Short answer: Nope. Dead as a doornail since 101 years ago last month.

See, I can make that joke because Virginia Rappe has been dead that long, and everybody who knew her, and who might take offense at my flippancy, has followed her into that undiscovered country from which no traveler returns.

But what about when this article was published in the December 1921 issue of Screenland Magazine? When it hit the stands in November, Virginia was only two months in her grave. Did anybody in the Screenland offices, or any of her friends and acquaintances in Los Angeles, Chicago (where she was born in 1891) or San Francisco (where she lived during 1916 before moving south) — did any of them detect the tone of morbid humor in that title and cry, “Too soon! Too soon!”?

I probably don’t need to explain to most Cinedrome readers who Virginia Rappe was, but just in case, here’s a quick rundown. Born Virginia Rapp in 1891 in Chicago, her mother died when she was 11, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother (Virginia, born out of wedlock, had her mother’s surname; her biological father, allegedly a prominent and married Chicago socialite, was never in the picture). As a teenager she found work as an artist’s model, and that appears to be when she added the sounded “e” at the end of her name for an exotic touch (she also sometimes went by Virginia Rappae). It was modeling that led her to move to San Francisco, where she not only earned a comfortable living, but became engaged to a dress designer named Robert Moscovitz — until he was killed in a streetcar accident. An opportunity to enter moving pictures took her to Los Angeles, where she landed occasional work while living with — and reputedly being engaged to — producer/director Henry Lehrman. Some stories also have her living in New York for a while and gallivanting around Europe at some time or other. Maybe so.

Anyhow, it all ended for Virginia three weeks after the release of her last picture, the comedy short The Misfit Pair, when she attended a Labor Day 1921 party in the suite of superstar Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. In the ever-present defiance of Prohibition, liquor flowed freely, and exactly what happened at the party has never been clear, probably not even in the booze-fogged memories of several who were there and later testified. What is known for sure is that sometime around 3:00 p.m. that Monday, Virginia became violently ill and began tearing at her clothes. Several of those present tried to soothe her with various home remedies, and finally the hotel doctor was summoned. He diagnosed a case of extreme intoxication, and he — or maybe somebody else; like so much of the story, that detail isn’t clear — administered a shot of morphine for her pain. She was moved to another room at Arbuckle’s expense; assured that she would be all right in a day or two, Arbuckle checked out on Tuesday and went home to Hollywood. This picture of the party suite offers mute testimony that today’s hotel-trashing rock musicians have nothing on partying Prohibition movie stars — although to be fair, we don’t know who took the picture, or when, or whether any of the damage happened after the party broke up.

Virginia, alas, did not get better. By Thursday she had been hospitalized at the private Wakefield Sanitarium in San Francisco, and by Friday she was dead, age 30, done in by a ruptured bladder and resulting peritonitis (a serious killer in those pre-antibiotic days). It later came out that Virginia had suffered from a chronic bladder condition since at least 1913, possibly — though not necessarily — from one or more illegal abortions she had undergone over the years.

So much for the undisputed facts. At this point, two real-piece-of-work characters enter the story — three, if you count William Randolph Hearst, who sensationalized the case as a way of exploiting Hollywood’s “immorality” while diverting attention from his own relationship with Marion Davies. The first piece of work was a woman named Bambina “Maude” Delmont, who came to the party with Virginia. Early on, already drunk, she disappeared into a bedroom with Arbuckle’s suite-mate Lowell Sherman, locking the door. She didn’t emerge until after Virginia fell ill, but then she stayed with her to the end, after which she swore out a complaint accusing Arbuckle of raping and murdering Virginia.

The second was San Francisco District Attorney Matthew A. Brady. Intensely — even unscrupulously — ambitious, Brady believed he could ride the Arbuckle case all the way to the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento. Early on, he hit a few snags. For one thing, a post-mortem examination of poor Virginia by doctors at the sanitarium was inconclusive as to whether she had been assaulted, physically or sexually. Worse, Maude Delmont, Brady’s accusing witness, had testified before the San Francisco Coroner’s Court, leading to Arbuckle’s indictment, but she was useless as a trial witness. She had a police record for prostitution, extortion and blackmail, running “the old Badger Game”, setting up marks (the more famous the better) in compromising situations, then shaking them down to keep the story quiet. She had even wired two lawyers in L.A. and San Diego as soon as Virginia died, crowing that she had Arbuckle “in a hole here[,] chance to make some money out of him”.  Brady was in a spot; in those days, police and prosecutors didn’t feel the need to use words like “suspect”, “alleged” or “accused” when discussing cases, and he had shot his big mouth off about Arbuckle’s guilt; he couldn’t back down now. While he didn’t hesitate to bully witnesses, suborn perjury, and even — perhaps — falsify fingerprint evidence, he didn’t dare put Delmont on the stand; her background was too unsavory, and there were too many discrepancies between the complaint she’d sworn out with the cops and the one time she did testify at the coroner’s inquest. Brady knew she wouldn’t last five minutes under cross-examination.

Incredible as it sounds to us today, when high-profile trials can drag on for years, even decades, Arbuckle stood trial three times between November 1921 and April ’22. After two hung juries, the third jury deliberated six minutes before acquitting him — five of which were spent drafting an unprecedented apology that he had ever been charged in the first place. Nonetheless, Arbuckle’s career was wrecked. Like later blacklisted celebrities, he eked out a living off-screen under an alias throughout the ’20s, and he was on the verge  of a comeback in 1933 when a heart attack carried him off in his sleep at 46. (On a side note, the scoundrel Brady’s career didn’t exactly flourish. He stalled out at D.A. of San Francisco, the poster boy for malicious prosecution and misconduct. In a delicious irony, he never made it to the Governor’s Mansion, but the man who finally unseated him in 1943, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, did.)

So there, in a hasty six paragraphs, is a summary of why Virginia Rappe’s name was a headline in the December 1921 issue of Screenland Magazine: “Is Virginia Rappe Still Alive?” Beyond that, I’m not going to rehash the case here; it’s fascinating but way too complicated, fascinating and complicated enough to have provided fodder for several books; go to Amazon and run a search in Books for “Fatty Arbuckle Case” and you’ll find several examples (I can personally recommend The Day the Laughter Stopped by David Yallop [1976]; it’s out of print but still available used or on Kindle. Others, more recent, look interesting, but I haven’t read them). My subject today isn’t the case, but the Screenland article, illustrating as it does a peculiar intersection of spiritualism, yellow journalism, and celebrity culture.

Here, just to show that it was a headline inside and out, is the cover of that issue of Screenland, featuring that same question about Virginia’s survival that spreads across pp. 20-21 inside. The question, which hit the stands midway through Roscoe Arbuckle’s first trial, is deliberately provocative, slyly hinting that Virginia may be hiding out somewhere, watching from a distance as Roscoe squirms in the dock.

But no, it’s just a come-on, designed to get readers browsing the newsstand or drugstore magazine rack to plunk down their dimes. The “survival” implied was spiritual, not physical. The article is reproduced above in its entirety; depending on the size and resolution of your monitor, you may be able to read it. In case you can’t, here’s a rundown of what it says:

Under the sub-head “The Most Amazing Message Ever Published”, the article reprints a letter to Screenland editor Myron Zobel from one Roy Jefferson, Secretary of the International Psychical Research Society (IPRS), located at State and Randolph Streets in Chicago. Mr. Jefferson is writing in response to an article in the previous month’s Screenland about the Arbuckle case, written by Gouverneur Morris.

Now here, a sidebar. Having read that much, I assumed that “Gouverneur Morris” must be a pseudonym adopted by some employee of the magazine, a cub reporter or intern (or whatever they called office interns in the 1920s). But no, he was a real person — actually, Gouverneur Morris IV (1876-1953), great-grandson of the signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a prolific writer of pulp novels and short stories, several of which were filmed over the years. Morris was about 45 in 1921. It would be interesting to know what he wrote about the Arbuckle case at that early date, but unfortunately my digital Screenland archive doesn’t include that particular issue.

Anyhow, whatever Morris wrote, it was interesting enough to prompt Roy Jefferson to write, and to assert that Roscoe Arbuckle was innocent. Now remember, this was barely two months after the party at the St. Francis; Roscoe was being denounced from every pulpit in America and vilified in every newspaper in the world. It took a certain amount of nerve to stand against that tsunami of public opinion, so let’s give credit where it’s due. Roy Jefferson was firm in his faith in Roscoe’s innocence, and no wonder: He claimed that he heard it from Virginia Rappe herself, and that she wanted justice to be done. This happened, he said, at a meeting of the IPRS, facilitated by the “psychic” Elizabeth Allen Tomson (they preferred the word “psychic” to “medium”, Jefferson wrote, because self-described mediums were often frauds, while psychics were serious researchers).

When the Screenland editors followed up by mail, they got a reply from Halma Tomson, Mrs. Tomson’s daughter and secretary, confirming what Jefferson had written — Virginia manifested herself on October 2 at a meeting of the IPRS attended by some 450 people. Mrs. Tomson, having stripped to the skin and been examined for any fakery by a committee of six ladies, was “placed in an enclosure which was examined and built by six gentlemen [sic] investigators.”

“Shortly after the meeting had started and during a violin solo Virginia Rappe appeared as in a beautiful cloud. She gradually became a materialized form and was recognized by many. We were all astonished as she had not even been spoken of by anyone present. She was visible to all and said in a voice loud enough to be heard by many:

“‘Roscoe Arbuckle is not guilty and I want justice done.’

“…My mother is in a state of coma inside the enclosure during these experiments and does not realize what transpires. But I act as her secretary and was present when she heard the story. She was more surprised, if possible, than the spectators.”

I’m sure she was. And what a lucky coincidence that in Virginia’s native city, where she hadn’t lived since at least 1913, there were “many” people in the audience who were able to confirm her identity.

When a person materializes from The Other Side in front of an audience of 450, through a “psychic” who has been privately examined nude by six women (proving that she has, ahem, nothing up her sleeve) and placed in a cabinet that has been assembled and examined for any trickery by six other volunteers — and all this accompanied by a violin solo, no less — we’re not talking about your usual séance, much less an actual scientific “experiment”. What we have here is a magic show — what magicians to this day call “the spirit cabinet”.

Is it possible that the showbiz-savvy editors of Screenland didn’t see through these vaudeville monkeyshines? They must have done, and no doubt knowing a great hook when they saw it, decided to play it for all it was worth. Anyhow, play it they did. They hired the W.J. Burns International Detective Agency to send an operative to investigate. The unnamed detective reported in a telegram to Screenland that he attended a meeting of the IPRS with about 150 others and was among those who inspected the cabinet Mrs. Tomson entered. He witnessed the emergence from the cabinet of “a white robed figure” who did not speak to him; another man on the platform asked the detective if he recognized the figure as Virginia Rappe. In his report the detective didn’t say one way or the other, but he said that was the only time Virginia’s name was mentioned. He said that Mrs. Tomson ‘s daughter Halma and Dr. Lawrence H. Rowell, president of the IPRS, told him of an earlier séance, attended by about 250, in which Virginia emerged from the cabinet onstage “in a bright blue light, wearing beautiful pure, white flowing robes [with] wonderful dark brown eyes and hair which hung over her shoulders” (per a related telegram to Screenland from Halma herself). She (Virginia) strode to the edge of the stage and addressed a newspaperwoman in the front row: “I am Virginia Rappe and must say that Roscoe Arbuckle is absolutely innocent of causing my death,” whereupon she “returned to the cabinet and faded away.”

Notwithstanding all the references to Mrs. Tomson’s “cabinet”, daughter Halma called it an “enclosure”, and described what sounds more like a kiosk than a cabinet: “…made of two sides and a top of one thickness of half inch wood securely fastened together and absolutely void of any traps or trickery. It is six feet high, about four and a half feet deep and four feet wide. The front is closed with one thickness of gray French velour drapery in which nothing could be concealed, with an opening in the center where the apparitions appear.” Halma then provided the names and (astonishingly, to 21st century readers) addresses of 11 men and women (“eye and ear witnesses”) whom she said comprised “the committee” — whether the committee of women who privately examined the nude Mrs. Tomson, or of men who examined the cabinet/enclosure, or both, or neither, is unclear.  

Maybe I’ve seen The Front Page once too often, but I can’t help imagining gales of laughter echoing through the offices of Screenland Magazine as this article was passed around before going off to the printer — this, mind you, while Virginia Rappe was barely cold in her grave and Roscoe Arbuckle’s career and character were being assassinated in a San Francisco courtroom.

How far did the editors take it? Did they bother contacting any of those committee members? Mrs. J.K. Moorehead of 632 Maryland St., Gary, IN? Mrs. Jane Brooks in Room 1244 of Chicago’s Morrison Hotel? Mrs. Edna Bacon of Blackwell, OK? Surely not; communication was slower and more expensive in 1921. But if any Cinedrome readers can make out the list in the article that opens this post, and if you care to comb the 1920 US Census, knock yourselves out.

I didn’t bother with that, but I did do a little poking around, beginning with the International Psychical Research Society. No luck, though I found several similarly-named organizations, especially in Great Britain, where the vogue for spiritualism, always pretty strong, burgeoned in the years right after World War I. But of the IPRS itself I could find no trace.

It was a different story, however, with the IPRS’s address at State and Randolph Streets in Chicago. That was a major intersection in downtown Chicago in 1921, and it still is today. Here are two recent views from the middle of State St. looking down Randolph to the east (above) and west (below). The only corner of the intersection that is reasonably intact from 1921 is the southeast corner, the site of Marshall Field’s, Chicago’s legendary upscale department store. Marshall Field’s is no more, having been bought out by Macy’s in 2005, but the Marshall Field — er, Macy’s — building at State and Randolph is a designated Chicago Landmark, as well as being on the National Register of Historic Places. So the building, with its “Marshall Field and Company” bronze plate and iconic green clock, is intact from the day construction was finished in 1906. A time traveler from 1921 would recognize it on sight.

The other corners, probably not so much. Presumably the IPRS was housed in one of those; if the Society had had an office in the Marshall Field Building, their letterhead would surely have said so. Personally, I vote for the northwest (Old Navy) corner, if only for the proximity of the Nederlander Theatre a few doors down; I like to fancy that the theater was rented by the Society to stage their “experiments”. Of course, it wasn’t the Nederlander then; it wasn’t even the same building, though there’s been a theater on the site since 1903. From 1905 to 1924 it was the Colonial, then it was torn down and replaced with the Oriental, renamed the Nederlander in 2019. Before 1905 it had borne the most notorious name of all American theaters: Iroquois. The Iroquois Theatre opened on November 23, 1903; one month and one week later, at a holiday matinee packed with some 2,200 patrons (many of them women and children), errant sparks from an arc light ignited a blaze that mushroomed within minutes into the deadliest single-building fire in American history, with at least 602 dead from burns, smoke inhalation, and trampling in the panic to escape. There’s a morbid fascination to the idea of Elizabeth Allen Tomson communing with spirits of the departed in such a building, but it probably didn’t happen there — if it had, there could have been over 600 ghosts elbowing Virginia Rappe aside, vying for Mrs. Tomson’s attention.

As for the personalities identified by name in the Screenland article, as I said, I didn’t bother scouring the 1920 Census for traces of that 11-person “committee”. Likewise, with Roy Jefferson, secretary of the IPRS, Googling such an ordinary name struck me as a futile exercise. But with Elizabeth Allen Tomson, much to my surprise, I hit paydirt.

It turns out Mrs. Tomson and her family had been running this spirit cabinet game for at least a year. Thanks to a Spanish-language blog, SurvivalAfterDeath | Psychic Sciences, I even found this 1920 photo of Mrs. Tomson in action. Well, more or less in action; the picture is obviously posed for the camera, with none of the lighting effects described in the Screenland article. But at least it gives us faces to go with the names. Mrs. Tomson is seated at center, beaming at someone draped in white, standing in for the ectoplasmic apparitions that were no doubt enacted by Mrs. Tomson herself in performance. At right is her husband/manager/spokesman Clarence, and at left is their daughter Halma. (I wonder if Halma herself didn’t contrive to stand in for Virginia; she seems a lot more age-appropriate.)

The Tomsons popped up once more in the historical record — at least in that portion of it that I was able to uncover. This story comes to us through the efforts of Sarah Quick of the Brooklyn Public Library’s Web site.

In 1922, the magazine Scientific American offered a $2,500 prize to anyone who could offer proof of spiritual or psychic phenomena, and the Tomson family decided to go for it. Almost exactly two years after Elizabeth Allen Tomson channeled the ghost of Virginia Rappe to exonerate Roscoe Arbuckle, they descended on New York with all their paraphernalia and presented a series of séances in homes around the city. This caught the attention of another medium, one Lillian C. Briton of the Church of Spiritual Illumination in Brooklyn. Exactly how sincere a medium Miss Briton was, Sarah Quick doesn’t say, but she was convinced Mrs. Tomson was a fraud, and was determined to save Scientific American the trouble of debunking her. So Miss Briton invited Mrs. Tomson to perform a séance at her church, before an audience which (unbeknownst to the Tomsons) was laced with Miss Briton’s own “ghost breakers”, who would turn on the lights and grab the Tomsons at Briton’s arranged signal. All was going as planned, with the usual dim blue light and soft music (the violin solo replaced by a phonograph playing “Rock of Ages”), when Dick Gallagher, one of Briton’s agents, jumped the gun. Invited to peek in the cabinet to see, Gallagher was standing with Halma Tomson holding his hands (ostensibly to strengthen the psychic bond, but probably just to keep his hands from grabbing anything they shouldn’t). He found himself confronted with what purported to be his deceased grandmother, who leaned out of the cabinet and tried to embrace him. With his hands pinioned by Halma, and moved either by panic or calculation, Gallagher did the only thing he could: He leaned forward and bit the ghost as hard as he could: “I bit my Grandmother and it was Mrs. Tomson,” he recalled. Mrs. Tomson burst out the back of the cabinet in her bathrobe and ran upstairs, where she fainted. Gallagher had bitten the “ghost” so hard that the silken cloud-like cloth she wore became lodged in his teeth. The next day the Tomsons slunk back to Chicago, with Clarence Tomson blustering about severed spiritual connections and unworthy motives, and demanding the return of their silk cloth. In the end, Scientific American monitored over 100 séances but never had to pay up. The Tomsons never even got a hearing.

Thus do Elizabeth, Clarence, and Halma Tomson disappear from history, at least as far as I could ascertain; read Sarah Quick’s post at the link above for the full hilarious details of their Brooklyn Waterloo. But let’s try not to judge them too harshly. I like the approach of the Screenland staff: However cynically they may have regarded the assertions of the International Psychical Research Society, they were gracious enough to keep a straight face in print, and they gave the Society a fair hearing. And too, let’s give credit where it’s due: Whether or not Mrs. Tomson had the endorsement of Virginia Rappe’s Testimony from Beyond, she was right. Roscoe Arbuckle was railroaded, guilty of nothing worse than partying hearty with illegal liquor. We know that now, and Elizabeth Allen Tomson said so before most people.

I have an acquaintance who is a collector/dealer of movie memorabilia and ephemera. I’ve known this fellow for 54 years — or rather, let me rephrase that: I knew him 54 years ago, when his younger brother and I were roommates at Sacramento State College (now CSU Sacramento). The collector/dealer’s path and mine have crossed once or twice since then, but the brother, my former roommate, and I have remained reasonably in touch over the years.

We met for lunch recently, and he shared this photo with me. As he told it to me over our sandwiches, these fragments were included in a bookcase-load of material that his older brother acquired last year from the estate of producer Jerry Wald. The bookcase’s contents mainly consisted of leather-bound copies of scripts to pictures Wald had produced (Peyton Place, Wild in the Country, Sons and Lovers, An Affair to Remember, etc.), but there were also these pieces of paper. They were from a single oversize sheet of parchment that had been cut up, cutting carefully around signatures, so that they could be put into a standard-size manila folder.

Unfortunately, as we can clearly see, the roster hasn’t survived intact. My friend tells me there are 100 signatures on what we have; I haven’t counted myself, but looking at it, that sounds about right. And they’re real signatures too, not reproductions, written in ink on parchment. No telling how many more there may have been; my own guess would be somewhere between 20 and 40.

Since that day at lunch, my friend has IM’d me with a correction. It turns out this incomplete jigsaw puzzle wasn’t among that recently-acquired Jerry Wald collection after all. On the contrary, the collector brother told him he’s had this for at least thirty years. So long, he says, that he’s no longer sure exactly where he got it — but he thinks it was among a large batch of film ephemera he bought from another dealer in Los Angeles in the 1980s, a batch that included scripts and business documents from the Hal Roach Studios. 

On that narrow thread, I ran the picture by historian Richard M. Roberts, who specializes in silent comedy and knows more about Hal Roach’s career than Roach himself ever did. Richard didn’t know of any possible connection to Roach; he speculated only that the occasion was some sort of event at Paramount, since many (if not most) of the names here were Paramount employees at the time; beyond that he couldn’t say, though he did allow as how it was “an interesting bunch of autographs.”

It is indeed. And by the way, what do we mean by “at the time”? Well, as it happens, we can date this paper pretty narrowly based on internal evidence. At the due east point on the paper is the signature of Gale Sondergaard. Her first picture, Warner Bros.’ Anthony Adverse, was released in August 1936; it’s a cinch she wouldn’t have found herself in such illustrious company before then, and probably not till some time after, when she’d had a chance to make a splash with her showcase performance (she went on to win an Oscar for it). At the other end of the time-window, the southeast quadrant has the signature of composer Hugo Riesenfeld; he died on September 10, 1939 after a severe and lengthy illness. I don’t know how severe or lengthy that illness was, but let’s say it lasted most of 1939; let’s also say Gale Sondergaard didn’t break into the A-List until at least January 1937. Allowing that, it’s reasonable to say this roster is from sometime during 1937 or ’38. 

But what was the occasion? At the center of the sheet there’s a wide gap, but we can glimpse the remnants of printed red letters that look like they may have formed the word “welcome”. Under the final “e” of “welcome” there’s another trace of red ink that suggests there were additional words, or perhaps a name, under that, and then there’s a third row consisting of white dots. This gap in the puzzle is what creates the mystery; if that weren’t missing, the purpose of this sheet of signatures might be crystal clear.

Even as it stands, there are interesting points to be gleaned from these signatures. Just under the w-e-l of “welcome” is a trio of noted German expatriate directors: Ernst Lubitsch, E.A. Dupont, and none other than that era’s supreme genius of the stage, Max Reinhardt himself. Two names below Reinhardt is Rouben Mamoulian (who directed High, Wide and Handsome at Paramount in 1937), but between them is what looks like someone named Maria Solvez. Who in the world could that be? For that matter, who are Nick Carter, Guillermo Areos, Manny Wolfe, Ralph Wilk, and several others whose handwriting is — to me at least — illegible?

Walter James Westmore of the Westmore makeup dynasty may have been billed as “Wally” in his 463 screen credits, but he signed this sheet “Wallie” (east of center, next to the big gap in the middle). Similarly, Cecil B. DeMille may have billed himself with an uppercase “D”, but here (across that gap from Wallie Westmore) he spells his last name “deMille”, just like brother William, niece Agnes, and the rest of their family always did. And in the southeast quadrant, between casting director Fred Schuessler (Gone With the Wind, Christopher Strong, King Kong [’33]) and costume designer Ali Hubert (The Life of Emile Zola, The Merry Widow [’34]), actor Joseph Schildkraut (who won an Oscar the same year as Gale Sondergaard) spells his first name “Josef”, the way his parents did when they named their newborn son in Vienna in 1896. And the Oscar-winning cinematographer we know as Tony Gaudio signs here (southwest, fourth row from bottom) with his given name of Gaetano.

Adding to the mystery of it all is the fact that Hollywood people, then as now, didn’t as a rule go around collecting each other’s autographs, except on checks and contracts. So who collected all these, and why? The only clue I can offer is this — another collection of celebrity signatures on parchment, although here they’re lithographic reproductions, not the real McCoy. There’s no mystery to this parchment; it was an insert in the souvenir program for The House of Rothschild (1934) starring George Arliss, Loretta Young, Robert Young and Boris Karloff. As you can see, it’s a sort of birthday card, congratulating Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck on the first anniversary of 20th Century Pictures and the release of Rothschild. From the top row (Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Marie Dressler) to the bottom (Johnny Weissmuller, Adrienne Ames, Toby Wing, Randolph Scott, Jeanette MacDonald), it’s an impressive roster. (And about to become two less: When Rothschild premiered on April 7, 1934, Marie Dressler had only three-and-a-half months left; she would die of cancer on July 28. Later, in September, 26-year-old crooner Russ Columbo [fourth row from bottom] would be shot to death in a freak accident with an antique dueling pistol.)

Clearly, I think, the parchment above was something along the lines of this, wishing somebody or something welcome the way this wishes happy birthday and congratulations. But who, why, and when…? Barring some lucky miracle, I guess we’ll never know. Pretty much everybody who signed it had left us by the end of the 1980s; actor Fritz Feld (southwest quadrant) made it to 1993, but he died of dementia, so who knows how much he would have remembered that late? I don’t know when my friend’s collector brother acquired the chart (neither, evidently, does he for sure), but by the time he did, there was probably nobody left to ask about it.

As Hollywood mysteries go, this one is comparatively trivial — but that doesn’t make it any less of a mystery. So I offer it here for study and speculation. Comments, hypotheses, ruminations are welcome. Meanwhile, I look forward to the day that some unexpected revelation, some offhand comment in some history, memoir or oral-history interview sheds light on what happened at Paramount (or wherever) in 1937 (or whenever) to make all those people write their names on a sheet of parchment to prove they were there.

UPDATE 9/20/22:

My friend Blair Leatherwood, who has access to a number of newspaper archives as part of his genealogical research, has been able to fill in a few gaps in our knowledge of these signatories:

Maria Solveg (not “Solvez”) was, like the three names above her — Ernst Lubitsch, E.A. Dupont, Max Reinhardt — a German expatriate. She and her husband Ernst Matray (Maria sometimes billed herself under her married name) first came to America with Reinhardt’s company in 1927, performing as a dance team and, in her case, actress. In 1933 the Matrays joined the exodus of German Jews who had the foresight and good fortune to flee Nazi Germany while the getting was good, first to France, then Great Britain, and finally the U.S. Significantly for our purposes, in August and September 1938 she was in Los Angeles working as Reinhardt’s assistant director on a production of Faust at the Pilgrimage Outdoor Theatre (today, the John Anson Ford Theatre) in the Hollywood Hills; that may narrow down even further the dating of this jigsaw puzzle. At some point, probably in 1940, Maria became a U.S. citizen and, in the words of Reinhardt’s son and biographer Gottfried, the Master’s “highly efficient assistant on Broadway”. Also a dancer and choreographer, she worked in some capacity (according to her Trivia page on the IMDb) on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Pride and Prejudice (’40), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (’41), White Cargo, Random Harvest (both ’42), Swing Fever (’43), Step Lively (’44), Murder in the Music Hall (’46) and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (’47), among others. Whatever she did, she was not credited on most of those, either on screen or on the IMDb. By the late 1950s she was back in West Germany, the country having been safely de-Nazified, and she reclaimed her German citizenship in 1960. By then she had segued into screenwriting, and she worked steadily at that until 1992. She died in Munich in 1993, age 86.

Ralph Wilk (southwest quadrant, above Torben Meyer and Gaetano Gaudio) was born in Minneapolis in 1894 and lived in Los Angeles from 1927 until his death on June 9, 1949, age 55. According to his obituary in the L.A. Times, he was “West Coast manager of Film Trade”, but that was the result of either sloppy obituary writing or faulty information supplied to the paper; in fact, Ralph Wilk was the L.A. representative for Film Daily, a daily trade paper that published from 1918 to 1970.

Manny Wolfe (top left corner) was, from July 1932 to May ’39, head of the Paramount story department. Before that, he had been story editor at First National Pictures. From September 1928, First National was a subsidiary of Warner Bros.; flush with profits from The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, the Bros. had purchased a 58 percent share of First National to gain access to FN’s theater chain and Burbank studio complex (which remains the Warner Bros. Studio to this day). Warners eventually acquired a total of 87.5 percent, and First National became a wholly-owned subsidiary, with pictures released under both FN and Warners banners until 1936, when First National was dissolved. This is all necessary background to the following: While Manny Wolfe was at First National, across the lot at Warner Bros. there was a press agent and aspiring playwright named Norman Krasna. Krasna’s first produced play was Louder, Please, about two Hollywood publicity men who fake the disappearance of a movie star, with characters reportedly based on easily recognized persons around the Warners-First National lot. The play opened on Broadway on November 12, 1931 and ran for 68 performances. The Louder, Please playbill bears the credit, “A.L. JONES (By arrangement with Manny Wolfe) PRESENTS…” My guess is that Wolfe and Krasna knew each other at the studio, Krasna showed Wolfe his script, and Wolfe hustled it around New York, acting as Krasna’s unofficial agent and wangling an associate-producer credit on the production (not to mention pocketing a tidy sum in that “arrangement” with A.L. Jones). The play made enough of a splash that Krasna landed a writing gig at Columbia in 1932; it may have gotten Wolfe the job at Paramount as well. Whatever the case, Wolfe stayed at Paramount until May 1939, when he left “to assume a producer’s post at another studio.” What that studio was is not known, but Wolfe never seems to have earned a producer credit — or a writer’s for that matter. For all we know, he did fine work as a story editor, but that’s the kind of administrative position that leaves little trace except in a studio’s corporate records. Krasna, on the other hand, went on to a long and distinguished career on Broadway and in Hollywood as both writer and director, earning an Oscar for writing Princess O’Rourke (1943) and three other nominations before his death in 1984. What ever became of Manny Wolfe after 1939, I haven’t been able to ascertain.

Guillermo Arcos (not “Areos”; due west, under Robert Florey and Melvyn Douglas) was born in Spain in 1880. He is, according to Blair, “listed on various documents (border crossing, WW II draft registration card, etc.) as an artist and as a jeweler. He also appears to have been a classical guitarist of some note.” At first I thought that, since Arcos would have been 60 in 1940, that draft card could not have been his (maybe a son, or even grandson) — but no, the card gives his birth date as July 8, 1880 (check!) and his “present” age as 62 (double check!). On IMDb, he has a handful of Spanish-language acting credits, plus uncredited (and probably non-dialogue) bits in A Message to Garcia and Ramona (both 1936). This photo is from his “Declaration of Intent”, a step in applying for U.S. citizenship, dated January 5, 1949. Also, an undated newspaper item from sometime in 1951-53 mentions him having given a guitar concert in Carnegie Hall “33 years ago” and credits him with having played incidental music for Robert Rossen’s The Brave Bulls (1951). Coming at this from another angle, on FindAGrave.com I found a listing for Pilar Arcos, born in Havana, Cuba in 1893. She was an actress and operatic soprano, and according to the listing, in 1917, while studying at the Conservatory of Madrid, she “married a guitar teacher/actor Guillermo Arcos.” (In early 1917 Guillermo would have been 36, Pilar 23. There may have been some urgency to their nuptials: Their first child, a boy William, was born October 28, 1917 in Houston, Texas.) In 1935, Pilar traveled to Spain to continue her singing career, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War drove her back to North America. Were she and Guillermo still together by then? Perhaps, or perhaps they had already separated. In any case, they were divorced in December 1939; on May 6, 1941 Guillermo married his second wife, Concepción. Guillermo died at 78 in 1959. Pilar outlived him by over 30 years; she died in 1990, age 96. Both died in Los Angeles, but they are not buried together. Pilar rests in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, beside her and Guillermo’s daughter Helen (1919-73), whom she outlived by 16 years. Guillermo’s resting place I was unable to locate.

If any other information comes to light about the less-familiar names on the parchment, I’ll post another update — and another, and another, as needed. Watch this space!

Heading into the home stretch of this first Columbus Moving Picture Show, we saw…I believe the customary term is “the thrilling conclusion” with Chapters 9-12 of Adventures of Red Ryder. Justice triumphed, bad guys got what was coming to them (banker Drake met a particularly grisly end), and surviving good guys lived happily until the next adventure — which came in the funny papers, on radio, and in B-western features; there were to be no more serials.

Then we saw former child star Jackie Cooper in the first of 73 adult roles in his 61-year career: Stork Bites Man (1947). This was the second picture for which I contributed notes to The Picture Show program, and here they are:

In 1945 Mary Pickford, still dabbling in movies from her boozy retirement at Pickfair, formed a production company, Comet Pictures, with husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Ralph Cohn. Cohn was the son of Jack and nephew of Harry, the battling brothers who were always at each other’s throats over the running of Columbia Pictures, where Ralph had been a B-picture producer, turning out installments in the Crime Doctor, Lone Wolf, Boston Blackie and Ellery Queen series, along with other low-budget efforts.

The model for Comet Pictures was Hal Roach’s “Streamliners”, mid-length pictures longer than short subjects but less than an hour long and aimed at the bottom slot on double features. Comet productions came in right around 65 minutes, as does our specimen, Stork Bites Man.

The germ of Stork Bites Man was a slim book by Louis Pollock, subtitled “What the Expectant Father May Expect”. Pollock’s comic treatise, dedicated to the proposition that no man is ever ready for fatherhood, never made the bestseller lists. But being published in 1945 during the waning months of World War II, it fortuitously caught the leading edge of the Baby Boom, when millions of returning servicemen were poised to go through what Pollock wrote about.

In adapting Stork Bites Man to the screen in 1947, there was a catch: Most of what Pollock wrote about was frowned upon by the Production Code, if not downright forbidden. This included such things as morning sickness, food cravings, mood swings, a high-strung wife losing (temporarily) her figure — even the words “pregnant” and “pregnancy” themselves. Writer/director Cyril (“Cy”) Endfield and adapter Fred Freiberger met the challenge by changing the story’s focus: Instead of Lou Pollock coping with his wife Cleta’s nine expectant months, their theme was America’s post-war housing shortage.

And so it was that Lou and Cleta Pollock were renamed Ernie Brown (Jackie Cooper) and his wife Peg (Gene Roberts, later to change her name to Meg Randall), resident managers of an apartment house. The landlord (Emory Parnell) doesn’t allow families with children, and housing being a seller’s market after American industry’s four years of single-minded focus on wartime production, he’s able to get away with it. The first half of the picture chronicles Ernie’s efforts to keep Peg’s condition secret from the boss. Inevitably, once the cat is out of the bag (if you’ll pardon the expression), Ernie is fired, he and Peg are evicted, and Ernie decides to organize a strike among workers and tenants to force a change of policy.

Variety found Stork Bites Man a “lightweight comedy that’ll serve for dualers,” reserving special praise for Jackie Cooper and co-star Gus Schilling as a baby-supplies salesman. Still, amusing as it was, its theme of the little guy organizing against the hard-hearted plutocracy was the kind of candy-coated leftism that would in time draw the baleful attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Cy Endfield’s time came in 1951; blacklisted for his Young Communist League activism at Yale in the 1930s, he relocated to the U.K., where he worked for a while under various aliases, finally resuming his real name in 1957. Depending on your point of view, his directing career peaked either with the 1961 Jules Verne fantasy The Mysterious Island (with visual effects by the great Ray Harryhausen) or with 1964’s Zulu, about the battle of Rorke’s Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (starring Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, and the up-and-coming Michael Caine). Endfield lost interest in filmmaking in 1971, but he remained an author, inventor, and amateur magician for the rest of his life; he died in England in 1995, age 80.

Comet Pictures, alas, fizzled after only four releases; Stork Bites Man was probably its best, and certainly its last. Cy Endfield (as noted) moved to England. Ralph Cohn returned to Columbia to head Screen Gems, the studio’s TV distribution wing. Fred Freiberger went on to produce The Six Million Dollar Man, Space: 1999 and the original Star Trek, among other TV programs. Buddy Rogers and Mary Pickford, of course, retreated to Pickfair, where Buddy became Mary’s devoted caretaker for the rest of her long life, and custodian of her legend for the rest of his.

Wild Beauty (1927) was a vehicle for the equine star Rex, who was introduced to audiences in The King of the Wild Horses (1924, screened at Cinevent 50 in 2018). Rex was “discovered” by Hal Roach, who used Rex to get his feet wet in feature production. Rex has the distinction of being the only horse in history to become a genuine movie star without (literally) supporting some human cowboy star. With Rex it was the other way around: In his pictures, the humans (figuratively) supported him. In the course of his career, which lasted until 1938, he was variously billed as “Rex the Wonder Horse” or (echoing the title of his film debut) “King of the Wild Horses”. By the time of Wild Beauty, Hal Roach had decided to postpone his move into features a few years, so he sold Rex to Carl Laemmle over at Universal. The plot of this first Universal Rex picture had human hero Hugh Allen rescuing a mare he names “Valerie” from the battlefields of the Great War; he brings her home, where wild stallion Rex tries to lure her away from the ranch. Soon Rex is vying for Valerie’s attention with another stallion named Starbright. Meanwhile, there’s a parallel human romance between rancher Hugh Allen and June Marlowe — later, with blonde hair, to be beloved by generations of children as Miss Crabtree in the Our Gang shorts. But June Marlowe’s glory years were still in the future, and does anybody know or remember who Hugh Allen was? (Actually, his birth name was Allan Hughes; the spelling of his professional surname varied between “Allan” and “Allen”. He lived to be 93 but his film career ended at 27 without making the slightest impression.)

The humans hardly matter, though; Rex is pretty much the whole show. Now he makes an impression. Elinor Glyn, the British erotic novelist, famously tagged Clara Bow as having “It“, that elusive, hard-to-pinpoint magnetic power that attracts both sexes. According to Mme. Glyn, Rex had it too: “Rex has ‘it’ and if I could only find a leading man with the same look in his eye, my quest would be finished. He is not just a horse. He has personality and he exudes something beyond all this, and that is the spirit of romance.” I don’t know if Mme. Glyn’s words sounded as vaguely alarming in the 1920s as they do now, but there’s no denying that Rex had something, nor that the camera found it a joy to behold. And it wasn’t just the tricks he learned from a trainer. The buzz is that, like a number of human stars, Rex was notoriously difficult to work with — in Rex’s case, owing to some pretty brutal abuse in his early years. The difference, in Rex’s case, was that “difficult” could translate to “murderous” when you weigh approximately 1,400 pounds. Dangerous and unpredictable — maybe that’s what comes through on screen, and what gave Rex “It“.

Love Thy Neighbor (1940) provided the final highlight of the weekend. Expertly directed by the nimble Mark Sandrich, it capitalized on the p.r. “feud” between radio comedians Jack Benny at NBC and Fred Allen over at CBS, much the way 1937’s Wake Up and Live (Cinevent 51, Day 2) exploited the equally spurious clash between Walter Winchell and Ben Bernie. Allen and Benny were both professional funny men, so it was generally understood that their feud was all in fun; no one ever seems to have taken it seriously, as some did Bernie and Winchell’s.

The plot of Love Thy Neighbor offered new-minted Broadway star Mary Martin as Fred Allen’s (fictitious) niece Mary Allen. Mary goes to Benny’s office in an effort to negotiate a truce between the two men, then in a case of mistaken identity, she auditions for and gets cast as the leading lady of Benny’s new stage show, under the name of Virginia Astor. In Miami for rehearsals and the out-of-town opening, Benny winds up in a hotel suite next to Allen, who is also in Miami under doctor’s orders to work off the stress of the feud. While they’re all in Miami, with Mary walking the tightrope between her uncle and her boss, the real Virginia Astor (Virginia Dale) shows up, and…well, imagine the possibilities.

Love Thy Neighbor came midway in the three or four years during which Mary Martin tried and failed to transfer her stage stardom to the screen. Like her great rival Ethel Merman, there was something in her star persona that simply didn’t photograph well. In Merman’s case, she tended to come off as too big and brassy for the screen, even in the early years when she was still rather petite (and even a bit of a “dish”). With Martin, it wasn’t “too big”, but “too chilly”; somehow the camera didn’t warm to her, and neither did audiences. (Not until the 1950s, with TV productions of Peter Pan and Annie Get Your Gun did Martin approach her Broadway success, and those performances — preserved, thank God — remain the best record we have of her.) Martin isn’t quite able to provide the musical spice to Love Thy Neighbor that Alice Faye did to Wake Up and Live, but she at least is allowed to perform her first signature song, Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, slightly bowdlerized but within two years of introducing it.

What musical spice Love Thy Neighbor contains is rather fleeting, and from a surprising source. This is a nifty blend of Shakespeare and jitterbug entitled “Dearest, Darest I” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Eddie Anderson as Benny’s valet Rochester and Theresa Harris as his girlfriend Josephine. Anderson was so famous for his role that he was often billed with “Rochester” as his middle name, and sometimes by that name alone. His gravelly voice (the result of ruptured vocal cords as a newsboy in his youth) meant that Dick Powell and Nelson Eddy’s jobs were safe, but Anderson could put a song over with personality, and that voice (plus the generosity of Jack Benny, who saw to it that he always got all the best lines) made him a star. 

Now a few words about Theresa Harris (1906-85). This woman is long overdue for some kind of recognition. Hollywood blogger Steve Cubine, in a 2019 post about Harris, said, “Hollywood just didn’t know what to do with the talented Miss Harris,” but that’s a crock. Hollywood knew damn well what to do with Theresa Harris, they just wouldn’t let her do it. She was beautiful, intelligent and sexy; she could act, she could sing, she could dance. And oh yes, she was African-American. So naturally, she played maids. In a little over 100 films in a little under 30 years, you could find her picking up after, dressing the hair of, or laying out clothes for more than half the leading ladies in Hollywood — Lilyan Tashman, Thelma Todd, Lupe Velez, Ginger Rogers (twice), Margaret Lindsay, Barbara Stanwyck (twice), Mae Clarke, Constance Cummings, Billie Burke, Helen Morgan, Gloria Stuart, Claire Trevor, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Marlene Dietrich, Frances Dee, Betty Grable, Lillian Gish, June Haver, Maureen O’Hara, Gloria Grahame, Maureen O’Sullivan, Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Arlene Dahl, Jane Russell — you name her, chances are at some time or other you’ll see Theresa Harris standing behind her in a black dress and white lace cap, hands demurely folded in front of her. If she seldom got to show what she could really do, at least she was never used for coarse comic relief, and so could invest her roles with a dignity that plays well today — see her especially as Chico to Stanwyck’s Lily in Baby Face (1933) and as the wise house servant Alma in I Walked with a Zombie (’43). She was released from domestic service at least twice: Here in Love Thy Neighbor and in a previous turn as Rochester’s Josephine in another Jack Benny vehicle, Buck Benny Rides Again earlier in 1940. In that outing she and Anderson got to sing and dance “My My” by Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh. (It’s probably not a coincidence that Buck Benny was also directed by Mark Sandrich. Good for him.) There’s plenty of good work from Theresa Harris if you know where to look, but in those days of artistic apartheid, she is yet another example of a Great Star Who Never Was.

I was much looking forward to seeing The Student of Prague in Columbus this year, but I was laboring under a misunderstanding: I thought we were getting the 1926 silent with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss. Instead, it was The Student of Prague (1913), the earlier version. And considering how much cinema all over the world evolved between 1913 and 1926, it must be said that what we saw was a much earlier version. The picture tells the story of Balduin (Paul Wegener), a college student less interested in academics than in drinking, gambling, dueling, and — it is discreetly hinted — whoring (“The more things change…”). As Balduin fritters away his limited funds, he is approached by a whimsical old man named Scapinelli (John Gottowt). He offers Balduin a vast fortune (“100,000 pieces of gold”, “600,000 florins”, or other amounts, depending on which translation you watch) in exchange for any single item the old boy is able to find in Balduin’s lodging. Knowing he owns practically nothing, Balduin readily signs Scapinelli’s contract, and forthwith he is showered with a mountain of coins. He leads Scapinelli to his barely-furnished room, where the old man claims an item Balduin wouldn’t have thought was part of the deal: His reflection in the mirror. 

Only momentarily dismayed at his failure to cast a reflection, Balduin sallies forth with his newfound funds, becoming the life of every party. But his reflection dogs his every move, becoming in effect his evil twin, and working mischief in the lives of Balduin and everyone around him — the barmaid who loves him (Lyda Salmonova, Wegener’s wife at the time), the countess whom he loves (Grete Berger), the countess’s fiancé (Fritz Weidemann). Things do not end well for anyone but Scapinelli.

The Student of Prague is widely regarded as “the first German art film”. But it’s an art film in comparison to what came before it, not to what came after. It wouldn’t be till after the Great War — to be precise, with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — that Germany vaulted to the front rank of world film. But Student has its points. The locations (it was actually shot in and around Prague) are attractive, the special effects surprisingly sophisticated — and most of all, there’s Paul Wegener. Wegener had a spectacular screen presence — in The Golem (1920) he gives one of the great performances of the silent era — and it comes through even in the blurriest versions of Student to be found on YouTube. Just take a gander at the lobby card above; notice how even with Lyda Salmonova flaunting her bare legs, your eye is drawn irresistibly to Wegener. 

There are several copies of The Student of Prague available on YouTube. The best one I could find is this one — but some of the intertitles come and go quickly, so be prepared to pause as needed. The best reason to see it remains Paul Wegener. The 1926 remake is there too, with an excellent image but, alas, no translations for the German titles. If you read German, here it is, with Conrad Veidt as Balduin and Werner Krauss (the original Dr. Caligari) as Scapinelli. The remake is still on my bucket list, but Conrad Veidt has some mighty big shoes to fill.

Cigarette Girl (1947) brought The Picture Show to a close, not with a bang — but to be fair, not really with a whimper either. For the benefit of Cinedrome readers who are not of a Certain Age, a cigarette girl was an employee of a restaurant or night club who, like a cocktail waitress, roamed among the customers’ tables with a tray slung around her neck (as in this poster) offering tobacco products for sale: “Cigars…cigarettes…pipe tobacco…” This was a viable line of work in the days when (1) indoor smoking was not only legal, but everyone without exception smoked, and (2) a cigar or a pack of cigarettes could be had for small change — say, ten cents for a pack of Luckies or Camels, or a White Owl or Dutch Masters cigar. The girl usually had to buy her own stock, but she could get it wholesale, and the tips could be pretty good: If a guy wanted to impress a date, or to hit on the cigarette girl herself, he might slip her a buck for a dime pack of cigarettes and tell her to keep the change. At that rate, with luck, she could earn her month’s rent of, say, $45.00 in a couple or three nights. 

End of history lesson. The cigarette girl of the title was played by Columbia contract player Leslie Brooks, the sort who played supports and bits in A-pictures and leads in B’s like this. Likewise leading man Jimmy Lloyd, and as a romantic team the two of them were blandly personable. They meet on neutral ground and launch a courtship under harmlessly false pretenses: She’s a “lowly” cigarette girl, but tells him she’s a popular night club singer; meanwhile he tells her he’s an oil company president (if memory serves, he’s really a gas station attendant). But lo and behold, their Little White Lies come true — by the final fadeout he’s a tycoon, she’s a Broadway star, and all’s right with the world. Russ Morgan and his Orchestra performed class arrangements to the songs by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts — I sat there tapping my toes as the movie unspooled, though I couldn’t have hummed a single tune ten minutes after the lights came up. All in all, a pleasant palate-cleanser to close out the day, and the weekend.

Thus did The Columbus Moving Picture Show take up the Cinevent torch, banner, baton — fill in the metaphor of your choice — for 2022. Memorial Day 2023 will be here before any of us know it, so take my advice and make your plans now; start by getting on their mailing list and Liking them on Facebook. I hope to see you in Columbus next year. Don’t forget to say hi.

Day 2 of The Columbus Moving Picture Show began — after Chapters 4-6 of Adventures of Red Ryder, of course — with another happy holdover from Cinevent, one which dates back at least to 2001: the Festival of Charley Chase Shorts.

Charley Chase: cheerful, dapper, handsome, doggedly normal, even ordinary, yet constantly put-upon and buffeted by events not of his making; for nearly 20 years it was a winning screen persona for the man born Charles Joseph Parrott in 1893. By now Charley needs no introduction to Cinevent/Picture Show regulars, but there may be Cinedrome readers who are still unfamiliar with him. Unlike every other great silent clown — Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, even Roscoe Arbuckle before his murder trials scuttled his career — Charley Chase never moved up to features, other than the occasional supporting role for friends, as in Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert (1933). But he made hundreds of one- and two-reel shorts between 1914 and 1940, hitting his stride in the 1920s for Hal Roach. When Roach himself began concentrating on features and moving away from shorts, he dumped Chase in 1936, whereupon Charley moved over to Columbia, where he both acted in shorts and directed them, sometimes under his real name (more about that later today). Maybe Chase felt temperamentally unsuited to features, or maybe he was just behind the curve and would have made the leap eventually. We’ll never know because he drank himself to death in 1940 at 46, and his life and work, once quite popular, went down the memory hole.

Fortunately, interest in Charley Chase has been on the upswing since the 1990s (witness the Cinevent tributes appearing in 2001 and thereafter), and it’s much easier to find him than in the first decades after his death. There’s a Web site, The World of Charley Chase, with a lot of good information, although it appears not to have been updated since 2019. And anyone wishing to sample Charley’s work will find plenty to choose from on Amazon and YouTube. On Amazon I particularly recommend the series Charley Chase: At Hal Roach: The Talkies from The Sprocket Vault and Kit Parker Films — three volumes so far, with a fourth coming in October.

In recent years the Cinevent emphasis has been on Chase’s silent shorts, and so it was this year at The Picture Show. There were three in all:

Innocent Husbands (1925)  Faithful husband Charley flies into a panic when a drunk woman from a party next door passes out in his apartment — and jealous wifey (Katherine Grant) is due home any minute.

Dog Shy (1926)  Charley, who has a serious phobia about dogs, tries to help a female friend from college escape from an arranged marriage to a pompous duke. His efforts are frustrated by the presence of her family’s enormous dog — also, curiously, named Duke.

Limousine Love (1928)  Already late for his wedding, Charley is delayed even further when a naked lady takes refuge in the back seat of his limo (don’t ask). A passerby, hearing Charley’s predicament, offers to help — he doesn’t know, and neither does Charley, that Charley’s nude passenger is his wife.

The day’s first feature was Ramrod (1947), introduced by James D’Arc. James, in addition to being a film historian, is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and the author of When Hollywood Came to Utah, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory. If you’ve ever visited or driven through the Beehive State, you know the beauty of its scenery — there’s much more to it than just the Great Salt Desert. Hollywood has indeed come there to work. You might be surprised to learn how many movies have been shot there, many of them drawn to the terrible, majestic desolation of Monument Valley.

But not all. Ramrod was one that passed on Monument Valley in favor of Zion National Park and the ghost town of Grafton just south of the park. Wikipedia even claims that Ramrod‘s producer Harry Sherman actually purchased Grafton to use as a filming location, but I was able to find no confirmation of this in James D’Arc’s book, so…well, Wikipedia, you know. Still, no denying that Sherman, “a westerner at heart” in James’s words, was taken with Utah in general and Grafton in particular. 

Like Pursued (1947) at last year’s Cinevent, Ramrod is a western with overtones of film noir. If anything, in Ramrod the overtones are even more pronounced; among them being the inclusion of a femme fatale played by Veronica Lake, then-wife of director Andre de Toth (this was their first project together). Check out the slogan on this poster about men being so easy; other posters were even more provocative: “They called it God’s Country…until the Devil put this woman there!” Both catchphrases aptly summarize Connie Dickason, Lake’s character — although, seeing as how the movie takes place sometime in the 1880s, I don’t recall her ever showing as much leg or décolletage as she does on this poster. In fact, I don’t think we saw so much as an ankle.

But this femme was plenty fatale, make no mistake. Ruthless, duplicitous and manipulative, she plays all the men around her against each other to make a go of her cattle empire: her ranch foreman, or “ramrod” (Joel McCrea); her decent weakling of a father (Charlie Ruggles); a good-bad-man drifter (Don DeFore); a rival rancher and former suitor (Preston Foster); the local sheriff (Donald Crisp); and various bystanders who become collateral damage in her drive to prevail. Her conniving is so over the top that at the film’s dénouement (which I will not spoil here), more than a few satisfied chuckles rippled through The Picture Show screening room. This may well be Veronica Lake’s best performance. Her director husband de Toth deserves credit, too, for effectively disguising the fact that at 5 ft. 1 in., she’s at least a foot or more shorter than all the men she uses, bullies and domineers.

Moving on, to after the lunch break…

In 1936 Paramount released a picture entitled Valiant Is the Word for Carrie, in which Gladys George played a prostitute who reforms for the sake of two orphans and starts a successful laundry business, only to have heartache beset her and the orphans as the children grow to adulthood, with (to paraphrase Thelma Ritter in All About Eve) everything but the bloodhounds snapping at their rear ends. It was a shameless six-hanky tearjerker and a big hit; Gladys George was nominated for an Academy Award. That was then. Now, Valiant Is the Word for Carrie is as utterly forgotten as any major Hollywood A-picture of the sound era. Gladys George lost her Oscar bid to Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld, and she’s mainly remembered now as Miles Archer’s cheating wife in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the woman who says, “He used to be a big shot” about James Cagney at the end of The Roaring ’20s (1939).

If you think I’m building up to telling you that Valiant Is the Word for Carrie was screened at this year’s Picture Show, I’m not. I’m setting up one of the most exquisitely hilarious jokes in movie history, one that everyone understood at the time, but which nobody gets anymore. It so happens that the following year, the Three Stooges came out with one of their best-remembered shorts. It’s still very popular, but its most brilliant joke, which goes over the head of every Stooges fan today, is its title: Violent Is the Word for Curly (1937).

And how’s this for a coincidence: This classic Stooges short was directed by none other than our good friend Charley Chase, returning to the Picture Show screening room with only lunch and Ramrod between his last appearance and this. The academic robes in this shot are because Moe, Larry and Curly play gas station attendants who — never mind why — find themselves mistaken for three distinguished professors newly hired at a women’s college. The company of so many beautiful young co-eds is all it takes for the three of them to decide to go along with the mistake, and their introduction to the student body (if you’ll pardon the expression) leads to one of the Stooges’ most famous bits, one they performed live at personal appearances for years afterwards. This is the song “Swingin’ the Alphabet”, interpolated here by Charley, who learned it from his family maid. Stewart McKissick’s program notes tell us that the song itself was the work of the 19th century songwriter Septimus Winner (“Listen to the Mockingbird”, “Ten Little Indians”). Maybe so, but as done by the Stooges it definitely has a 1930s swingtime rollick to it. The whole short can be seen on YouTube, and here’s just the song — rather nicely colorized.

The title of Is Everybody Happy? (1943) was the trademarked catchphrase of bandleader Ted Lewis, who was a household name second only to Paul Whiteman in the 1920s, well before the advent of what we know as the Big Band Era, and would remain so well into the ’60s. He was an indifferent musician (his instrument was the clarinet) and a vocalist with a range of approximately one note, but his schmaltzy personality struck a chord with ballroom and radio audiences and he was a popular front man, especially since the band he fronted was so very good (indifferent clarinetist or no, he knew talent when he hired it, and his band was an early stop for such future greats as Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Muggsy Spanier and Jack Teagarden). 

Lewis’s lilting, wistful refrain between songs of “Is EVVVV’rybody HAPPP…pyyyy…?” was so instantly recognizable and widely imitated that it had already served as the title for his first film musical in 1929. That had been a bit of a train wreck and was completely forgotten by the time Columbia used the title 14 years later for this B-picture, an early specimen of what would come to be known as the jukebox musical. That “18 terrific tunes!” on this poster was no exaggeration; the songs, all easily sing-along-able chestnuts for 1943 audiences, included “Am I Blue?”, “Cuddle Up a Little Closer”, “St. Louis Blues”, “When My Baby Smiles at Me”, and (as the saying goes) many more. With a running time of only 74 min., the music never stopped for long. A good thing, too.

The last feature before dinner was the earliest of the whole weekend: Happiness (1917). It was, as Variety pointed out in its review on May 4 of that year, essentially a “poor little rich girl” picture, with Enid Bennett as a super-wealthy and super-shy heiress who gets a reputation for snobbery thanks to a snarky profile in a newspaper magazine supplement. When she goes away to college, eager to make friends, she finds that her bogus “reputation” precedes her and everybody shuns her — except for one decent fellow (Charles Gunn) working his way through college by taking in laundry. It was a diverting little drama, but the most remarkable thing about it is its basic premise: A perfectly nice person who wouldn’t harm anybody finds her life (almost) ruined by some nasty reporter for no better reason than to sell newspapers. That this plot device could be employed without even raising an eyebrow more than a hundred years ago suggests that contempt and mistrust for a dishonest, yellow-journalism news media isn’t as recent a phenomenon as we might think. 

After the dinner break we leapt forward 98 years, from the earliest movie at The Picture Show to the most recent. This was Bride of Finklestein (2015) — not only the most recent film of the weekend, but “younger” than anything ever shows at Cinevent during it’s 52-year run. But while it may have come into being only seven years ago, in content, style and spirit it’s much older — say, somewhere between 1935 and 1940.

Let me explain. Bride of Finklestein is one of the extant comedy shorts of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster. Biffle and Shooster, in turn, are the creations of Nick Santa Maria (Biffle, left), Will Ryan (Shooster, right), and their producer-director Michael Schlesinger (not pictured, but a veteran contributor to past Cinevents). Together they made a number of Biffle and Shooster shorts between 2013 and 2015, faithfully duplicating the black-and-white style of such classic comedy teams as Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and Wheeler and Woolsey, with titles like It’s a Frame-Up!, Imitation of Wife, and Schmo Boat (that last one a musical in a pretty faithful approximation of Cinecolor). On the strength of just Bride of Finklestein, I can testify that Biffle and Shooster can hold their own among those classic teams, and are much funnier than Wheeler and Woolsey (but then, root canals are funnier than Wheeler and Woolsey). There are two Biffle and Shooster collections available that I know of: The Adventures of Biffle and Shooster can be streamed on Amazon Prime. There is also a DVD, The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster; which has everything on the streaming Adventures, plus 28 minutes of other odds and ends; the DVD can be obtained from Amazon (curiously, the DVD is a Kino Lorber release, but the KL Web site offers only the shorter Adventures). Sadly, what we have now of Biffle and Shooster is all we’ll ever get: Will (“Sam Shooster”) Ryan passed away in November 2021; The Picture Show’s screening of Bride of Finklestein, introduced by Michael Schlesinger, was dedicated to his memory.

Bride of Finklestein also served as a kind of lead-in to the next feature, which was introduced by Nick (“Benny Biffle”) Santa Maria. This was Hold That Ghost (1941), Abbott and Costello’s third starring feature, and one of their best. It started out as a B-comedy, Oh, Charlie, produced before their previous vehicle, Buck Privates, was released. When Buck Privates became Universal’s biggest hit in years and Universal finally realized what they had in Bud and Lou, Oh, Charlie was held back while they rushed the team into another service comedy, In the Navy. Meanwhile, Oh, Charlie was pumped up to A-picture status by adding musical numbers with the Andrews Sisters (who supported Bud and Lou in both service pictures) and (once again!) Ted Lewis. Retitled Hold That Ghost, it was released on August 30, the third of their four pictures for 1941.

Personally, I still say the team’s masterpiece is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948); after that, my own favorite is The Time of Their Lives (’46), with Lou and Marjorie Reynolds as ghosts from the American Revolution haunting modern-day Bud. Hold That Ghost, which has Bud and Lou treasure-hunting in a supposedly haunted old tavern they’ve inherited from a dead gangster, is right up there with them, funny enough to make the tacked-on musical numbers worth sitting through. Funniest scene: a levitating candle that scares the wits out of Lou but refuses to budge when Bud is looking. Pleasant surprise: Joan Davis as a radio actress who specializes in screams; she’s a scream herself, as funny as Lou. 

Next to the 1930s pastiche of Bride of Finklestein, the most recent picture at The Picture Show this year was Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), a lumpy, slipshod caper comedy that had Robert Wagner as the naïve nephew of a Boston scrap-metal dealer who tries to save a mothballed Liberty Ship from the scrap heap, only to see it, himself, and his long-suffering fiancée (Dolores Hart) fall into the hands of a gang with big plans and small I.Q.s. The gang plans to use the ship as their getaway vehicle after knocking over a Boston bank disguised as Pilgrims during a Thanksgiving festival. It was an inoffensive time-waster, interesting mainly as the last film of TV comedy genius Ernie Kovacs; it was released barely three weeks before he wrapped his Corvair station wagon around a lamppost on Santa Monica Blvd., dying instantly. His performance, indeed, was one of the picture’s assets, as was that of Frank Gorshin as the (relatively speaking) “brains” of the gang.

Not long after Sail a Crooked Ship, Dolores Hart gave up acting and became a nun. Coincidence? Maybe.

Day 2 wrapped up with Glen or Glenda (1953), the notorious first film by the notorious Edward D. Wood Jr. This poster notwithstanding, Glen or Glenda was not entirely about transgenderism — or, as it was more commonly known at the time, a “sex-change operation”. To be sure, that was what producer George Weiss had in mind when he hired Wood to write and direct a quickie picture exploiting the case of Christine Jorgensen (née George), whose series of gender-reassignment surgeries between 1951 and 1953 had focused public awareness on the issue; Weiss wanted to cash in.

Shooting in four days, Wood gave Weiss what he asked for — sort of. In fact, Glen or Glenda divides its time between two cases, both recounted by a doctor to a police detective (Lyle Talbot) investigating the suicide of a man who, repeatedly arrested for wearing women’s clothes, couldn’t face going through the ordeal again. As the doctor describes the two cases, one is Glen/Glenda, a “transvestite” — a heterosexual man who finds it pleasurable and comfortable to wear women’s clothes — while the other is Alan/Anne, a “transsexual” — a person who feels mentally and emotionally female but is trapped in a male body. Whether the movie’s approach to the issue would pass muster with 21st-century gender theory is beside the point; what matters is that it was surprisingly enlightened for 1953 (there were some pretty mean jokes going around about Christine Jorgensen at the time), and it offered an earnest plea for compassion and understanding. Note I said “earnest”, not “eloquent”. The fact is that, whatever its intentions, Glen or Glenda comes up against the invincible ineptitude of Edward D. Wood Jr.

What can we say about Ed Wood? The kindest thing is that you have to be in a certain frame of mind to sit through one of his movies. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood tried to portray him (in the person of Johnny Depp) as a wide-eyed naif with an irresistible urge to be part of the transformative art of the twentieth century, moving pictures. Burton’s movie got good reviews, and won an Oscar for Martin Landau playing Bela Lugosi (whom Wood befriended and exploited in Lugosi’s last drug-riddled years), but it sank like a rock at the box office, earning less than a third of its modest $18 million cost. My own feeling was that if you wanted to make a movie celebrating some unsung artist of the motion picture industry, there were about 875 directors you might go through before you got down to Ed Wood.

Nevertheless, any Ed Wood movie is certainly something to have seen, and Glen or Glenda is less mind-bogglingly inept than his later movies like Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space — probably because he wasn’t yet the incoherent, falling-down drunk he would later become. Even so, as a writer he could barely put one sentence after another; Glen or Glenda‘s narrative is interrupted at intervals by Bela Lugosi sitting in a laboratory among skeletons, skulls and test tubes, babbling about God knows what. As a director he lacked any sense of pace, composition or atmosphere. And as an actor — Wood, himself a heterosexual cross-dresser, plays Glen/Glenda, billed as “Daniel Davis” — as an actor he was…well, any junior high drama club in the country would have been glad to have him.

As I said, something to have seen, and you can see it here on YouTube. And with that, we called it a day in Columbus. More to come!

To be continued…

I’m back from Columbus, where Memorial Day Weekend was always Cinevent Weekend until 2019, when Cinevent Chair Michael Haynes announced that Cinevent 52 in 2020 would be the last — but that the tradition of a Memorial Day classic movie convention in Ohio’s capital would continue under a new name (to be determined) and new management (albeit with many familiar faces performing the same volunteer services as before).

Then, like so much else intended for 2020, Cinevent 52 didn’t happen — until Halloween Weekend 2021, 17 months late. By then, the TBD name for Cinevent’s successor had been chosen, The Columbus Moving Picture Show, and this above is their new logo. You’ll find it here on their Web site, and if you’re on Facebook (who isn’t?), on their FB page as well. You can also follow them on Twitter and Instagram if you’re of a mind.

Last October brought the final installment of Cinevent, presented in conjunction with the fledgling Columbus Moving Picture Show. Cinevent’s Michael Haynes passed the torch to Samantha Glasser (right), who stepped up from Dealers Coordinator to Chair, overseeing the activities of a cadre of dedicated Cinevent volunteers, who elected (unanimously, as far as I could tell) to continue under the new banner.

So for Memorial Day Weekend 2022, and moving forward, it’s The Columbus Moving Picture Show from now on. (Michael Haynes was there, however, as a dealer, seeking new homes for the extensive — nay, mind-boggling — collections of books, films and videos of his late father Steven, one of Cinevent’s original founders. I suspect Michael will be back next year too; he still has plenty of things to offer for sale.)

One thing more before I embark on my coverage of The Columbus Moving Picture Show 1; that is, to find a useful shorthand term to refer to the four-day event, whose full name, for all its stateliness and retro-nostalgic charm, can be a little cumbersome if used too frequently. In covering Cinevent 52 last October, I often referred to “CMPS”, but I found that to be a bit unsatisfactory; to me it sounded like the acronym of a non-governmental organization, or some disease requiring a rolling oxygen tank. Instead, in present and future posts, once the full name is established, I’ll just shorten it to “The Picture Show”; please take it as given that the location is Columbus and the Pictures are Moving.

Picture Show Eve at the Wexner

This year marked the return of a night-before tradition at Cinevent/The Picture Show: A double-feature screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State University campus, in conjunction with the weekend’s events downtown. The theme for this year’s Wednesday evening was “Pre-Code at 20th Century Fox”.

Ahem. Did you catch the glaring blooper in that theme? That’s right: There’s no such thing as Pre-Code 20th Century Fox; 20th Century Fox didn’t exist during the Pre-Code Era, which ended a year before Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures merged with (read “gobbled up”) the moribund Fox Film Corporation. The theme should properly have been “Pre-Code at Fox”, and the folks at the Wexner Center should have known as much. (Then again, maybe they did. Maybe they were afraid they’d incur the wrath of angry leftists unable to grasp that the Fox Film Corp. — which ceased to exist in 1935 — has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel — which didn’t exist until 1996. That seems to be the motivation for the Disney Corporation, once they in turn gobbled up 20th Century Fox, changing the studio’s name back to 20th Century Pictures — which was a pity, because it banished the name of William Fox from the movie industry he did so much to create.)

Well, whether the Wexner Center admitted it or not, Pre-Code at Fox is what we got, starting with Me and My Gal (1932, not to be confused with For Me and My Gal, the Judy Garland/Gene Kelly MGM musical of ten years later). This one was an urban melo-dramedy directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett. The story wasn’t much. Tracy played Danny Dolan, a happy-go-lucky waterfront cop who takes a shine to Helen (Bennett), a waitress in a greasy spoon on his beat. Meanwhile, her sister Kate (Marion Burns), though married to an adoring nice-guy dork, can’t resist her gangster ex-boyfriend Duke (George Walsh), who has her wrapped around (phallic symbol alert!) his little finger. While hubby is away in the merchant marine, Duke breaks out of prison and Kate hides him in the attic of the apartment she shares with her father-in-law, who is mute and wheelchair-bound from a stroke.

Got that? Now you can forget it, because it’s all beside the point. Marion Burns was a bland presence whose career would be pretty much over in another three years, and no wonder; she can’t even carry a subplot. On the other hand, it is nice to see George Walsh (Raoul’s younger brother) in a substantial role; his career never recovered from getting canned from the silent Ben-Hur in 1924 before even walking onto the chaotic set (see here for details about George’s short-circuited career). Still, the real fun of Me and My Gal is the wise-crackling courtship between Tracy’s Danny and Bennett’s Helen. In a couple of decades, they would be the middle-aged, staid, almost stodgy Bankses in Father of the Bride (1950) and Father’s Little Dividend (1951), but what a difference 18 years makes: Here they are sassy, sexy, and full of piss and vinegar, sparring jauntily with slangy dialogue at a lively pace set by director Walsh. The image on the poster here is, for once, taken directly from the movie, as the two of them snuggle cozily on her living-room sofa. Danny tells Helen about a movie he saw last night, “Strange Inner Tube or something like that” — and suddenly the scene segues into a witty parody of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, the movie of which was just then in theaters. The scene is not only an amusing send-up, but also a clever moment of character exposition:

Helen: “I saw that. That’s the one where the actors say one thing, and then a minute later say out loud what they really think.”

Danny: “Yeah. Y’know, you remind me an awful lot of the leadin’ lady — good lookin’ and a swell figure.” (Voice-over: “That oughta hold you for a while, baby.”)

Helen: “Say, come to think of it, you remind me of the leading man — so big and strong.” (“Probably won’t be able to get into that derby now.”)

Danny: “Gee, what a squawk your old man’d put up if he come in and found us like this, huh?” (“If he does it’s every man for himself.”)

Helen: “Well, wouldn’t be anything to squawk about.” (“Not much! If he walked in here and saw me like this they’d have to put you under ether to extract his foot, that’s all.”)

. . .

Danny: “Y’know, I feel as though I’ve known you a long, long time.” (“I think I better slip this dame a little kiss before the old man gets here.”)

Helen: (“Oh! He kissed me. I’m so thrilled. But I’ll pretend I’m mad.”) “How dare you!”

That’s just a sample of the banter. The picture has other things going for it besides two stars in the peppery bloom of youth: reliable old J. Farrell MacDonald as Helen and Kate’s father; Henry B. Walthall, D.W. Griffith’s first leading man, as Kate’s disabled father-in-law, still conveying profound emotion without uttering a sound; Raoul Walsh’s feel for the unpretentiousness of working-class life. (On the other hand, there’s Bert Hanlon as a drunken fisherman hanging out in Helen’s diner, quickly wearing out his welcome with her — and even more quickly with us.)

Then — getting back to the movie’s assets — there’s this fellow here. He plays Al, Danny Dolan’s partner/sidekick, a good fellow but a little slow on the uptake, very much in Danny’s shadow. I spent the whole picture trying to figure out where I’d seen this guy before. Then, during the intermission before the next movie, it hit me. It wasn’t where I’d seen him before, but who he reminded me of: John Candy. He had the same look, the same voice, the same physical and vocal mannerisms. It was remarkable, even a little eerie.

Then again, delving further, I found out that I had seen him before, in a lot of famous movies, usually in small roles, often uncredited: ‘G’ Men (1935); The Petrified Forest (’36); Angels with Dirty Faces (’38); Union Pacific and Rose of Washington Square (both ’39); The Grapes of Wrath, Castle on the Hudson and Christmas in July (all ’40).

His name was Adrian Morris, scion of a distinguished showbiz family; his father was the William Morris (of the William Morris Agency), his older brother was the actor Chester Morris. In his 10-year career, he racked up 79 screen appearances — 15 in 1939 and 14 in 1940 alone. Here he is (at right, below) in one of his most instantly memorable bits, in Gone With the Wind as the sidewalk carpetbagger in postwar Atlanta, promising Freedmen 40 acres and a mule (“…because we’re your friends. And you’re gonna be voters. And you’re gonna vote the way your friends vote…”). He’s on screen for only 13 seconds of a four-hour movie, but everybody remembers him.

Still ahead for Adrian Morris were Penny Serenade, Blood and Sand, The Big Store and Belle Starr (all ’41). He might have continued in that vein for decades and hundreds more titles, but a cerebral hemorrhage carried him off in November 1941 at the obscenely young age of 34.

If you care to check out Me and My Gal — and I recommend it — it’s available to rent or buy on Amazon. Or you can watch it for free on YouTube (click on Settings to turn off the intrusive Portuguese subtitles). As The New Yorker’s blogger Richard Brody says, the point of Me and My Gal isn’t the drama; the point is the spice. 

The evening’s other feature, alas, isn’t so readily available. This was The Warrior’s Husband (1933), a title that sounded more of an oxymoron at the time than it does now. It’s too bad it’s not easy to get to see, because it is hands-down one of the great what-the-hell-is-this??? movies of the 1930s. The Wexner Center presented it in a sparkling brand-new 4K digital transfer, so there may be hope for a DVD or streaming option sometime in the future. If it does happen, you really want to take a gander at this thing.

The Warrior’s Husband began as a 1924 play by pharmaceutical executive and amateur playwright Julian F. Thompson. It opened and closed on May 6, 1924; even in those days of shorter Broadway runs, one performance counted as an unmistakable flop. A 1932 revival fared better, running a more respectable two months. This production showcased a newcomer named Katharine Hepburn as Antiope, sister to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The attention earned her a trip to Hollywood for her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement with John Barrymore.

Later that year, when Fox purchased the movie rights to the play, Hepburn was otherwise engaged, so her role went to Fox’s new contract discovery Elissa Landi. And no kidding, in the finished film Landi looks like nothing so much as — wait for it — Katharine Hepburn. This was understandable, since Hepburn was the current Big Thing, and Fox had plans to make Landi the next Big Thing. She had already made an impression on loan to Paramount and Cecil B. DeMille for The Sign of the Cross. Her timorous Christian damsel in that Roman spectacle pales beside her swaggering pagan Antiope; if The Warrior’s Husband were as widely available as The Sign of the Cross, this might be the picture she’s best remembered for today. Here are dueling Antiopes, Landi’s from the movie beside Hepburn’s from the stage; it’s not easy to tell them apart.

The conceit of Thompson’s play, and the screenplay that Sonya Levien, Ralph Spence and director Walter Lang made of it, was that in the land of the Amazons, women are the warriors and breadwinners while a man’s place is in the home, barefoot and — well, not pregnant, obviously, but confined to knitting, cooking, and running the house. Queen Hippolyta (Marjorie Rambeau) rules in her capital city of Pontus by virtue of the power vested in the Sacred Girdle of Diana. There’s a subversive legend about a mythical race called “Greeks” where the gender roles are shockingly reversed, men in charge and women subservient, but this is widely dismissed as an old husbands’ tale to frighten girls. Then two actual Greeks show up at Hippolyta’s court, the handsome soldier Theseus (David Manners) and the poet Homer (Lionel Belmore), followed by Hercules (Stanley “Tiny” Sanford). Despite his terror of the mighty Amazons, Hercules is determined to fulfill the ninth of his twelve labors — to steal the Girdle of Diana from Hippolyta. (Quasi-historical note: In the ancient myth, Hercules kills Hippolyta to get it, but that detail is happily fudged here.) This not only removes the Amazons’ invincibility in battle, it makes them vulnerable to the masculine charms of the handsome Greek soldiers under Theseus’s command — and especially Antiope vis-à-vis Theseus himself.

It also gives Hippolyta’s spouse Sapiens (Ernest Truex) ideas above his station. Sapiens (or “Sap”) shares with Theseus the “warrior’s husband” designation of the title, and his newfound assertiveness makes him an ancient advocate of men’s liberation (I guess you’d call him an early “masculist”).

If you wanted to find an actor to make Marjorie Rambeau, Elissa Landi, and every other woman on the Fox lot look macho, you could hardly do better than Ernest Truex; his spit-curl hair and ringleted beard complete The Warrior’s Husband‘s plunge into deep “woo-woo” territory.

The picture has some pretty spectacular production values — massive sets, elaborate clashes of Amazons and Greeks that are half battle, half orgy, and a convincing simulation of a cast of thousands. This, mind you, at a time when Fox was reeling from years of financial losses and ripe for takeover (even as The Warrior’s Husband was hitting screens, there were rumors that Warner Bros. was about to buy the studio up; in time, of course, it would be 20th Century that did the deed). At the same time, there’s a subversive, transgressive approach to gender roles that’s pretty startling for a movie from the depths of the Great Depression. True, in the end the Amazons all yield to the invading Greek men and Theseus carries Antiope off to marriage with her enthusiastic consent, so things resolve themselves in a manner quite comfortable to mainstream audiences of 1933. But for much of its 75 minutes, The Warrior’s Husband pokes wicked fun at those gender-role conventions, as if to say, “How would you like it if…”

As the lights came up in the Wexner Center, a gentleman sitting near me turned to David Drazin (one of The Picture Show’s silent-movie accompanists) in the row behind us and said, “Well, that was just about the queerest movie I’ve ever seen.” This prompted a question in my mind, which I kept to myself: In what sense? Almost immediately, I had my answer: Take your pick. I kept that to myself too.

So much for The Picture Show’s night-before appetizer, appetizingly served by the Wexner Center. The main event would begin the next day.

To be continued…