And the Monkey is even slower—the question is, how patient are you?
After a long creative break, I'm getting back to work on my Silent Oscars series. Remember that? It's a history of silent movies, one made-up award at a time Up next, either something about Cecil B. DeMille, or Mary Pickford's Stella Maris or maybe a reposting of all the previous winners, or—well, we'll find out, won't we.
By the way, the line "The ox is slow, but the earth is patient" is an ancient Buddhist proverb, made up, I believe, for the 1983 Tom Selleck movie High Road to China. A rip-snorting action-adventure rom-com about a World War I flying ace who ferries a rich, young, beautiful socialite to China to rescue her missing father, High Road to China was supposed to be Selleck's consolation prize for missing out on the starring role in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Instead, critics mostly ripped it because it was clearly inferior to the aforementioned Raiders and it flopped at the box office.
Now we know, of course, that everything is inferior to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the best rip-snorting action-adventure rom-com ever made. High Road to China ain't Raiders, but it is entertaining: Selleck is appealing as always, Bess Armstrong as the socialite is the girl-next-door you wish lived next door, and John Barry's score is gorgeous, one of the best of an Oscar-winning career that included Dances with Wolves, Out of Africa and the James Bond movies.
If you haven't seen it, don't blame yourself—the film's been tangled up in rights-litigation/bankruptcy hell for nearly thirty years and was never even released (in this country anyway) on VHS much less DVD. Until now, that is. Circle April 17 on your calendars for the release of the Blu-Ray edition. (It's available as a DVD as well.)
And what does any of this have to do with silent movies? Um, well, Tom Selleck's character, Patrick O'Malley, owns two airplanes, "Dorothy" and "Lillian," a couple of French Stampes biplanes named for—yes, you guessed it—the Gish sisters, two of the silent era's greatest stars.
Whom I have also written about (here and here and here), and will be writing about again.
When America went to war in 1917, Hollywood—motivated by a mix of patriotism and profit motive—went to war with it. Some made propaganda pictures (Mary Pickford's The Little American and Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania), some made serious drama (Thomas Ince's Civilization), Chaplin even made a classic comedy (Shoulder Arms). And everybody made one-reel shorts promoting the purchase of war bonds.
So it's no surprise that D.W. Griffith—still regarded in 1918 as the world's greatest director—should also enter the fray. And he would seem to have been a natural for the job. He was already a proven master at staging battle scenes. His fame gave him and his cameras access to the front lines. And you would think that a man so devoted to Victorian morality would have something to say as war daily blasted the Old Order into dust.
Too bad, then, that the resulting movie, Hearts of the World, is such a lousy picture.
Griffith billed the movie in an early intertitle as "[a]n old fashioned play with a new fashioned theme." He wasn't lying as it turned out. Hearts of the World is not my first D.W. Griffith movie—including the Biograph shorts, this was in fact my 70th—and I can tell you that the story of a young couple torn apart by war is cobbled together from the plots of several early Griffith films, particularly The Unseen Enemy, In The Border States, Swords and Hearts and, of course, The Birth of a Nation.
The result is stale, overly sentimentalized and unconvincing.
The couple in question is played by Robert Harron and Lillian Gish as two Americans living with their respective families in a small French village on the Franco-German border. War breaks out days before the couple's impending nuptials, which proves inconvenient for everyone involved—the Boy volunteers for the French army, is soon wounded in battle and is presumed dead; the Girl is trapped behind enemy lines and put to work in the fields; and the conflict that consumed all of Europe is reduced to the question of whether the Boy can rescue the Girl before the evil German officer "von Strohm" has his way with her.
This wasn't the first (or last) time Griffith reduced a complex historical event to a question of who would get into Lillian Gish's underpants first, and as propaganda, the rallying cry of "Quick, boys, join the Army and save Lillian's virginity!" pales next to such classics as "The Yanks Are Coming" and "Uncle Sam Wants You!"
Hearts of the World does not represent Gish at her best. I've praised her at length before (in my review of The Wind, for example), but here she uncharacter- istically overacts. Rather than allowing her pain and suffering to well up gently from some hidden inner source, as she did in the wonderfully understated manner of Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and The Wind, Gish offers up a grotesque pantomime of grief, panic and temporary insanity.
Her co-star, Robert Harron, is, if anything, even worse. In previous pictures such as Judith of Bethulia, Hoodoo Ann and Intolerance, Harron was highly effective playing a young man in love, but in those movies, he was paired with Mae Marsh, not Gish, and while Marsh could never match Gish's ability to project pain and anguish—no one could—she had a mischievous light in her eye that made her good girls exciting. Marsh made Harron seem much more interesting than he really was—he must have something on the ball, the viewer figures, to send Marsh into such a tizzy—and when he falls for her and fights for her, it's to his credit. But by 1918, Marsh had moved on to greener pastures, and against Gish's reticence and rectitude, Harron could strike no spark.
Hearts of the World might have overcome the limitations of its bland central romance, though, if the battle scenes had lived up to their claim of authenticity. As a short prologue trumpets, the British government had allowed Griffith and his cameras unprecedented access to the front lines, but aside from some brief documentary footage of tanks, dirigibles and trench mortars, the battle scenes are flat and with no sense of the realities of trench warfare. Armies run back and forth as easily as school boys playing Capture the Flag, and with a cavalry charge, a bayonet thrust and the toss of a grenade, the bloody stalemate that in reality lasted for years and cost millions of lives is decided—and just in the nick of time. Hooray!
And yet for all its flaws, there's a story worth telling hidden in Hearts of the World in the form of Dorothy Gish—Lillian's little sister—who here provides the film's comic relief. "The Little Disturber," as she is called, is a traveling street musician who takes a fancy to Robert Harron on the eve of his betrothal. Like the actress who played her, the Disturber is a gawky free spirit, funny and flirty and full of life. She knows what lips and hand grenades are for, and she does plenty of kissing and killing in her twenty minutes or so of screen time.
In fact, Dorothy reminded me a bit of another war film heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, and it occurred to me that the problem with D.W. Griffith as his career wore on is that he was the kind of guy who would read Gone With The Wind and think the story was about Melanie.
What Lillian did well, she did better than anybody, but she couldn't play a conventional romantic lead and anyway, nobody could play Griffith's idea of a Victorian dream woman, part saint, part virgin goddess. It's a consistent failing of Griffith's that he failed to see that the "bad" girl was more interesting than the "good" one. Like a grumpy grandpa hectoring the kids to "get off the damn lawn," Griffith's insistence that girls who wear perfume and lipstick and fashionable hats are harlots luring our pure boys away from the joys of wholesome domestic drudgery was already comically out of date by 1918. By the height of the Jazz Age, it would be downright archaic.
Fortunately, audiences could see what Griffith couldn't. Her supporting performance made Dorothy a star in her own right and in 1919, she was offered a $1 million contract to do five films. (She turned it down, saying, "At my age all that money would ruin my character.")
Like Lillian, Dorothy's off-screen personality matched her on-screen persona: she was funny and roguish and fun, and mostly played in comedies during the silent era. Despite their different temperaments, though, the two sisters remained close and never considered themselves rivals.
When talkies came in, Dorothy departed Hollywood for the stage where she performed for the rest of her life. She made only four sound movies and a smattering of television, making her final appearance in Otto Preminger's 1963 film, The Cardinal. After a long illness, Dorothy died in Italy at the age of seventy.
Artistically, Hearts of the World was Griffith's first serious stumble, and though he would right himself with such classics as Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm, the writing was on the wall. Increasingly, the public found Griffith's Victorian morality tales stuffy and old-fashioned and his audiences melted away. Griffith made his last film in 1931.
I've been cleaning up my blog's appearance lately, including trimming the gargantuan list of "labels"—you know what "labels" are in the blogging context, right? that list of names and subjects at the end of a post that with a click of the mouse will connect you with every other post I've written on that subject.
When the number of labels reached 500, I thought, this is ridiculous, especially since there are better ways to search this blog for past posts—either the "search this blog" gadget at the top of the right hand column; or you can scroll down just beneath that, and click on the "here" link under "What are the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards" or the "Silent Oscars" link under the heading, wait for it, The Silent Oscars, after which you can click on any highlighted link and go to the post about that person or movie.
You can still click a "label" at the end of a post to see what else I've written on a subject, but the list of labels on the right hand side of the page will no longer be six feet long. So long and God speed, boys.
But because I am a compulsive fussbudget, and because my essay about Buster Keaton is nowhere near ready, I thought before this information disappears forever, I would share with you photos of the ten movie personalities I have mentioned the most since I began writing this blog. (Included is a link to my favorite post about that person.)
Starting with number ten:
10. Louise Brooks 9. Cary Grant 8. Anita Page 7. D.W. Griffith (with the Gish sisters) 6. Joan Crawford 5. Greta Garbo 4. Douglas Fairbanks (with Mary Pickford) 3. Buster Keaton 2. The Marx Brothers 1. Charles Chaplin The only real surprise on the list is Joan Crawford since I haven't actually written about her before. But she made movies with everybody and was willing to say something nasty about all of them so she makes for a great quote to spice up somebody else's entry. Fret not, though—I'll be writing about her at length when I finally get to Mildred Pierce, sometime around the turn of the next century.
Since I'm working my way through the silent era, there's bound to be a lot more Chaplin, Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks on the horizon. But eventually I'll return to the sound era and, assuming I live long enough, Cary Grant will surge to the top of the list. Something to look forward to.
[To read part one of this essay, click here. To read part two, click here.]
The First Film Stars ● The first international movie star was Max Linder, a French comedian not just in the style of Charlie Chaplin but the guy Chaplin was often imitating early in his career, a fact Chaplin himself freely acknowledged. Born to a family of vintners in the Bordeaux region of France, Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle joined a troupe of actors touring France. In Paris, he discovered motion pictures and signed with Pathé in 1905, changing his name at the same time. He made over two hundred movies in his career, most as the recurring character "Max," an upper class roué who is a bit baffled by practical matters.
Linder wrote and directed his own films and in the years before World War I, he was the biggest star in Europe.
Unlike most of the comics of this era, Linder largely eschewed the slapstick style of Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies in favor of gesture and reaction; and as film historian David Thomson points out, "there was little of the sentimentality that American comedians resorted to." In this short Max reprend sa liberté (a.k.a. Troubles of a Grasswidower) (1912), you can see shades of Chaplin, the Three Stooges and Lucille Ball:
His career came to a virtual end during World War I after he was injured by mustard gas while serving as a dispatch driver in the French army. He never fully recovered and although he later made films at Chaplin's United Artists, he never again regained his audience. In 1925, he and his wife killed themselves as part of a suicide pact.
● Internationally, the best known actress was Asta Nielsen. Though born in Denmark, Nielsen made most of her films in Germany where she was known simply as "Die Asta" (The Asta). Film critic Lotte Eisner called her acting "intensely modern" and the "ideal" of European intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s. It was also, for its time, intensely erotic, and thanks to the heavy hand of American censors, largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless, her "exceptionally unmannered" style of acting (David Thomson) influenced the generation of performers who followed her. Her best known films now are Afgrunden (a.k.a. The Woman Always Pays), Hamlet and Joyless Street, in which she co-starred with a young Swedish actress making one of her first films.
"The woman who taught me everything I know," Greta Garbo said later, "was Asta Nielsen."
Nielsen's version of Hamlet, produced by a film company she formed specifically for that purpose, is unusual in that not only does she play the title role, but she plays Hamlet as a woman disguised as a man. She abandoned movies with the advent of sound and returned to the stage in 1927. She died in 1972 at the age of 90.
● In America, actors—and everybody else, for that matter—toiled in virtual anonymity for most of this era. Growing up in an age when a film's closing titles last seven minutes and even the caterer gets a credit, film fans now may find it hard to believe that a hundred years ago nobody got a credit—not the director, not the producer, and certainly not the actors—just the name of the studio and the film's title, that was it. As crazy as that sounds now, the studios believed that by keeping the cast and crew anonymous, they would remain interchangeable and underpaid.
And the strategy worked for a while. The only problem was, audiences weren't stupid; they knew who they liked and even if they didn't know the names, they knew the faces and clamored for more movies by, for example, "the Vitagraph Girl." And even though exhibitors couldn't advertise actors by name—they didn't know them either—they could, say, put a cardboard cutout of Charlie Chaplin's readily identifiable Tramp character in front of the box office whenever one of his films was playing.
The first American actress known by name (other than those already known from another medium) was Florence Lawrence. Known for years as "the Biograph Girl," Lawrence signed with the rival Independent Moving Pictures Company—"IMP" for short. In March 1910, to promote the new "IMP Girl," studio founder Carl Laemmle concocted a publicity stunt, first planting stories that Lawrence had been killed in a streetcar accident in New York, then buying up advertising refuting the story. "We nail a lie!" the ad boasted. Lawrence made a personal appearance in St. Louis to prove she was alive and well and within days, she was a household name.
To counter the publicity, Vitagraph began promoting its own star, Florence Turner, by name as well. The star system was born.
Sadly, Lawrence was badly burned in a studio fire in 1915 and her star quickly faded. Five years later, her husband died and two subsequent marriage failed. In 1938, reduced to bit parts at $75 a film and suffering from myelofibrosis, Lawrence committed suicide.
In terms of stardom, Lawrence's counterpart, Florence Turner, fared little better. She moved to London in 1913 and formed her own production company, which produced some thirty short films, but her career went into eclipse during the war and she returned to America to work mostly in bit parts at MGM. She died a virtual unknown in 1946.
● Although credited as the first American movie stars, Lawrence and Turner were soon eclipsed by "Little Mary"—better known now as Mary Pickford. Pickford was born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto and began acting on the stage at the age of seven. Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York and changed her name to Mary Pickford, and while she did land a few parts, by 1909 she was desperate for work and auditioned for a role in a D.W. Griffith film, Pippa Passes. Although she didn't get the part, Griffith offered her a contract at $10 a day with a guarantee of $40 a week —double the going rate. She made fifty-one movies that year alone.
Although like everyone else she remained anonymous on screen, audiences were immediately taken with her and theater owners began to bill her as "The Girl with the Golden Curls." By 1912, she abandoned the stage altogether. In 1914, by that time working for Adolph Zukor at Lasky's Famous Players (later Paramount), Pickford's name for the first time appeared above the title of a film, Hearts Adrift. Her next film, Tess of the Storm Country, was one of the most popular of the year and made Pickford an international star. (The film is preserved in the National Film Registry.)
Pickford later co-founded United Artists with husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, and won an Oscar for her performance in the 1929 film Coquette. At her zenith, Pickford's power and popularity was greater than that of any actress before or since. I'll be writing about her again. In the meantime, you can read a bit more about her here.
● Once Mary Pickford left Biograph, D.W. Griffith found his ideal leading lady in Lillian Gish. Born in Ohio in 1893, Gish's father abandoned the family when Lillian was still a child. Her mother took up acting to support herself and Gish and her younger sister, Dorothy, joined acting troupes early, including a stint with Sarah Bernhardt in New York. Eventually, Mary Pickford introduced the Gish sisters to D.W. Griffith and they made their film debut in the short drama An Unseen Enemy in 1912.
Gish quickly established herself as one of the finest actresses in film and made forty-five movies before her starring role in 1915's The Birth of a Nation. In Griffith's 1913 melodrama The Mothering Heart—about a wife abandoned to raise her child alone—she displayed a gift for conveying pain, particularly of the long-suffering variety, and thereafter her best work, such as Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East, mined that vein. Gish fit Griffith's notion of the ideal Victorian maiden, and she largely played that role on screen and off for the rest of her life, even after parting company with Griffith in 1921.
Dorothy Gish was five years Lillian's junior and was as different from her older sister as two people who nevertheless remained close could be. Whereas Lillian was a serious-minded tragedian, Dorothy was a flirtatious cut-up so adept at comedy that Paramount Pictures once offered her a million dollars to make a series of comedy features. "At my age," she said, turning down the offer, "all that money would ruin my character."
Although Dorothy actually made more movies during these early years than her older sister, she didn't really achieve a breakthrough until 1918 in Griffith's war picture, Hearts of the World, in which she played a small comedic part in an otherwise grim drama. After that she specialized in comedic roles. Still, her best performance was as a blind foundling threatened by the turmoil of the French Revolution in Griffith's last commercial success, Orphans of the Storm (1921).
After watching her sister in a rare leading role, Lillian exclaimed, "Why, Dorothy is good; she's almost as good as I am!"
Dorothy continued to work throughout the silent era, then returned to the stage when talkies came in. With the exception of a handful of television appearances in the 1950s, she remained on the stage for the rest of her life.
More about the Gish sisters when I hit the early 1920s.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
And the Monkey is even slower—the question is, how patient are you?
By the way, the line "The ox is slow, but the earth is patient" is an ancient Buddhist proverb, made up, I believe, for the 1983 Tom Selleck movie High Road to China. A rip-snorting action-adventure rom-com about a World War I flying ace who ferries a rich, young, beautiful socialite to China to rescue her missing father, High Road to China was supposed to be Selleck's consolation prize for missing out on the starring role in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
If you haven't seen it, don't blame yourself—the film's been tangled up in rights-litigation/bankruptcy hell for nearly thirty years and was never even released (in this country anyway) on VHS much less DVD. Until now, that is. Circle April 17 on your calendars for the release of the Blu-Ray edition. (It's available as a DVD as well.)
And what does any of this have to do with silent movies? Um, well, Tom Selleck's character, Patrick O'Malley, owns two airplanes, "Dorothy" and "Lillian," a couple of French Stampes biplanes named for—yes, you guessed it—the Gish sisters, two of the silent era's greatest stars.
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