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Yesterday, I posted a list of my favorite silent era character actors. Today, it's actresses.
10. Miriam Cooper—"The Friendless One" in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, she was a Method actress before the Method, once staring so intently into a Klieg light during a close-up, her eyesight was permanently damaged.
9. Clarine Seymour—Griffith cast her as the "bad" girl against Lillian Gish's "good" one in True-Heart Susie, but she proved so much more interesting than the heroine, she subverted the whole story. She died a year later on the cusp of stardom.
8. Gladys Brockwell—memorable as a hooker with a heart of stone in 7th Heaven and a homeless women with a pivotal secret in Lon Chaney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
7. Zasu Pitts—her quavering, sing-song voice turned her into comic relief during the sound era, but she was the avaricious shrew in von Stroheim's Greed, the love interest in The Wedding March, and Mary Pickford's only friend in The Little Princess.
6. Olga Baclanova—remembered now as the evil seductress in Freaks, she was at her best in Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs and Josef von Sternberg's The Docks of New York.
5. Anita Page—a personal favorite, she was Joan Crawford's arch-nemesis, on-stage and off, in Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens.
4. Edna Purviance—Chaplin's go-to girl in nearly forty shorts and features.
3. Louise Brooks—in Germany, she was a star, but in Hollywood, she was strictly supporting. And if you've seen A Girl in Every Port, The Show Off and It's the Old Army Game, you know she was one of the best.
2. Musidora—her iconic portrayal of spy master Irma Vep in Louis Feuillade's classic serial Les Vampires made crime so appealing, French police temporarily halted production.
1. "The Girl" (Bebe Daniels / Mildred Davis / Jobyna Ralston)—There was always a girl in Harold Lloyd's comedies, almost always named simply "The Girl," but she was, in fact, played by three very different actresses: the spunky Bebe Daniels (1915-1919), the demure Mildred Davis (1919-1923) and the soulful Jobyna Ralston (1923-1927). Daniels went on to bigger and better things with Cecil B. DeMille, Davis married Lloyd in real life and retired, and Ralston, well, she played second fiddle to Clara Bow and a squadron of airplanes in the first Oscar-winning picture Wings. But as "the Girl," they were all just wonderful. (Click here to read Annette D’Agostino Lloyd's essay on "the Girl." And no, she's no relation to Harold.)
Tomorrow: Silent Supporting Players Who Were Better In The Sound Era
As part of an ongoing side project to learn more about the Silent Era even as I continue to move forward with this blog, I tracked down a mid-period Lillian Gish movie, True Heart Susie from 1919, and wanted to share a couple of thoughts on the subject.
One of a series of inexpensive rural pictures directed by D.W. Griffith aimed at recouping the losses he suffered when the enormously expensive Intolerance failed to catch the same lightning in the box-office bottle that The Birth of a Nation, True Heart Susie is the story of a long-suffering and true-hearted country girl (Gish) who loses her childhood sweetheart to a "painted and powdered" city girl, only to win him back at the end when the city girl suffers a timely bout of pneumonia.
And when I say "painted and powdered," I'm not saying the city girl is a hooker or even a flapper, I'm saying she uses (gasp!) cosmetics and prefers the lively company of her friends to cooking, cleaning and gazing in adoring silence at one of the dullest leading men in movie history, Robert Harron (who at twenty-seven was at the tail end of a 220-film career that would end in suicide the following year).
It's a rather slight comedy that hinges mostly on Gish's ability to make befuddled self-delusion and virginal reticence charming, and I have to say it's not one of Gish's or Griffith's best. Griffith was a reactionary in the classic sense of the word—wanting to dial the clock back to an earlier time, in this case the 19th century Kentucky of his birth, a bit of problem since by then even Kentucky had moved on. He took the morals of his tales seriously, but increasingly his audiences didn't, and before you say, yes, but it was ninety years ago, what do you expect, I'd remind you that Picasso was already two years into his Cubist phase, Robert Weine was in Germany filming the groundbreaking Expressionist film, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was just a year away from publishing This Side Of Paradise. World War I was over and like it or not, the 19th century had been washed away in rivers of blood, never to be seen again.
Washed away with it was a public taste for black-and-white morality tales about the ordeals of Victorian virgins and once Gish left Griffith's employ to pursue more complex roles, audience quickly came to regard Griffith's movies as fusty relics of a more agrarian, pre-war age. The passage of another two years would mark the last commercial and critical success of Griffith's career.
True Heart Susie is worth seeing, though, beyond the curiosity factor that attaches itself to any work of Lillian Gish, for the supporting work of Clarine Seymour as the city girl.
Seymour was a young actress in Griffith's stable, having first started working in movies at the age of eighteen for the Thanhouse Film Company in New Rochelle. A year later she made a successful screen test for Griffith and moved to Los Angeles. She received good reviews in the few pictures she appeared in, landed the lead in The Idol Dancer (1920) and started working in Way Down East, one of Griffith's last great movies, when (according to Gish, who was there) she died of exposure filming one of the film's winter scene in near arctic conditions. Mary Hay replaced her, filming went on and Seymour's burgeoning fame was buried with her. She was just twenty-one and has largely been forgotten today, I'm sorry to say.
I saw this movie as a download from Netflix—the second reason I'm writing this post. This whole download thing (which computer wiz Katie-Bar-The-Door set up for the hapless Monkey) is a real boon to movie nuts such as myself. For a minimal subscription price (roughly $10 a month), you can stream at no extra charge hundreds of movies directly to your computer (or if you have the right equipment, to your television).
At a time when hundreds of Blockbusters are closing and Warner Home Video is changing its business model (selling most of their film library now on a mail order on-demand basis rather than spending speculative up-front money to stock store shelves), it's clear that the industry at least believes streaming and downloading is the future of movie viewing and that soon enough we'll one day look at all our DVDs the same way we look at those VHS tapes lining the shelves in the basement, as candidates for a landfill.
Which makes me wonder whether Blu-Ray won the format wars just in time to become the moral equivalent of a nuclear-powered buggy whip—both state of the art and obsolete at the same time.
Not that I'll stop collecting DVDs and Blu-Rays in the meantime. You think I'm going to stop watching movies for the next five years just because the dawn of the download age is upon us? Not a chance.
But still, something to think about ...
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