[To read part one of this essay, click here. To read part two, click here.]
The First Film Stars ● The first international movie star was Max Linder, a French comedian not just in the style of Charlie Chaplin but the guy Chaplin was often imitating early in his career, a fact Chaplin himself freely acknowledged. Born to a family of vintners in the Bordeaux region of France, Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle joined a troupe of actors touring France. In Paris, he discovered motion pictures and signed with Pathé in 1905, changing his name at the same time. He made over two hundred movies in his career, most as the recurring character "Max," an upper class roué who is a bit baffled by practical matters.
Linder wrote and directed his own films and in the years before World War I, he was the biggest star in Europe.
Unlike most of the comics of this era, Linder largely eschewed the slapstick style of Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies in favor of gesture and reaction; and as film historian David Thomson points out, "there was little of the sentimentality that American comedians resorted to." In this short Max reprend sa liberté (a.k.a. Troubles of a Grasswidower) (1912), you can see shades of Chaplin, the Three Stooges and Lucille Ball:
His career came to a virtual end during World War I after he was injured by mustard gas while serving as a dispatch driver in the French army. He never fully recovered and although he later made films at Chaplin's United Artists, he never again regained his audience. In 1925, he and his wife killed themselves as part of a suicide pact.
● Internationally, the best known actress was Asta Nielsen. Though born in Denmark, Nielsen made most of her films in Germany where she was known simply as "Die Asta" (The Asta). Film critic Lotte Eisner called her acting "intensely modern" and the "ideal" of European intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s. It was also, for its time, intensely erotic, and thanks to the heavy hand of American censors, largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless, her "exceptionally unmannered" style of acting (David Thomson) influenced the generation of performers who followed her. Her best known films now are Afgruden (a.k.a. The Woman Always Pays), Hamlet and Joyless Street, in which she co-starred with a young Swedish actress making one of her first films.
"The woman who taught me everything I know," Greta Garbo said later, "was Asta Nielsen."
Nielsen's version of Hamlet, produced by a film company she formed specifically for that purpose, is unusual in that not only does she play the title role, but she plays Hamlet as a woman disguised as a man. She abandoned movies with the advent of sound and returned to the stage in 1927. She died in 1972 at the age of 90.
● In America, actors—and everybody else, for that matter—toiled in virtual anonymity for most of this era. Growing up in an age when a film's closing titles last seven minutes and even the caterer gets a credit, film fans now may find it hard to believe that a hundred years ago nobody got a credit—not the director, not the producer, and certainly not the actors—just the name of the studio and the film's title, that was it. As crazy as that sounds now, the studios believed that by keeping the cast and crew anonymous, they would remain interchangeable and underpaid.
And the strategy worked for a while. The only problem was, audiences weren't stupid; they knew who they liked and even if they didn't know the names, they knew the faces and clamored for more movies by, for example, "the Vitagraph Girl." And even though exhibitors couldn't advertise actors by name—they didn't know them either—they could, say, put a cardboard cutout of Charlie Chaplin's readily identifiable Tramp character in front of the box office whenever one of his films was playing.
The first American actress known by name (other than those already known from another medium) was Florence Lawrence. Known for years as "the Biograph Girl," Lawrence signed with the rival Independent Moving Pictures Company—"IMP" for short. In March 1910, to promote the new "IMP Girl," studio founder Carl Laemmle concocted a publicity stunt, first planting stories that Lawrence had been killed in a streetcar accident in New York, then buying up advertising refuting the story. "We nail a lie!" the ad boasted. Lawrence made a personal appearance in St. Louis to prove she was alive and well and within days, she was a household name.
To counter the publicity, Vitagraph began promoting its own star, Florence Turner, by name as well. The star system was born.
Sadly, Lawrence was badly burned in a studio fire in 1915 and her star quickly faded. Five years later, her husband died and two subsequent marriage failed. In 1938, reduced to bit parts at $75 a film and suffering from myelofibrosis, Lawrence committed suicide.
In terms of stardom, Lawrence's counterpart, Florence Turner, fared little better. She moved to London in 1913 and formed her own production company, which produced some thirty short films, but her career went into eclipse during the war and she returned to America to work mostly in bit parts at MGM. She died a virtual unknown in 1946.
● Although credited as the first American movie stars, Lawrence and Turner were soon eclipsed by "Little Mary"—better known now as Mary Pickford. Pickford was born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto and began acting on the stage at the age of seven. Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York and changed her name to Mary Pickford, and while she did land a few parts, by 1909 she was desperate for work and auditioned for a role in a D.W. Griffith film, Pippa Passes. Although she didn't get the part, Griffith offered her a contract at $10 a day with a guarantee of $40 a week —double the going rate. She made fifty-one movies that year alone.
Although like everyone else she remained anonymous on screen, audiences were immediately taken with her and theater owners began to bill her as "The Girl with the Golden Curls." By 1912, she abandoned the stage altogether. In 1914, by that time working for Adolph Zukor at Lasky's Famous Players (later Paramount), Pickford's name for the first time appeared above the title of a film, Hearts Adrift. Her next film, Tess of the Storm Country, was one of the most popular of the year and made Pickford an international star. (The film is preserved in the National Film Registry.)
Pickford later co-founded United Artists with husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, and won an Oscar for her performance in the 1929 film Coquette. At her zenith, Pickford's power and popularity was greater than that of any actress before or since. I'll be writing about her again. In the meantime, you can read a bit more about her here.
● Once Mary Pickford left Biograph, D.W. Griffith found his ideal leading lady in Lillian Gish. Born in Ohio in 1893, Gish's father abandoned the family when Lillian was still a child. Her mother took up acting to support herself and Gish and her younger sister, Dorothy, joined acting troupes early, including a stint with Sarah Bernhardt in New York. Eventually, Mary Pickford introduced the Gish sisters to D.W. Griffith and they made their film debut in the short drama An Unseen Enemy in 1912.
Gish quickly established herself as one of the finest actresses in film and made forty-five movies before her starring role in 1915's The Birth of a Nation. In Griffith's 1913 melodrama The Mothering Heart -- about a wife abandoned to raise her child alone -- she displayed a gift for conveying pain, particularly of the long-suffering variety, and thereafter her best work, such as Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East, mined that vein. Gish fit Griffith's notion of the ideal Victorian maiden, and she largely played that role on screen and off for the rest of her life, even after parting company with Griffith in 1921.
Dorothy Gish was five years Lillian's junior and was as different from her older sister as two people who nevertheless remained close could be. Whereas Lillian was a serious-minded tragedian, Dorothy was a flirtatious cut-up so adept at comedy that Paramount Pictures once offered her a million dollars to make a series of comedy features. "At my age," she said, turning down the offer, "all that money would ruin my character."
Although Dorothy actually made more movies during these early years than her older sister, she didn't really achieve a breakthrough until 1918 in Griffith's war picture, Hearts of the World, in which she played a small comedic part in an otherwise grim drama. After that she specialized in comedic roles. Still, her best performance was as a blind foundling threatened by the turmoil of the French Revolution in Griffith's last commercial success, Orphans of the Storm (1921).
After watching her sister in a rare leading role, Lillian exclaimed, "Why, Dorothy is good; she's almost as good as I am!"
Dorothy continued to work throughout the silent era, then returned to the stage when talkies came in. With the exception of a handful of television appearances in the 1950s, she remained on the stage for the rest of her life.
More about the Gish sisters when I hit the early 1920s.
Some of these you've heard of. The others, I will (may) be writing about in turn. Just another friendly blog filler to keep you amused as I research old movies.
Max Linder Asta Nielsen Florence Lawrence Florence Turner Mary Pickford Lillian Gish Roscoe Arbuckle Mabel Normand Charles Chaplin
The numbers are in on the latest Monkey Poll and the results were decidedly mixed. In answer to the question "Of the previous winners of the Katie-Bar-The-Door award for best actress in a lead role, who is your favorite?" 10 of you chose silent film star Louise Brooks, while 8 each went for Lillian Gish and Marlene Dietrich. The always controversial "Queen of MGM," Norma Shearer, picked up 7 solid votes, while "America's Sweetheart," Mary Pickford, polled 5.
In a way I wasn't surprised that Brooksie won, albeit narrowly. Of the five choices, her face is the most famous, even among people who have no idea who she was or what she did. I was in a bookstore the other day, for example, and saw her image on the cover a magazine that had nothing to do with movies whatsoever. And last Christmas, I bought a pair of earrings for Katie-Bar-The-Door from a salesclerk wearing a Louise Brooks bob. Not to mention a new edition of The Diary Of A Lost Girl prepared by film historian Thomas Gladysz, the host of the Louise Brooks Society, the best site devoted to all things Brooks.
Louise Brooks is hot, in more ways than one. Pretty good for an actress who appeared in only 23 movies, with frankly no more than half a dozen worth talking about.
"A well dressed woman, even though her purse is painfully empty," she once said, "can conquer the world." And conquer the world she did. Just not in her lifetime.
I've written about Louise Brooks extensively here.
I've got a few posts in the works, including the award for best director of a drama (1932-33) and best actress in a comedy or a musical (also 1932-33).
In the meantime, how about a new Monkey poll? Of the previous winners of the Katie-Bar-The-Door award for best actress in a lead role, who is your favorite?
Mary Pickford Lillian Gish Louise Brooks Marlene Dietrich Norma Shearer Remember: there are no wrong answers, just movies you haven't seen yet.
As part of an ongoing side project to learn more about the Silent Era even as I continue to move forward with this blog, I tracked down a mid-period Lillian Gish movie, True Heart Susie from 1919, and wanted to share a couple of thoughts on the subject.
One of a series of inexpensive rural pictures directed by D.W. Griffith aimed at recouping the losses he suffered when the enormously expensive Intolerance failed to catch the same lightning in the box-office bottle that The Birth of a Nation, True Heart Susie is the story of a long-suffering and true-hearted country girl (Gish) who loses her childhood sweetheart to a "painted and powdered" city girl, only to win him back at the end when the city girl suffers a timely bout of pneumonia.
And when I say "painted and powdered," I'm not saying the city girl is a hooker or even a flapper, I'm saying she uses (gasp!) cosmetics and prefers the lively company of her friends to cooking, cleaning and gazing in adoring silence at one of the dullest leading men in movie history, Robert Harron (who at twenty-seven was at the tail end of a 220-film career that would end in suicide the following year).
It's a rather slight comedy that hinges mostly on Gish's ability to make befuddled self-delusion and virginal reticence charming, and I have to say it's not one of Gish's or Griffith's best. Griffith was a reactionary in the classic sense of the word—wanting to dial the clock back to an earlier time, in this case the 19th century Kentucky of his birth, a bit of problem since by then even Kentucky had moved on. He took the morals of his tales seriously, but increasingly his audiences didn't, and before you say, yes, but it was ninety years ago, what do you expect, I'd remind you that Picasso was already two years into his Cubist phase, Robert Weine was in Germany filming the groundbreaking Expressionist film, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was just a year away from publishing This Side Of Paradise. World War I was over and like it or not, the 19th century had been washed away in rivers of blood, never to be seen again.
Washed away with it was a public taste for black-and-white morality tales about the ordeals of Victorian virgins and once Gish left Griffith's employ to pursue more complex roles, audience quickly came to regard Griffith's movies as fusty relics of a more agrarian, pre-war age. The passage of another two years would mark the last commercial and critical success of Griffith's career.
True Heart Susie is worth seeing, though, beyond the curiosity factor that attaches itself to any work of Lillian Gish, for the supporting work of Clarine Seymour as the city girl.
Seymour was a young actress in Griffith's stable, having first started working in movies at the age of eighteen for the Thanhouse Film Company in New Rochelle. A year later she made a successful screen test for Griffith and moved to Los Angeles. She received good reviews in the few pictures she appeared in, landed the lead in The Idol Dancer (1920) and started working in Way Down East, one of Griffith's last great movies, when (according to Gish, who was there) she died of exposure filming one of the film's winter scene in near arctic conditions. Mary Hay replaced her, filming went on and Seymour's burgeoning fame was buried with her. She was just twenty-one and has largely been forgotten today, I'm sorry to say.
I saw this movie as a download from Netflix—the second reason I'm writing this post. This whole download thing (which computer wiz Katie-Bar-The-Door set up for the hapless Monkey) is a real boon to movie nuts such as myself. For a minimal subscription price (roughly $10 a month), you can stream at no extra charge hundreds of movies directly to your computer (or if you have the right equipment, to your television).
At a time when hundreds of Blockbusters are closing and Warner Home Video is changing its business model (selling most of their film library now on a mail order on-demand basis rather than spending speculative up-front money to stock store shelves), it's clear that the industry at least believes streaming and downloading is the future of movie viewing and that soon enough we'll one day look at all our DVDs the same way we look at those VHS tapes lining the shelves in the basement, as candidates for a landfill.
Which makes me wonder whether Blu-Ray won the format wars just in time to become the moral equivalent of a nuclear-powered buggy whip—both state of the art and obsolete at the same time.
Not that I'll stop collecting DVDs and Blu-Rays in the meantime. You think I'm going to stop watching movies for the next five years just because the dawn of the download age is upon us? Not a chance.
In honor of her birthday on Monday (November 9, 2009), Turner Classic Movies is showing Marie Dressler movies from 6 in the morning until 8 at night. They include her Oscar-winning turn in Min and Bill, her Oscar-nominated performance in Emma and Tillie's Punctured Romance from way back in 1914. Directed by comedy legend Mack Sennett, Tillie's Punctured Romance marks a couple of significant firsts—it was the first feature-length comedy ever produced and after years on the Broadway stage, was Marie Dressler's first Hollywood movie.
It may also have been the first performance by a very young Milton Berle in the role of a newsboy who gets slapped. Anyway, he said it was, but no one remembered him—he was only six years old—and no studio records exist to confirm his claim.
Tillie also marked a significant last: other than cameos, it was the last time Charles Chaplin appeared in a movie he didn't direct.
You might also check out The Patsy to see Marion Davies in her prime. Remem- bered now as William Randolph Hearst's mistress, skewered unmercifully in Citizen Kane as the no-talent "singer" Susan Alexander, Davies was actually a deft comic actress (I really recommend you track down Show People as well).
There are a lot of other name acts here as well—Mabel Normand, Bessie Love, Charles King, Jack Benny (in his first movie), Rudy Vallee, William Haines, Leila Hyams, Polly Moran, Wallace Beery, Jean Hersholt, Myrna Loy, Marjorie Rambeau.
Why, there's even Lillian Gish in a comedy.
Nothing but the best for Marie Dressler who was the biggest star in Hollywood during the Early Sound Era. Check it out.
Here's the schedule from TCM's website (as always times are Eastern Standard Time):
6:00am [Silent] Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) In this silent film, a con man dupes a wealthy country girl into marriage. Cast: Marie Dressler, Charles Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Charles Bennett Dir: Mack Sennett BW-72 mins
7:15am [Silent] Patsy, The (1928) In this silent film, a romantic young woman falls for her sister's fiancé, then discovers her sister is cheating on him. Cast: Marion Davies, Orville Caldwell, Marie Dressler, Dell Henderson Dir: King Vidor BW-77 mins
8:45am [Musical] Chasing Rainbows (1929) Musical performers fall in love while rehearsing for the big show. Cast: Bessie Love, Charles King, Jack Benny, George K. Arthur Dir: Charles F. Reisner BW-86 mins
10:15am [Romance] Divine Lady, The (1929) Lady Hamilton's love affair with Admiral Nelson rocks the British Empire. Cast: Corinne Griffith, Victor Varconi, H. B. Warner, Ian Keith Dir: Frank Lloyd BW-99 mins
12:00pm [Musical] Vagabond Lover, The (1929) A small-town boy finds fame and romance when he joins a dance band. Cast: Rudy Vallee, Sally Blane, Marie Dressler, Charles Sellon Dir: Marshall Neilan BW-65 mins
1:15pm [Romance] Girl Said No, The (1930) A college sports star surprises everyone with his money-making schemes. Cast: William Haines, Leila Hyams, Polly Moran, Marie Dressler Dir: Sam Wood BW-92 mins
3:00pm [Drama] Min And Bill (1930) Two crusty waterfront characters try to protect their daughter from a terrible secret. Cast: Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, Dorothy Jordan, Marjorie Rambeau Dir: George Hill BW-66 mins
4:15pm [Comedy] One Romantic Night (1930) A princess engaged to a prince falls for her brother's tutor. Cast: Lillian Gish, Rod La Rocque, Conrad Nagel, Marie Dressler Dir: Paul L. Stein BW-72 mins
5:30pm [Drama] Politics (1931) Two women take on small-town racketeers. Cast: Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, Rosco Ates, Karen Morley Dir: Charles F. Riesner BW-73 mins
6:45pm [Drama] Emma (1932) A housekeeper faces unexpected snobbery when she marries her boss. Cast: Marie Dressler, Richard Cromwell, Jean Hersholt, Myrna Loy Dir: Clarence Brown BW-72 mins
Found this on Chained and Perfumed, Charlie Parker's featured blog of the month. That's Lillian Gish on the set of The Wind. To create the endless sandstorms that are central to the plot, Gish and director Victor Sjöström flew eight airplanes to the middle of the Mojave Desert and cranked their propellers up on high. Coupled with 120ºF temperatures that cooked metal surfaces and warped film stock, it was a pretty miserable experience.
Great movie though.
I've written about Lillian Gish before and I won't reiterate it all here except to say that she was the best actress of the Silent Era and though she most often played shy, virginal victims, she was actually one tough cookie who took complete control of her career in the early '20s and crafted some of the best movies of the age. As screenwriter Frances Marion put it, "She might look fragile, but physically and spiritually she was as fragile as a steel rod. Nobody could sway her from her self-appointed course. With a Botticelli face, she had the mind of a good Queen Bess, dictating her carefully thought-out policies and ruling justly, if firmly."
Hmm, now that I think about, Lillian Gish sounds a lot like Katie-Bar-The-Door. And you wonder why I like her so much ...
Jen of both Silent Stanzas and Flappers and Flickers (I can barely write one blog, she writes two, both about the silent movie era) stopped by earlier today to say, "There can never be enough Brooksie!" Yer durn tootin', Jen!
In her honor, I am adapting a variant of a meme floating around the movie blogosphere ("meme"—I'm not even sure what that is unless it's plural and has the word "screaming" in front of it): Twenty Favorite Movie Subjects I Have Previously Mentioned In My Blog So Far.
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford
Frances Marion (the Silent Era's best screenwriter)
German Expressionism (here, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
Charles Chaplin
Lillian Gish
Buster Keaton
Greta Garbo
Harold Lloyd
Lon Chaney
Clara Bow
The Joan Crawford/Anita Page Flapper Trilogy (throw in Dorothy Sebastian on the left and you've got the cast of Our Dancing Daughters)
● The first international movie star was Max Linder, a French comedian not just in the style of Charlie Chaplin but the guy Chaplin was often imitating early in his career, a fact Chaplin himself freely acknowledged. Born to a family of vintners in the Bordeaux region of France, Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle joined a troupe of actors touring France. In Paris, he discovered motion pictures and signed with Pathé in 1905, changing his name at the same time. He made over two hundred movies in his career, most as the recurring character "Max," an upper class roué who is a bit baffled by practical matters.
● Internationally, the best known actress was Asta Nielsen. Though born in Denmark, Nielsen made most of her films in Germany where she was known simply as "Die Asta" (The Asta). Film critic Lotte Eisner called her acting "intensely modern" and the "ideal" of European intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s. It was also, for its time, intensely erotic, and thanks to the heavy hand of American censors, largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
"The woman who taught me everything I know," Greta Garbo said later, "was Asta Nielsen."
And the strategy worked for a while. The only problem was, audiences weren't stupid; they knew who they liked and even if they didn't know the names, they knew the faces and clamored for more movies by, for example, "the Vitagraph Girl." And even though exhibitors couldn't advertise actors by name—they didn't know them either—they could, say, put a cardboard cutout of Charlie Chaplin's readily identifiable Tramp character in front of the box office whenever one of his films was playing.
The first American actress known by name (other than those already known from another medium) was Florence Lawrence. Known for years as "the Biograph Girl," Lawrence signed with the rival Independent Moving Pictures Company—"IMP" for short. In March 1910, to promote the new "IMP Girl," studio founder Carl Laemmle concocted a publicity stunt, first planting stories that Lawrence had been killed in a streetcar accident in New York, then buying up advertising refuting the story. "We nail a lie!" the ad boasted. Lawrence made a personal appearance in St. Louis to prove she was alive and well and within days, she was a household name.
In terms of stardom, Lawrence's counterpart, Florence Turner, fared little better. She moved to London in 1913 and formed her own production company, which produced some thirty short films, but her career went into eclipse during the war and she returned to America to work mostly in bit parts at MGM. She died a virtual unknown in 1946.
Although like everyone else she remained anonymous on screen, audiences were immediately taken with her and theater owners began to bill her as "The Girl with the Golden Curls." By 1912, she abandoned the stage altogether. In 1914, by that time working for Adolph Zukor at Lasky's Famous Players (later Paramount), Pickford's name for the first time appeared above the title of a film, Hearts Adrift. Her next film, Tess of the Storm Country, was one of the most popular of the year and made Pickford an international star. (The film is preserved in the National Film Registry.)
Gish quickly established herself as one of the finest actresses in film and made forty-five movies before her starring role in 1915's The Birth of a Nation. In Griffith's 1913 melodrama The Mothering Heart -- about a wife abandoned to raise her child alone -- she displayed a gift for conveying pain, particularly of the long-suffering variety, and thereafter her best work, such as Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East, mined that vein. Gish fit Griffith's notion of the ideal Victorian maiden, and she largely played that role on screen and off for the rest of her life, even after parting company with Griffith in 1921.
Dorothy Gish was five years Lillian's junior and was as different from her older sister as two people who nevertheless remained close could be. Whereas Lillian was a serious-minded tragedian, Dorothy was a flirtatious cut-up so adept at comedy that Paramount Pictures once offered her a million dollars to make a series of comedy features. "At my age," she said, turning down the offer, "all that money would ruin my character."
After watching her sister in a rare leading role, Lillian exclaimed, "Why, Dorothy is good; she's almost as good as I am!"
