A Top Ten List (Of Sorts)

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.

The Silent Oscars: 1917—Part Three

(To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, click here.)

The Chaplin Mutuals
"I classify Chaplin as the greatest motion picture comedian of all time."—Buster Keaton, in a 1960 interview with Herbert Feinstein

I figure it unlikely that anything I write here will convince you to see Charlie Chaplin's Mutual Comedies—not that that will stop me from posting a couple of thousand words, of course; nothing can—so how about a testimonial from Chaplin's only real challenger for the title of greatest actor-director of the silent era (and maybe all time), Buster Keaton:

"I was in love with him, same as everybody else," he said, and on another occasion added, "[Chaplin] absolutely revolutionized the direction of pictures."

Now if that doesn't make you want to stop wasting your life on indefensible time sucks like this blog and click here to watch some of the best comedies of the silent era, nothing will. Two Three thousand words, here we come.

After his apprenticeship with Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios in 1914 (read about that here), Chaplin signed a one-year deal with Essanay Studios where he directed fourteen shorts, including such films as The Tramp and Burlesque On Carmen. By the end of that year, Chaplin was the most famous entertainer in the world, and the most influential. As I wrote in an earlier essay, "Seeing Chaplin in the context of his times, it's clear to me now he was to film comedy what D.W. Griffith was to film drama, establishing the rules and raising the bar."

After Chaplin's contract at Essanay expired, he signed with the Mutual Film Corporation to direct and star in a dozen two-reel comedies—known colloquially as "the Chaplin Mutuals"—for the then-unheard of sum of $670,000, the most any entertainer had been paid in history. "Next to the war in Europe," a Mutual publicist wrote, "Chaplin is the most expensive item in contemporaneous history." The deal with Mutual afforded Chaplin two luxuries he'd never had before as a director—time and money—and he took full advantage of the opportunity, not only re-shooting sequences that didn't match his vision, but also experimenting with the comedic form itself.

In support of this new venture, Chaplin gathered around him a team of familiar faces, recruiting a couple of friends from his days with the British music hall troupe that had also included Stan Laurel and Chaplin's brother Sydney. At 6'5" and 300 pounds, Eric Campbell was the most prominent of Chaplin's supporting players; a full foot taller and 175 pounds heavier than Chaplin, he made a good comic foil for the Tramp, and wound up playing his nemesis in eleven of the twelve Mutuals.

And wearing the ridiculously fake brush moustache known as a soup strainer was Albert Austin who performed mostly as the straight man on the receiving end of the Tramp's more destructive antics. (You can see Austin without his trademark facial hair in Mary Pickford's 1920 feature, Suds.)

As his leading lady, Chaplin brought Edna Purviance with him from Essanay. Purviance (Purr-VYE-ance) had been working as a stenographer in San Francisco when she caught Chaplin's eye, who, either as a trite come-on or because he could more easily mold the novice actress to fit his ideas of comedy, asked her if she would like to be in pictures. "I laughed at the idea," she said later, "but agreed to try it."

Although their romantic relationship was brief, Purviance continued to play Chaplin's leading lady for nine years, appearing in approximately forty films (the exact number is in dispute), more than any other actress.

Chaplin began his career at Mutual in the spring of 1916 with a couple of formula comedies, The Floorwalker and The Fireman. In the former, the Tramp wanders into a department store and wreaks havoc—knocking over displays, playing hide and seek with detectives, trashing the wares—before trading places with a look-alike store manager (future director Lloyd Bacon) who unbeknownst to the Tramp has just embezzled the payroll. In the latter, Chaplin plays the world's laziest firefighter—the kind of guy who stuffs a rag in the alarm bell to keep it from ringing—but comes to the rescue of a pretty girl (Purviance) when a fire breaks out.

Each film is a loose collection of well-polished comic set-ups and payoffs, distinguishable from Chaplin's work at Keystone and Essanay only be the quality of their gags. Nothing wrong with that—they're damn funny—but the stories are nothing more than clotheslines to hang jokes on, and the actors little more than props whose motivations change from scene to scene depending on the needs of the gag at hand.

Chaplin's third film at Mutual, The Vagabond, starts with a typical slapstick set-up—the Tramp as traveling musician busking in a bar for handouts—but quickly turns into the stuff of Victorian melodrama with the story of a wealthy middle aged woman haunted by the memory of a kidnapped child converging in a series of coincidences worthy of Charles Dickens with the story of young woman (Purviance) held captive by a band of gypsies. Into that mix, Chaplin introduced several themes that would characterize his work forever after—the separation of parent from child, artistic insecurity, noble self-sacrifice, and especially the exquisite pain of unrequited love.

The attempt to wed slapstick to the dramatic form made The Vagabond Chaplin's most ambitious film to date, but result was the most disappointing. There's nothing wrong with sentimentality per se—The Kid, for example, was one of the era's best films—and viewed objectively, from the outside looking in, the Tramp's white knight complex can be hilarious (see, e.g., The Pawnshop, where an old con's tale leaves Chaplin sobbing), but here the situation and its solution feel utterly contrived, and because we have no emotional investment in the characters, unsatisfying.

Chaplin the filmmaker only fitfully grasped that the problem with Chaplin the man's tendency to fall in love with damsels in distress is that the ones chronically in need are beyond help and the rest get better and move on, which suggests that a compulsion to rescue them is less about helping others and more about courting rejection and self-pity. When, as in The Vagabond, the filmmaker indulges the man's compulsion simply as the default mode for a situation he hasn't fully worked out, the result is not moving but mawkish, and I imagine that those who complain that Chaplin is too sentimental for their tastes are really saying he too often fails to establish an emotional connection to the characters that would justify the Tramp's (and our) tears.

Chaplin's relatively rare failure with The Vagabond underscores just how good Edna Purviance usually was at embodying the Victorian ideal of womanhood, a thankless role that required her to charm not only the Tramp but the audience as well. She began her career as little more than a pretty ornament whose job was to stand still while Chaplin danced around her, but during the Mutual years, Purviance developed a personality and comic timing of her own.

Look at her in this pair of stills from The Immigrant, standing in the rain as the Tramp indirectly proposes marriage by coaxing her into an office to buy a license. She was a lovely, quiet counterbalance to Chaplin's manic energy, who even though she serves as the object of the Tramp's affections for neurotic reasons of his own, becomes the object of our affections as well. Other than Paulette Goddard, Purviance was the only one of Chaplin's leading ladies able to transcend the limitations of the plot's requirements to become more than a cipher, and I suspect that's why Chaplin the filmmaker continued to cast her long after Chaplin the man's romantic ardor had cooled. Perhaps that's why Edna is one of the few supporting players from the silent era who continues to hold a fan base of her own.

Chaplin returned to form with his next film, One A.M., which combined elements from a pair of Max Linder "drunk comedies," First Cigar and Max Takes Tonics, to create a one-man tour de force that plays a little like a wager that a single joke—a drunk fumbling his way up a flight of stairs to bed—can work for twenty uninterrupted minutes.

Chaplin plays variations on the gag the way a jazz virtuoso plays variations on a theme, building simple movements into complex ones, anticipating some payoffs, denying others, going off in unexpected directions, finally returning to the beginning and starting something new.

As in most of his films, the camerawork is spare, the editing unobtrusive, with both focused on featuring the best available performance rather than solving technical problems such as continuity or matching edits. Like Fred Astaire, who insisted his dances be filmed in an uninterrupted take with an angle wide and long enough to show the performance from head to toe, Chaplin mostly used long shots and uninterrupted takes to show his audience that the dance-like rhythm of his intricate physical gags are not cheats conjured up in the editing room, but reflect his real abilities. Anyway, I'm no fan of fancy camerawork that exists only to prove the director wasn't napping during that day's lecture at film school (click here for David Bordwell's recent essay demonstrating how Paul Thomas Anderson directs the viewer's attention in There Will Be Blood without moving the camera at all), and though Chaplin's style remained primitive compared to his contemporaries, it was a conscious choice with a specific payoff in mind.

Chaplin finished out 1916 with four films—The Count, The Pawnshop, Behind The Screen and The Rink—that returned to familiar formulas, but the comedy was well thought out, as funny as anything he had ever done. Of the four, I'd rate The Pawnshop and especially Behind The Screen the most highly. In the former watch particularly for the Tramp's efforts to evaluate the alarm clock Albert Austin has brought into the shop to pawn—do I need to tell you how things work out for Austin and the clock?

The latter, the story of a much put-upon worker bee (Chaplin) in a studio full of lazy, incompetent bosses, was aimed squarely at Mack Sennett who was happy to spend the millions Chaplin generated for Keystone Studios while paying his star a pittance ($125 a week with a $25 bonus for each film he directed). Chaplin had mined a similar vein at Essanay with His First Job, also about the Tramp taking a job at a movie studio, but the barbs here are sharper, the comedy funnier.

Chaplin opened 1917 with one of the most beloved comedies of his career, Easy Street. Set in the slums of New York, the Tramp wanders into a Salvation Army style mission and falls instantly in love with the pianist (Edna Purviance, of course). Determined to redeem himself in her eyes, the Tramp volunteers for a job as a policeman with a beat on the notorious Easy Street (which is anything but). The Tramp's battles with the local bully—Campbell, who is a foot taller and a foot wider than Chaplin—provides the bulk of the comedy.

Like any other artist, Chaplin was at his best when he both had something to say and sublimated that message into a universal form, in this case translating his personal experience into a comedy accessible to a wide audience. The setting of Easy Street is particularly harsh, populated with drug addicts, rapists, wife beaters, and hungry children, the sort of neighborhood Chaplin himself grew up in as the son of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother, yet the finished film is pure laughs and I never feel like Chaplin is lecturing or hectoring us.

He would return to this setting in 1921 for his first feature-length film, The Kid.

Typical of the Mutual era, Chaplin followed the personal with the formulaic, this time with The Cure, another drunk act reminiscent of One A.M. except this time with a sanitarium full of rich hypochondriacs instead of furniture to trip over. Again, Chaplin takes simple jokes, such as a man caught in a revolving door, and stretches them to unbelievable lengths, repeating them, adding new elements, changing payoffs. In one scene, Chaplin—here playing a rich alcoholic rather than the Tramp—attempts to drink from the health-giving spring that is the facility's main attraction, yet always winds up filling up his hat instead. Later, though, after the stash of booze he's smuggled in to tide him over during rehab winds up in the well, he of course doesn't spill a drop.

The film's structure is loose, and the basic plot is a staple of Chaplin's comedy dating back at least to The Rounders in 1914, but with time to work through his ideas, the individual pieces are polished gems.

Chaplin's next film, The Immigrant, his eleventh at Mutual, is not the funniest, but I would argue it was the most important—maybe the single most important development in movie comedy from any source to that time.

The Immigrant is the story of the Tramp's journey from Europe to America, starting in medias res on board an overcrowded ship and ending on the streets of New York. In the twenty minutes in between, Chaplin better captured the immigrant experience than all the "serious" films before or since, and in doing so succeeded at last in wedding the slapstick form to a dramatic subject.

In a short chock full of comedy, Chaplin managed to show the hardship's immigrants faced as they tried to reach America—intolerable shipboard conditions including overcrowding, theft, execrable food, illness; the humiliation of being herded like cattle through Ellis Island; and finally, after landing in New York, the linguistic, economic and cultural hurdles, as well as nativist hostility, involved in adapting to every day life in a foreign country, demonstrated in this case through an act as simple as ordering dinner in a restaurant.

Yet Chaplin also captures the hope and promise that America at that time represented to millions worldwide. The scene of hopeful passengers crowding the deck to watch in silence as the ship sails past the Statue of Liberty is justly one of the most famous of the silent era. And the giddiness with which the Tramp courts the Girl (Purviance) is a perfect expression of the indomitable human will to survive.

The Immigrant underscores the source of the Tramp's lasting appeal—the ability to handle even the most difficult situation with aplomb, a skill his audience no doubt envied as they met their daily suffering. As I once wrote in describing the most famous scene of Chaplin's 1925 triumph, The Gold Rush, "Oh, to relish the taste of the boot you've boiled for your Thanksgiving dinner the way the Tramp did—there's Chaplin appeal reduced to a single scene."

If he wasn't already, Chaplin's Tramp was from this point forward identified with those first-generation immigrants then making up more than ten percent of America's population, as well as with those abroad who yearned to breathe free.

"The Immigrant," Chaplin said years later, "touched me more than any other film I made."

We take for granted now that film comedy can have a serious point to make, ala Dr. Strangelove or The Apartment, but that idea was still radical in an era when, as Roscoe Arbuckle explained to Buster Keaton while making their first film together, comedy was aimed at twelve year olds. The notion that comedy could offer up more than laughs, could have a point of view, could, in fact, make a point, comes largely from Chaplin.

The Immigrant is preserved in the National Film Registry.

Chaplin finished his contract at Mutual with a crowd-pleasing throwback to his earlier comedies. The Adventurer is the story of an escaped convict (Chaplin) who worms his way into the affections of a high society debutante (Purviance) only to discover that her dad is the judge who sent him up. Lowlifes wreaking havoc with the carefully-ordered lives of the aristocracy was a staple of slapstick comedy almost from the origins of film itself, and would later become the meat of such acts as the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. In that sense, The Adventurer isn't particularly original; it is funny, though, one of the best of the bunch, and with it, Chaplin left Mutual giving his employers and his audience their money's worth.

(The Adventurer proved to be Eric Campbell's last film; he was killed in an automobile accident later that year. Edna Purviance, Albert Austin and cinematographer Rollie Totheroh, however, all followed Chaplin to his next studio.)

After Mutual, Chaplin scored his first million dollar payday, signing with First National, a association of independent theater owners seeking a cut of the lucrative film distribution pie. Under the terms of the contract, Chaplin was to direct eight two-reel comedies, but the twenty minute format could not longer satisfy his artistic ambitions. Before his deal with First National was done, Chaplin had directed, among other things, his first feature length film, The Kid, as well as the four-reel war comedy, Shoulder Arms.

In 1919, Chaplin would co-found his own distribution company, United Artists, teaming up with three of the greatest names of the silent era, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith.

Despite reaching ever more dizzying heights of fame, fortune and artistic achievement, Chaplin later confessed his years at Mutual were the happiest of his life. "I was light and unencumbered," he wrote, "twenty-seven years old, with fabulous prospects and a friendly, glamorous world before me."

Years later, Chaplin's son Sydney found himself at the Silent Movie Theater in Hollywood enjoying a revival of Chaplin's Mutuals only to be out-laughed by an elderly gentleman a few rows behind him. Turning to investigate he discovered "[i]t was my father who was laughing the loudest! Tears were rolling down his cheeks from laughing so hard and he had to wipe his eyes with his handkerchief."

"Perhaps," wrote Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance, "[Chaplin] had great fondness for the Mutuals simply for the same reason that generations of audiences have as well—because of the sheer joy, comic inventiveness, and hilarity of this extraordinary series of films."

[To continue on to part four, click here.]

Very Good Reasons For Not Watching The Chaplin Mutuals

Well, the results are in on the latest Mythical Monkey Poll—"Which of Chaplin's four films from 1917 do you like best?"

The number one answer, with 16 votes? "I haven't seen any of these films."

Second was The Immigrant, with 10. Rounding out the field was Easy Street with five, The Cure with two and The Adventurer with one.

The 34 total votes cast were the fewest in a Monkey Poll in nearly a year, and considering that 109 of you voted in the last poll, I'm guessing the real number of my readers who haven't seen the Chaplin Mutuals is much higher. But I can't say I blame you. Two years ago, before I started this blog, I don't think I'd seen any of them either. What can I tell you—I was busy.

I asked a few friends to tell me why they hadn't seen Chaplin's Mutuals.

Phil Connors: "I was in the Virgin Islands. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank Piña Coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day."

Joliet Jake Blues: "Honest. I ran out of gas! I—I had a flat tire! I didn't have enough money for cab fare! My tux didn't come back from the cleaners! An old friend came in from out of town! Someone stole my car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It wasn't my fault, I swear to God!!!"


Jeff Bailey: "Near the plaza was a little cafe, called La Mar Azul next to a movie house. I sat there in the afternoons and drank beer. I used to sit there half-asleep with the beer and the darkness. Only that music from the movie next door kept jarring me awake."

You can't argue with any of those excuses.

And what about you? Share your personal memories— Where were you and what were you doing the night you weren't watching Chaplin's Mutual Comedies?

The Coming Debt Crisis

People have been walking up to me a lot in recent days, saying, "Monkey, you're a banking lawyer—what should I do if the United States defaults on its debt?"

While I myself am loathe to dispense free legal advice, my good friend John Blutarsky is rather free with it. What say you, Bluto?

Happy Birthday, Clara Bow

From my review of Clara Bow's performance in Wings, the first movie to win the Oscar for best picture.

Wings is the story of two pilots who have volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force headed for France and the First World War. They're both in love with the rich girl on the hill. She only has eyes for Richard Arlen but the third member of the triangle, a young and naive Buddy Rogers, is sure he's the one.

Ironically, Bow who was known as the "It Girl," the greatest sex symbol of the day, was not part of the triangle. Instead, she's on the outside looking in, playing an atypical role for her, the fresh-faced girl next door. She's been in love with Rogers ever since she was a kid, but he's never seen her anything other than a pal.

Clara Bow's part was not in the original story, penned by future Oscar-winner John Monk Saunders (The Dawn Patrol), but was instead inserted into the picture to take advantage of Bow's popularity. Director William Wellman, for one, was delighted—Bow's presence guaranteed a bigger gross at the box office.

As it turns out, it also guaranteed someone on the screen knew something about acting.

In order to achieve authenticity in the truly spectacular flying stunts, Wellman (himself a flyer during World War I) and special effects man Roy Pomeroy bolted cameras onto biplanes and hired actors based on their ability to fly. While the result is still some of the most spectacular aerial combat and trick flying ever filmed (Pomeroy won a well-deserved Oscar for his efforts), the acting, outside of Clara Bow's supporting role and Gary Cooper's three-minute star-making appearance, is spotty at best.

Bow, hopelessly in love with Rogers, follows him to France as a volunteer ambulance driver. While on furlough, she sees him with a Parisian hooker while he on the other hand is too drunk to recognize his old pal. In the best scene of the movie, Bow hustles him out of the bar just ahead of the MPs and takes him to a hotel room where he's too drunk to perform. As he sleeps it off, she sees a locket with the other woman's picture and finally realizes the truth about his feelings.

Victor Fleming, who directed Bow in two movies and who would go on to direct Gone With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, compared her talent to "a great violin; touch her, and she answered with genius."

Watching her in Wings (then in It and everything else I could get my hands on), I saw the same thing in Clara Bow that others saw in her at the time, that when she's on the screen, you simply can't take your eyes off her.

It's not that she was the most beautiful woman of the era; to be honest, she often wasn't even the most beautiful woman in whichever movie I was watching. But she had what all the great stars had, a quality that attracts attention no matter what else is happening on screen and an ability to make us root for her no matter what part she's playing.

Maybe in Bow's case that quality had something to do with the odds she had to overcome to succeed, both on-screen and off. Although she usually played a bubbly modern woman who knew just what she wanted, there was often (as there is in Wings) a vulnerability and pathos just below the surface. That contradiction—fighting for what she wanted when she's secretly afraid to—is called courage and that courage gives her characters a humanity her audience could relate to.

In what I suppose you could describe as proto-Method acting, Bow added depth to her characters by drawing on emotional memories of her horrific Brooklyn childhood—her mother was a mentally-ill prostitute who routinely assaulted Bow before finally trying to kill her; her father abandoned Bow at birth only to return when she was a teenager and rape her.

Those who worked with Bow said that whenever a scene called for tears, she would have someone play "Rock-A-Bye Baby" and real tears flowed. Given her childhood, I can only imagine what the song meant to her.

"All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing," she once said, "there's a feeling of tragedy underneath. She's unhappy and disillusioned, and that's what people sense. That's what makes her different."

I think Bow was describing herself.

Wings was a huge hit and won two Oscars, for best picture and for "engineering effects." In 1997, it was included in the National Film Registry.

Although she was one of the most popular actresses of her day, Bow was out of the movies within six years. Producer B.P. Schulberg of Paramount Studios shoved Bow into an interchangeable series of underwritten flapper and shopgirl parts then handled her transition to sound carelessly—MGM gave Greta Garbo two years to prepare for her first sound picture; Paramount gave Bow two weeks. Even though her Brooklyn accent was fine for the parts she played, Bow developed an odd phobia that left her terrified of the microphones that recorded her voice which led to numerous production delays.

In addition, Bow was a favorite target of the gossip columnists, particularly after she sued her personal secretary for embezzlement. Although she won the suit, the details of Bow's private life that emerged from the trial were scandalous and turned the public against her.

Schulberg took to calling her "Crisis-a-day-Clara" and dropped her from her contract when, exhausted from overwork and savage publicity, she suffered a nervous breakdown.

Bow made a brief comeback in 1932 for Fox and though both movies, Call Her Savage and Hoop-La, were critical and commercial successes, Bow was worn out from years in the public eye. She retired from acting at the age of 28, never to return to the screen.

"A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry," she later wrote, "when you're tired, hurt and bewildered."

At the time and for years after, Bow's notoriety obscured her talent. But she was, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, "the real thing," and the more I see of her work, the more I am convinced she was one of the greatest actresses of the Silent Era.

In addition, I would say that more than with any other performer or picture so far, watching movies for this blog has completely altered my perception of Clara Bow. When I began writing, I saw her as the empty-headed glamour girl the gossip columnists of the time so gleefully tore into. Watching her movies, I realized she was actually something quite special.

It's a measure of the lasting damage celebrity gossip can do when we so casually tar someone with the brush of scandal. The tabloids of Bow's day recycled their rumors, sold their papers, wrapped fish in them the next day and moved on. But the perception they created has lingered now for eighty years.

Cleopatra (1917)

So what's the most difficult part of reviewing silent movies, you might ask. That's easy: the fact that something like 80% of them no longer exist.

For a case in point, take Cleopatra, the 1917 blockbuster starring Theda Bara. It was far and away the most popular movie of that year. Not only did it finish atop the list of top grossing movies of 1917, but you see references to it all over the place—for example, Roscoe Arbuckle spoofing Bara's famous dance in his comedy short The Cook (which you can see here).

Unfortunately,the last print of Cleopatra was destroyed in a fire in the 1930s, not an uncommon fate for films of that era which were printed on silver nitrate—nitrate being a key component of gunpowder.

All that remains of Cleopatra are some stills and a legend. Unfortunately, it's impossible to judge a silent film by its legendary status. Too many times, a lost film has acquired a reputation for greatness, then been rediscovered and turned out to be a tremendous letdown. Based on stills alone, Alla Nazimova's Salome, for example, was considered a classic; then the film itself was rediscovered and turned out to be a train wreck, nearly unwatchable.

Add in that Bara's fame was very brief—only about four years—and that her most famous surviving film, A Fool There Was (1915), reveals a rather stiff performance, and I'm inclined to think Bara's success was more a matter of notoriety than actual talent. I could be wrong—lots of people will disagree—and if a complete copy of Cleopatra turns up in somebody's attic one day, I'll cheerfully revisit the question.

Anyway, here's all that remains of the most popular movie of 1917, Cleopatra:

Cary Grant Has A Cold

"Do I look heavyish to you?" asked Cary Grant as the Hudson River valley rushed past the train's window. "I feel heavyish." A Gibson with three pearl onions sat untouched at his manicured fingertips. "I should leave myself a note in the morning: 'Think thin.'"

As a favor to Monty at All Good Things, I had agreed to interview Cary Grant on the Twentieth Century Limited which makes trips between the left and right hemispheres of my brain on a daily basis. History's greatest movie star and I had been sitting in the dining car unmolested by a waiter for twenty minutes and we were both hungry, the difference being that when Cary Grant's stomach growls, it sounds like a murmuring brook on a summer day, while mine sounds like the score of Forbidden Planet.

"Everyone tells me I've had such an interesting life," he said, "but sometimes I think it's been nothing but stomach disturbances and self-concern."

The man born as Archie Leach had seemed oddly unsure of himself ever since we'd met up in New York's Grand Central Terminal shortly before our train's departure. Cary Grant had a cold and for the sixth time in as many minutes, he blew his nose into a monogrammed handkerchief—mine, unfortunately. Grant had left his in a suitcase in his stateroom and hadn't wanted to make the long trek back to get it.

"Pardon me," he said, blowing his nose again, and he snapped at a waiter, "Either hurry up, or get me a snorkel!"

I recognized several faces at the surrounding tables—John Barrymore and Carole Lombard; Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave; and all four of the Three Stooges. Janet Leigh was lighting cigarettes for a heavily-sweating Frank Sinatra, and at a corner table Nick and Nora Charles were working on the six martinis they had lined up between them. On Nora's lap was an over-sized purse with a suspiciously wagging tail (no baggage car for Asta, no sir).

Everyone was polite about pretending not to pay any attention to us, but I could see their eyes shift away whenever I looked up.

"I'm not shy," Grant said, letting their glances roll off his shoulders. "I've been looked at before. Everybody would like to be Cary Grant," he asserted, but then his voice softened and he added with a wry smile, "even I would like to be Cary Grant."

At last a white-coated porter came to the table for our order.

"I recommend the brook trout," Grant said, frowning at the menu card. "It's a bit trouty, but quite good." Then he looked up and shrugged. "Actually, I have no idea whether it's good or not. It's just something Eva Marie Saint said to me once. It didn't make a lick of sense to me, then or now. But she was so beautiful, she could have told me monks taste like monkeys and I would have nodded and said, 'Yes, dear.'" He eyed the Gibson, but still didn't drink. "You know she never makes love on an empty stomach? Which tends to explain why her husband is so fat. No wonder they've been married sixty years. Judas Priest!"

That got us on the subject of leading ladies and at last Grant reached for the untouched drink. "Irene Dunne was the sweetest smelling actress I ever worked with," he said, "with lips that tasted of spiced cider and gingerbread—like kissing Christmas morning right on the teeth. Katharine Hepburn, on the other hand, smelled like old money—sort of dank and musty, but in a way a man could get used to, especially if he grew up as poor as I did." He swallowed the Gibson in one gulp and contemplated the onions at the bottom of the empty glass. "Deborah Kerr never let me get close enough to sniff her, but I imagine she smelled pretty good."

After the waiter brought out our dinners—the trout was indeed "trouty"—Grant continued cataloging the scents of various actresses. Jean Arthur smelled of "elderberries," he said, Myrna Loy of "patchouli," Ann Sheridan of "brown soap and beer."

"Ingrid Bergman had no particular scent," he said, "but she had very sensitive hands and an exceedingly light touch," then added, "She strangled a German general once—just for kicks!"

Grace Kelly's name came up ("a curious combination of Creed Fleurissimo and Philly cheesesteak"), and I mentioned that my late father-in-law had met her while working as a stringer for the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin—he took photographs for the paper because he ran in the same circles with the society editor, owned his own tuxedo and could handle a camera.

Grant nodded and smiled wistfully. "Gracie and I would picnic in the hills around Monaco while we were filming To Catch A Thief," he told me. "Every day at lunch, she would say, 'Leg or a breast, leg or a breast?' and I would let her choose, but still, it bothered me. Finally I said, 'Why all the protein, Graciebird? Why not a vegetable or a nice spring salad once in a while?' That's when she explained she wasn't talking about food." He looked out the window and shook his head. "The years I wasted eating chicken."

Grant stated flatly he was a man who loved women, no matter what the tabloids had reported. "In the spring," he said, "a young man's fancy lightly turns to what he's been thinking about all winter." He wagged a finger at me. "I tell you, women are not the sensitive sex. That's one of the grand delusions of literature. Men are the true romanticists."

He professed to have loved all his wives dearly, even though he divorced four of them. "I still claim I was tight the night I proposed," he said, blowing his nose again. "If they had been gentlemen, they would have forgotten all about it."

Perhaps worried about to whom he might propose next, Grant stayed resolutely sober, nursing a second Gibson through the long summer evening. As the shadows lengthened in the dining car, the other passengers drifted out, singly or in pairs, and but for Nick Charles who was demonstrating the proper rhythm for shaking a cocktail to a yawning porter, we were alone. Grant lighted upon a number of subjects—travel ("You can always drive over to Tulsa for the weekend"), time management ("When a man is wrestling a leopard in the middle of a pond, he's in no position to run"), and even his male co-star in His Girl Friday ("He looked like that fellow in the movies, you know, Ralph Bellamy")—but eventually the conversation wound down and I knew the interview was over. He blew his nose one last time and stood up.

"I'm going to bed soon," he said, as he returned my now irretrievably soiled handkerchief, "and I plan to lock my door. There are mad killers and dangerous assassins on the loose, and I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me. I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself slightly killed." Then he cocked his head and added, "Say, you wouldn't happen to have an extra pair of pajamas, would you? How about olive oil? I want to be packed in olive oil if I'm to be a sardine."

I said, no, I had neither pajamas nor olive oil, and wondered to myself what the bartender had put in those drinks.

Grant made his way forward to his stateroom and I made my way to the observation car at the rear of the train where I put myself to sleep with a bottle of cheap blended whiskey, which is all a struggling movie blogger can afford, even in his own head. I spotted no famous passengers back there, just a few who hadn't bothered to shower before getting on the train in New York.

I opened a book and daydreamed about Irene Dunne and kisses that tasted like Christmas morning.

We didn't pull into Chicago's LaSalle Street Station until after nine. As I stepped off the train, I bumped into Grant on the platform. I had expected him to be long gone, whisked away in a limo perhaps, and was surprised to see him carrying luggage while dressed in a redcap's uniform.

"You look terrible," he said sympathetically. "Me, I slept like a baby." There was none of yesterday's hesitation in his voice, and his eyes sparkled with the familiar, easy mischief of the dozen best movies of Hollywood's Golden Age. "I see you've noticed the uniform," he said, grinning. "What can I tell you—whenever I come to Chicago on the Twentieth Century Limited, I bribe a redcap to strip down to his boxer shorts while I fondle strangers' luggage. Later I'll change clothes in Marshall Field's window then take a Greyhound bus to Highway 41 where I'll blow up a tanker truck with a cropduster."

My face must have revealed more than I intended because he said, "My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can." Then his eyes lit up and he paused to sniff the air. "Rosewater and sandalwood," he said. "Smells like Joan Fontaine!" And with a cheery wave, he was suddenly off, chasing a large woman with a carry-on bag. "Come here, you!"

As he disappeared into the crowd, I reflected that Cary Grant was a very sick man, indeed. But at least he was over his cold.