The selections for the Best Picture category were dire.  Brokeback Mountain was beautifully directed but otherwise forgettable romance that was notable only for somewhat breaking sexual taboos in mainstream cinema.  Capote was the token annual exercise in mediocrity featuring an actor doing a disturbingly dead-on impression of a dead celebrity.  Munich revealed to us that Spielberg only likes his own people when they’re the helpless victims, not when they actually choose to fight back against tyranny.  Good Night, and Good Luck bravely tackled McCarthyism (gee, I wonder if it was trying to say something about Bush).  Crash, the worst film of the lot, was an overcooked, emotionally manipulative turd designed to help white liberals who live in gated communities and harp on about diversity feel a little less racist than everyone else.

And I’m not even bringing up the socio-political themed garbage that didn’t nab a Best Picture nomination.  2005 sucked.  Hard.

The reason I bring up this bleak year of cinema is because as the Oscar ceremony approached, George Clooney declared that Hollywood filmmakers were becoming “brave.” He bragged about how Hollywood was making big, important statements with their films, as though Good Night, and Good Luck was a daring film that would put Clooney’s life in danger.  If criticizing a country that happily protects your right to do so is “brave,” it begs the question as to what Clooney would constitute as “safe.”

Hollywood is a town that has always been terrified of real risks.  When I say “risks,” I’m not talking about something like making a film in black & white in 2011.  I’m talking about, for example, Trey Parker and Matt Stone attempting to depict Mohammed on South Park.  It’s rare that Hollywood has had artists working in the mainstream willing to actually put anything on the line (and I realize that’s easier said than done).  One such artist of the past was none other than Charlie Chaplin, and his risky venture, The Great Dictator, is coming out Blu-ray and DVD this week from Criterion.

The Great Dictator features Chaplin playing two roles, one as a variation on his famous Little Tramp character, who in this movie is a Jewish barber.  The other character is a fascist dictator named Adenoid Hynkel, a not-so-subtle take on Adolph Hitler.  Today, making a film attacking Hitler and Nazism is as safe as it gets, yet when The Great Dictator was released in 1940, this wasn’t necessarily the case.  America was over a year away from the attack on Pearl Harbor, as the United States was still a neutral party at this point in World War II.  It was an uncertain time, and not exactly a safe occasion for one of the biggest movie stars in the world to mock the world’s most aggressive tyrant.  Once the U.S. entered World War II, everyone from Bugs Bunny to Donald Duck was taking a swipe at Hitler.  But Chaplin fired the first shot from the realm of pop culture.

It’s no secret that Chaplin was a kool-aid drinking hard leftist.  But his use of comedy as a weapon against something evil was a brilliant display of the power of pop-culture, a power, as Andrew Breitbart has pointed out time and again, is often ignored by the right.  Hitler remains a trusty comedy meme to this day, and Chaplin’s film is ground zero.

Criterion did a fabulous job with their essential release of Chaplin’s Modern Times, and one can expect the same level of quality here.  Among the bevy of goodies, there is a pristine new digital transfer, a new commentary with Chaplin scholars, and the documentary The Tramp and The Dictator that covers the parallel lives of Chaplin and Hitler.  Criterion never disappoints in making essential movies into essential Blu-rays and DVDs, their edition of this movie will no doubt be worth trading up for.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Okay, so I may lose friends over this one (or maybe not), but I don’t see what the big deal is over Platoon, which comes to Blu-ray this week.  Oliver Stone, crazy and obnoxious as he is as a person, has a talent as a filmmaker that can’t be denied.  For example, JFK is brilliant as a conspiracy theorist’s fever dream, it never fails to entertain and fascinate me from the word “go.”  Even though it’s complete fiction, I would call it a perfect film.  But there are certain subjects that he tackles with a tone that is not unlike nails on a chalkboard.

Usually these subjects fall within the anti-war movement during the Vietnam war.  Movies like Platoon have the stink of “I was there, man” sanctimony on them (another example includes his annoying Jim Morrison biopic).  I realize that Stone himself is a Vietnam vet, and that is to his credit, but Platoon is boring and overwrought as a movie.  The divide between Tom Berenger’s cartoon of a jingoist leader and Willem Dafoe’s peace-loving soldier hippie might have seemed deep at the time, but to me it seemed like a plot that has a thematically ham-sized fist.  In the middle, we have none other than Charlie Sheen, the only actor crazy enough to be Stone’s avatar.  Don’t get me wrong, screaming his themes from the top of the highest building with a megaphone has often worked well for Stone, but not here.  The first casualty of war may be innocence, but truth is a constant casualty in Stone’s feverish films.

Available on Blu-ray/DVD combo.

Other Noteworthy Releases

Solaris: Criterion is updating and re-releasing their edition of Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic.  Available on Blu-ray and DVD.

Papillion: A Blu-ray release of the film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman about the true-life story of a prisoner’s escape from Devil’s Island.  Available on Blu-ray.  Previously available on DVD.

Gnomeo and Juliet: A Shakespeare plot pun from Disney for the little ones, featuring tunes by Elton John.  Call it a hunch, but something tells me the star-crossed lovers aren’t going to die in a horrible double-suicide at the end like they’re supposed to.  Available on Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray/DVD Combo, and DVD.

I Am Number Four: This title invites far too many poop jokes.  Available on Blu-ray/DVD combo, Blu-ray, and DVD.

Tigerland: The Joel Schumacher/Colin Ferrell Vietnam movie is available on Blu-ray.  Previously available on DVD.

Public Speaking: Martin Scorsese’s new documentary on Fran Lebowitz.  Available on DVD.

Grand Prix: John Frankenheimer’s ’66 racing flick starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, and Toshio Mifune comes to Blu-ray.  Available on Blu-ray.  Previously available on DVD.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

As for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.”

Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. . . no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. . . I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.”

That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age.  Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp — at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. Late in life, Keaton remembered…

…a night away back in 1920 when Charlie and I were drinking beer in my kitchen. He was going on at a great rate about something new called communism which he had just heard about. He said that communism was going to change everything, abolish poverty. The well would help the sick, the rich would help the poor. . . .

I myself have gone through life almost unaware of politics, and I only wish my old friend had done the same. He must know by now that communism, wherever it has been practiced, bears not the slightest resemblance to the benign system he described to me forty years ago.

That sort of ordinary common sense shines through in Buster Keaton movies like The Cameraman. Meanwhile, as communism became a faddish preoccupation of liberals in the 1920s and ’30s, Chaplin’s movies became increasingly politicized and culturally rebellious, culminating in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a subversive serial-killer comedy that Chaplin considered “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career” even as ordinary Americans fled from it in droves, leaving it to flop catastrophically at the box office. Based off a script by Orson Welles and championed by critics like the selfsame James Agee who praised the work of Keaton’s silents, it nevertheless repulsed American theatergoers. The elderly serial killers of Arsenic and Old Lace at least were portrayed as crazy — Chaplin’s sardonic wife-murderer justifies himself by pooh-poohing his comparatively meager killings when set against the much greater casualties of war.

By the end, the guy who had started by wagging a cane and walking funny fancied himself one of the greatest artistes of the age, whereas Keaton judged his own career far more humbly, seeing himself as a mere gag man and entertainer. With feet (and ego) firmly on the ground, he was thus able to see Chaplin’s preening leftism for what it was: “I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do, Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers. Neither of us had time while growing up to study anything but show business.” It’s to Keaton’s credit that he realized this, and wasn’t seduced by the pretty lies being sprinkled throughout Hollywood by commies in those decades.

Keaton saw the core difference between Chaplin’s artistry and his own as a moral one. “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philosophy,” he wrote. “Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman and honest.” During The Cameraman, for instance, we see Buster’s character celebrating America’s favorite pastime, working hard to get ahead, courting his girl in a decent way, and continually acting honorably whenever a moral choice presents itself. By the picture’s conclusion, he’s become more than the butt of jokes, more than a thinly veiled political message, and more than a pouting beggar soliciting other people’s pity. He’s become a hero, by virtue of his actions being grounded in the same basic morality of the country in which he grew up and found fame. This came easy and natural for Keaton, with no guru or faddish ideology necessary — after all, he spent decades entertaining average Americans sitting a few feet away from the stage, and he served honorably with our troops in France during World War I.

If Buster Keaton has a single artistic disciple in modern times, it’s the Hong Kong martial artist Jackie Chan (another guy we’ll be studying in more detail later on in FCML). Like the elder comedian, Chan found himself entertaining on the stage from a young age as an acrobat, and later parlayed the skills gained in that endeavor into the most inventive and astounding physical comedy of his era. Eschewing the herd of stars attempting to ape Bruce Lee, he chose instead to embrace the style of the American silent comedians of old, particularly Keaton. It’s a perfect example of someone in our day taking an art form declared dead for fifty years and finding a way to make it relevant again.

It’s no mistake that, like Keaton before him, Jackie Chan became one of the most popular movie stars of his time. Like James Agee wrote those many years ago, we haven’t lost or outgrown our craving for “laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall,” the kind that only true physical comedy induces. Even in this age of special effects and CGI fight scenes, when geniuses like Jackie Chan bring it alive again au naturel, audiences respond.

I think it’s a tragedy that Buster Keaton died of cancer at the age of seventy in 1966, and hence didn’t live long enough to view movies like Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985). If he did, he would have seen in Jackie Chan a true kindred spirit rekindling fires that seemingly died out for good with The Cameraman in 1928. When asked about his influences, Chan routinely puts Keaton at the top of the list, going so far as to say, “I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster.”

If The Great Stone Face were still with us, even he would have to crack a smile upon hearing that.

This concludes our look at silent comedy great Buster Keaton and his final masterpiece, The Cameraman (1928).

Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

As we learned in Part 1 of this series, we’re lucky in that over just the past few decades enough film has been discovered in various places to piece together a pretty fine quality copy of The Cameraman for DVD. Thus here in 2010 we are privy to a far better presentation of the picture than any previous generation save for the one that saw it fresh at the theater in 1928.

There are various versions floating around on the internet (if you don’t mind the terrible image, for instance, you can watch the entire movie on YouTube if you wish), but your best option is to either buy or rent the TCM Buster Keaton Collection. (here’s the same set for rent at Netflix — choose Disc 1 to watch The Cameraman.)

And remember what I said when we were discussing D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms — for the best silent movie experience, try watching it completely silent without the cheesy organ tracks that the DVDs include, and if your player/computer permits it try slowing down the playback by 5-10% to eliminate the herky-jerky too-fast motion that plagues so many films of the era. The movies come across much better when you do.

Review of TCM’s Buster Keaton Collection DVD set: Here’s a nice review of the TCM DVD set containing The Cameraman, with some background on the making of the film, the recovery of the best version, et cetera.

Jackie Chan’s homage to Buster Keaton: From his classic movie Project A, a series of gags on a bicycle that instantly beg comparison to the great physicality and boffo laughs of The Great Stone Face.

Agee, afire with a sense of purpose and mission, sought to arrest that forgetfulness with his essay. An early film critic and soon-to-be screenwriter (his work in Hollywood would later include the scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter), he was, in the words of a friend, “a big, untidy man who frequently looked like a tramp and who cared not a bit for material things. . . Agee was extremely fastidious about many things — about people, about humanity, about music, movies and, above all, about writing. In his years as a critic, he anguished over books and films that less patient critics would write off as trash: somewhere, Agee felt, there had to be something worth praising.”

A thrice-married, hard-drinking insomniac with the tender heart of a poet, Agee began his now-classic treatise with a description of the type and quality of laughter that America had lost with the death of silent movies:

In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the bellylaugh and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure knows all about a bellylaugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills. An ideally good gag, perfectly constructed and played, would bring the victim up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, and would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave and brandish the ladder until he groaned for mercy. . .

The reader can get a fair enough idea of the current state of screen comedy by asking himself how long it has been since he has had that treatment. . . The laughs today are pitifully few, far between, shallow, quiet and short. They almost never build, as they used to, into something combining the jabbering frequency of a machine gun with the delirious momentum of a roller coaster.

In Agee’s view, those meticulously crafted and constructed laugh fests of yore — inspiring in audiences what he described as the “laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall” — had given way to cheap isolated one-liners strung together with little thought to momentum, timing, and nuance. As a reminder of what he was describing, he profiled a rich selection of the era’s shining lights, from Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon to Mack Sennett and his Keystone Cops.

Saving one of his favorites for last, his essay ends with a look at the man who “never smiled,” a comedian with a face “as still and sad as a daguerreotype” that “ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful.” The man, of course, was Buster Keaton, and Agee credited the bearer of “The Great Stone Face” with “some of the most preposterously ingenious and visually satisfying physical comedy ever invented.”

The response to Agee’s effusions was rapturous. “The best thing I’ve ever read on the best thing ever done in films,” one reader wrote. “A masterpiece of perspicacity and lucidity,” intoned another, “done with a precision, an incisiveness — and withal a reverent tenderness — I have not seen equaled.” In the coming years, “Comedy’s Greatest Era” was quoted far and wide as America woke up to their lost heritage. Retrospectives became well-attended. Old funnymen still living gained new fans in their dotage via live appearances on that new medium hungry for content, television. Universities, museums, historians, and private collectors went on a quest to preserve as many moldering nitrate film reels as they could. And, bit-by-bit, much of the best of our silent comedies was saved from oblivion. James Agee’s drinking, smoking, and long nights spent agonizing over his writing eventually caught up to him, with a series of heart attacks striking like so many titters and yowls until the fatal one — a real boffo, one might say — felled him in 1955. But he lived long enough to see what an effect his heartfelt essay had on a previously somnolent movie-going populace (and ultimately became one of America’s most revered writers, with a posthumously published novel winning the Pulitzer Prize, and a large selection of his work being immortalized in The Library of America).

One particular treasure, however, looked lost forever: Buster Keaton’s last true silent film, The Cameraman (1928). With prints of two of his other filmic triumphs — The Navigator (1924) and The General (1926) — in increasing circulation among film fans and scholars throughout the 1950s, scholars went hungrily looking for his other pictures. The Cameraman was the first Keaton picture made at M-G-M after a long stint working independently, so it was assumed that the great studio would have an archival screening print on file.

And yet, when one of Keaton’s friends went to ask for a copy, he was told that their house print had deteriorated into oblivion, not from neglect but from over-projection. Apparently, studio heads throughout the 1930s and ’40s had deemed The Cameraman a perfect example of cinematic humor on screen, and ordered every comedian on contract to view it before embarking on their own careers. The movie was screened hundreds of times by the likes of The Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, Zasu Pitts, Cary Grant, and Red Skelton until it was left in useless tatters.

(The original negative, squirreled away in the depths of the M-G-M vault out of reach of ordinary fans on the street, was later lost in a devastating 1965 fire, and looking far and wide across the world failed to turn up a decent print. It took the fortunate discovery and assembling of several copies found between the late 1960s and 1990s to create the fairly high-quality version on DVD that we enjoy today.)

When fans, spurred on in their quest by James Agee’s writing, finally got a hold of The Cameraman, what did they find? If the long-dead writer were still here with us, he might answer “titters, yowls, bellylaughs, and more than a few killer boffos.” (not to mention a preternaturally talented monkey whose hilarious hijinks put the Nazi-saluting simian from Raiders of the Lost Ark to shame.) Poised as it is at the tail end of Keaton’s prime years, and filmed mere months before sound rendered the great silent comedians, in Agee’s words, “as badly off as fine dancers suddenly required to appear in plays,” the picture represents an elegant summation of what he reverently calls the Silent Era’s “beauties of comic motion which are hopelessly beyond reach of words.”

Yet as hopeless as the effort may be, we shall attempt in the coming weeks — as Agee himself did — to use mere words to bring the visual comedic delights of both The Cameraman and its maker to life again for modern Conservative Movie Lovers.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read James Agee’s essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Luckily for Conservative Movie Lovers, back issues of Life magazine have been archived and made available for free at Google Books. Head on over and peruse the September 5, 1949 edition containing Agee’s most famous essay. Also take some time to check out the wonderful ads — here is one of my faves:

For cinematographic “boy Friday” Karl Brown (1896–1990), this latest impossible request was all in a day’s work. Ever since begging his way into a job with Griffith as a camera assistant, he had often been sent on strange excursions to capture some particular shot haunting the director’s imagination. “One man who was the master designer, Griffith, drew all the plans,” Brown wrote as an old man in his book Adventures With D. W. Griffith. “The rest of us, from the highest to the lowest, gave whatever was in us to the realization of the master plan. I was the lowest, a beast of burden by day and a chore boy by night. The work was cruelly hard, the hours exhaustingly long.”

This latest task, Brown soon discovered, was for a new film called Broken Blossoms, a title “so sickly sweet that the working crew, a godless bunch by definition, never called it anything but Busted Posies.” The film was supposed to take place in the infamous Limehouse district in London, a poverty-wracked den of thieves, swindlers, brutes, hookers, and opium addicts bordering the Thames. Griffith had pulled strings to get young Mr. Brown called back to Hollywood (from a World War I stint in the Army) just so he could create and capture one master image of the Limehouse riverfront on celluloid.

Despite a reputation for action, spectacle and (in the case of one singularly notorious film) controversy, at heart and above all David Wark Griffith (1875–1948) was a poet. In later years, the people who worked with him on his best known movies — The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920) — all remembered how much he admired Edgar Allan Poe and a variety of other versifiers. With stories that inspired his poetic nature, it wasn’t enough to just shoot action — the images had to possess a certain aura and emotional resonance that hammered home the themes of his tales.

For Broken Blossoms, this meant doing more than walking down to the nearest culvert, getting a quick shot of the Los Angeles River, and calling it the Thames on film. He needed an idealized waterfront tableau, one full of shadows and fog and billowing clouds, a place full of secret thoughts and fantasies. A place where a pair of sad, lonely people — each bereft of happiness and starved for some hint of beauty in life — could find each other and fall in love like two fragile flickers of light amidst a sea of darkness. A place of poetry and dreams.

Actress Mary Pickford — who along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks and the comedian Charlie Chaplin were partners with Griffith in a new production company, United Artists — was the one who introduced the director to a bestselling volume of short stories, Limehouse Nights (1916), authored by a young Englishman named Thomas Burke.

The book, coming as it did in the years before literature grew stark and hardboiled in the hands of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett, was a soul-stirring reverie of romance, sordidness, and exoticism rivaling the appeal of modern novels such as Memoirs of a Geisha (1997). “Thomas Burke’s stories of Limehouse were enjoying a great vogue,” Karl Brown remembered many decades later. “I’d read all of them. So had everyone else. You might as well confess at once that you were utterly behind the times if you were not intimately acquainted with Burke’s stories of Limehouse. The whole English-reading world knew every dark and dangerous alley of Limehouse as well as they knew the way to the corner grocery.”

Griffith became particularly entranced with the first story in the volume, “The Chink and the Child” (a title as offensive then as today — Burke’s use of the pejorative here is cynical, designed to elicit sympathy from the reader and putting us firmly on his Chinese protagonist’s side). This story (and hence the bestselling book as a whole) sets the mood as follows:

IT is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond. In Pennyfields, too, you may hear it; and I do not doubt that it is told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears, and should you hear it in the lilied tongue of the yellow men, it would awaken in you all your pity. In our bald speech it must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow. It will sound unconvincing, a little. . . you know. . . the kind of thing that is best forgotten. Perhaps. . . .

But listen.

These lilting, lyrical, rhythmic words, and the ones that followed, made a deep impression upon the famous director. “It was originally intended to be just a regular picture, so far as presentation was concerned,” he said in an interview soon after the film’s release. But what was supposed to be a straightforward programmer grew much more visually ambitious. “Something impelled me — the story, in the first place. I believed in it.” These were years in which Griffith felt a great responsibility to grow the medium of film beyond its Nickelodeon roots and into a more rarefied sphere. His last few films had been indifferently received, and he was determined to do justice to this popular, achingly soulful work of literature. With Broken Blossoms, he endeavored to craft a “photodrama” unlike any seen before.

Karl Brown eventually created the Limehouse riverfront shots by building them in miniature. A trough was filled with water to make the Thames, wooden storefronts covered one side of the foreground, fake ships lazily drifted through the frame, a large painted background gave the sky billowing night clouds, some smoke provided the requisite night fog, and flash powder sprinkled on the water created the effect of sparkling moonlight on gentle ripples. After the whole diorama was lit with strategically placed lights, the effect was convincing. Brown took his film to Griffith’s on-site developing department, where they lovingly developed and tinted the film multiple times until it was just the right shade and color to evoke a riverfront at night.

When Brown projected his finished shot for Griffith, the director watched with rapt attention, then asked to see the whole thing again, overwhelmed. “It’s a painting!” he gasped in awe. “A painting. . . that moves!”

With that, Karl Brown went back to his Army outfit, and Griffith went on to shoot his film in a matter of a few weeks. For the first time in his career, he stayed entirely in the studio on meticulously designed sets, where he had total control over light and mise-en-scène as he strove to get every shot to measure up to that first great painterly effect.

Brown was away in the Army during the shooting of Broken Blossoms, but he returned home in time for the movie’s grand Los Angeles premiere on September 16, 1919. The movie had already appeared in New York earlier that spring, receiving rave reviews, and he was curious to finally see with his own eyes what magic Griffith had conjured to earn them.

He arrived at Clune’s Auditorium, a massive silent theater seating thousands, to find that all of the movers and shakers in Hollywood had turned out for the spectacle (an architectural marvel and a Los Angeles landmark, Clune’s would later become the longtime home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic). The program booklet carried a cryptic legal note: “Copyrights and patents pending on all lightings and effects used in this production.” It also contained an alluring epigraph heralding the evening’s entertainment, from Poe: “The end of all art is to be beautiful — there is no moral in art.”

Everyone in the crowd was no doubt sharing the same thought: what on earth had Griffith come up with this time?

They soon found out. A Russian balalaika orchestra — of all things! — came through the door of the orchestra pit and took their places. Incense began floating up lazily from the stage in tenuous, fragrant strands. Then, Karl Brown writes,

The houselights dimmed, but not entirely so. Instead of darkness, the entire auditorium was suffused with a strange, unearthly blue that seemed to come from everywhere — from the chandelier, from spots ranged along the balconies, from the footlights. There was something eerily supernatural about it.

The balalaikas began to whimper a strange, haunting, shimmering melody. . . The big curtain whispered upward, revealing the screen, which was not all white but bathed in that strange, all-suffusing blue coming from spots arranged around the inside of the proscenium arch.

Then the picture came on in a slow fade that revealed the scene I had been released from the army to make — but with what a difference. I had seen it in a black-painted little projection room on a white screen with black edges and a silence broken only by the whirring of the projection machine.

This was a vision of gold swimming in a misty blue, a vision that seemed to reach on and on, far and away, as far as the mind could reach. The shimmering music echoed the shimmering of the water. The slow movement of the river was the endless motion of time itself. You could head a gasp from the audience at the impact of pure beauty.

My mother, seated next to me, reached over and gripped my arm strongly.

As the movie played out for that audience of jaded Hollywood veterans, they were as taken with its stunning visuals as the New York critics had been. All the reviews raved about its color and beauty. “The screen was always bathed with a curious, vibrant mauve,” marveled the New York Sun, “while the inner core of the picture itself shimmered with salmon pink.” The New York Times promised its readers that, “Many of the pictures surpass anything hitherto seen on the screen in beauty and dramatic force.” The Morning Telegraph went even further, gushing that “No word of ours can do justice to the photographic effects, which are like beautiful paintings, put on with an impressionistic touch. . . Such art, so real one can think only of the classics, and of the masterly paintings remembered through the ages; so exquisite, so fragile, so beautifully and fragrantly poetic is Broken Blossoms.”

Karl Brown, Lillian Gish, and the rest of Griffith’s crew finished watching the movie with thousands of Hollywood counterparts, and all realized they had just seen something far beyond anything they ever imagined could exist on celluloid. Brown tells us that

The picture closed as it had begun, with that blue vision of the mysterious river of time, forever flowing yet forever the same, with the shimmering of the balalaikas dying away to silence.

The reaction of that crowded house was the ultimate in applause — a stunned silence of the deeply moved. This lasted a moment, and then came a spontaneous roar of sound, people on their feet shattering the air, hands smiting hands, voices crying, “Bravo! Bravo!” and the walls loud with the echoed uproar.

This went on and on, until finally Griffith appeared, a small, frail figure all in black and seeming to be very tiny at the edge of that big proscenium. He said nothing. . . He let the waves sweep over him a moment and then he was gone; the houselights came on and the audience began to leave, full of overflowing talk about the miracle they had witnessed.

In London, critics gave Griffith’s depiction of the Limehouse district their highest accolades. “The reviews were all but unbelievably exultant,” Brown writes. “They could find no words of praise fine enough to compliment Griffith on his meticulously accurate reproduction of Limehouse down to its tiniest detail. This was something no American should be capable of doing, because one must live in such a place for a lifetime to capture its inner spirit and not merely its outward appearance. And yet he had done it.” Some even claimed to have hunted down the exact spot where Griffith must have filmed that lush and ghostly master shot of the riverfront. That it was a miniature invented by a twenty-two-year old kid in a Hollywood studio eluded them.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, how Lillian Gish generated the performance of a lifetime for Broken Blossoms.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read Limehouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke. Both volumes of short stories are available online, and still well worth perusing.

Adventures With D. W. Griffith by Karl Brown. An intimate behind-the-scenes look at Griffith and his production company during their Hollywood years, when all of his greatest films were made, including Broken Blossoms. Written by Brown in old age, some fifty years after his time with the master director.

Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film. Brown is also featured in several episodes of Kevin Brownlow’s epic thirteen-episode documentary on the silent era. Every fan of cinema should see this series at least once in their life, but unfortunately the set is only available on VHS at the moment, and is ridiculously overpriced (I scored my set through alternate, shadowy channels worthy of Limehouse itself). You can currently find several episodes on YouTube. Narrated by James Mason.

Clune’s Auditorium. Some history and pictures of the storied silent film auditorium in Los Angeles where Broken Blossoms had its west-coast premiere. After 1920 it became the Philharmonic Auditorium, and also was used as a Baptist super-church until its demolition in 1985 (to make way for a promised new complex of ritzy modern buildings that never materialized — the area is now an empty lot).

Touches and things. As we learned last week, Vidor equated silent films to ballet: operatic makeup, overwrought facial expressions, stylized movements, and the action punctuated by an enormous symphonic orchestra that — because the players and their instruments were live in the theater — sounded as amazing as today’s very best surround-sound systems. With the advent of synchronous dialogue, all of this vanished — people now wanted to hear actors talk, of all things! Now, rather than mounting a sort of grand operatic ballet, Vidor found himself helming something more akin to a stage play, and the change was jarring and disheartening. How could a director recapture the emotional magic of old, using mere dialogue?

The freedom accorded to Vidor by Marion’s script gave him time to think through these challenges, and ultimately work out an entirely new way of expressing himself on celluloid. For every silent-film technique he was forced to abandon, or that he preserved to his detriment (I’m thinking of his under-cranking the camera for The Champ’s final fight to artificially speed up the action, a trick that today looks horribly dated and silly), Vidor discovered another made possible because of sound. For instance, “When we were running the silent films,” Vidor explains, “faces were always in profile. We called these ‘fifty-fifty shots.’ In this film, you began to see people’s backs.” Such a tiny thing, filming the actors from behind — but think of the freedom this gave the director to attempt shots impossible in silent films:

Then there was the rebirth of camera movement. In the silent era cameras were gloriously mobile, but now they were imprisoned in large, soundproofed housings. (Thankfully, sound also ended the reign of hand-cranked cameras, which so often resulted in herky-jerky action, and ushered in pilot-toned and ultimately crystal-synched cameras that captured movement at exactly 24 frames per second). By the time of The Champ, the old silent-era directors were itching to recapture the sense of motion that propelled their earlier films, so they started experimenting. “Sometimes you had to do a retake because of camera noise,” Vidor remembered. “However, we were able to put the camera tripod on a dolly, and then move the whole thing around the floor. This was what we called a perambulating shot. I liked to move the camera around, and I used a lot of this in The Champ.”

Lighting, too, improved by leaps and bounds in the early silent era, for reasons that may not be immediately apparent to modern audiences. It wasn’t just technology that was advancing, but film grammar. “As we depended on dialogue more and more,” said Vidor, “we could have the faces more in shadows, and we could pay more attention to effect lighting. With sound, you were not completely dependent on facial expressions to tell the story. I realized that I could do a whole scene in the dark if I really wanted to. It freed lighting to help establish more of the mood.”

Then there was the freedom of dialogue to consider. Unlike a stage play on Broadway, where every line has to be projected — almost shouted — to the whole audience, in film an actor could whisper a line, or hem and haw and stutter under his breath, and by so doing broaden the range and depth of a line of dialogue far beyond what was possible before. Acting became more subtle and intimate.

It was inevitable that actors exploring these boundaries would soon discover the joys of improvisation. One of the big complaints against Wallace Beery was his infuriating penchant for changing the script’s dialogue on-the-fly to better match his blue-collar vernacular. “I don’t think he’d ever speak a line exactly as it was written,” Vidor said, “unless it was right in line with his character. He wanted to be crude and mumbling a bit. He was not thinking in the exact words the character was supposed to be speaking with.” Imagine a director doing Shakespeare and having Beery changing lines pell-mell!

But King Vidor — ever on the lookout for new ways to improve his films — saw improv not as an annoyance but as a boon. He quickly recognized in Beery a budding expert in the skill, correctly divining that the hulking lug’s natural style fit perfectly with his character in The Champ. “As far as I was concerned,” Vidor said, “I didn’t care if he spoke the exact words, as long as he put across the feeling of the scene. I like an actor to adapt things to his own character and way of speaking.” Thus Vidor encouraged the habit that so many other directors despised. “Quite a few lines were all off-the-cuff. It seemed to work pretty well.”

It wasn’t only the actors that were improvising — Vidor found himself doing a lot of things “off-the-cuff” as well. “I don’t know whether you remember Jackie Cooper walking up on a roof of a house and singing a song and sticking cigarettes in his pocket — well, this was Marion Davies’ dressing room on the M-G-M lot, but it was ad-lib, off-the-cuff, because I was in the mood.”

During these moments, Vidor began to appreciate his luck in having two naturalistic actors like Beery and Cooper to work with, instead of the more stolid and classically trained thespians that littered M-G-M’s roster. “When you put Wallace Beery in a film,” Vidor said, “you had something to work with. You had interest immediately, in every shot. And Jackie Cooper at the that time was the same type of small boy. So you had a live couple of actors in there, interesting actors.”

Interesting as they were, they were still actors, and Vidor sometimes had to use guile to evoke the performances he needed. The very end of The Champ was the key to the whole picture: we see Jackie Cooper’s character, so old beyond his years, regress back to a child. “When we got down to the end of the picture,” Vidor said, “he had to have this very hysterical sobbing scene. I wanted to achieve something a little beyond fake acting. I wanted to really feel it.” For Cooper’s role in the hit film Skippy his director/uncle had, among other things, threatened to shoot his dog to get him to cry. Vidor wasn’t that mean, but at one point he told Cooper he had fired assistant director Red Golden (who Cooper was apparently quite fond of, despite his later protestations in his autobiography), and even lied that Cooper’s mother had been brought to the hospital. “I’m sure he didn’t believe these stories,” Vidor said later, “but he was enough of an actor to understand what we were doing, and he went along with it. Pretty soon he swung into it and became hysterical, and started to throw a tantrum. The result was great. He was a very good actor, and a joy to work with.”

With Beery, getting a professional performance wasn’t the problem, but there were other issues. When first offered the role, Beery had told Vidor, “If I have to do any fighting, I can’t do it.” His reluctance wasn’t merely movie-star pique. A few years earlier, during a training flight for the Navy, Beery had suffered a mild stroke, forcing the trainee he was teaching to bring the plane down in an emergency landing. Now he was afraid of putting too much strain on himself, and the final fight in The Champ sounded like a bridge too far.

“All right,” Vidor assured him. “We’ll get doubles. I’d like to have you do the film.” But Vidor wasn’t about to let one of the picture’s important scenes suffer so easily:

One day at lunch when we were getting to do the prizefight scene, I noticed [Beery] with a couple of pretty girls, extra girls, having lunch, and I was having lunch with the assistant director and I said, “Go over and get the girls’ names — I have an idea.”

We took them off the set where they were working, put them in the front row of the prizefight audience, and then when I called for the doubles to do the fighting, Wally said, “What do you mean, doubles?” So he got up in the ring and did some tough fighting because those two pretty girls he’d had lunch with were sitting there.

He was a wonderful character.

All of these things — script, camera movement, lighting, improv  — helped make The Champ one of the monster hits of 1931-32. Audiences lined up for the chance to delight in the byplay between a washed-out father and his adoring son. Handkerchiefs were a necessity. Thinking about the film’s success fifty years later, Vidor would conclude that, “It was simply the fact that everybody could go and have a good cry that marked the success of The Champ.” People had wept at films before, of course, but a tender relationship between father and son had never been rendered so delicately and humorously on screen.

When first taking on the job, Vidor had considered it little more than hackwork, a studio gig endured so that he could get permission to make the less bankable, artistic films he liked best. But by the time the film premiered the nation was deep in the Depression, people were feeling downtrodden and vulnerable, and they reacted strongly to Vidor’s championing of lower-class American exceptionalism. A funny gossip item from The Hollywood Reporter for October 6, 1931 was titled “Two-Time Weeps,” and dutifully reported that M-G-M executives

“Louie” B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Eddie Mannix were among the weepers at the preview of The Champ. While in the theater they wept because of what the picture did to them — and later on the curb, for joy at what the picture would do for them.

Vidor in turn was touched by the reaction of his countrymen, and he found himself going out of his way to enjoy their emoting first-hand. “Those were the days when I was seeing a lot of [Charlie] Chaplin,” Vidor remembered. “We usually had dinner at Musso and Frank’s and then we would walk the length of Hollywood Boulevard. I always timed it so that we would be walking past the theater when The Champ was getting out. I would watch the people come out with their handkerchiefs in their hands, wiping their eyes. This was a great joy to me.”

When asked in the 1960s why movies had dropped so much in popularity, the now-retired Vidor acidly quipped, “The sight of a couple having sexual intercourse is not a good enough reason for people to spend money on babysitters.” He correctly perceived that the duty of the Hollywood entertainer wasn’t to mirror the state of the lowest elements of the culture or put filth on a pedestal in the name of realism and artistic authenticity. “The movie director has a voice, a powerful and articulate voice,” he said, “and he should use it well. People in India, China, South Africa, Uruguay have been affected by the fashions and customs set forth in American motion pictures. . . I had always felt the impulse to use the motion-picture screen as an expression of hope and faith — to make films presenting positive ideas and ideals rather than negative themes. When I have occasionally strayed from this early resolve, I have accomplished nothing but regret.”

Whether filming the trials of a soldier (The Big Parade), or a man and his family struggling in the big city (The Crowd), or an over-the-hill prize fighter and his boy (The Champ), or a little girl dreaming on a Depression-era farm (The Wizard of Oz), Vidor’s America possesses a God-graced moral center. The Champ’s Andy Purcell is a divorced drunk and a gambler, someone whose loss of fame has turned him into a sot and a loser. But he is never beyond hope. There’s a classically American optimism that courses through him and the story, and I credit that to the soul and sensibility of King Vidor. “I affirm that ours is a grave responsibility,” Vidor said about his profession as a Hollywood entertainer.

Man, whether he is conscious of it or not, knows deep inside that he has a definite upward mission to perform during the time of his life span. He knows that the purpose of his life cannot be stated in terms of ultimate oblivion. That is why the Bible has always been at the top of the bestseller list and why the assertion “In God We Trust” is a national motto, minted on our coins. So an explanation of this heroic struggle that we are living — a film story giving humanity reassurance that the good fight is not in vain, and showing the individual that he is not alone in his quest for the good life — would be received by receptive hearts everywhere. I think that multitudes would leave their warm firesides and doubtful television programs, call in babysitters and stand in line to see such a film.

After a long life as a film director, King Vidor died hopeful that Hollywood would one day redeem itself, just like The Champ’s flawed protagonist, and that through the efforts of good filmmakers it would once again man its post on the ramparts of American culture. “The only barrier between the public and the filmmaker lies in the mind of the latter,” he vowed. “When the makers of films are as unafraid of good films as the public, we shall really have a renaissance.”

This concludes our five-part look at Frances Marion’s and King Vidor’s The Champ. Come back next Saturday as For Conservative Movie Lovers turns to an all-new film from an all-new-year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

OK, time for you to hunt down a copy of The Champ. You can find a good-looking print on DVD for as low as $14.05 (the audio, being from the dawn of sound in 1931, hasn’t held up nearly as well, but played through a good sound system it’s plenty serviceable). Alas, no Blu-ray yet.

You can also pop The Champ into your Netflix queue, (avoid the 1979 remake, which features the Mighty John Voight but is a pale shadow of the original).

And if the Beery-Cooper combo delights you as much as I think it will, you can also use Netflix to watch their final team-up in the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Treasure Island (1934), directed by Victor Fleming (who would go on to make both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz).

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections:

(1) Rebecca and Suspicion are the same film, not Notorious and Rebecca; (2) the Orlando Bloom reference was to Black Hawk Down, not G.I. Jane, and I apologize for the obvious mix-up. 

Now, to the real question: the top-ten greatest directors of all time.  This is truly a rough decision – there are at least two score great directors who could make this list.  Here is my one basic criteria: directors who provide me the most viewing pleasure over the course of their career.  That means telling a great story in the best possible way.  Subjective?  Sure.  Deal with it.  I’ll admit that this list skews toward older directors, not because older movies are generally better than newer movies (though I think they are), but because directors in the period 1920-1960 generally made more movies, which means more opportunities for directors to shine. 

I’ll start by explaining why certain directors are not in the top ten. 

Francis Ford Coppola:  He had a period of unbelievable creative magic.  Within a ten year period, he made Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a charming musical; The Godfather (1972), which requires no commentary; The Conversation (1974), perhaps the creepiest movie ever made; The Godfather: Part II (1974), which matches its predecessor in quality; and Apocalypse Now (1979), a mad journey into the heart of darkness.  Then he was done.  How this talented filmmaker went from The Godfather to the atrocity that was Jack (1996) is utterly bewildering.  It was tough to keep him off the top ten list. It was even harder to boot someone from that list to make room for him. 

Peter Jackson:  I believe Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to be the finest directorial effort of all time, surpassing even Citizen Kane.  That said, Jackson hasn’t done anything else.  King Kong was overlong and CGI-obsessed.  He has shown that he can produce with the best of them – District 9 is brilliant – but he needs to direct more great movies before he belongs in the top ten. 

Christopher Nolan: I believe Nolan will one day make the top-ten list.  He’s that talented.  Watch one of his early efforts, Following (1998) if you don’t believe me – on a budget of $6,000, he creates a taut thriller.  His last five movies have all been terrific: Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight. He is one of the few modern directors for whom I check the IMDB calendar to see when his next movie comes out.  I look forward to Inception with bated breath.  For now, however, it’s too early to chart his trajectory with certainty. 

Orson Welles:  Citizen Kane requires no explication – it is justifiably seen by many as the greatest directorial job ever.  His Othello is similarly creative and inspired.  The Magnificent Ambersons follows the pattern.  But Welles destroyed himself and his career, and the fates should never forgive him for wasting his unparalleled talent. 

Peter Weir:  I love Weir.  He is always creative and interesting.  Although I didn’t enjoy Master and Commander as much as others, The Truman Show, Fearless, and Gallipoli are all minor masterpieces.  As far as the top ten, my heart says maybe, my brain says no. 

Stanley Kubrick:  Overrated.  Yes, he directed the wonderful Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Dr. Strangelove, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is an abomination, A Clockwork Orange doesn’t hold up, The Shining is made a parody by Jack Nicholson’s scenery-chewing. He’s inconsistent, and that’s what knocks him off the list, as it should. 

Vincente Minnelli:  The best director of musicals of all time came close to making the list, too.  Meet Me in St. Louis is delightful.  An American in Paris is a joy for the senses. The Band Wagon is the best parody of Broadway ever made; Brigadoon is pretty if unfaithful to the source material (they cut a couple of the best songs from the Broadway version); Gigi is gorgeous; Lust for Life is well-done.  Few directors have Minneli’s grasp of the music that film can be, the vibrancy that film can create.  Again, this is just a case of ten being too few to fit him. 

Fritz Lang:  M is the best foreign language film ever made.  Period.  It is tight and tense and incredibly driving.  Metropolis is fantastic too.  Perhaps if I’d seen more Lang, I’d put him up in the top ten (the only other films I’ve seen of his are Fury and The Big Heat), so I’ll claim ignorance here. 

Fred Zinneman: Perhaps the best conventional director of all time – a man who simply puts on camera what needs to be there.  He’s not the artist that any of the top ten are, but he did create The Day of the Jackal, A Man for All Seasons, Oklahoma!, From Here to Eternity, and High Noon, a list to be reckoned with. 

Victor Fleming:  How hard was it to come up with this list?  I had to leave off the guy who directed Captains Courageous, The Good Earth, The Wizard of Oz, some of Gone with the Wind, A Guy Named Joe, and Treasure Island.  He also directed lots of films that ain’t quite as great, so his percentage is what keeps him off the list. 

Stanley Donen: Stylistically, Donen was tops.  He directed On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Charade, Damn Yankees!, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Two for the Road.  The pure fun that is Seven Brides could put him on the top ten list.  But Donen just can’t knock anyone else off. 

Robert Rossen: His resume is simply too short.  Three fantastic movies: Body and Soul, All the King’s Men, The Hustler.  A great career.  Not a top ten one. 

John Huston: The best adventure director of all time, responsible for The Man Who Would Be King, Moby Dick, The African Queen, and The Maltese Falcon.  Again, not enough versatility to put him over the top. 

George Stevens:  Tough to keep off the list, tough to make room.  The Diary of Anne Frank, Shane, A Place in the Sun, I Remember Mama, Gunga Din – versatility, certainly, brilliance, certainly, sweetness, certainly.  Off the list?  Hesitantly, yes. 

The Top Ten Greatest Directors of All Time

10.  Steven Spielberg:  This will be the most controversial pick on the list, to be sure.  He’s got big hits, and he’s got big misses.  His hits are clearly terrific – Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan.  His misses are pure awfulness – A.I., 1941, The Terminal, and the misery that was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Of late, far more misses than hits.  Still, that early canon of films, plus Schindler’s and Saving Private Ryan puts him over the top.  No better popcorn filmmaker has ever been born.  Yes, I hate his politics.  But his artistry, when he’s at the top of his game and when he’s comfortable with the script, is unmistakable.  Watch this scene again: 

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Nobody – nobody – directs action better.  And Schindler’s List proved he can do drama, too.  Is he the deepest guy on the list?  Nope.  Does he belong here?  I say, yes.  

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9.  Michael Curtiz:  How can I possibly put the man who directed the monstrous farce that is Mission to Moscow on this list?  Because he also directed Casablanca, the best movie of all time; White Christmas and Yankee Doodle Dandy, two of the best musicals; The Adventures of Robin Hood, one of the best adventure movies; Mildred Pierce, one of the best melodramas.  Other films: The Sea Wolf, Angels with Dirty Faces, and Captain Blood.  Renting his film canon, Mission to Moscow aside, is almost entirely wonderful. 

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8.  Ingmar Bergman:  No one made images like Bergman.  The Seventh Seal is easily the darkest movie ever made, and it’s got some of the most stirring pictures ever put on screen.  His version of The Magic Flute is a delight.  Then there are his others, like Fanny and Alexander, Through a Glass Darkly, The Virgin Spring.  Do you watch Bergman for a laugh?  Not unless by laughter you mean suicidal depression.  But no finer image-maker has ever stood behind a camera. 

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7.  Billy Wilder: Nobody ever mixed drama and comedy like Wilder.  And he was a master at getting great performances from his actors.  Jack Lemmon was his muse, and he used him to the fullest: he made the ultimate Matthau/Lemmon comedy in The Fortune Cookie, the ultimate Lemmon comedy, Some Like It Hot, and the beautifully understated The Apartment.  If Lemmon wasn’t his muse, William Holden was – and he’s got masterpieces like Sunset Blvd. and Stalag 17 to prove it.  Or maybe it was Audrey Hepburn – Sabrina, and Love in the Afternoon.  And that isn’t even looking at Witness for the Prosecution and Double Indemnity. The guy was a classics factory.  And all of them are fast-moving and fun to watch. 

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6.  Charlie Chaplin:  It would be a crime to leave Chaplin off this list.  Watch him toss around the globe as Hitler in The Great Dictator and tell me who you’d put in his place.  The Kid is as affecting as any movie ever made.  Modern Times is chock full of amazing sequences, and so are Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and many of his others.  The silent movie era was never so magnificent. 

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5.  Frank Capra:  In my review of the top ten most overrated directors of all time, I wrote this about Martin Scorsese: “In the musical Damn Yankees, a group of hapless baseball players sing the following lyric: ‘You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart!’  Martin Scorsese never saw that musical.  His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.  They are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring.”  If Scorsese is the epitome of the heartless director, Capra is the embodiment of heart on screen.  It’s a Wonderful Life is simply the most heartfelt movie ever made (and it’s Jimmy Stewart’s best performance).  From It Happened One Night to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Meet John Doe to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, nobody made movie magic like Capra.  If you can sit through all his films without crying and smiling simultaneously, I’m betting there’s something wrong with your tear ducts or your cheek muscles. 

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4.  Elia Kazan:  Reviled by the Hollywood left, Kazan was also one of Hollywood’s greatest directors.  His IMDB reads like a top ten list of films: A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata!, A Streetcar Named Desire, Gentleman’s Agreement, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  The performances Kazan elicited from his actors are groundbreaking and astonishing.  Unlike some others on this list, Kazan’s films do not date (other than Gentleman’s Agreement, perhaps) – they remain timely and prescient.  And they’re quick-moving and entertaining, which is tough to do with heavy drama.  He does it with ease. 

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3.  John Ford:  The man revolutionized movie making, and is worshipped widely for all the right reasons.  First off, the Western is the American genre, and Ford was the best.  Name the best Westerns of all time, and you’ll be sure to come up with Stagecoach, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The Informer is an early masterpiece, and there’s no movie more fun than The Quiet Man (plus, the cinematography is enough to bring a tear to your eye).  Mister Roberts is a chock full of great performances (Lemmon and Cagney stand out, of course).  How Green Was My Valley is a beautiful film.  The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln are rightly credited with making Henry Fonda the quintessential American actor. 

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2.  Akira Kurosawa:  Nobody plumbed the depths of human emotion like Kurosawa.  Ikiru is known by few outside the film buff community, but it is a masterful expression of human hope and tragedy.  Ran is exciting and thrilling and brilliant.  Throne of Blood is a wonderful adaptation of Macbeth.  The Seven Samurai is tremendous, an adventurous expose of the best and worst mankind has to offer.  Rashomon is a groundbreaking exploration of perspective.  I could keep going, but there’s no point – few will argue with Kurosawa’s placement on this list.

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1.  William Wyler:  Underrated beyond all rationality, Wyler was a master of all genres.  He covered gothic romance (Wuthering Heights), period pieces (Jezebel) light comedy (How to Steal a Million and Roman Holiday), film noir (The Desperate Hours and Detective Story), epic (Ben Hur), morality tale (Friendly Persuasion), horror (The Collector), western (The Westerner) and wartime drama (Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives).  His first tier films are unmatched (Dodsworth, Ben Hur, and The Best Years of Our Lives deserve to make anyone’s top ten list), and his second tier films (The Big Country, The Heiress) are better than most first-rate directors’ first-tier films.  If you don’t believe Wyler’s range, watch these three scenes back to back:

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That’s not even the best scene from The Best Years of Our Lives (the movie contains perhaps the most beautiful love scene in screen history, between Harold Russell and Cathy O’Donnell – and, in a lesson to Aronofsky and Lynch, he didn’t need to show T&A to do it).

Whom would you put on the list?

Beery was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest son of three. He dropped out of school in fourth grade (“I was too dumb to get any farther”) and ran away for a few months, bumming around the Midwest, spurred onward not by a hatred of family but by a sense of pure adventure. At sixteen he lied his way into a job as an elephant handler with a circus, spending the next three years traveling across the country, and even crediting himself with being the first to train elephants to use their trunks to grab the tails of the elephants in front of them in order to keep them all in line. But eventually he realized that, where bull handling was concerned, “my ambition had been no ambition at all, that I was just drifting.” When Beery heard that his older brother Noah was working on Broadway in New York, he hurried there to try his hand at the acting game.

He first got a job in a stage chorus, singing and dancing. “Chorus men wore tights and frills,” Beery remembered with disgust, “and carried pink wands with ribbons on them, and made thorough asses of themselves. I didn’t like it, but it was the place to start. . .with a straw hat, cane and everything, including rouge cheeks and lips, I sang for a couple of years.” He also took whatever parts he could find in various stock companies, playing dramatic roles, villains, comedy — anything. Stock companies, he would later opine, “are the greatest training schools in the world for actors.”

In 1913 he went to Chicago and joined Essanay Studios, then-home of Charlie Chaplin. Beery made his name playing Sweedie, a maid (in drag!) always engaged in pie-throwing style hi-jinks. It was also there that he met his first wife, the future silent-film superstar Gloria Swanson. Beery later reminisced that

Gloria was about sixteen and the nearest thing to an angel that this elephant trainer had ever seen. I feel in love with Gloria at once, but I was twenty-seven and felt old enough to be her father. She liked me and we got along splendidly, and I did all I could to help her. To her I was a big motion picture star, just what she wanted to be. . . My salary was $125 a week, and I had a yellow speedster that was hot stuff. I think Gloria looked at the yellow paint instead of at me.

A two-year marriage ended with Swanson running off to other beaus who might further help her career (she would eventually marry seven times). “For a year I was entirely worthless,” Beery said later. “In the meantime I had got an uncontested divorce from Gloria on the grounds of desertion.” As his ex-wife quickly grew into one of the great stars of the silent era, he saw his own career fading away.

It was the opportunity to play villainous World War I roles that reignited his career. He played sadistic German officers both in The Unpardonable Sin (1919 — notable for featuring Rudolph Valentino’s first starring role) and in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). About the former film he said, “I put inside the part all of the hatred against the world that had been piling up inside me for a year,” and in the latter, audiences gasped as his character blithely munched on an apple while directing the slaughter of scores of women and children. Beery’s performances were judged “screen masterpieces” at the time by critics, with breathless newspaper articles boasting that “Beery fairly lives on the hisses of the crowd.”

These roles, and the multi-faceted ones that followed, propelled him through the rest of the decade as one of the top stars of the silent era. The 1920s were good to Beery. Now in his thirties, he was in his prime as an actor. In 1924 he remarried, to an actress named Rita Gilman, and would eventually adopt (and cherish for the rest of his life) the orphaned daughter of one of his wife’s relatives. He bought a beautiful Spanish-style home in Beverly Hills, branched out into a successful new comedy series, won accolades in now-classic films such as Robin Hood (1922), The Sea Hawk (1924), and The Lost World (1925), and became an accomplished pilot. By the end of the decade, books and magazines about Hollywood were hailing him as “one of the screen’s greatest actors.”

But those same publications were also delving into his personal life, and more often than not they were startled by the lack of pretension they found therein. Arriving at his home, reporters inevitably found him garbed in “an old sweat shirt” and “flannel trousers that had been pawed by his dogs.” One noted that, “Beery, happy-go-lucky and downright homely, is careless of his grammar, swears freely, prefers his new Ford to his two Lincolns, loves his beautiful home and his wife, the lovely Greta Gilman, and has no social ambitions.” When asked about their jobs, most actors are wont to give a long spiel about high Art, but Beery would just shrug and say, “To me pictures are merely a means of making a good living along the path of least resistance.” Whereas other actors bragged about their yachts and art collections and jewelry, Beery would admit, “Me, I like huntin’ and fishin’ and the simple life.”

With his Hollywood money he bought a series of hideaways in distant mountain locations: a cabin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; an isolated lodge on a lake in the High Sierras of California; and ranches in Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. Having become certified as a pilot (going so far as to earn a aerial commission as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve), he logged thousands of hours flying to these remote vacation spots, where he would spend weeks out in the woods or on the water, far away from Hollywood, communing with the natural world. In a town where image is everything, many glitzy stars mocked Beery as a simpleton and an unmannered boor, but Beery seldom gave a damn what anyone else thought of him. “Maybe I do look like a bum,” he said,

but I have lots of fun. . . Vacation time to me means an opportunity to get away from civilization and rough it. I would rather spend one week knocking around my cabin at Silver Lake than a month visiting the famous spas or other resorts of Europe, and when summer rolls around I feel my fingers itching for a fishing rod or one of my game rifles.

As it happened, 1929 was an awful year for Beery. The “talkies” hit Tinseltown like a tsunami, and overnight scores of longstanding stars found their jobs in mortal jeopardy. Beery ruefully remembered how, “A horde of elocutionists were brought from New York to the studios, and they were the people who decided whether you were out or in. They made a test of my voice and said it wouldn’t do. I was, they said, a silent actor.” Finished, just like that. Try as he might, he couldn’t get new roles. Days, weeks, and months passed with him hanging out at M-G-M every day, waiting for a single break and getting nowhere. At the same time, the stock market crashed, taking Beery’s $750,000 in securities and bringing them down to zero. A further $165,000 was lost due to two bank failures. And to top it off, a faulty heater burned his beautiful Beverly Hills house to the ground.

In a few short months, he had gone from being one of Hollywood’s top actors to finding himself wiped out, a forty-five-year-old broke has-been.

It was while gloomily eating spaghetti in the M-G-M commissary one day that he was spied by ace screenwriter Frances Marion, who saw in the burly, ugly hulk and his sloppy table manners a certain unvarnished quality that she felt might be well put to use in a prison movie she was making called The Big House. An impassioned talk with M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg, and Marion had given Beery a new chance at breaking back into pictures. He made the most of it, playing “Machine Gun” Butch Schmidt with equal parts sadistic menace and pitiable loutishness. The role reminded audiences of Beery’s talent, and with his first Academy Award nomination all worries about his sub-par “talkie” voice vanished. Just like that, Marion had put his career back on track. In the following years she continued to write a series of parts specifically for him, star-making turns in Min and Bill (1930), The Secret Six (1931), and finally The Champ.

In hindsight, The Champ took fuller advantage of Beery’s personality than anything that had come before. His Andy Purcell remains one of the most sympathetically flawed characters ever put on-screen — a self-destructive alcoholic and gambler who, thanks to Beery, never comes close to leaving the audience’s good graces. In a way, his character epitomizes the entire era of The Great Depression, that peculiar mixture of raw hope and monumental failure that defined a generation. The movie allows Beery to veer effortlessly from raucous laughs (in the lighthearted scenes with little Jackie Cooper) to horror (as when he punches his bloody fist into a jail-cell wall over and over) to abject tears (the famous ending, of course, but also several other memorable scenes).

While Frances Marion wrote the script, it was Beery’s performance that brought it to such startling, natural life — the smiles, the physicality, the mugging, the hesitations. And, above all, that natural charisma that simply can’t be taught. “You must understand life,” Beery insisted when asked how he managed to nail such roles. “You must have received some of its hard knocks, as well as a few of its benefits and enjoyments. Otherwise one cannot attain any depth of emotion, or carry conviction to the part. The fact that I have gone through the mill of experience is what has let me get by as a character actor.”

The Champ gave Beery his second Academy Award nomination, and when the ballots came in he had lost to Fredric March’s acting in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by a single vote. The Academy promptly declared a tie and gave both men an Oscar, a decision eliciting cheers at the ceremony but also some grumbling among the rank-and-file. It’s hard to argue that Beery wasn’t as fully deserving of the award as March was, especially since Beery earned his with a very human and unadorned performance that didn’t rely on fancy makeup or effects.

In the wake of The Champ, Wallace Beery became not just successful but an enormous star, and would spend the rest of his life as a sort of American treasure. Yet to the end he stayed as unpretentious as ever. “I have no art in my soul,” he said in a 1940s interview, “except on Saturday night, when I draw a paycheck.” When Beery died in 1949, the news caused nationwide mourning. A writer at The Detroit Michigan News concluded: “No other Hollywood career provided more amusement and innocent satisfaction than that of the lumbering moose of a man that at one time or another in the last 38 years touched every heartstring in the beholder.” The Muncie Indiana Star added that, “Beery managed to pack more emotional wallop into his roles than most of the carefully-trained products of the dramatic schools. He was truly a ‘natural.’ Now he has joined W. C. Fields and many another beloved performer whose names may mean little to today’s youngsters but who will never be forgotten by their elders.”

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the kid who set the bar for all other child actors to come.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There is precious little about Wallace Beery on the Internet or in print. No biography, no documentaries — just isolated tales and rumors, usually centered around gossip concerning how much of a pain he was to work with. That charge is apparently accurate as far as it goes, but it takes two to tango, and a lot of the people he worked with were no angels themselves. Beery, for his part, comes across as surprisingly polite in the interviews he gave during his life, even when others (like ex-wife Gloria Swanson) were slyly dissing him. In any case, it should be remembered that he didn’t live long enough to hear and answer the various sniping stories about his on-set behavior, and so they should be read and interpreted in the context of a one-sided story.

A few more vicious rumors about Beery — that he raped his first wife, Gloria Swanson, on her wedding night, and fed her poison to abort the baby; that he beat Three Stooges creator Ted Healy to death at a Hollywood nightclub in 1937 and had M-G-M cover up his involvement — are, as far as I can discern, baseless slander promulgated decades after his death by people with a grudge and/or a penchant for Hollywood Babylon-style gossip. Don’t believe everything you read. . . .

Here’s a YouTube tribute video to Beery that someone posted, which offers a lot of rare pictures both from his movies and from his private life (such as him posing by his airplanes).

A blogger called the Mythical Monkey has a fine post on Beery’s star turn in The Big House, complete with some nice pictures.

Beery’s brother Noah Beery was also a popular character actor, although he never fully broke into the leading man A-list the way his brother did. And Noah’s son, Noah Beery Jr., followed in the family footsteps and became a noted actor in his own right (he’s most famous for playing James Garner’s pop in The Rockford Files).

“Reel Chicago” by Robert Loerzel in Chicago Magazine: a well-researched article about the old Essanay Studios where Wallace Beery got his start in movies, complete with lots of rare high-quality photographs.

If you want to write for Hollywood, study this picture.

This faded lobby card from Charles Chaplin’s The Kid is the best lesson you’ll ever have in how to write for the movies. Despite its age, it illustrates many of the essential elements you’ll need to keep in mind today as your write your Hollywood screenplay. It’s a visual reminder of the kind of movie that producers, studios and – most importantly – audiences are looking for.

And that’s no accident. This lobby card had a specific purpose: to bring people into the theater. Chaplin chose this particular image because it effectively answers the first three questions that are always on the mind of the audience when the lights go down on a Hollywood movie.

1) Who is the hero?

2) What important thing does the hero want?

3) Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?

The First Three Questions are important to your audience because they bring into focus the central conflict of the movie. The nature of the conflict is what the audience is curious about when the show begins. And, in large part, they will judge the movie as good or bad depending on how the conflict unfolds and how the conflict is resolved.

Your audience may initially be drawn to the theater with the promise of rampaging dinosaurs or a steamy shower scene of a voluptuous movie star. And your job as a writer is to deliver the most compelling dinosaur rampage or steamy shower scene ever put on film

But your audience has another expectation – a storyline based on conflict that is dramatic and compelling. And they’ll be disappointed if you don’t deliver on that, as well.

This is true today and it was true in 1921, when The Kid was first released. And right there on the lobby card, Chaplin clearly addresses the audience’s First Three Questions…

According to the card, this movie promises a conflict between Charlie and the Cop, and their struggle will be over The Kid.

The First Three Questions in the mind of the audience are based on the primary ethical question that all heroic drama attempts to answer: What should I do? The author of a heroic screenplay says “Watch the hero and do what he does.”

That’s why, in every heroic screenplay, there are moral questions at stake. It’s these moral issues that are the source of the conflict. For our purposes, conflict is defined as the active clash between characters caused by incompatible, opposing moral principles.

In the simplest terms, the Hero and the people who oppose him represent the two sides of a moral question. Their conflict during the course of the movie is a cinematic moral argument about which side is correct. Whoever wins the conflict decides the moral question.

Cinematic should be your focus. Your movie will not be a dry, dusty, academic argument made by chin-pulling, pipe-sucking professors in a lecture hall.  Your movie will be a gripping, emotional, entertaining argument thrashed out by the dramatic actions of your main characters and supported by film technique.

What moral arguments are you going to make? There’ll be at least two.

First, your film will attempt to prove the general moral principle that “doing the right thing is worth the struggle, because it achieves or restores the good.” If your Hero struggles against his opponents to do the right thing, and by the end of the film achieves or restores the good, he’s won the argument.

But there will be a second moral argument, as well. This argument will be about the particular moral theme of the movie. For example, in The Kid, the moral theme concerns whether Charlie – alone, poverty-stricken, and with a larcenous heart – should be allowed to care for an orphaned child.

The lobby card sets ups this moral question perfectly – one one side is the issue is the Cop, who will strongly oppose the idea of Charlie caring for the child. On the other side is Charlie, who wants to hold onto the Kid. And in the middle is the Kid himself, the “important thing” that the hero wants.

In short, the lobby card is an illustration of the dramatic and compelling moral argument of the film, which accounts for its power to attract an audience.

Simple, right? The lobby card pretty much lays is all out right in front of you.

But there’s much more going on in this photo. Take another look at that Cop.

The Kid was released in 1921. In this early 20s, most cops in comedies looked like this:

Cops in comedies were…well…comedy cops. The most famous of them all were the Keystone Cops, seen above. Here is how they were described when they honored with a 29 cent American stamp several years ago:

“From 1914 through the early 1920s, moviegoers were entertained by the antics of the silent screen’s most irreverent and incompetent police force, the Keystone Cops. Dressed in ill-fitting, disheveled uniforms, this merry band of misguided gendarmes stumbled through a series of chaotic chase scenes in the name of law and disorder.”

Chaplin could have used Keystone-like Cops for his movie, but he didn’t. Take a good look at the type of cop Chaplin chose for Charlie’s opponent…

Does this Cop look “incompetent? “Disheveled?” “Stumbling?” Does he look like part of a “merry band of misguided gendarmes?”

Let’s face it…there’s nothing merry about this guy at all. This is not a comedy cop. In fact, he looks downright threatening. Consider the way he and Charlie are posed together.

Charlie is small and crouched in the gutter. The Cop is tall and looms over Charlie on the sidewalk. Charlie is slender and slight, the Cop is a manly figure.

Charlie comforts a cuddly baby in his hands. In the Cop’s hands is a hard, wooden billy-club, tightly gripped.

You can just imagine the Cop biding his time, patiently tapping the nightstick against the palm of his hand, waiting for just the right moment to give Charlie ’s head a good whack, followed by a poke in the ribs. “No vagrants on my beat, you bum. Ankle off and keep moving. Hey, wait a minute…where’d you get the brat?”

Chaplin wanted to create the impression of threatening power in the Tramp’s opponent and he succeeded. But it’s not only physical power that the Cop displays, he represents another kind of power, just as threatening.

The Cop is in uniform.

He’s got stripes on his sleeve, a cap on is head and a badge on his coat. In short, he has authority. If Charlie tangles with the Cop, he tangles with City Hall.

Charlie’s opponent is more than just this single cop. The Cop in the lobby card represents authority in The Kid. By the middle of the movie, the entire weight of government is going to come crashing down on Charlie’s head, along with the Cop’s nightstick. There will be no one in authority to protect Charlie because the people in authority are the very ones out to get him.

Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?
These guys.

By the end of the film, the entire apparatus of municipal authority – police, doctors, city social workers – are trying to take the Kid from Charlie’s care. So the authority that the Cop wields is just as powerful as his nightstick, making him an even more dangerous figure.

And for the sake of the conflict, that’s a good thing…the more threatening the opponent is to the hero, the more the story will excite and move the audience.  That’s why the hero needs strong and credible opponents, not opponents who are weak or too improbable to be believed.

By selecting a threatening Cop and the authority he represents over a Keystone Cop for his movie, Chaplin has successfully made the necessary choice for the type of heroic story he intends to tell. He’s created a credible opponent for the Tramp with a strong stake in winning.

But the hero, too, needs a strong stake in winning. Whatever it is the hero wants to achieve or hold on to, it has to be important. So important, the he will put himself on the line to keep it. Does this look important to you?

It does to most of us. Parenthood is one of the things we feel most passionately about. The forced separation of a child from his mother or father is guaranteed to arouse emotion and sympathy. (In preparation for this post, I screened the movie and my wife saw the film for the very first time a few days ago. At a key moment when the Kid is being forcibly removed from Charlie, I caught her sniffing back tears.) This nearly 90-year-old silent comedy still had the ability to move us emotionally because it’s about something that matters.

In the lobby card, Charlie is clearly bonded to the child. He holds the helpless infant tenderly, lovingly, protectively. He’s portrayed as a father figure, and we expect fathers to fight strenuously on behalf of their children.

Chaplin made a wise choice for his first Heroic movie. If the nature of the conflict is intense – if the hero chooses to struggle mightily against an opponent who seems to hold all the cards – then we are inspired by the hero’s courage and dedication to do the right thing. Our emotions are fully engaged by the conflict. In a well-constructed story, we identify with the hero. Which means that if the struggle is important to the hero, then it becomes important to us, too.

Take another look at the pose of Charlie and the Cop.

You’ve heard the term “underdog” before. It describes two dogs testing each other’s dominance over the other. Cringing, the weaker dog will roll on his back as a sign of submission while the stronger dog stands tall above him. In this way, the “top dog” asserts his dominance over the “underdog.” Likewise, the difference in posture and positioning between Charlie and the Cop illustrates the dominance of the Cop over Charlie. Charlie is the “underdog” in this story.

And that’s just what Chaplin wants the audience to believe. In public, he most often referred to his Tramp character as “The Little Fellow.” Now, you know why.

Chaplin wants the audience to identify with the “The Little Fellow.” Audiences tend to root for the underdog because, in our own lives, we identify with the underdog – we see ourselves as the underdog.

Children have parents, teachers, bullies and older siblings to battle against. Adults have bosses, government, society and mother-in-laws as their opponents. In the narrative spin we give our own lives, we always appear to be clashing with forces much greater than ourselves. Our victories seem more significant if we feel that we’ve battled the odds and won.

Surely, when facing important moral issues, we feel as if we are fighting something much more powerful than ourselves. Sometimes we feel it’s us against the world. This feeling is perfectly captured in Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down…

Well I know what’s right, I got just one life.
In a world that keeps on pushin me around.
But I’ll stand my ground
…and I won’t back down.

This is the way we feel emotionally when contemplating our struggles against the hardships and vicissitudes of life. We cast ourselves as underdogs against an entire world that keeps “dragging me down” and “pushing me around.” But we “know what’s right” (making this a moral issue…we’re not fighting for the hell of it – we’re fighting because we’re right) and that “there ain’t no easy way out” (meaning we’ll have to struggle).  So we “stand our ground” and struggle to do the right thing.

If we see ourselves as the underdog in our own life story, then, in order for us to identify with the hero, it’s often the case that the hero needs to be the underdog, too. In that way, the hero’s emotional journey of frustration, struggle and triumph, becomes our emotional journey, as well. That’s the power – and the pleasure – of identifying with the hero in stories. It’s one of the main reasons we are drawn to heroic drama.

Even someone like James Bond – as heroic a figure as you can imagine – is presented as an underdog in his movies. The screenwriters are careful not to have him struggle against criminals such as purse snatchers or shoplifters. Bond would easily defeat them; it would be no struggle at all. Instead, Bond is pitted against criminals that are powerful megalomaniacs, out to conquer the world. Only against opponents like this – a Goldfinger or a Blofeld – could Bond be considered an underdog. It’s long been noted that the best Bond films feature his strongest opponents.

So Chaplin needs his character to be perceived as an underdog because it resonates with us emotionally, and it makes his struggle significant. But being the underdog also promotes another key element that is important to the Hollywood screenplay.

Take another look at Charlie and the Cop, paying attention to the composition.

A very important element to this photo is that Charlie is unaware of the Cop. This element is so important, that Chaplin uses it in other publicity shots for The Kid. Like this one…

Chaplin even reversed the idea. Here’s the same Cop and street corner, but now it’s the Cop who is unaware of Charlie and the Kid…

And here is a French poster of the same idea.

The hidden face, Darth Vader shadow and highlighted billy-club, make the French poster even more threatening!

All these photos portray either the hero or his opponent as being unaware of the other.

In the lobby card photo, Charlie is unaware that the Cop is watching him. But we, the audience, are aware of the Cop. This means that we have knowledge that Charlie doesn’t, and this creates psychological tension within us. This tension is suspense, that is, the excited expectation of an approaching climax. In the most basic of terms, something exciting is going to happen and we want to see it.

Suspense is an extremely potent element of storytelling, pulling the audience along scene by scene from start to finish. Several times in the story, Chaplin has the boy’s mother meet the Kid, unaware that the child she’s speaking to is her own abandoned son. The suspense in these scenes is almost unbearable – you want the mother to recognize the child, at the same time you worry what will happen to Charlie when she does.

In a well-constructed screenplay, this type of gripping emotional tension can last the entire movie. But individual scenes, too, will have their arcs of tension. Look at how Chaplin brilliantly builds suspense in this short scene from The Kid below.

Twice he has the Cop appear unnoticed behind Charlie and the Kid. From the moment the Cop appears, Chaplin has constructed this scene to keep the audience wondering: what will happen next? Chaplin knew the power of suspense in his movie, and he was wise enough to include it as part of his lobby card and other images promoting the film.

The comedic cousin of suspense is anticipation, which is defined as pleasurable expectation. The emphasis here is on pleasurable, and this probably more accurately describes our response to the lobby card. Charlie and Cops have a long history of comic battle. When the audience sees an image like this, they know what’s coming and have faith that Chaplin will give them a good time.

So Chaplin has two types of suspense going for him in the lobby card – we anticipate the specific humorous revelation to Charlie of the Cop behind him, and we are filled with suspense over the more general struggle of the heroic underdog against his opponents.

But here’s another thing to consider about this card: if you didn’t know it was a Charlie Chaplin movie, would you think it was a comedy?

You’ve probably memorized it by now, but let’s take one last look at the photo of Charlie and the Cop. And this time, we’ll use the original photo that the lobby card was based on.

Just as the Cop himself is not funny, this whole situation is not funny. Where’s the humor in a derelict tramp finding an abandoned baby in the gutter? This isn’t a humorous premise…this is serious stuff, and not at all what Chaplin’s audience was used to.

When Chaplin arrived at the Keystone studios in Hollywood in 1914, the silent film comedies of the time were very primitive. They were little more than 1 or 2 reels of frenetic action.

A typical plot consisted of a girl in a park being energetically and ridiculously wooed by rival suitors. It was followed by a sustained head-conking, ass-kicking, brick-tossing, rough-house battle between the boyfriends, ending with a wild chase through city streets in open-air jalopies until the road ends and everyone careens off a cliff to certain death. Except they don’t die, they just brush themselves off and continue to chase each other into the sunset. The End.

Over the years, Chaplin refined his stories and his characters, but the plots and action were still pretty wild. Silent movies especially lend themselves to a type of twilight existence – half reality, half dreamworld, where anything can happen. That’s fine for a 20 minute two-reeler, but longer narrative forms of serious purpose demand something more. They demand a story that matters.

Chaplin wanted to do a comedy with strong emotions, and that means a moral theme – a comedy where the Tramp “struggled to do the right thing” because that’s what generates the emotion. In short, he wanted to make a Heroic Hollywood movie.

Which meant Chaplin, led by his artistic ambitions, had a problem on his hands. He had to introduce moral seriousness into his brand of knock-about, rough-house comedy. But how do you accomplish such a serious purpose in a movie full of pratfalls and butt-kicking? How would the audience react to a comedy attempting pathos?

Which is probably why his marketing efforts desperately attempted to reassure his audience that The Kid was, indeed, a comedy despite it’s serious premise. More than merely humorous, the film was promoted as Six Reels of Joy! as the various posters insistently promised.

Joy, or possibly the lack thereof, in these illustrations of The Kid.

Oh, yeah…you can just feel the rib-tickling joy radiating from Charlie and the Kid in these posters, can’t you?

Well, no…you can’t.

That’s the problem Chaplin faced with his film – it was a comedy, yet heartbreakingly serious.  It was a very risky undertaking, and in the hands of a lesser artist (IYKWIM / AITYD) may well have been a disaster. But The Kid ended up being the second biggest film of the year and served as an example for other comedians of the day of how to make comedies with serious, heroic themes.

That’s the beauty of the Hollywood formula. As I’ve argued previously, the Formula appears to be inflexible and artistically stifling. But if you look deep within it, and understand the reasons behind each part of the Formula, it becomes a source of inventive inspiration. Chaplin created something new by figuring out how to wed his type of comedy with the heroic Hollywood Formula. He didn’t pursue creativity by shunning the Formula; he embraced it and found his vision within it. Heroic movie-making lifted his work to a new level of artistry.

Chaplin portrayed various types of characters in his movies – a fireman, a floorwalker, wealthy cads, drunks, and assorted rounders. But in this movie, he reprised his iconic role of the Tramp. The illustrations of Charlie and the Kid that appeared in the posters above must have been quite a shock for his audience.

After all, his Tramp character was a free spirit – roguish and vulgar. The Tramp was a vagrant with spotty employment, at home in the streets, and a lawbreaker when opportunity presented itself. Tramps, by their nature, are escaping the responsibilities of life – no job, no wife, no children.

It is not in the Tramp’s nature to make a long-term commitment to care and provide for a child. If the film had presented Charlie and the Kid as father and son from the moment the curtain rose, it would have struck the audience as terribly false.

Which is why Chaplin took great pains at the beginning of the film to show how circumstances force the freewheeling, irresponsible Tramp to “man up” and make a fundamental ethical choice to care for the child. Seeing the Tramp tenderly caring for the Kid in the lobby card is a reminder that the moral choices that a character makes are at the heart of heroic drama.

For the first time, Chaplin’s Tramp exhibited a full-fledged character arc, that is, the character moving from one viewpoint to another during the course of the movie, prodded by the ethical choices he confronts.

The amount of character arc the hero experiences will vary from film to film. For some movies, like the wonderful suspense film ffolkes the needle barely budges. (A moral theme of ffolkes is the need for rough men who “stay the course” and Roger Moore, in his best role, does exactly that…he doesn’t change very much, which is exactly why he saves the day.) For other movies, the character arc of the hero does a complete 180 – he comes to believe the exact opposite of his initial belief.

The important thing to remember is that character arc is a reflection of the shifting ethics of the hero. How much you want his ethics to shift depends on the moral point of the story you want to tell.

At the time of The Kid, Chaplin’s “Little Fellow” was not only the most famous movie character in the world, he was also the most beloved. And it is critically important to the success of heroic movies that the character is likeable.

“Likeable’ covers a lot of ground. Objectively, the Tramp character was a petty criminal, reckless and opportunistic. Yet, he made the world laugh, and that goes a long way towards creating likability for your character. A character can do the most repulsive, disgusting things – but if they’re done with humor, you can forgive him his faults.

Think of Shrek. Moments after being introduced, we see the monstrous ogre showering in mud, using bugs as toothpaste, and so on. His pointed grossness was so over-the-top that it made you laugh and instantly form a rapport with the hero. This likability carried the audience into the picture long enough for them to discover why they really liked him: his noble soul and the yearning of his heart, as the story eventually revealed.

And so it is with the Tramp in The Kid. First, Chaplin used humor to make the audience like him (despite his faults), then used his heroic struggle to earn their heartfelt love and admiration.

Whew! There’s a lot going on in that lobby card. As you outline your next screenplay, take a look at the lobby card of Charlie, the Cop and the Kid occasionally and ask yourself these questions as you consider your own story:

Who is the hero?
What scenes will I write to make the hero likable?
What important thing does the hero want?
Who will strongly oppose the hero from getting what he wants?
What scenes will show them in conflict?
Is their conflict based on incompatible, opposing moral principles?
How do I show these moral principles in conflict cinematically, not through dialogue?
What scenes will I write that portray the hero as an underdog?
How will I make the hero’s opponents even stronger?
How will I make the hero’s struggle more intense?
How do I build suspense throughout the movie?
How do I build suspense within each scene?
How big is my hero’s character arc?
What scenes will I write that will shift the hero’s moral viewpoints?

It is important to note that these are not questions about a style of writing, clever wordplay or beautiful phrasing – these are questions about structure because structure is what matters in your screenplay, first and foremost.

And the First Three Questions in the mind of the audience supply the framework of the movie. They provide the key structural boxes that you will build your film around – the Hero Box, the Nemesis Box, and the Quest Box

I’ll have more to say about each of the issues above in future posts, as we get deeper into the writing process. But my next post will be about the very beginning of your screenplay – you know, that first moment when an idea pops into your head and you say to yourself, “Hey, that’d make a good movie!” I will tell you how do decide if that idea actually will make a good movie or not. See you then!

Previous Heroic Hollywood posts found here.

They called her: The American Venus.

She lived in a Hollywood mansion with a staff of servants. Her chauffeur drove a limited edition limousine. But she ended her days in an upscale trailer park in Ventura, California.

One of the enduring mysteries—for yours truly—are the scores of Hollywood starlets, innocent young women, who are attracted to bad men: drunks, gamblers, liars, tinsel town sociopaths.

Esther Ralston is a prime example of an early Hollywood star who showed great promise as an actress—she played drama and comedy with equal craft—but three ill-considered marriages effectively derailed Ralston’s career and drained away her considerable fortune.

Esther On the Road

Esther spent her childhood as a member of The Seven Ralston’s, an entertainment troupe made up of her four brothers and her parents. It was a hardscrabble, gypsy life, traveling across rural America performing in carnivals, town halls, revival tents, high school gymnasiums, colleges, even insane asylums, anywhere there was an audience.

In her tender and revealing autobiography, Some Day We’ll Laugh, Esther remembers:

As children, my four brothers and I never knew what it was like to have enough to eat or to be sure where we would sleep that night. In this modern world of disposable diapers, detergents, and specialized medicine, I often wonder what mama used for diapers and how she washed them, or us, in theater dressing rooms or railroad station waiting rooms.

Quite often, when there was no money for railroad fare, a kind station master would persuade the brakeman of a freight train which was stopping by for water, to allow us to ride to our next destination in the caboose. This was high adventure for us kids.

Billed as “Baby Esther, America’s Youngest Juliet,” Esther performed Shakespeare at the tender age of six.

The Ralston Family, 1917, from left to right: Esther, Howard, Bradford, Carleton, Mama, Clarence, and Papa.

In spite of poverty, hunger and the uncertainty of where the next job and buck would come, Esther’s memories of her childhood are, for the most part, bathed in the warm glow of nostalgia. Being poor was a minor annoyance when placed against the overwhelming security of a close, loving family.

But then, as now, human monsters preyed on innocent children.

In the Summer of 1911, in West Virginia, alone in a shabby rural hotel room, a traveling salesman promised seven-year old Esther a “surprise” if she would visit his room:

Esther was uncertain but remembered that her mother cautioned never to be rude to their public.

… he grabbed me and threw me backward across the bed, trying to pin me down by my arms. Terror-stricken as I was, the training in boxing, wrestling and gymnastics I’d had from my father since I was two stood me in good stead now. I was scratching, biting, kicking and squirming like a wildcat and the startled young man was no match for me; freeing myself from his clutches, I beat him to the door, raced down the hall and out of the hotel.

Esther sobbed out her story to her family and her father, in cold fury, ran back to the hotel to deal with the child molester, but the traveling salesman had already fled.

Esther in Hollywood

In 1917 the family moved to California in order to escape the infantile paralysis scare. Esther, growing into an American beauty, attended Glendale high school. Soon, Esther was picking up work as a movie extra and in 1920 she signed a three-month contract with Charlie Chaplin Studios to play an angel in The Kid, 1921. Unfortunately, her footage ended up on the cutting room floor.

In 1922, Esther appeared with the great Lon Chaney in Oliver Twist. The veteran actor mentored Esther on set, advising her to relax between scenes or she would rapidly burn out due to her nervous enthusiasm. Playing opposite Chaney, a huge movie star, proved a valuable boost to her career.

A few months later, on the set of a western, Phantom Fortune, 1923, Esther met actor George Webb, a reliable character actor well known for playing heavies.

Esther recalls:

I was immediately attracted to Mr. Webb, and he to me.  He often drove me home in his fine car. This was much better than hitch-hiking.

One late afternoon, when we had finished work earlier than usual, Mr. Webb invited me to have dinner with him at the Hollywood Athletic Club, where he was living. I had had very little experience eating in a fine restaurant and I was enthralled but very conscious of “minding my manners.”  When Mr. Webb, ordering a lovely dinner, asked me, “Would you like to have a fruit cocktail?” I answered with dignity, “Oh, no thank you. I don’t drink.”

Raised on the road with few creature comforts, often eating out of tin cans and having absolutely no experience in polite society, we sense this young woman’s excitement and excruciating self-consciousness as she fumbles for the right fork and tries desperately to impress the seemingly sophisticated and worldly George Webb.

George Webb, Esther’s first husband.

Esther in Love

Women are attracted to powerful men and Esther, a stunning if insecure ingénue, perceived Webb as a Hollywood player, a well known actor who seemed to know everybody in the business.

But of course, there were warning signs that Webb was a leaky vessel:

As the picture progressed, so did our friendship. To me, Mr. Webb was the epitome of elegance and sophistication and one of the best actors in Hollywood.  But George was an inveterate gambler. He’d bet on whether it was going to rain the next day. Sometimes he would drive me to the beach after work and I would watch him in adoring silence while he spent hours playing the local pinball machine.

Reading this paragraph, I wanted to travel back in time, sit down with Esther and explain that this guy is big trouble, certainly not marriage material.

Soon, George Webb confessed to Esther—they were in love and so it was truth time—that his real name was George Webb Frey and he was still married, but separated from his wife and waiting for a divorce.

Esther’s family was appalled at this romance. Esther was twenty-one years old. Webb was old enough to be her father.

The close-knit Ralston family demanded that Esther stop seeing Webb, but Esther, gripped by romantic illusions, stubbornly defied her brothers and parents.

After the preview for “Phantom Justice,” on a dark side street where Webb’s car was parked, Esther heard the sounds of shouts, blows and scuffling:

I jumped out of the car and ran around back in time to see Clarence [brother] holding George by his arms while Howard [brother] beat him unmercifully.

Screaming for help, and yelling, “You cowards, two against one!” I grabbed Howard by the hair and clung with my legs around him while nearby doors opened, lights went on and the police arrived.

We were all driven down to the police station in Los Angeles, where the two boys were booked for “Disturbing the Peace and Assault.” George, his eyes blackened and his nose dripping blood, managed to give me a dime to call his lawyer, and then I was left alone in the waiting room.

“How am I going to get home?” I sobbed to the policeman behind the desk. “I don’t have any carfare.”

“Too bad you didn’t think of that, girlie, before you got mixed up with a married man,” smirked the policeman.

Waves of shame and humiliation washed over me and I buried my face in my hands and wept.

Already an action-filled evening, it only gets worse as Esther accepts a ride home from a reporter who was hanging around the station.

In the car, Esther pours out her heart to the sympathetic journalist, who promptly makes a crude pass at her. Horrified, Esther jumps out of the car at the next red light and runs all the way home, where she throws herself at her mother’s feet:

“Oh Mama, Mama, why would you let them do that to me. Why would you betray me. Why… why?”

Mama coldly pushed me away and stood up, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”

Ouch.

Financially independent due to her film work, Esther packs a bag and moves into her own apartment.

And then, another great role comes along. Esther is cast as Mrs. Darling in Peter Pan, 1924. At first, Esther is horrified at playing the part of a mother. After all, she’s a rising star, a beautiful ingénue, hardly the mother type, but director Herbert Brenon explains that he wants to cast Mrs. Darling as every child sees his mother—as a young girl.

Peter Pan, 1921, Esther Ralston, left, plays Mrs. Darling. Mary Brian is her daughter Wendy. Esther was just four years older than Mary.

After the success of “Peter Pan,” Esther’s star rises in Hollywood and she is offered more roles. George Webb, a classic manipulator, gives up acting in order to “manage” Esther’s career. He shrewdly reads her scripts and coaches Esther on her acting technique. Esther writes that sessions with Webb often reduced her to tears, but she freely admits that she emerged a far more skilled actress.

Esther in Marriage

More sinister, Webb has Esther alter her contract at Paramount so that her weekly paychecks are paid to George Webb, “for services rendered.”

Esther does not have a checkbook, not even her own bank account.

One day Esther asks George for a dollar—yup, one single American dollar—to keep in her purse in case she wants to buy something. Webb smoothly assures Esther that whenever she needs money she only has to ask. “I’m going to make sure, sweetheart, that you will never be poor again.”

In a screenplay this is called a foreshadowing moment.

Far from stupid, Esther Ralston comes across as hopelessly naïve and trusting. Separated from her family, Esther Ralston substituted George Webb as her primary emotional support. Webb became lover, father, mother and brother to the fragile young woman who found herself abruptly thrust into the confusing world of Hollywood stardom.

At this point in Esther’s narrative, I was gnawing my handkerchief in alarm. Here was a good and decent woman surrendering control of her professional and financial affairs to a stone cold sociopath.

Webb uses Esther’s hard earned money to purchase a diamond ring. Nothing like buying your own engagement ring, right ladies?

Predictably, Webb invests Esther’s money and in a sure-fire real estate deal that conjures the Marx Bros. in “Coconuts:”

While I was filming Trouble with Wives, George invested in four lots in Eagle Lake, California; total price $200.00. When we visited Eagle Lake some time later to look at our beautiful property, we discovered that all four lots were under water—IN the lake, not beside it, as the real estate salesman had assured us. It wasn’t the last time “Gambler George” was to be swindled.

In 1925, Esther and Webb are finally wed and the surprises keep coming: Esther discovers that she is now stepmother to Webb’s children. Esther takes it in stride, she loves the children and adores being a mother.

By this time, Esther is under an exclusive seven-year contract to Paramount. Esther is cast by the legendary Florenz Ziegfeld—a man who knows something about beautiful women—to play the lead role in The American Venus, 1926, a film about the Miss America contest in Atlantic City.

Years later, reports Anthony Slide in Silent Players, Esther Ralston read a biography of Louise Brooks that describes Brook’s performance as eclipsing Esther’s work. Ralston commented: “Hell, I didn’t even know she was in the film!”

Esther in Close-Up

Almost every page of Ralston’s modest volume contains a telling anecdote about her career and the people with whom she worked. Her recollections are razor-sharp and invariably shed a welcome light on early Hollywood.

On the set of Victor Fleming’s The Blind Goddess, 1926 Esther was having trouble conjuring tears for an important scene:

…Mr. Fleming ordered the cameraman to set up for a big close-up of me crying for my dead father I couldn’t squeeze a tear.

Mr. Fleming was getting disgusted with me and I felt miserable. Just then the lovely and marvelous actress, Louise Dressler, came over and knelt beside me and, taking my hand in hers, she said quietly, “Esther dear, my beloved mother is in the Hollywood hospital, dying of cancer. They just phoned me and said if I could get right over there, I’d be able to see her once more before she dies.  I can’t leave until we do this scene.” Before she finished talking to me, I was sobbing like a child. Mr. Fleming signaled the cameraman to “get her close-up… quick!” It turned out to be one of the best scenes in the picture, but I couldn’t stop crying for an hour afterward. Later that day, I found out that Miss Dressler’s mother had passed on an hour after she reached the hospital.

After shooting Old Ironsides, 1926, Esther’s favorite film, she has another talk with George Webb about money:

“I know you handle all our money,” I complained. “I’m grateful for that, as you know I don’t know anything about business, but I never have even a quarter in my purse. Suppose I’m stuck somewhere where you can’t get to me and I can’t get home? I can’t even buy an ice cream cone without asking you for money.”

Webb magnanimously agrees to give Esther an allowance of ten dollars a week.

Esther comments:

I knew my salary was twenty-five hundred a week, but I was so glad to get an allowance, I stopped complaining.

George continues showering Esther with extravagant gifts—he’s generous with her money.

By 1927, Esther was enjoying a high standard of living. Here, she’s posing with her limited edition Lincoln Town Car. Esther did not know how to drive.

On Christmas Eve of 1927:

…George gave me a gorgeous diamond bracelet with a square-cut emerald in the center, and a new Lincoln Town Car which had just won first prize at the auto show in Chicago. Only two of these town cars  were ever built, mine and the one Sue Carol bought. I reveled in at last reaching stardom and riding in the back of this elegant green car with its rabbit-fur lap robe, crystal rose vase, and phone to my chauffeur.

Esther in Peril

Esther Ralston has reached the upper level of Hollywood stardom, but there is an abyss of danger and darkness in the starlet’s life:

In February, George and I drove to the Grand Canyon on our vacation. While we were crossing the lonely desert up to the canyon, George suddenly stopped the car and turned to me.

“I’m sorry, Honey,” he told me, “But … I brought you up here to kill you.”

I stared at him in horror. There wasn’t a house, a tree, or another car for miles in any direction. “You mean,” I faltered, “because of my life insurance?”

George gazed at my startled face for a moment and then patted my knee. “Honey,” he said, as he started up the car, “I was only kidding.”

Esther deadpans:

I didn’t think this was funny at all.

Does Esther take the hint that she’s married to a sociopath, does she walk out on him and serve him with divorce papers?

Sadly, the answer is no.

Esther Crashes and So Does America

George fast-talks a group of Hollywood stars into investing in a sure fire gold mine in Arizona. Big surprise, the mine turns out to have been “salted” and vast amounts of money are lost.

George buys a mansion, 2212 Hollyridge Drive, befitting a Hollywood star. There is a swimming pool and a staff of servants. George and Esther go on a spending spree furnishing the home with valuable antiques.

And then comes the stock market crash of 1929:

About three-thirty one morning I awoke to find myself alone in bed. I saw there was light in George’s office den, so I got up and went out to see him. He was slumped over his desk, his head on his arms, and he was sobbing. I rushed over to him and put my arms around him.

“What is it, darling,” I whispered. “Why are you crying?”

He sat up and stared at me and then blurted out, “Oh, my God honey, don’t hate me. I’ve lost all your money! I bought stock on margin, four-hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars, and it’s all gone down the drain.”

Esther is pretty darn upbeat for a woman whose fortune has just been stolen and lost by a husband who has already admitted to homicidal tendencies.

Let’s be clear: Esther now moves from simple naivete to an entirely other level.

All together, let’s spell, e-n-a-b-l-e-r.

“Oh my poor darling,” I cried. “Can’t you save any of it? I know, my jewelry!” I ran to my dressing table and collected all the beautiful diamond jewelry I owned and dumped it on his desk.

“There,” I said. “Take these, they’re certainly worth something. I don’t need any jewelry. Besides, we’ve still got my contract.”

George looked at me sadly and said, “Honey, that jewelry is only a drop in the bucket. And besides, I didn’t want to tell you, but Paramount didn’t take up your option.”

Indeed, sound has arrived and there is panic in Hollywood with the studios undermining and destroying scores of careers.

Coming soon, Part II: Here comes husband #2, and guess what, he too wants to murder Esther.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech