Silent Star Smackdown Round 2: Lon Chaney versus Douglas Fairbanks

Lon Chaney drops by the Pickfair mansion to press his argument with Douglas Fairbanks ...

Long Lost Cowboy Star Fred Thomson (And The Horse He Rode In On)

An Army chaplain by training, Fred Thomson had the face of a movie star and when he married the best friend of the most popular actress in America, his days as a minister were numbered.

A top amateur athlete who three times won national titles in track and field, Thomson was serving as a chaplain for the U.S. Army's 143rd Field Artillery Regiment during the First World War when he met "America's Sweetheart," Mary Pickford, and her best friend, screenwriter and war correspondent, Frances Marion. Marion was too good a writer to fob off the love-at-first-sight trope on her audience, but she tumbled for it in real life and she and Thomson were engaged ten days later.

The two waited until war's end to marry and then were joined on their honeymoon by Pickford and her new husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Thomson and Marion had envisioned a quiet trip around Europe but instead found themselves swarmed under by crowds of fans eager to see Pickford and Fairbanks. Marion later commented that she felt like the lady-in-waiting to a queen.

To make amends, Pickford allowed Marion to direct her next movie, The Love Light, and despite his lack of acting experience, cast Thomson as the leading man. Although the production was fraught with problems and marked the end of Marion's and Pickford's professional relationship (they remained personal friends), Thomson proved to have a natural screen presence and was quickly cast in additional movies.

Because of Thomson's athletic ability and his expertise with horses, he was cast primarily in Westerns. His co-star in many of his films was his horse, Silver King, which Thomson trained personally. By 1926, Thomson was the second biggest box office draw in Hollywood, behind only fellow Western star, Tom Mix.

Silver King, a white Palomino seventeen hands high, was probably more popular than either one of them. "He did all of the work," said Al Rogell, director of seven of Thomson's Westerns, "everything in the early pictures—the mouth work, the jumps, the chases, the falls, quick stops—and could untie knots, lift bars, etc. He could wink one eye, nod his head yes or no, push a person with his head. Fred trained him to do certain things and expected him to perform them."

In December 1928, Thomson stepped on a nail while working in his stables and contracted tetanus. He died on Christmas day, survived by his wife and two sons.

Only two of Thomson's thirty movies survive to the present day, the first one with Mary Pickford and a 1924 Western, Thundering Hoofs. After Thomson's death, his horse Silver King continued to work in movies, and according to the Internet Movie Database, made its final appearance in 1938's The Lone Ranger, the first movie serial featuring the masked lawman and his famous horse, "Silver."

Best Screenplay Of 1928-29: Frances Marion (The Wind)

From 1915 to 1933, two-time Oscar winner Frances Marion was the highest paid and most respected writer in Hollywood, earning $3000 a week at the height of the Great Depression, and shaping the screen images of some of Hollywood's greatest stars including Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler.

Born Marion Benson Owens, Frances Marion was the daughter of one of San Francisco's wealthiest families, hobnobbing with the likes of Jack London, but at the age of 27, she abandoned that life for Hollywood's fledgling film industry and its promise of opportunities denied women in other walks of life. Her beauty landed jobs as an actress and as a model but she disdained work in front of the camera, and sought jobs behind the scenes, first painting advertising posters for movie studios then writing for the movies themselves.

Eventually she became close friends with Mary Pickford (so close that she, Mary and their respective husbands, actors Fred Thomson and Douglas Fairbanks, honeymooned together) and Marion shaped Pickford's image as America's Sweetheart with screenplays for Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm, Stella Maris, Pollyanna and Amarilly Of Clothes-Line Alley.

Pickford's insistence that Marion write the screenplay for Poor Little Rich Girl over Cecil B. DeMille's objection may have led to the first instance of a star firing her director, but the result was so successful that Pickford forced the studio to renegotiate her contract, thereafter earning Pickford $10,000 a week, half of all her films' profits and complete creative control.

Screenwriters who could tell their stories through images were highly prized during the Silent Era and no writer was more prized than Frances Marion. In 1926, legendary producer Irving Thalberg approached Marion to adapt The Scarlet Letter to the screen for star Lillian Gish. Where other writers couldn't solve the problem of how to bring Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel to the screen, Marion hit upon a way to remain faithful to the story while giving Hester Pryne a modern woman's desire to make her own choices—inventing, for example, a scene of Hester admiring herself in a mirror hidden under a needlework sampler embroidered with an admonition against vanity.

The movie was such a success that Gish gathered the same cast and crew—actor Hans Larson, director Victor Sjöström, producer Thalberg and writer Marion—to adapt Dorothy Scarborough's novel The Wind for the screen. The result, a tale of repressed desire that explodes into violence, was the last great silent movie without Charlie Chaplin's name on it to emerge from Hollywood.

The difference between writing novels and writing movies is that movies are primarily visual: the screenwriter has to think of storytelling as a series of pictures that convey information. Snappy dialogue is a bonus but not a necessity, and, in fact, in a silent movie, dialogue (which required cutting away from the action to title cards) was not only not a bonus, it was a distraction.

That Frances Marion found a way to tell what is essentially a psychological story through images and action while only rarely falling back on dialogue and title cards is a testament to the skill that made her so sought-after during the Silent Era.

In this story, about a sheltered virgin, Letty (Gish), whose repressed desire slowly drives her insane in the forbidding environment of the frontier West, Marion establishes a visual pattern that links the ever-present danger of the Texas prairie's wind and sandstorms, where men are killed and wild horses driven mad, with the threat Letty's sexuality represents to herself and to the tight-knit social order she has invaded. The images are simple—she smiles at a man, she gets a face full of blowing sand; she lets her hair down and starts to undress on her wedding night, and the wind kicks up—but their repetition and juxtaposition with moments when Letty is about to indulge her desire establishes both in her mind and in the mind of the audience that sex represents danger and death.

The wind also traps the inhabitants of this land into close quarters and again through simple, easy to interpret images, Marion establishes that passion and seething paranoia is the natural result. In one comical bit, a couple comes into a town dance followed by a half dozen identically-dressed little girls, each a half head shorter than the one before, like a set of Russian nested dolls, a visual way of saying that in this godforsaken country where the wind blows 24 hours a day, sex is the only way of passing the time. In other scenes, the wife of Letty's step-brother becomes convinced Letty is there to supplant her and she gives Letty the choice of marrying a man she doesn't love or wander homeless.

The screenplay initially envisioned a dark ending where an insane Letty wanders into a sand storm to be consumed by the desert, but when studio heads saw the initial cut, they insisted on a happy ending. The cast and crew reluctantly shot a new ending but as it turned out, it didn't much matter. Audiences rapidly acquiring a taste for talkies weren't interested in silent movies anymore or, for that matter, Lillian Gish whom they regarded as a relic of a previous age. The movie bombed at the box office. Nevertheless, The Wind has gone on to be regarded as one of the greatest movies of the Silent Era and almost certainly the best movie of Lillian Gish's long career.

Despite the film's commercial failure, Marion's career soared. She adapted the screenplay for Greta Garbo's first talkie, Anna Christie, won an Oscar for her searing exposé of prison life, The Big House, won another Oscar for the Wallace Beery classic, The Champ, wrote Marie Dressler's Oscar-winning turn in Min and Bill, and scripted Dinner At Eight, which helped make Jean Harlow a star.

Her Oscar for The Big House was the first ever won by a woman in a non-acting category.

Her professional success, however, was balanced by personal tragedy. On Christmas Day, 1928, Marion's husband, Fred Thomson (who riding his horse, Silver King, became the biggest cowboy star of the Silent Era), died suddenly of tetanus, leaving Marion a widow raising two young sons.

In 1933, at the top of her creative and earning power, Marion formed the Screen Writers' Guild. In retaliation for her union-organizing activities, MGM dropped Marion's contract and when Thalberg died three years later, Marion's career in Hollywood was abruptly over.

It was a common end for many women in Hollywood during the Depression as the studios changed from wide-open try-anything enterprises, when half the screenwriters were women and there were more women directors than there are now, to factory-style boys-only clubs where women need not apply.

Marion abandoned Hollywood, turned to sculpting and painting and died in 1973 at the age of 84. All told, she wrote more than 160 movies and is still regarded as one of the greatest writers to ever work in Hollywood.

Note: When I mentioned to Katie-Bar-the-Door that I planned to give the award for best screenplay to Frances Marion, she reasonably asked whether Marion was related to General Francis Marion, a.k.a. "The Swamp Fox," who led American guerrilla forces against the British during the Revolutionary War. Disappointingly, as far as I can tell from my research, she was not, but if I turn up anything to the contrary, you'll be the first to know.

Cartoon Intira Sexy Actress and Model

Name: Intira Ketworasoontorn
Nickname: Cartoon
Profession: Actress and Model
Brithdate: 26 April 1987
Education: Rangsit University

Chompoo Araya A Hargett Thai's super sexy star.

Araya A Hargett is Thai's super sexy star. Fan club called her Chompoo. She was ranked 1st vote in 100 sexiest women 2007 from FHM Thai's edition. At this moment, many people like Araya A. Hargett, because she is famous Thai actresses.

Name : Araya Alberta Hargate
Nickname: Chompoo
Birthday : 28 June 1981
Nationality : Thai/British
Religion : Buddhist
Sibling : An Only Child
Height : 171 cm.
Weight : 47 kg. (104 lbs)
Hobby : Watching TV, Shopping and Reading
Best Friends : Tangmoe Pattaratida & Aimee Morokot
Favorite Star : Nok Chatchai & Mew Lalita
Favorite Color : Every Color
Favorite Fruit : Cherry & Mango
Education : Bodindecha School

Douglas Fairbanks Demands Equal Time

Striving always for balance in our coverage of the ongoing feud between silent film greats Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks, we here at the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards present a movie poster of the latter's nominated feature, The Iron Mask.

A Programming Note: Clara Bow On The Fox Movie Channel

Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, May 26, 2009) at 7:30 a.m., the Fox Movie Channel is showing one of Clara Bow's last talkies, Call Her Savage. It's not as good as her silent work, particularly It, Wings and Mantrap, but it's pretty good.

Sorry for the late heads-up, but I only just stumbled across this one.

Here's what Fox has to say about it:

CALL HER SAVAGE

Clara Bow delivers a passionate and sensual performance as Nasa Springer, a young girl with Indian blood who lives a stormy rebellious life.

Cast: Clara Bow, Gilbert Roland, Thelma Todd, John Francis Dillon

Director: John Francis Dillon

The Katie Award Nominees For 1928-29

If the Academy was in the ballpark the first year it handed out Oscars, it completely blew it the next. This year the winners were chosen by a five-member panel—The Central Board of Judges—and while the previous year's smoke-filled room used the awards to settle scores and promote their own interests, at least they felt the need to pretend they were motivated by artistic concerns. This year the panel seemed interested only in handing out awards to the Academy's founders and the man who hand-picked them for the job, Louis B. Mayer.

It was not until the following year that the full membership of the Academy voted on the awards.

The Broadway Melody is one of the weakest best picture winners ever, and that's saying something. It's the story of two sisters who go to New York and fall for the same guy. As musicals go, it did feature the classic title tune, but the story is trite and the acting, especially among the supporting cast, is too awful to be believed.

At least the Board of Judges made Mayer happy—it was his studio, MGM, that produced The Broadway Melody.

Another two of the top awards went to co-founders of the Academy. Mary Pickford, who won the Katie as best actress in 1927-28, took home the best actress trophy for her first talkie, Coquette. Audiences flocked to see "America's Sweetheart" talk for the first time but critics reviled her performance and only the first Oscar campaign in history secured the award.

Likewise, best director Frank Lloyd, who won for the dull and overly-long The Divine Lady, was one of the founding members of the Academy and his win raised eyebrows among the press.

As for the best actor winner, I encourage you to go to Turner Classic Movies and watch some clips of Warner Baxter's performance as the Cisco Kid from In Old Arizona. If your head doesn't explode, you're made of sterner stuff than I am. Check out the clip entitled "Ham and Eggs." Ostensibly, the ham refers to the Kid's breakfast, but don't you believe it.

Two of the Academy's choices, best screenplay winner, The Patriot, an Ernst Lubitsch movie which also provided a best actor nominee, and The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, which earned MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons the first of eleven Oscars (he was nominated thirty-nine times), have both been lost. That is, unfortunately, an all too common story when it comes to the early history of motion pictures—Hollywood took no care when it came to preserving these early films and let thousands of movies deteriorate or vanish altogether. Aside from losing irreplaceable works of art, Hollywood's negligence makes my task of handing out coveted Katie awards all the more difficult. They have a lot to answer for.

Hopefully, this round of Katie awards will improve on the Academy's choices. At least I don't owe Louis B. Mayer anything.

The nominees for the 1928-29 Katie Awards are:

PICTURE:
The Cameraman (prod. Buster Keaton)
The Docks Of New York (prod. J.G. Bachmann)
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (prod. Société générale des films)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck)
The Wind (prod. Victor Sjöström)

ACTOR:
George Bancroft (The Docks Of New York)
Douglas Fairbanks (The Iron Mask)
Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)
Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March)

ACTRESS:
Marion Davies (Show People)
Maria Falconetti (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Lillian Gish (The Wind)
Bessie Love (The Broadway Melody)

DIRECTOR:
Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou)
Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Victor Sjöström (The Wind)

SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Wallace Beery (Beggars Of Life)
Lewis Stone (A Woman Of Affairs)
Ernest Torrence (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Olga Baclanova (The Docks Of New York)
Mary Nolan (West Of Zanzibar)
Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters)

SCREENPLAY:
Jules Furthman; story by John Monk Saunders (The Docks Of New York)
Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)
Frances Marion (The Wind)

I'll start handing out Katies a couple of days from now, beginning with Best Screenplay ...

The Must-See Movies Of 1927-28

Director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has called 1928 the greatest year in the history of movies, which is definitely saying something. If we expand the time frame a bit to include both 1927 and 1928, I will agree that he's on to something.

Between January 1, 1927 and the end of 1928, more than a dozen films were released which might reasonably make a list of the best movies ever made, including The General, Metropolis, Napoleon (released too early in 1927 to qualify for this year's Katies), Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, The Crowd, The Man Who Laughs, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, The Circus, Wings; Laugh, Clown, Laugh and a handful of late 1928 releases, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, The Wind, The Cameraman, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Docks Of New York and The Wedding March (eligible for next year's Katies). Greta Garbo was never more popular, Gloria Swanson was still doing great work, Emil Jannings hadn't joined the Nazi party. Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish gave the best performances of their careers. Directors Murnau, Chaplin, Keaton, Lang and Dreyer were at or near their peaks, and Lubitsch was emerging as the next great director. Movie audiences wouldn't see such an outpouring of quality again until 1939, the year most film historians fix as the best ever, and it's clear, at least in retrospect, that silent movies had reached their highest ever level of artistic achievement and were poised for even greater breakthroughs.

And yet, once The Jazz Singer hit theaters, studios couldn't pay audiences to see anything but talkies. Silent movies were better than ever but for the audiences of the time, they might as well have never been made. It's as if the "Mona Lisa" were hanging in Louvre unseen while art lovers rushed past it to crowd around a McDonald's placemat.

There wouldn't again be such a disconnect between quality and box office receipts until the present age.

Commercially speaking—in the long run, the only language Hollywood speaks—silent movies were dead and there was no going back.

Unfortunately, the new sound technology was primitive, relying on large, immobile cameras and unreliable microphones that glued actors in place and returned movies to that place from whence they had just escaped, the stage-bound theater. It took about five years for sound technology to become workable enough for directors to move the camera again and more than a decade for Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland to remember that they could.

In the meantime, in case you need reminding, this is my list of movies that I consider the must-see movies of 1927-28. Unlike my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On, not all of these movies are equally accessible to a viewer unfamiliar with silent movies, but I do believe every one of them is worth the time and effort is you are so inclined.

The Circus—Charlie Chaplin's comedy of a tramp who finds love and work in the circus

The Crowd—King Vidor's gritty tale of the American Dream turned nightmare

Laugh, Clown, Laugh—Lon Chaney as a man destroyed by love

The Man Who Laughs—a macabre love story about a man with a face that inspired Heath Ledger's Joker

The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—a bittersweet romantic comedy about a prince who falls for a commoner

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans—my pick for the best movie of the year, about a marriage in crisis

Wings—a rip-snorting war picture about World War I flying aces and the girl they left behind

All but two of these movies, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg and Wings, are available on DVD.

You might also check out Sadie Thompson, the 1928 Gloria Swanson-Lionel Barrymore movie based on Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain." Time hasn't been kind to the print and the last reel has been lost, but film historians reconstructed the ending with the use of still photographs and what remains is very good. Sadie Thompson earned Swanson an Oscar nomination, the first of three, and might have earned her and Barrymore (the latter in a supporting role) Katies for their work if I could have been more certain of what I was seeing. Sadie Thompson is available on DVD.

What can I tell you? This whole business of handing out awards, even with eighty years of hindsight, is a frustratingly subjective business. It only gets worse the closer to the present we get.

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