Big Hollywood » Silent Films

America, the Melting Pot: Jewish-Catholic Short Film to Cleanse the Palate

Robert J. Avrech — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:53:52 +0000

Here’s “The Tailor,” an adorable short from the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, written, directed and edited by Gordon Grinberg.

“The Tailor” 2011Jewish Film Festival Entry Vidéo funnytoo sélectionnée dans Cinéma

Don’t want to say too much except to note that:

1. The film is based on an old and well known Jewish joke. So old is the joke that I actually heard this back in high school when I was a student at the Brooklyn Talmudic Academy.

2. A certain segment of orthodox Jewish men wear black suits and black hats only. Think of it as a regulation uniform. Why? The most common explanation is that black signifies mourning and the Jewish people are still mourning the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Also—and this is just my personal opinion—black is, y’know, slimming.

3. Be sure to watch the film all the way through the credits. Enjoy!

For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and ‘The Champ’ Part 5

Leo Grin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:41:00 +0000

When King Vidor first stepped onto the set of The Champ, he was filled with a rare sense of freedom. Frances Marion’s script was unusually simple, focused squarely on a pair of immensely sympathetic protagonists and their relationship. All the key moments, plot twists and emotional climaxes were spelled out on the page, with no false conflicts or manufactured drama to complicate the works. Vidor realized that having such a tight screenplay “would relieve me as a director — now I didn’t have to worry about the story, worry about how I will wrap this up and keep it all together. I could concentrate on little details, touches and things.”

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

Lupe Velez: When Shame, Abortion and Suicide Collide

Robert J. Avrech — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:56:51 +0000

Lupe Velez, The Mexican Spitfire.

The lives of Hollywood stars are frequently tragic and messy tales of absent fathers, cruelly ambitious mothers, and madly dysfunctional families.

Mexican-American actress, Lupe Velez (July 18, 1908 – December 13, 1944) “The Mexican Spitfire” was a beautiful, passionate, emotionally unstable woman best known for a series of 1930’s B movies in which she plays a delightfully scatter-brained character who speaks broken English mixed with streams of rapid fire Spanish.

Her first feature-length film was in the Douglas Fairbanks blockbuster, The Gaucho (1927), where she plays a high spirited Spanish dancing girl. Velez performed in a further eighteen films before settling into comedy—she had a Carol Lombard vibe, a flair for screwball situations, but her accent limited her appeal—most notably in the seven “Mexican Spitfire” series of films (1939-1943).

Lupe Velez and Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho, 1927.

In private life, Velez carried on a number of highly publicized Hollywood romances. Gary Cooper had an affair with the dark beauty as did the great director—and ladies man—Victor Fleming.

In a 1929 interview with Motion Picture World, Velez said:

“And Victor Fleming! I like him because he is a devil with womens… But I am more than a devil than he is. That is why I never fall in love with him.”

In another interview, Velez said of herself:

“I have flirt with the whole film colony. Why not? I am not serious. What harm is a little flirting? No I do not kiss many mens. But when I kiss them, they stay kissed!”

Lupe’s casual demeanor was a carefully constructed image serving to conceal a troubled and vulnerable personality—possibly bi-polar—a young woman almost continually in the grip of a turbulent and painful love life.

In 1933 she married Olympic athlete turned Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. They fought loudly and drunkenly, frequently in nightclubs and restaurants, hurling insults, drinks and punches at each other. The marriage lasted five years. They divorced in 1938.

Velez’s father, an army officer, was so humiliated by his daughter’s chosen profession that he refused to let her use his last name, Vallalobos. Velez was her mother’s maiden name.

Lupe Velez and Gary Cooper in Wolf Song, 1929.

Esther Ralston, (here’s my three part series about Ralston) a Hollywood star for a few brief years during the silent era, at one point earning as much as $8,000 a week, gives a remarkable insight into Velez’s difficult life in Raltson’s obscure but invaluable autobiography, Some Day We’ll Laugh.

Not too many months later, Gary [Cooper] had transferred his affections [from Clara Bow] to the Mexican bombshell, Lupe Velez. Lupe came to my brand new star dressing room one day to tell me about it. Then she launched into an impassioned recital of the troubles she was having with her mother.

“No matter what I do for her,” she wailed, “I cannot satisfy her.”

“I can’t see what your mother can find to complain about, Lupe,” I tried to comfort her. “You’ve given her a house, a mink coat, clothes, diamond bracelets, everything. What in Heaven’s name is she fussing about?”

“My mother, she say to me,” Lupe explained, “For nine months I carry you in my body. You owe me RENT!”

Velez, in the mid 1940’s, had an affair with a young actor named Harald Maresch, and became pregnant. Unwilling to marry her, Maresch demanded that Velez get an abortion, (Hollywood abortions will be the subject for a future and tragic post here at BH) but Lupe was a faithful Catholic and flatly refused.

The actress, with a weakness for liquor and drugs, spiraled into a clinical depression. Increasingly isolated, the fragile young woman felt unable to bear the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child.

Velez sat down and composed a note:

To Harald, may God forgive you and forgive me too but I prefer to take my life away and our baby’s before I bring him with shame or killing him. Lupe

Lupe Velez took an overdose of Seconal and died in her bed—not with her head in the toilet as the ugly myth contends—on December 13, 1944.

She was 36 years old.

Here’s an absolutely heartbreaking clip from The Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event, 1943.

Lillian Gish: Dying for Her Audience

Robert J. Avrech — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:13:27 +0000

Lillian Gish

The great twin tragedies of the fate of silent films in the modern era is indifference and ignorance. And for those who have seen clips from silent films, they invariably view muddy, degraded prints projected at the wrong speed, hence the jerky motions that give the impression that all silent films are bad slapstick.

Of course, we all owe a great debt to Robert Osborne and TCM for programming so many fine silent films. At last, film lovers have the opportunity to screen a varied selection of silent films and appreciate the great craft that was abruptly short-circuited with the advent of talkies. The best silent films were a universal language in which image, motion and emotion were paramount.

Silent movies were shot and duplicated on fragile nitrate stock. In the few original prints I’ve been fortunate enough to screen the images are just stunning. The screen glows with a liquid, silvery radiance that’s impossible to duplicate on modern film or tape. The finest silent film players were geniuses who conveyed a world of emotion through the most subtle means.

The great director King Vidor, (1894-1982) whose career spanned eight decades—from early silent movies right into the sound era—directed Lillian Gish in a 1926 silent version of La Boheme.

At this point in her career, Gish was so powerful that she had contractual approval over script and director. The intensity of her work ethic, the dedication to her craft simply awed Vidor as he noted so many years later in his excellent 1952 memoir, A Tree is a Tree.

The title is very funny, an insider Hollywood joke. It’s a quote from a penny pinching studio executive who famously said: “A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park!” Hence, in early films, Los Angele’s Griffith Park was used as a location for cowboy movies, Civil War movies, New York’s Central Park, the Scottish Highlands, Versailles—you name it, Griffith Park served as a default location.

Director King Vidor

Here, Vidor describes how Gish rigorously prepared for and played her dramatic death scene in La Boheme:

When she arrived on the set that fateful day, we saw her sunken eyes, her hollow cheeks, and we noticed that her lips had curled outward and were parched with dryness. What on earth had she done to herself? I ventured to ask about her lips and she said in syllables hardly audible that she had succeeded in removing all the saliva from her mouth by not drinking any liquids for three days, and by keeping cotton pads between her teeth and gums even in her sleep.

A pall began to settle over the entire company. People moved about the stage on tiptoe and spoke only in whispers. Finally came the scene where Rudolph carried the exhausted Mimi to her little bed and her Bohemian friends gathered around while Mimi breathed her last. I let the camera continue on her lifeless form and the tragic faces around her and decided to call “cut” only when I saw that Miss Gish was forced to inhale after holding her breath to simulate death. But the familiar movement of the chest didn’t come. She neither inhaled nor exhaled. I began to fear she had played her part too well, and I could see that the other members of the cast and crew had the same fears as I. Too frightened to speak the one word that would halt the movement of the camera, I wondered how to bridge this fantastic moment back to the coldness of reality. The thought flashed through my mind, “What will the headlines say?” After what seemed many, many minutes, I waved my hand before the camera as a signal to stop. Still there was no movement from Lillian.

John Gilbert bent close, and softly whispered her name. Her eyes slowly opened. She permitted herself her first deep breath since the scene had started; for the past days she had trained herself, somehow or other, to get along without visible breathing. It was necessary to wet her lips before she could speak. By this time there was no one on the set whose eyes were dry. The movies have never known a more dedicated artist than Lillian Gish.

Lillian Gish, on her deathbed in La Boheme.

Miss Gish did not work with King Vidor again until 1946 when she played Mrs. McCanles in David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun. There’s a lovely and touching moment in the film when Jennifer Jones says to Gish: “I’ll be a good girl—I want to be like you.”

Whenever I’m in production, working with actors, deep in my heart I too hope that they want, consciously or not, to be like Lillian Gish.

Colleen Bobs Her Hair and The Stars and Stripes

Robert J. Avrech — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:39:33 +0000

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.”

In 1923, Colleen Moore’s starring vehicle, Flaming Youth was an international box office hit that ushered in the era of the Flapper. The Jazz crazy kids wore their galoshes unbuckled causing the rubber tongue to flap. Thus: Flappers.

Colleen Moore, studio portrait in the Stars and Stripes.

I’m waiting for that particular fashion statement to reappear.

Colleen Moore, born Kathleen Morrison, (1900-1988) and her husband John McCormick embarked on a grand tour of Europe to promote Flaming Youth, Colleen’s career, and enjoy a belated honeymoon.

Colleen’s look, specifically her Bobbed haircut, was a global fashion rage. Contrary to popular opinion it was Moore who pioneered the severe cut—not Louise Brooks. It is sad and certainly a skewed vision of film history that the current Louise Brooks cult has spread like a virus, whereas Moore, a far more important figure in motion pictures, is virtually forgotten. George Cukor, a director who knew something about Hollywood stardom, was utterly baffled by the post-modern Brooks fever. When queried about the star of Pandora’s Box, Cukor forcefully exclaimed: “Louise Brooks? She was nothing!”

Anyhoo.

From where did the idea for this cubist haircut originate, so markedly different than the opulent Victorian tresses in favor at the time? Moore explains that her mother copied the look from a favorite childhood Japanese doll.

The new hairstyle sent a fascinating and complex message: this young lady is independent, plucky, fiery yet down-to-earth, tom-boyish but completely feminine; she’s the decent and adorable girl next door who is a boy’s best friend and then KABOOM! the love of his life.

Never a great beauty or a smoldering presence, Moore presented a new female paradigm: cute, feisty and refreshingly devoid of a self conscious sexuality. The surprising Bob helped cement Moore’s image as the modern American woman, and it changed the trajectory of the young actress’ career from feature player to star. At the height of her stardom Moore earned $12,500.00 a week.

The haircut also gave birth to a new product that is still with us: The Bobby Pin.

In Dublin, a celebrity starved crowd of 10,000 frantic fans broke through a police cordon and grabbed at Colleen who was wearing a stunning cape covered with intricately stitched tiny feathered plumes. Finally, McCormick lifted Colleen on his shoulders and carried her to the car where she arrived “looking like a plucked chicken.”

In Switzerland the mayor of Zurich arranged a dinner party in Colleen’s honor. An orchestra was present to play the the American national anthem.

Colleen describes the scene in her superb memoir Silent Star:

We’d no sooner sat down than the mayor, with a small bow to me, signaled the orchestra, who started playing “My Country,’Tis of Thee.” We all got up and stood very silent. When we sat down again, I said to the mayor, “That was the English national anthem, ‘G-d Save the King.’”

I should have kept my mouth shut. The mayor sent for the orchestra leader, spoke a few words to him in German, and no sooner had we started the soup course than the orchestra struck up again, this time with John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The Mayor stood up, beckoning to all of us, saying excitedly, “Stehen sie auf, bitte—everybody please stand up.”

We all stood, the orchestra finished, we sat down, and the American consul and I burst out laughing. When the mayor asked what we were laughing about, like an idiot I said, “That wasn’t our national anthem. That’s a march.”

The mayor, red in face, sent for the orchestra leader, spluttering German at him. The leader turned to me and asked the name of our national anthem. I said, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

He returned to the bandstand, the mayor watching him with an eagle eye. A few moments later the orchestra struck up “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” the mayor rose, saying, “Stehen sie auf, bitte,” and a tableful of by-now bewildered guests stood at attention once again. When we sat down, I smiled at the mayor and said, “That was lovely.”

In 1930, Soviet director Sergei Eisentstein arrived in Hollywood to set up several projects. The talented propagandist met everybody in the business, partied like one of the Communist hacks in Ninotchka, but, naturally, got stuck in development hell, and returned to mother Russia without a deal. Studio heads were baffled by his adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Eisenstein said a great deal about Hollywood and the decadent capitalists he encountered. He judged Marlene Dietrich dull, Greta Garbo stupid. But Collen Moore, rhapsodized Eisenstein, was the only intelligent woman he met in Hollywood.

Colleen Moore, Desert Flower, 1925

Colleen’s first husband, studio executive John McCormick, was, in many ways, responsible for steering the meteoric rise of her flapper film career. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic and frequently abusive.

Director Mervyn LeRoy in his fascinating autobiography Take One, describes a terrifying night when McCormick, on a bender, tried to hurl Moore out of a N.Y. hotel window. LeRoy—from an assimilated Jewish San Francisco family whose last name was probably Levine—saved Moore’s life by smashing McCormick over the head with a chair. The gallant and properly violent LeRoy—at the time a top “comedy constructor” for Moore—remained as her protector the entire night, the two of them aimlessly walking the streets of New York.

In Hollywood past and present, major movie stars have major tzuris.

In fact, Moore and McCormick’s troubled relationship inspired George Cukor’s top-notch insider Hollywood drama What Price Hollywood in 1932 as well as the three versions of A Star Is Born.

Colleen Moore, Her Wild Oat 1927.

Tragically, Flaming Youth, is presumed to be a lost film. Perhaps, somewhere in an archive in Eastern Europe, lies a decaying copy of this legendary motion picture. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

And as an example of how a lost film suddenly shows up—in this case Czechoslovakia—a Colleen Moore movie, Her Wild Oat, long considered lost, has been rediscovered and expertly restored. This article is an interview with archivist and historian Joseph Yranski who met Colleen Moore in the early 1970s, and remained friends with her until her death in 1988. Yranski was indirectly responsible for the rediscovery of Her Wild Oat.

Colleen Moore and the six-year-old Mickey Rooney in Orchards and Ermine, 1927

On DVD you can see Colleen Moore in Orchids and Ermine, 1927. Colleen plays a shop girl, a flapper, who’s looking for a sugar daddy. But she’s got to remain an innocent at heart, meaning she has to fall in love for the sake of love—not money. There’s romance, mistaken identity, and of course true love triumphs in the end. It’s a screwball comedy before screwball comedies were invented in the 30’s. Moore is magnetic as a gold digger who’s not as avaricious as she should be. A classic.

Colleen Moore in the dog house, in Ella Cinders, 1926.

Ella Cinders was probably Colleen Moore’s best role. In this spin on the Cinderella story, and much like Mabel Normand’s The Extra Girl, 1923, Moore plays a young girl in a dead end life who dreams of stardom, wins a beauty contest and goes to Hollywood. Once there, our heroine discovers that the contest was a scam. But with determination and talent Ella makes it in the movies and, natch, finds true love. This film is absolutely charming and Moore is delightful. Lombard before Lombard, Lucy before Lucy. You can get a DVD of the film here.

The Scarlet Letter, 1934, starring Colleen Moore and Alan Hale, 1934. This is a sound film, late in Colleen’s career. Moore was primarily a comedian but here she was trying to broaden her horizons as an actress. I haven’t yet seen this film so I’m clueless. But anything with Colleen Moore is interesting.

Broken Hearts of Broadway, 1923, was produced just before Moore broke through as a major star. Colleen plays the role of Mary, an aspiring actress who arrives in New York, all young and wholesome. Will she betray her friends for fame and fortune? This is a lovely show-biz morality tale, and Moore, as always, is genuine, vivacious, and utterly magnetic.

Reel Baseball/The Busher is a collection of baseball-themed silent movies. Colleen Moore co-stars with Charles Ray in The Busher, 1920, about a small town pitcher who is brought up to the big leagues but can’t quite make the grade. Colleen plays Mazie, his local sweetheart. Charles Ray was briefly a star of the silent era who specialized in playing rural heroes. On screen Ray was a one dimensional performer who relied on an aw’, shucks grin and a standard check list of hick mannerisms which appealed to audiences—for a short window of time.

Off-screen Ray was hugely tempramental, and according to Adolpf Zukor’s memoir had an inflated sense of his own importance. Ray spent his fortune lavishly and went bankrupt when he produced and financed his own pictures. Eventually, Ray devolved into alcoholism and uncredited walk-ons. In 1935, Ray published a collection of short stories titled Hollywood Shorts, Compiled From Incidents in the Everyday Life of Men and Women Who Entertain in Pictures. Anthony Slide, in his seminal volume Silent Players, reports that, “…an undercurrent of anti-Semitism is evident in a number of stories, suggesting that Ray blamed his downfall on Jewish studio bosses.” Impoverished, Ray died from an infected tooth in 1943 at the age of 52.

I saw The Busher on TCM—I have a TCM addiction and I am powerless to control it—about a year ago. Moore, was not yet a star, just another feature player trying to claw her way from the middle ranks. But as soon as she appears on-screen—behold!—a refreshing, exuberant presence. The petite and vivacious Moore just blows the eager-to-please Charles Ray off screen.

Colleen Moore as Mazie on Charles Ray's lap in The Busher.

Fortunately for Colleen, the black and white film stock of the time never registered that one eye was brown, the other blue. She would have looked cross-eyed.

John Gilbert, who rose to be the first million dollar contract matinee idol at MGM, has a supporting role in The Busher as the spoiled rich kid who’s vying for Colleen’s affections over Charles Ray’s salt of the earth hero. Tragically, Gilbert, talented but immensely self-destructive, had a tortuous love affair with the great narcissist Greta Garbo—she left him stranded at the altar—and then, with the coming of sound his career crashed and burned in a terrific orgy of booze and babes.

After her retirement from motion pictures in 1935, Colleen Moore dedicated herself to an ongoing project: building the world’s most dazzling and elaborate doll house, actually a fairy castle. She toured with the fairy tale house to raise money for children’s charities.

The house is an engineering marvel. It has its own miniature sophisticated lights and wiring, a self-contained plumbing system, and a Lilliputian library with books signed by some of the greatest authors of our time. Every single detail of the castle is simply breath taking.

The fairy castle is on permanent exhibition in Chicago’s Museum of Science of Industry. Here’s the homepage.

Moore also wrote a best-selling volume: How Women Can make Money in the Stock Market.

Colleen Moore was Mervyn Leroy’s champion in Hollywood. She also mentored the luminous teen-age Loretta Young, and wisely cast an inexperienced but jaw-droppingly handsome Gary Cooper in his first starring role opposite Moore in Lilac Time, 1928. Moore believed that LeRoy, an incredibly bright, energetic, and creative young man, would develop into a fine director. She was right. LeRoy was known—before Orson Welles—as “The Boy Genius.” So let’s close with LeRoy’s warm words about this important actress and Hollywood icon:

Colleen Moore was a remarkable girl who grew into a remarkable woman… and became, next to Mary Pickford, the biggest silent film star of them all.

Later, she would retire from the screen at the height of her fame, marry well, and spend the rest of her life doing important civic works in Chicago, writing books, raising her stepchildren, and doting on her grandchildren. She was never anything but a lady, throughout her career and her postcareer life.

Her fame, however, never went to her head in any way. Perhaps because of her affluent background, she was never spoiled by her wealth., never seduced by her notoriety, never changed by her success. She was always sweet—in the best sense of the word—and kind and pleasant to everyone she met. I doubt that there was a man who worked on her pictures who was not platonically in love with her.

Links:

The Colleen Moore Project

Colleen Moore: Century Baby

Another Colleen Moore Site

True Hollywood Confession: I am a Dope Fiend But Not a Jewess!

Robert J. Avrech — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:25:55 +0000

Alma Rubens, Early Studio Portrait

Many persons who have followed my career on the screen and stage mistake me for a Jewess. This belief perhaps was strengthened when I married Ricardo Cortez, my third husband, the only one I ever really loved, and whom I am now trying to divorce.

Although I didn’t find it out until almost a year after our marriage, Ric, instead of being a gallant Spanish caballero which I believed him, was the son of a kosher butcher, with a shop on First Avenue, New York City. His real name is Jacob Kranz. — Alma Rubens

Alma Rubens, silent film star turned hopeless drug addict, penned a fascinating, lurid confessional, This Bright World Again, serialized in newspapers in 1931.

Her insistence of her non-Jewish roots comes early in Chapter One. She wanted to get the Jewish thing out of the way—fast. She assured her readers that she was of French and Irish ancestry, reared as a strict Catholic. Alma was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in San Francisco.

But the truth is her father was Jewish. According to halachah, Jewish law, matrilineal descent decides who is a Jew and who is not. Thus, Rubens was not Jewish. But she certainly went out of her way to deny her father’s Jewish roots.

Rubens, in a nasty move for the times, outed her husband Ricardo Cortez. No doubt, Alma wanted to damage his fast rising career as a handsome leading man. Cortez, now sadly forgotten, played private eye Sam Spade in the original The Maltese Falcon (1931) and he is perfect. Cortez is far more dangerous and charming than the mannered, lip-curling Bogart.

Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, 1931

There’s another Cortez film, practically unknown—I caught it on TCM, G-d bless Robert Osborne—but truly amazing, Symphony of Six Million, (1932) where he plays a brilliant Jewish surgeon—as if there’s any other kind. And Irene Dunne, not yet a star, is cast as, get this, a Jewish girl from the Lower East Side who faithfully loves the Cortez character though he gradually abandons his medical practice to the poor Jewish community for the “Park Avenue trade.” Dunne’s got a limp and she teaches blind kids. Obviously, not the bad girl of the story. Viewer whiplash sets in for yours truly watching Dunne do Jewish with that subterranean Kentucky shicksah twang. It’s the only Hollywood film I’ve ever seen that has a Pidyon Ha-ben, a Redemption of the First Born ceremony, in the storyline.

Though melodramatic and at times stiff, Symphony of Six Million—the title refers to New York’s population—is well worth seeking out and screening. It’s Hollywood dealing affectionately with Judaism, immigrant Jewish characters and culture.

Interpolation:

Not too many years later, prominent Jewish movie moguls Irving Thalberg, L.B. Mayer, Paul Bern, Harry Cohn and the Warner Bros. stifled genuinely Jewish narratives, and such stories almost disappeared from American movies. This ethnic black-out neatly coincided with The Production Code. Hollywood Jews were running scared, anxious to be perceived as loyal Americans, not clannish Jews, and the self-censorship of the Hays Office over issues of sex and race bled directly into the insecure Jewish psyche of the secular, assimilationist Hollywood Jewish elite.

End Interpolation:

Alma Rubens is truly a lost star of the silent screen, but her memoir, almost certainly ghost written, is absolutely riveting. Now, it’s been edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Alexander Webb and published as Alma Rubens, Silent Snowbird.

Translation:

Silent = silent films.

Snowbird = female cocaine addict.

As Rhodes and Webb write in their splendid introduction:

By 1918, actress Alma Rubens was a noted screen personality. By 1920, she was a major star. By 1929, she was hospitalized for drug abuse. By 1931, she was dead from its effects. Little more is generally said of Rubens, one of the great female stars of the emergent feature film industry of the 1910’s and one whose popularity continued over a fifteen year period.

Rubens, exquisitely doe-eyed and dark-haired, broke into the film industry in 1914 with appearances in two three-reelers, The Narcotic Spectre and The Gangster and the Girl. In 1915 Rubens starred in The Lorelia Madonna produced by Vitagraph. Rubens got strong reviews for this film and producers noticed. D.W. Griffith cast her in Intolerance (1916) as one of the girls of the marriage market in the Babylonian sequence—I can’t pick her out. She also worked with cowboy star William S. Hart in The Cold Deck (1917).

From these associations, Rubens was offered a contract with Triangle, the studio formed by D.W. Griffith, Mack Sennet, and Thomas Ince. Rubens starred in films opposite Bessie Love and Douglas Fairbanks. Ironically, the three actors appeared in one of the most notorious pictures of the silent era, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) in which Fairbanks is a cocaine using detective named “Coke Ennyday.”

From 1918 until 1925 Alma Rubens became a Hollywood star before stardom was understood, before Hollywood celebrity was common. She was comfortable in front of the camera and didn’t display the formal stiffness that characterized so many early film stars. In a way, Alma was the girl next door. Except she was drop-dead gorgeous, sensuous without the threatening Theda Bara vamp thing that was all the rage at the time.

Interesting to note that Bara was promoted as the exotic Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. In fact, Bara was a smart, hard-working Jewish woman from Cincinnati: Theodosia Burr Goodman.

Rubens starred in Humoresque (1920), according to the silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, the “first [Hollywood] Jewish classic,” produced and financed by William Randolph Hurst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. The movie was directed by the twenty-seven year old Frank Borzage, an Italian-American from Salt Lake City. Borzage, one of Hollywood’s finest directors, was a former Shakespearean actor who toiled for a time as an extra at Universal, and was then signed by Thomas Ince as a leading man. Gradually, Borzage found his way to the director’s chair. The script, based on a Fannie Hurst novel, was penned by the great screenwriter Francis Marion.

Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount, despised the finished film and could not understand why anybody would want to see a movie about, what he perceived, as lower-class Jews. As Brownlow reports in Behind the Mask of Innocence, Zukor wrote to screenwriter Marion: “If you want to show Jews, show Rothchilds, banks and beautiful things. It hurts us Jews—we don’t all live in poor houses.” Humoresque was almost shelved, but when finally released, it proved to be a popular sensation, a big money-maker, and Rubens was catapulted to the deadly Hollywood stratosphere.

Typical of so many Hollywood actresses—the Gish sisters, the Talmadge sisters, and countless others—Alma Rubens was impoverished and fatherless for most of her childhood.

Her love life was a series of disastrous, ill-considered marriages. She married stage actor Franklyn Farnum in 1918. He was 20-years her senior. The marriage lasted about two weeks. He was, she said, drunken and violent. In 1923 she married Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman, but they separated after a few months. He too, she charged, as physically violent and mentally abusive. While working for Fox in 1926, she married the handsome leading man Ricardo Cortez—the only Hollywood actor ever to get credit above Greta Garbo, in The Torrent, 1926.

Ruben’s mother, Teresa, was a powerful influence who manged to sock away money and buy some valuable real estate. Rubens, in her memoir, admits that if not for her mother’s wise investments, all her Hollywood earnings would have gone into her veins.

Alma Rubens, glamor portrait

Rubens claims that her addiction to morphine began in 1923, after marriage to Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman, screenwriter and head of production for Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. Rubens has just signed a contract for a thousand dollars a week.

Then came an illness, painful and nerve-wracking, though of short duration, but which proved to be the ultimate stumbling block upon which my career was wrecked.

It marked the beginning of my addiction to the use of narcotic drugs.

So, what exactly was the nature of Ruben’s illness?

Ruben’s goes on to explain:

My first shot of morphine, administered to ease my suffering, was given me by Dr. A., now one of the leading gynecologists in the country and a professor in one of our great universities.

Later, when my husband learned the exact nature of the treatment for my womanly weakness—the use of morphine—he called in another great physician, Dr. B., who said it would be a crime to operate on a girl of my tender age—and conceded that his contemporary’s treatment was a most proper one.

Womanly weakness.

There is no further explanation.

But a friend who is a physician has this compelling diagnosis:

Rubens may have been referring to Endometriosis, a gynecologic condition where there is thought to be hormonally responsive tissue within the abdomen (endometrial fragments, hence the name), which can become extremely painful at different times during a woman’s cycle.

In the days before hormonal therapy injections, and even now, when hormones don’t work, narcotics were often prescribed.

The definitive surgical therapy—drastic, last resort, but 100% curative—is ovarian removal, but completely understandable why physicians would be reluctant to perform this on so young a woman.

We know that Rubens was first arrested for narcotics possession as early as 1919, so clearly she was using before she was given her first shot of morphine in 1923 as she claims.

Okay, addicts lie. They like to blame others for their addictions. No surprise there. But let’s give Alma the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was just partying like so many Hollywood starlets then and now, and only seriously got hooked later on.

Rubens blames only herself for becoming a “dope fiend.”

A weak, worldly girl, who hadn’t sufficient will power to cast aside the treacherous needle; the insiduous [sic] liquid, responsible for my loathesome [sic] yearning.

Shockingly frank about her frequent violence, Rubens stabs a physician with a pen knife as he attempts to treat her. When she comes home from a sanitarium, pretending that she’s cured, she snarls to her mother and Cortez: “You’re both fools. I’m still an addict. And now I’m going straight to hell.”

Rubens marches right into her bedroom and shoots up with narcotics she purchased from a corrupt sanitarium physician.

Talk about a full service treatment center.

The actress tracks down a black maid she recently fired for dishonesty from her Beverly Hills home. Rubens trades a $4,000 mink coat for a few day’s supply of dope. Rubens catches the look of perfect revenge on her former maid’s face as the exchange is finalized. Soon, Rubens is handing over expensive evening gowns, sable and ermine capes, silk lingerie and fine jewelry. Most of the time, Rubens sadly admits, she gets just enough narcotics to get through a few days.

Alma Rubens, studio portrait

There are wild, public incidents. Frequent violent outbursts. There’s a loud, drunken orgy in a hotel room. Court orders to have Rubens committed are filed by Ruben’s mother. Counter appeals are filed by Alma. At last, an ambulance pulls up to her ranch, Rubens is strapped into a strait jacket and whisked away for a “cure.” Before you know it Rubens escapes and hides away in a cheap hotel with a supply of dope, bathtub gin, and some bad boy junkie she picked up in Chinatown. Reporters from The New York Times—what, you expected The National Enquirer?—get wind of her addiction, and like jackals track her descent.

It’s a life so out of control that when she writes about the fist sized infected abscesses on her thighs, I literally shivered. Reading the memoir I had a hard time believing that this was taking place in the roaring twenties and not today, in the Hollywood Hills or Malibu.

Of course, like so many true confessions, much of what Alma writes is self-serving, and the reader has to pluck kernels of truth from some pretty sensational fiction cooked up by professional ghost writers anxious to sell a sordid yarn in order to boost newspaper circulation. But the core of the memoir reeks of truth—she’s a sad, desperate Hollywood type I fully recognize—and Rubens pulls no punches as she details a harrowing plunge into addiction and moral chaos.

Alma’s addiction became public knowledge in 1929 and film roles dried up. She played Julie in the 1929 part-talkie Show Boat. But really, it was all over. Her angelic looks were ravaged by drugs and hard-living.

In 1930 she was arrested in San Diego with narcotics found sewn in the lining of an evening gown. She had purchased the dope in Mexico and tried to smuggle it back into America. Rubens claimed that she was framed.

A few weeks later, Alma Rubens (February 19, 1897- January 22, 1931) died of drug-induced pneumonia. She was 33 years old.

Alma Rubens IMDb

The Madge Bellamy Acting Workshop

Robert J. Avrech — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:16:30 +0000

A few years ago, I was up in Toronto, on location for Within These Walls, a film the Academy Award winning actress Ellen Burstyn, acting as producer and star, asked me to write. Ellen, one of the great Hollywood actresses—past and present—discovered the true story and immediately realized its potential as a powerful and entertaining film. The challenge of playing a hardened murderess—redeemed by training dogs for the disabled—greatly appealed to Ms. Burstyn.

Silent Star Madge Bellamy

During the first week of production, one of the featured actresses—not Ellen—knocked on my hotel door and asked if she could discuss her role with me.

Of course I sat down with the actress—a recognized and respected talent—and we discussed her role, the character’s history, motivation, and dramatic arc. The actress relentlessly probed every single line of dialog. She challenged me to defend all the hard decisions I’d made in writing the character.

I kept saying:

“I think you do this because…”

“I think you feel this because…”

“I think the big turning point is when…”

The Actress kept saying:

“I feel that I do this because…”

“I feel that my character experiences this because…”

”I feel that my character…

I short: I was thinking and she was feeling.

The great liberal, conservative divide as applied to a film.

It was a long night, but because film is a collaborative craft, and because I respected the actress and she—I think—respected me, we each made concessions, and ultimately the character that emerges in this fine and touching film is richer, more complex than I originally imagined. The actress turned in a stupendous performance. After a few days of watching rushes, I took the actress aside and said:

“You’re making me look good.”

“Honey, I’m just doing my job,” she purred.

Which brings me to Madge Bellamy.

Madge Bellamy, studio publicity photo

A huge Hollywood star in the early 20’s, most of Bellamy’s early, silent work has been lost. But you can still see her in starring roles in John Ford’s Iron Horse (1924) and Maurice Tourneur’s Lorna Doon (1922). In the sound era, Madge’s most famous role is as Madeleine Parker, in White Zombie, with Bela Lugosi (1932), a cult classic.

Tragically, Madge was one of the most self-destructive Hollywood stars of all time. In a town where players excel at self-annihilating behavior, that’s quite a distinction. In 1943 Madge stalked and shot her former lover, Stanwood Murphy. The massive publicity and resulting scandal destroyed her already sputtering career. Regarding the shooting Madge said: “I only winged him, which is what I meant to do. Believe me, I’m a crack shot.”

Madge Bellamy, cover of Photoplay Magazine,
January, 1929

But for now, let’s leave scandal behind and focus on how Madge learned to act in motion pictures as revealed in a fascinating interview from Photoplay Magazine, Oct. 1927.

Madge had the unfortunate reputation of being a dumb actress—probably because she made a series of disastrous career choices and insulted so many powerful Hollywood moguls. She walked out of L.B. Mayer’s office just as he announced that he wanted to cast her in the starring role of his next film. Madge explained that Mayer didn’t stand up to greet her like a proper gentleman.

Big mistake.

However, as you can see from this excerpt, Madge Bellamy was bright and articulate. Unfortunately, then and now, beautiful women are often ruthlessly stripped of their brains by bright people who should know better.

“Acting,” for instance. “I always thought that acting was a question of emotions—that you felt a scene and played it as you felt it.”

“Well, I was wrong about that. Acting is a matter of intelligence and observation. You don’t have to feel an emotion to portray it. You must observe how other people express their emotions.”

“Mr. Dwan [Alan Dwan, the great, pioneering director] and I had an interesting conversation on the set this morning. I had been playing a sad scene and when I finished, Mr. Dwan asked me what I had been thinking about. And I told him I had been thinking about something sad. ‘Well,’ said Mr. Dwan, ‘you should have been thinking of the muscles of your face.’”

“Now I see what has been wrong with me. I have been trying to feel emotions and express them. I have never thought much about the technique; I simply wanted to be sincere. That was a mistake.”

“So I have been sitting here practicing with the muscles of my face. Look!” And Miss Bellamy drew here eyebrows. Instantly, the tears slowly rose to her eyes.

“See, I am crying and yet, I am not thinking of anything sad. It’s just a muscular reaction.”

Adoring crowds line up to see Madge Bellamy in Ankles Preferred (1927)

Madge Bellamy authored a fascinating if deeply eccentric autobiography, A Darling of the Twenties, published in 1989, a few months after her death. Silent film scholar Kevin Brownlow’s introduction is free of star-worship and highly informative. Unfortunately, new copies of the book are impossible to find, but used copies, usually cast-a-ways from public libraries, are readily available on the internet. Madge’s autobiography is filled with fascinating details of her years in early Hollywood, and illustrated with dozens of rare photos from Madge’s personal collection.