others, that, even though the public does not understand the exact reason for my performing them, I notice, when I attend a theater that they draw a laugh. I will not tell you just what my methods are, though—because they are too valuable to me—and a comedian must eat.

The success of Charlie Chaplin and his brother Sidney is excellent proof of the fact that one reliable method of making people see the humorous side of life is by doing ridiculous things—provided they are original, and not done in a ridiculous manner.

If, after what I have said in this article, there is doubt in your mind as to whether a picture fun maker earns his money or not, I suggest that you go to a studio, and when one of the players meets with an accident that prevents him from working for a few days, apply for his position and try to make people laugh for as long a time as you can stand the strain.