The Fog of Lost London, Part 2

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Here begins a chapter-by chapter synopsis of London After Midnight, a novel by Marie Collidge-Rask, based on the scenario of the Tod Browning production. Like the book, the synopsis will be

ILLUSTRATED WITH SCENES
FROM THE PHOTOPLAY
A METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURE
STARRING LON CHANEY
Chapter 1 – Balfour House

Balfour House is an old ancestral home on the outskirts of London whose origins stretch back to before the time of Charles II. Successive generations of the Balfour family have added to it until it is a weird and mystifying architectural abnormality, a labyrinth of chambers, corridors, passageways and dark, massively furnished and heavily curtained rooms. One room, heavily bolted and padlocked, has not been opened in centuries. It is said that a beautiful young woman once met a horrible death in that room, and that her ghost walks restlessly moaning and sobbing whenever some tragedy is about to occur in the house. Those sobs are heard the night Roger Balfour is found dead in the house, a bullet in his head, driven to suicide by depression and money problems.

Roger’s son Harry, 15, and daughter Lucy, 13, become the wards of their father’s friend and neighbor Sir James Hamlin. Since there was no will, Sir James supervises the settling of Roger Balfour’s estate and takes the two children into his home. Balfour House and its grounds become shunned and neglected and, with no money left for their upkeep after settling Roger’s debts, fall into disrepair.

Five years pass. Harry Balfour, now 20 and more than a little resentful of his and Lucy’s dependence on Sir James’s generosity, returns from school and announces that he wants to reopen Balfour House. Sir James says this is impossible without major repairs, either by finding a wealthy tenant or a wealthy bride for Harry. Harry refuses to marry for money. Sir James offers to buy the Balfour estate outright, to give Harry a stake in life. Again, Harry indignantly refuses: “So long as I live the Balfour estate shall not revert to other hands.”

Soon after this, Harry has an unpleasant scene with Jerry Hibbs, Sir James’s secretary. An agitated Hibbs mutters to himself that Harry is “courting disaster” if he goes near Balfour House.

Chapter 2 – Another Mystery

 

Two days after his confrontations with Sir James and Hibbs, Harry fails to show up for a riding date with his sister Lucy. No one has seen him since dinner the night before, and his bed has not been slept in. At first Lucy pouts that Harry has ruined her day, but as the day wears on she begins to worry.

That night Hibbs sends one of the servants on a confidential errand. Overheard by the maid, Anna Smithson, Hibbs asks her to say nothing to anyone.

An hour later a group of Sir James’s servants, lashed by wind and rain, spooked and unnerved as they search through the overgrown grounds at Balfour House, find the body of Harry Balfour. As they lift the body to carry it to shelter, one of the servants swears he can hear, beneath the whistling of the wind, the wails of the ghost in the secret room of Balfour House.

Chapter 3 – Who Killed Harry Balfour?

 Lucy Balfour is still worrying about Harry’s disappearance when her brother’s body is brought in. She is distraught at his death and horrified, as are the others, at the sight of two red wounds on his throat. The coroner’s inquest returns a verdict of death at the hands of “person or persons unknown.” In testimony at the inquest, neither Sir James nor Hibbs mentions their respective run-ins with Harry before his disappearance. The maid Smithson testifies that on the night of the murder, she was looking out a window into the storm and saw a man heading toward Balfour House. The man was definitely not Master Harry, she says. It is assumed that the person she saw was the murderer, but there is no clue as to his identity, his motive, or why he would make those wounds on Harry’s throat.

Chapter 4 – Hypnotic Hypotheses

Chief Detective Inspector Burke of Scotland Yard, dining with the assistant commissioner of his division, discusses the unsolved murder of Harry Balfour. Burke believes that the murder of Harry confirms his suspicion that Roger Balfour was murdered as well, even though all signs seemed to point to suicide at the time. He says that he has a number of leads but no firm evidence, and plans to test his theory that under hypnosis and the proper conditions, a criminal will reenact his crimes. Burke borrows a book from the assistant commissioner’s library, saying that he expects to be busy with his investigation for some time, but when next they dine together, Burke says, he is sure he’ll have the proof he needs.

Chapter 5 – A Betrothal

Seven months have passed since Harry’s death, and Lucy is finally beginning to emerge from her grief. As May turns to June, Lucy finds herself turning more and more to Jerry Hibbs for companionship, and her feelings for him have grown more than sisterly. At last, in a sun-bathed arbor scented by the blooming roses of Hamlin House, Lucy and Hibbs profess their love for one another. They agree to say nothing to Sir James for the time being, for fear that he will disapprove and dispense with Hibbs’s services.

Chapter 6 – Uncanny Tenants

Night. Two men stand under a tree on the grounds of Balfour House, near where Harry Balfour’s body was discovered. They are representatives of the London realtor’s office that administers the Balfour property and are waiting while prospective tenants inspect the premises by lantern-light. The people came into the office near closing time and expressed an interest after seeing a picture of the house in a magazine (the realtors having long since given up advertising the property). If satisfactory, the tenants propose to move in at once. This has all happened so quickly that the agent hasn’t had time to notify Sir James, though he did get in touch with Hibbs. Hibbs told him to go ahead with the transaction if the tenants’ references are satisfactory. The agent is waiting outside for the tenants because, he said, nothing would induce him to enter the house.

Meanwhile, Anna Smithson and Thomas, another of the Hamlin House servants, are returning from the village station in a cart with the luggage of a guest Sir James is expecting. They see the light in Balfour House. They can see two shadowy figures moving about with the lantern; one of them is a woman, but they can make out no other details. Thomas believes the woman is the ghost of the house, but Anna scoffs. As they watch, the door of Balfour House opens and a man emerges, tall but stooped, shrouded in a heavy Inverness coat and wearing a high beaver hat. That’s all it takes for Thomas to crack his whip and hurry the horse on to Hamlin House.

 
The man in the beaver hat crosses slowly to where the realtor’s agents wait. The agents apologize for not accompanying him into the house, but he reassures them — in his spooky way: “Life is a mystery no man can solve. It extends beyond the grave.” They remind him that the owner will make no improvements, but he doesn’t mind; the house will suit his purposes.
 
The agent hands the man the lease papers and he peruses them, only briefly looking up when a mournful wail rises from somewhere out in the darkness. By now the agents are thoroughly unnerved and eager to be off. With a “horrible” smile, the man in the beaver hat slowly signs the lease. As he heads back into the house, the agents scurry off to apprise Sir James of the transaction.

 

Chapter 7 – Sir James Receives a Shock

At Hamlin House, preparations are under way for the coming of Colonel Yates, Sir James’s guest, when the realtor’s agents arrive. Sir James is astonished to learn that Balfour House has been let, and it is evident that the surprise is not an entirely pleasant one. Hibbs explains that he did not expect the tenants to take immediate possession; he thought they would merely inspect the property and then negotiate terms. The agents report that the tenant’s references were impeccable and he paid the entire term of the lease in cash, in advance.

Reassured, Sir James glances at the papers the agents have handed him. His calm demeanor vanishes and his face goes white when he sees the signature on the lease. It is signed “Roger Balfour.” And it is in Roger Balfour’s handwriting.

Chapter 8 – An Unexpected Guest

Why wasn’t this noticed at the office? Sir James asks. The agent replies that the matter was handled by a new employee who didn’t know the house’s history; the agent himself had simply presumed that this Roger Balfour was perhaps a distant relation wishing to see the ancestral home. Sir James says there are no other branches of the family and demands a description of the man in the beaver hat.

At this point, the butler announces Colonel Yates. Sir James’s consternation is almost complete, because in addition to this shock about Roger Balfour, he has been trying all day to remember who Colonel Yates is; he learned only today that this “old friend from India” was coming, and has been unable to place the name. As Yates is ushered in, however, Sir James remembers him at once and is reassured by Yates’s solid, dependable, no-nonsense presence. In fact, he welcomes his guest’s opinions on the matter of the new tenant at Balfour House, and briefly explains the situation to him.

It turns out Yates had known Roger Balfour years before, but had lost touch and did not know of his death; he says suicide seems unlike the Balfour he knew. When the agents describe the new tenant as “creepy” and “un-holy,” Yates scoffs. “You chaps must have been smoking something…” His laughter diffuses the tension in the room; even Sir James looks less upset.

Chapter 9 – Ghouls

As Yates and Sir James discuss the matter later, alone, Sir James shows Yates some documents signed by the late Roger Balfour, and Yates concedes that the handwriting on the lease is unmistakeably the same. Mulling this over, he cautions Sir James not to dismiss out of hand the idea of supernatural; years in India, he says, have taught him the folly of that. In fact, he has a book with him that he thinks might bear on the subject, and promises to give it to Sir James. Later, after dressing for dinner, Yates gives the book to Hibbs to place in the library, where it will be available to anyone interested. Hibbs (who for some reason has taken an instant, mild dislike to Colonel Yates) does so, and a glance at the book’s contents interests him enough to make him resolve to come back to it later.

 
 
 
 
All through dinner, and even afterward as Lucy plays for diversion, Sir James’s mind is elsewhere. He had insistd to Yates that he does not believe in ghosts, but he nevertheless has a superstitious nature and is troubled.
After Lucy finishes playing, Yates invites her to take a walk on the verandah. Hibbs, miffed and a little jealous, decides to take a closer look at Yates’s book in the library. He finds Sir James in the library, himself so absorbed in the book that he doesn’t hear Hibbs’s approach. Hibbs suggests that a study of the book might “throw light upon the mysteries of Balfour House.” Sir James says the mysteries be damned, he just wants to know who signed Roger Balfour’s name to that lease. 
 
When Yates joins them in the library, Sir James shows him a passage in the book, printed in early English text, that has particularly alarmed him: “Men who have died by murder or suicide frequently become vampyrs.” The two agree that, unpleasant as the idea is, nothing will do but that they inspect the vault on the grounds of Balfour House where all the Balfours, including Roger, have been entombed. The sooner the better. 
 
After midnight Yates and Sir James set out, armed with revolvers and carrying a lantern. Almost immediately Sir James’s courage begins to fail. He senses that someone, or something, is following them and trying to stop them on their errand, but every time he turns around, nothing is there. Only Yates, in his “military determination,” is unwavering, and Sir James forces himself to go on. At one point something suddenly flaps at them out of the darkness. A bird? A bat? No way to tell. Slowly, carefully, onward they creep. 
 
At the door to the Balfour crypt Yates raises his lantern. The door is closed and locked, seemingly undisturbed since the day months earlier when Harry Balfour was interred there. Sir James’s hand shakes as he inserts the key into the locked door. The rusty lock resists, but eventually yields, and the door slowly swings inward. 
 
The two men halt at a sudden sound — it sounded almost like a sigh. They wait, tensed, but now there is only silence. 
 
Standing in the yawning doorway, they peer into the darkness of the tomb. Yates raises the lantern and holds it forward in the gloom. By the dim yellow light, Sir James’s eyes search the shadows. His blood freezes as he sees that the lid of Roger Balfour’s coffin is open. The coffin is empty. 
 
There is a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder, and somewhere in the night, the mournful, blood-curdling howl of a dog. 
 
 
To be continued…
 
 

The Fog of Lost London, Part 1

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London After Midnight (MGM; 1927) is the Holy Grail of Lost Films. Oh sure, there’s the complete Greed. But we do have the incomplete Greed, and it’s a masterpiece as it stands. Besides, tell the truth: Isn’t there just the tiniest little fear, deep down in your heart, that if Stroheim’s 42-reel, ten-hour cut should miraculously turn up, it just might turn out to be a letdown, maybe even (Heresy! Heresy!) a bit of a bore? But be that as it may, we do have Greed; all we have of London After Midnight is an assortment of stills like this one of Lon Chaney in makeup and costume as the Man in the Beaver Hat.

There are enough of these remnants that Philip J. Riley was able to publish a reconstruction of Tod Browning’s movie in book form, but if you didn’t have the opportunity or good sense to pay $29.95 for it in 1987, you’ll have to shell out ninety bucks or more now. A few years ago Turner Classic Movies did a similar reconstruction, this time on film, and that one’s available on The Lon Chaney Collection.

In 1970 the Museum of Modern Art staged a “Lost Films” exhibit and published an accompanying book by the same title. At least two of the pictures in MoMA’s exhibit — Street Angel (1928) with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, and Rex Ingram’s The Garden of Allah (1927) — have surfaced since then, so there’s always hope. But London After Midnight remains lost, and the pages devoted to it in the MoMA book are sparse. Author Gary Carey wrote: “It is almost impossible to synopsize a mystery film which one has not seen because critics, bound by professional ethics, divulge little of the plot let alone its solution.”

Mr. Carey should have read the review that appeared in Variety on December 14, 1927. Variety’s reviewer, “Mori,” didn’t much care for the movie (“Will add nothing to Chaney’s prestige as a trouper, nor increase the star’s box office value.”), nor did he shrink from discouraging potential viewers by recounting the entire plot, solution and all. Then, amazingly, in his last paragraph, he said: “The usual suspicions, planted while the situations are worked out, succeed in leaving an impression of mystery regarding the outcome.” (Not anymore, Mori!)

As a side note, let me add that Mori wasn’t the only Variety reviewer to do this sort of thing. It’s our good luck now that the Spoiler Police weren’t so powerful back then; the detailed descriptions in Variety’s reviews from 1907 to 1930 are virtually all we have to go on for movies now lost beyond recall. I’ve found them invaluable in researching the careers of the stars in the M.J. Moriarty deck of movie playing cards.

But back to London After Midnight. There’s always hope it may someday surface, like Street Angel and The Garden of Allah, but it hasn’t happened yet; the last known print was destroyed in a studio fire in the 1960s. Director Browning did a loose remake in 1935 — Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi and Lionel Barrymore taking over the equivalent roles that were both originally played by Lon Chaney — but that time Browning made major changes; for one thing, the new picture didn’t even take place in London. If we want any sense of the original, we still have to depend on the Riley and TCM reconstructions.

 
 
 

Or…there is this. I came across this book while perusing the shelves at the estate sale of a popular Sacramento TV personality. The novelization is the work of Marie Coolidge-Rask, who evidently made a decent living out of this kind of piecework. She’s known to have also novelized Mary Pickford’s Sparrows (1926) and the King Vidor-Lillian Gish La Boheme that same year (now there’s a literary platypus for you: a novelization of a silent movie of an opera). 
 
Otherwise, Ms. Coolidge-Rask’s literary output seems not to have left much impression on the shifting sands of time. These movie tie-ins weren’t a terribly lucrative field for the writer-for-hire; usually there was just a flat fee — probably, in the 1920s, no more than a thousand dollars or so, if that — and that was that, no royalties. A shame, because London After Midnight may have sold pretty well; Mori’s opinion notwithstanding, the movie was the most successful Browning-Chaney collaboration. Whatever MGM or Grosset & Dunlap paid her for her efforts, I hope for her sake she invested it wisely.
 
In any case, she doesn’t seem to have slavishly followed Browning and Waldemar Young’s script: Her novel features at least one character, a certain Colonel Yates, who doesn’t appear in the movie’s cast list on IMDB. And she isn’t bound by the limits of silent movies — her characters are certainly a talkative bunch. For that matter, so is Ms. Coolidge-Rask herself — she crams words in like a canner stuffing sardines in a tin. Here she is describing Sir James Hamlin (Henry B. Walthall):
 
“Sir James, despite the studied calmness of his demeanor when with Lucy Balfour or in the presence of those he deemed his inferiors, was of a nervous temperament, at times easily influenced, again firm to the point of stubbornness, according to his mental reaction to whatever force against which he found himself in opposition.”
 
Got all that? Here she is again, later on the same page: 
 
“In his presence, the baronet felt himself unusually helpless. Like a fly, pinned against the wall for scientific inspection with a microscope.” 
 
I don’t know what kind of scientist would pin a fly to the wall to see it through a microscope, but I suppose Ms. Coolidge-Rask might have known some.
 
 
   
 
 
Anyhow, now, just in time for Halloween, I propose to spend the next few posts hacking through the purple undergrowth of Marie Coolidge-Rask’s prose (I do these things so you don’t have to), distilling it into a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of her novelization. In this way I hope to get some sense of what audiences at Browning’s vampire/murder mystery might have seen in 1927 — sort of like Tod Browning, Polly Moran and Lon Chaney here pretending to commune with the spirit world for the MGM publicity department. This will be, so to speak, by the book, without reference to either Philip J. Riley’s or TCM’s reconstructions; if there are differences, maybe we can talk about those later.

 

So be warned: if you’re worried about spoiling the ending of London After Midnight (which you can’t see anyhow) or Mark of the Vampire (which you can), proceed at your own risk.

Movie Playing Cards: 3 of Hearts – Geraldine Farrar

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Geraldine Farrar was not the first star to occupy the M.J. Moriarty deck’s 3 of Hearts; that distinction (if Cliff Aliperti’s guess at the deck’s provenance is correct) belongs to Cleo Madison. But Ms. Farrar is the only Metropolitan Opera star in the deck. Other great singers would make the transition from Met to movies, but not until the sound era; and while some (Lawrence Tibbett, Grace Moore, Lily Pons, Maria Callas) would be more successful than others (Kirsten Flagstad, Luciano Pavarotti), only Geraldine Farrar managed to become a movie star without ever once depending upon her voice to get her there.

No wonder. She was a natural actress without a trace of self-consciousness, and the camera loved loved loved her. The picture on the card isn’t the most flattering, with that hairstyle like a leather aviator’s helmet, but you can see what I mean, especially with those enormous, all-seeing eyes — they make you want to glance over your right shoulder to see what she finds so fascinating and amusing; not even that huge corsage can pull your attention away from her eyes for very long. 

Here’s another look at those eyes, this time smoldering and looking straight into your own. The portrait is by the German painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1850-1920), and is now part of the Geraldine Farrar Collection in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. It was probably painted in late 1901 or early ’02, about the time the 19-year-old Geraldine created a sensation as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust and became the toast of Berlin.
 
That Berlin triumph was the culmination of a course of study that had taken her from her birth in 1882 in Melrose, Massachusetts — where she determined at an early age to become an opera star — through voice study in Boston, New York, Paris, and finally Berlin, where her big splash in Faust brought her under the tutelage of the great soprano Lilli Lehmann. She remained with Berlin’s Royal Court Opera for several seasons and became a favorite of the Kaiser and his family; there were scandalous rumors of an affair with Crown Prince Wilhelm which Farrar’s family and friends (protesting too much?) were at great pains to deny. Berlin was the springboard to a brilliant European career — Monte Carlo, Stockholm, Paris, Munich, Warsaw — that brought her home to America and the Metropolitan Opera in 1906. 
 
Geraldine Farrar was perhaps the world’s first multimedia star — if only because for the first time in history, a performer could have more than one medium to be a star in. Besides her dazzling success on the opera stage and recital circuit, she made over 200 recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company; you can still hear plenty of them on YouTube.
 

And then, in 1915, yet another medium. Moving pictures came calling, in the form of Cecil B. DeMille and the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Lasky and DeMille had been making a go of their venture out in sleepy Hollywood, shooting in a converted barn at the corner of Vine and Selma Streets. I don’t know what prompted them to approach Farrar; perhaps they read the interview where she described herself not as a singer but “an actress who happens to be appearing in opera” and figured an actress in any other vehicle… Whatever the impetus, it was a masterstroke. Farrar agreed to work eight weeks during the Met’s off season, making three pictures for a fee of $35,000. The news, and the announcement that the diva’s first picture would be a silent version of her Met success Carmen, electrified the industry. The William Fox Co. was inspired to do a quickie knockoff Carmen with their house vamp Theda Bara (Fox’s picture went into release the day after DeMille’s Carmen but doesn’t seem to have cut very deeply into its business).

The DeMille-Lasky Carmen wasn’t planned as an adaptation of the opera; the work was still under copyright, and the proprietors were asking too much for the movie rights. Instead, DeMille and his scriptwriter brother William turned to Prosper Mérimée’s original novella, now in the public domain, which had a story much changed in the opera. Still, the opera was too familiar to ignore completely, so a musical score was commissioned adapting Bizet’s themes (Lasky could afford that much).

Before shooting on their big-money title, though, DeMille made a canny decision: he would shoot Farrar’s other two pictures (Temptation and Maria Rosa) first, just in case his leading lady needed a little experience to put her at ease in front of the camera. This was probably prudent, but it proved to be unnecessary; Geraldine Farrar took to movies like a duck to water. Here she is in Carmen’s classic pose — a cliché by now, but at that time you could hardly get away with leaving it out — the rose clenched in her teeth, lasciviously eying the unfortunate Don Jose (Wallace Reid), whom she intends to seduce to help her smuggler cohorts.

And here she is again, assuring her gypsy confederate (Horace B. Carpenter) that the trap is ready to be sprung. As DeMille biographer Scott Eyman observes, Farrar wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was alluring. Her Carmen moves like a cat, slinky, self-assured and radiating a confident, even aggressive sexuality. (Apparently in real life, too; Crown Prince Wilhelm wasn’t the only name linked romantically with hers. While at the Met she carried on a torrid six-year affair with conductor Arturo Toscanini that ended only when she gave him an ultimatum: leave your wife or else. The maestro abruptly resigned from the Met and beat a hasty retreat back to Italy, wife and family in tow.)

Carmen was a big hit for the Lasky Co., in both money and prestige. Not since the aging Sarah Bernhardt hobbled around on her wooden leg in Queen Elizabeth had a star of such international magnitude graced a movie screen. And it must be said, whatever the Great Sarah’s power on stage, she had hardly a tenth of Farrar’s instinctive understanding of movie acting. By the time the picture was released — on October 31, 1915 — Farrar had returned to the Met; the other pictures she had shot that summer were spaced out for release the rest of the season, Temptation at the end of December and Maria Rosa at the beginning of May 1916.

Farrar enjoyed her eight week stint in Hollywood, where every man and woman in the Lasky Co. was completely won over by her professionalism and her down-to-earth personal charm; people used to gather outside the window of her dressing room and listen to her sing as she prepared to go on the set. Between pictures she met the handsome actor Lou Tellegen, whom she married in February 1916. That following summer, with the Met again going dark, she was back at the Lasky Studio, again working for DeMille. 
 
This time the subject was even bigger than Carmen: Farrar would play Joan of Arc in Joan the Woman. Joan had not yet been elevated to sainthood, but it was only a matter of time; she had been beatified in 1909 (sainthood would finally come in 1920). As the title suggests, Farrar’s allure was not to be entirely subsumed into the religious fervor of the Maid of Orleans; DeMille and writer Jeanie Macpherson defied history by giving Joan a chaste romance with an English soldier, teaming Farrar again with Wallace Reid. (In the movie it plays better than it probably sounds.) 
 
Joan the Woman was the first example of the kind of movie most people think of when they think of Cecil B. DeMille today: a sweeping historical epic with semi-florid acting and none-too-subtle religious overtones. A second historical epic followed: The Woman God Forgot, with Farrar bizarrely cast as an Aztec princess, daughter of Montezuma, whose intervention on behalf of her Spanish lover (shades of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith!) brings about the downfall of her father’s empire. (Both Variety and the New York Times commented that Miss Farrar was noticeably more pale-skinned than the rest of her Aztec family.) 
 
The Woman God Forgot wasn’t released until 1917; the big money picture for ’16 was Joan the Woman. DeMille and Macpherson drew a direct parallel between the Hundred Years War and the war then raging in Europe, telling the story of Joan’s battle for France within a framing story of an English officer in the trenches of the Great War (also played by Wallace Reid) who takes heart from Joan’s devotion (and attains a similar shall-not-have-died-in-vain martyrdom under the barbed wire). This publicity still was presumably approved for release by DeMille and Lasky, but unfortunately it isn’t terribly becoming to Ms. Farrar; granted, she was some years over-age (and some pounds overweight) for the role, but in the finished picture she never looks quite as tomboy-silly as she does here.
 

In fact, it was in working on Joan the Woman that Farrar demonstrated the quality that DeMille, throughout his career, would especially prize among his actors: absolute fearlessness. Well, not absolute; she was actually afraid of horses and had to be doubled in many of her riding scenes. But fearless nevertheless; you can see it in the battle scenes, as she strides resolutely in full armor (only without that dear little pleated skirt) among the flailing swords, maces and pikestaffs.

 

 

You can particularly see it in the scene of Joan’s execution at the stake, one of the most horrific scenes of the silent era, all the more effective for the stencil-tinting process that colored the flames of her pyre. Looking at a single frame, this closeup might look easy to fake, and it probably would be, but believe me, the flames in action look a lot closer and more dangerous than they do here. But if this shot of Joan appealing to her saints at the moment of death doesn’t convince you Geraldine Farrar was a real game ‘un…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…then how about this?…

 

 

 

 

…or this?

As Scott Eyman says, “How Farrar managed to survive without third degree burns or, at the very least, smoke inhalation remains a mystery.”

 

Alas, the honeymoon with Lasky and DeMille did not last, chiefly because of the honeymoon with Lou Tellegen. The Dutch-born Tellegen had come to America in 1910 at 29, as leading man (and offstage consort) to Sarah Bernhardt. After marrying Farrar in 1916, when she returned to Hollywood he began throwing his weight around and interfering in her films. To keep him out of their hair (and hers), DeMille and Lasky allowed him to direct a picture, What Money Can’t Buy. When they judged that one to be a dog — along with another, The Things We Love — Tellegen got his nose bent out of shape, and Farrar (out of what she later ruefully called “wifely loyalty”) sided with him. Both of them left the Lasky Co. and signed with Samuel Goldwyn.

Working her customary off-season shifts, Farrar made six pictures for Goldwyn (three co-starring Tellegen). When Goldwyn complained that her pictures were not doing well, she suggested (with no hard feelings) that they cancel the remaining two years of her contract. She left movies for good in 1920, though she appears to have remained in the M.J. Moriarty deck until it ceased production — perhaps in the hope that she might return to the screen; anyhow, it was back to the Metropolitan Opera, where she retired amid great fanfare in 1922 at the age of 40.

The marriage to Lou Tellegen (her only one, the second of four for him) suffered from his chronic infidelities and succumbed to divorce in 1923. Tellegen himself came to a sorry end in 1934, a month short of his 53rd birthday. By then he had lost his looks (to a combination of age and facial injuries in a fire) and his career. He was ailing (it was cancer, but he wasn’t told). In 1931 he had published an autobiography, Women Have Been Kind, essentially a long boast about his sexual conquests that made him widely despised as a kiss-and-tell cad. (That year, the old Vanity Fair magazine had spotlighted him in their monthly “Nominated for Oblivion” feature, referring to his memoir as Women Have Been Kind [of Dumb].) Now, three years later, he elected himself to the oblivion Vanity Fair had nominated him for: While visiting friends in Hollywood, he locked himself in the bathroom, stood naked before the mirror, stabbed himself seven times with a pair of sewing scissors, and bled to death over an array of his clippings he had strewn on the floor. Approached by a reporter for a comment, Geraldine Farrar said, “Why should that interest me?”                   

 
Now that’s a bitter divorce. 
 
What might have been if Geraldine Farrar had not joined in Lou Tellegen’s falling-out with Cecil B. DeMille is a tantalizing question mark. Even more tantalizing is the thought of how her career might have gone if she’d been born 20 years later, if she had made that hit in Berlin in 1921 instead of 1901. Then, when Hollywood went ransacking New York for musical talent during the sound revolution, she would have been about the age she is here, when she created the role of the Goose-Girl in Humperdinck’s Königskinder (The King’s Children) at the Met in 1910. Jeanette MacDonald and Irene Dunne, among others, may have had reason to be grateful that they never had to deal with any competition frrom Geraldine Farrar.
 
As it is, Geraldine Farrar is doubly unique in the Moriarty deck: the only opera star, and the star with the shortest movie career — where others made dozens, even hundreds of pictures, she made only 14 features (plus one Liberty Bonds short to aid the war effort in 1918) during five years in Hollywood. In her autobiography, she wrote of her movie experiences: “I had greatly enjoyed them, and only regret that my own era was too early for the combination of the present acting and talking features.” Yes indeed, the movie musical would have known exactly what to do with Geraldine Farrar. And vice versa.
 
 
 
The determination, hard work and self-confidence of little Alice Geraldine Farrar, who decided before age 10 that she would be a great opera star, served her well through a long and healthy life. After retiring from the Met, she continued on the concert stage until 1931, and appeared in a 1926 Franz Lehar operetta, Romany Love, that closed after one performance. From there she made occasional appearances on the radio, published an autobiography (Such Sweet Compulsion) in 1938 to go with an earlier one in 1916 (Geraldine Farrar: The Story of an American Singer by Herself), and served as a Red Cross Volunteer during World War II. She lived in comfortable retirement in Ridgefield, Connecticut as the well-loved Dowager Queen of American Opera until her death on March 11, 1967. She was 85.

 

 

Tony Curtis 1925-2010

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When the news broke that Tony Curtis had died, suddenly everybody was talking about Some Like It Hot or Sweet Smell of Success. For my part, I got out my old laserdisc of Taras Bulba. I must have seen that movie three or four times within two weeks in 1962, at Sacramento’s old Esquire Theatre, but I hadn’t set eyes on it in decades, not even when I bought the laserdisc as a sentimental sop to my adolescence. It holds up rather better than I expected: a cast-of-thousands epic that didn’t skimp at a time when you really did have to hire thousands of extras, a pretty-good movie with one great sequence (the gathering of the Zaporoshti Cossacks, galloping across the Ukrainian steppes) and, as Leslie Halliwell aptly put it, “plenty of spectacular highlights.”

I suppose my resorting to Taras Bulba betrays a certain nostalgia for the big clunky pleasures of early-’60s Panavision — plus, of course, it hasn’t been that long since I saw Some Like It Hot or Sweet Smell of Success, or some of the other pictures that people point to when they reflect that the former Bernard Schwartz Could Really Act: The Defiant Ones, Spartacus, The Boston Strangler. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Taras Bulba, in its way, serves as an apt summary of Tony Curtis’s entire 130-picture run, from City Across the River to David and Fatima: a pretty-good career with plenty of spectacular highlights.

Students who come to Tony Curtis via film-class screenings of Some Like It Hot have a different perspective from those of us who were going to movies when Curtis was really hot. For them, his career dribbles down from Some Like It Hot; for us, it built up to it — or to The Defiant Ones (his sole Oscar nomination) or Sweet Smell (for that hardy handful who saw it at the time). My intro to Tony was George Pal’s colorfully ersatz biopic Houdini, a staple of Saturday kiddie matinees in my town during the ’50s; I must have seen it five times. Son of Ali Baba was another. I can’t say I ever heard him utter the immortal “Yondah lies the castle of my faddah” (did he really say that? Where? The Prince Who Was a Thief? The Black Shield of Falworth?), but that’s pretty much the Tony Curtis I first met.

It’s the Tony Curtis of this publicity still, which was printed in a short chapter near the end of Richard Griffth and Arthur Mayer’s 1956 coffee table tome The Movies. It was part of a two-page spread headed “Teen Faves,” featuring pictures of Curtis, Tab Hunter and Guy Madison and wondering which, if any, would turn out to be more than a flash in the pan.

For Curtis’s fans from those early days, this is the Tony we remember — athletic, exuberant, rambunctious. If we want to remind ourselves of what a good actor he could be, we’re as likely to think of The Great Impostor (as real-life poser Ferdinand Demara) or The Outsider (as the tragic Ira Hayes, participant-by-chance in the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising) as we are Sweet Smell of Success. And at comedy, we may say he never got the credit he deserved for Some Like It Hot, but we’re as likely to remember him for Operation Petticoat. That was the quintessential Tony: slick, even a bit shady, Bronx-street-hustler charming, fast-talking with that Noo Yawk honk, and immensely pleased with himself and what he could get away with. Which, by all accounts (including his own), is pretty much what Bernard Schwartz was like in real life.
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Films of Henry Hathaway: The Shepherd of the Hills

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In 1941 Paramount and Henry Hathaway followed up their success with The Trail of the Lonesome Pine with another Technicolor version of a bestselling rural romance. This one was taken from a novel by Harold Bell Wright, a writer who was, if anything, even more popular in his day than Lonesome Pine author John Fox Jr. I say “in his day,” but actually it was pretty much the same day; Fox’s most productive years were 1895-1910, Wright’s 1902-16 (although he continued to write and publish almost up to his death in 1944).
 
 Certainly, even as late as 1941 the name of Harold Bell Wright was one to conjure with; in this magazine ad for the picture, Wright’s name appears above the title, not once but twice. Even so, the credit “Harold Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills” has a sharp edge of irony — in point of fact, Grover Jones and Stuart Anthony’s screenplay has little to do with Wright’s novel (even less than Lonesome Pine had with Fox’s) beyond the title and some character names. (And by the way, here’s full disclosure: One of the names, in novel and movie, is Jim Lane, father of the movie’s heroine Samantha “Sammy” Lane; he’s played by Tom Fadden.) This departure from the text is enough to make Hathaway’s movie an outcast among Wright’s latter-day fans (and yes, he still has them), but in the movie’s defense it can be said that Wright’s plot is a pretty melodramatic can of worms, though it had been filmed fairly closely in 1928, and earlier in 1919 (that version, now lost, was presumably the most faithful of all, having been produced by Wright himself). Harold Bell Wright was still around in 1941, when the Hathaway picture was released, but what he thought of it — or for that matter, whether he even saw it — is not recorded. By that time, he might simply have washed his hands of Hollywood altogether — and thereby hangs a tale.
 

 

 

Harold Bell Wright was a 35-year-old minister in the Disciples of Christ Church in Redlands, Calif. when he resigned his ministry in 1907 after the success of The Shepherd of the Hills, his second novel. Thereafter, he devoted himself full-time to writing as a way of spreading the Gospel (of decency, of hard work, of caring for the downtrodden) by other means.

 

You can get the whole story at Gerry Chudleigh’s comprehensive Harold Bell Wright Web site, including this page specifically dedicated to movies from Wright’s stories and novels. The Reader’s Digest version, as brief as I can make it, is that Wright, dissatisfied with a 1916 picture based on his Eyes of the World, decided to film his books himself. To that end he formed the Harold Bell Wright Story-Picture Corporation with his publisher, Elsbery Reynolds. The company made only one picture, The Shepherd of the Hills in 1919, adapted and directed by Wright himself. Perhaps the picture was not well-received, perhaps the company was torn asunder by the falling-out between Wright and Reynolds when the writer decided to sign with a different publisher. Whatever the cause, by 1922 the two men were on the outs and the Harold Bell Wright Story-Picture Corporation was no more.

This is where Sol Lesser enters the picture. Lesser is remembered as a low-to-middle-budget independent producer who turned out such pictures as Our Town, Stage Door Canteen, and a long spate of Tarzan movies in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. In 1922, however, he was an eager young go-getter, an exhibitor looking to get into production after making a killing on a quickie exploitation flick about the passing of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. He approached Wright for the movie rights to his books, but Wright’s first nine books were co-owned by Reynolds, and the two weren’t speaking; if Lesser would deal with Reynolds, Wright said, then they could talk. Lesser bought out Reynolds’s full interest for $174,500, then made a straight trade with Wright: publication rights, including Reynolds’s original printing plates, in return for the movie rights to all nine books.
 
Wright saw in time that he’d made a bit of a fool’s bargain. His books were hugely popular, but their very popularity had saturated the market; there simply wasn’t that much to be made from republishing them. The real money was in putting them on the screen, and he had traded that chance to Lesser. After the coming of sound, Wright tried to get the rights back — or at least get more money for them — with the creative argument that he had given Lesser only the rights to make silent movies, not talkies. Nice try, Harold, but that one didn’t hold up, and Lesser’s rights to the works “regardless of technical changes or additions in the film medium” were confirmed. And those rights were extensive; they were universal and in perpetuity, and they included the right to make any changes whatsoever in the story, title, or characters of a given work “to such an extent as the purchaser [Lesser] may deem expedient.” In effect, Lesser could make pretty much any picture he wanted and call it “Harold Bell Wright’s This and Such.” That’s what he did, for example, with Wright’s cowboy morality tale When a Man’s a Man, turning it into a rather paltry little B-western in 1935.
 

So Wright may well (and I wouldn’t blame him) have sighed and rolled his eyes at what was happening to his books in Hollywood, being powerless to alter it. Then again, his curiosity may have drawn him to check out what Paramount did in 1941 with his most popular novel; if so, perhaps he took comfort that, unlike that cheapskate Lesser, at least Paramount brought Technicolor, an “A” budget, and top-shelf talent to the table — beginning with Henry Hathaway and scenarist Grover Jones.

Hathaway and Jones had collaborated successfully before, having first worked together on 1929’s The Virginian, where Hathaway served as assistant to Victor Fleming. When Hathaway himself became a director, Jones worked with him on the scripts of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Souls at Sea. Shepherd of the Hills would be their last picture together; on September 24, 1940, while Shepherd was in post-production, Grover Jones died of complications following surgery. He was 46.

The script for Shepherd is credited to Jones and Stuart Anthony, in that order. I don’t know how much the two collaborated; maybe they didn’t. Anthony may have been the writer brought in to add some connective scenes after Hathaway left the picture (more about that later). In any case, the script jettisons all the melodramatic curlicues of Harold Bell Wright’s plot and leaves only a few basics, expanding and elaborating on those.

The setting is a remote mountain valley (Wright was living in the Ozarks of southern Missouri when he began the book) where the sparse populace ekes out a hardscrabble life based on subsistence farming, small-scale sheep ranching, and running moonshine past impotent federal authorities. Everyone cowers under a pall of superstitious misery centered on an empty homestead called Moaning Meadow, where walks (so they say) the ghost of a woman whose man left her to die of a broken heart. Feeding off this festering unhappiness like a spider is the dead woman’s sister Mollie Matthews (Beulah Bondi); she has raised her nephew, Young Matt (John Wayne), on a diet of hate, telling him every day that the curse on all their heads can be lifted only when he finds and kills the unkown man who brought it on: his father. Matt is a gentle, tormented soul who doesn’t relish the thought of killing, but he sees no way out; not even his growing feelings for pretty Sammy Lane (Betty Field), who plainly adores him, can be allowed to sway him from the task Aunt Mollie has set for him.

Into all this walks kindly old Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey), a man of some (though mysterious) means with a hankering to settle down there. He befriends Sammy Lane and her father Jim, staying with them until he persuades the Matthewses to sell him Moaning Meadow. His effect on the whole valley is nearly miraculous: he heals the sick (treating Jim Lane’s wounds when he is shot by a federal agent), raises the dead (saving a little girl who nearly chokes to death while her grieving parents look helplessly on), and makes the blind to see again (sending an old woman to the city for an operation to restore her eyesight). As Howitt tends his flocks on Moaning Meadow, folks roundabout come to regard him, both literally and figuratively, as a good shepherd.

It isn’t long before Sammy figures out what has long since dawned on us: Daniel Howitt is Young Matt’s long-lost father, the man Matt has sworn to kill. What happens from there constitutes the last act of The Shepherd of the Hills.

Whether the credit goes to Grover Jones or Stuart Anthony (my own money’s on Jones), the script for Shepherd has passages that rise to a kind of mountain poetry, like something by James Whitcomb Riley or an Ozark Robert Burns. We hear it in the everyday speech, when a mother tells the village storekeeper about her sick daughter: “I put a dried tater chip and two crawdad legs in her bed. But she’s still got that seldom feelin’, complainin’ from head to heel.” And at more important moments, such as when Sammy first tells Mr. Howitt about Moaning Meadow: “That’s where the ha’nt comes from. Frogs as quiet as graverocks, and the lake comin’ from nowhere, and the trees don’t rustle, and the flowers grow big but they don’t have pretty smells.” Then, when Howitt disregards her advice and buys the meadow: “On account o’ ye disobeyin’ me ye bought a unhappy land. Moanin’ Meadow! Won’t nobody come an’ pay ye company there, nor warm by your fire with ye … Them that goes in there has daylight dreams they allus disremembers! An’ there’s pizen plants an’ pokeberries, an’ nightshades dancin’ with the bats!” The dialogue paints us a picture of an isolated people without schooling in the rules of grammar, but who have learned to make their language measure the deepest reaches of their simple hearts.

Casting Harry Carey and John Wayne as father and son was an inspiration, and it resonated for audiences in 1941 as much as it does for us today, if for a slightly different reason. Wayne was still sweeping along on the momentum of his A-picture breakthrough in Stagecoach after nearly a decade in Poverty Row horse operas. It’s a bit of a myth that John Ford and Stagecoach made a star out of an “unknown” John Wayne. He was already a star, albeit in the kind of movies that didn’t play Radio City or the Roxy, or win Oscars or make the New York Times 10-best list. But after Stagecoach Wayne was batting in a whole different league. He reported to the set of Shepherd directly after wrapping Seven Sinners with Marlene Dietrich over at Universal. The Duke Wayne of Santa Fe Stampede or King of the Pecos couldn’t have shot his way into a Dietrich picture; that’s what Stagecoach did for John Wayne. And in 1941 the Wayne persona was still malleable; studios were still experimenting with what kind of vehicles best suited this tall, handsome, earnest young man. The persona wouldn’t really become rigidly set until 1948, with Red River, when writer Borden Chase handed Wayne the script and said, “Here’s a part you can play for the next twenty years.” (Which Wayne pretty much did.) 

In 1941, naturally, audiences couldn’t be sure where John Wayne was going, but they all knew where Harry Carey had been. Born in the Bronx in 1878, Carey was a self-made westerner and by 1917, as “Cheyenne Harry,” he was a western star on a par with William S. Hart. By the late ’30s he had made well over 200 pictures and graduated to Respected Elder Character Actor, snagging an Oscar nomination in 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Even without knowing what the future had in store for Wayne, audiences could see that he and Carey were two of a kind, and Shepherd of the Hills — especially in a scene at a fishing hole where Young Matt finds a tentative rapport with the man he doesn’t yet know is the father he’s sworn to kill — has an unmistakeable passing-the-torch aura to it.
 
 
But the real revelation of The Shepherd of the Hills, its fervently beating heart, is the performance of Betty Field as Sammy Lane. Some writers have asserted that Henry Hathaway was strictly a man’s director, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. A simple look at what he drew from the normally decorative Dorothy Lamour in Spawn of the North and Johnny Apollo, from the ice queen Ann Harding in Peter Ibbetson, from Debbie Reynolds in How the West Was Won, or from Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (probably her best dramatic performance) is enough to put the lie to that. 
Frame18-Wayne-FieldThe best of the lot just may be Betty Field in Shepherd. Her Sammy is feisty and independent, uneducated and superstitious — muttering half-heard incantations, drawing symbols and spitting in the dirt before venturing into Moaning Meadow — but no fool. She knows her own world inside out, and when her moonshiner father stumbles home with a revenuer’s bullet in his side, she calmly goes about her business, slicing bacon and singing as if nothing had happened, until the suspicious lawmen have gone their way. When she meets Daniel Howitt, she’s wary at first, but she soon sees the good in the man and vouches for him to others; when he seeks to cash a check for the unheard-of sum of a hundred dollars, the storekeeper blanches, but says, “Sammy’s say-so is all right with me. I’ll look around.” Sammy senses the tender heart of Young Matt, too, and struggles to reach it, battering in futile frustration at the crust of hatred so carefully planted and tended by the malicious Aunt Mollie.
Hollywood never really knew what to do with this quirky, unique actress. She wasn’t really star material, never conventionally glamourous, and she didn’t always photograph well. Even when she did, she tended to be merely “attractive” in her youth, “handsome” in middle age. But you couldn’t ignore her on screen; whatever she had, she brought it to roles as different as the slatternly Mae in Of Mice and Men (1939), poisonous bad-news Kay in Blues in the Night (’41), and the tormented Cassie Tower in Kings Row (’42).
 
In Shepherd of the Hills she gave probably the best performance of her career, and for once she photographed like gangbusters. Her delicate, heart-shaped face, blue-water eyes and fair complexion never looked better than they did for the Technicolor cameras in the crisp mountain sunshine of Shepherd‘s Big Bear locations. (What a pity that this was her only Technicolor movie in her prime; she didn’t face Tech cameras again until 1955’s Picnic, when she was well out of her thirties and playing the kind of matronly roles that would occupy the rest of her life.) For perhaps the one and only time in her career, Betty Field is truly beautiful. Still not movie-star glamourous, no competition for Ava Gardner or Maureen O’Hara, but beautiful — in a way that perfectly suits the earthy, simple and pure-hearted character of Sammy Lane. The Shepherd of the Hills is Betty Field’s picture — lock, stock and barrel — and Netflix browsers who pop it into their queues expecting a “John Wayne movie” are going to be in for a very big surprise. I hope for their sakes that they’re open to it.
 
In a 1973 oral history interview with Polly Platt, Henry Hathaway told a frustrating tale of studio politics regarding Shepherd of the Hills. His first cut ran 120 minutes and was previewed in San Bernardino. The response, he said, was excellent: no walkouts, and nobody thought the picture was too long. At a second preview, with about ten minutes cut, a few people walked out and about five percent of the audience thought it was too long. A third preview confirmed the trend: the more they cut, the more people thought the movie was too long. Paramount refused to restore any of the cut scenes and just kept cutting; eventually they decided that new scenes needed to be shot to connect what was left. Hathaway said no, just put back some of what I’ve already shot. Instead, Paramount’s Y. Frank Freeman brought in another writer (Stuart Anthony?) and director Stuart Heisler to film the new scenes. Hathaway left the studio to work for Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox; he didn’t return to Paramount until The Sons of Katie Elder in 1965.
 
Stuart Heisler was a textbook example of the reliable studio hack, and I think I can spot some of the scenes he directed after Freeman took Shepherd out of Hathaway’s hands. One is this studio-bound scene between Sammy and Young Matt, talking about things which I strongly suspect Hathaway showed us in some of those missing 22 minutes. Another is the picture’s hasty and too-pat final scene, where the writing has a let’s-wrap-things-up hurry to it, with little of Grover Jones’s ear for the artless poetry of rural speech — and the staging shows little of Hathaway’s instinct for where to put the camera.
 
But it’s no use crying now over 22 minutes of milk spilt 69 years ago. As it is, at 98 minutes, The Shepherd of the Hills gives us Harry Carey toward the end of his career and John Wayne and Betty Field near the beginning of theirs, all of them — and Henry Hathaway and Grover Jones, too — at their best.