Schede film/Programme Notes
Introduzione/Introduction
HIS NIBS (Exceptional Pictures, US 1920-21)
Regia/dir: Gregory La Cava, [Al Christie]; scen., mont./ed: Arthur Hoerl; f./ph: William Tuers, A.J. Stout; cast: Charles “Chic” Sale (Theo Bender, Wally Craw, Mr. Percifer, Elmer Bender, Peelee Gear, Jr., Miss Dessi Teed); cast of “He Fooled ’Em All”: Charles “Chic” Sale (The Boy), Colleen Moore (The Girl), Joseph Dowling (The Girl’s Father), J.P. Lockney (Old Sour Apples), Walt Whitman (The Boy’s Father), Lydia Yeamans Titus (The Boy’s Mother), Harry Edwards (first villain); data uscita/released: “His Nibs” Syndicate, 22.10.1921; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: UCLA Film & Television Archive, Los Angeles.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles
In 1955 William K. Everson wrote an article called “Movies Out of Thin Air” in which he revealed how Fred Balshofer had transformed An Adventuress, a 1920 feature in which Rudolph Valentino played a bit part, into The Isle of Love, a 1922 feature starring Rudolph Valentino. William S. Hart and Charlie Chaplin also fell victim to reissue distributors who patched together ersatz “Chaplin” and “Hart” pictures from outtakes and obsolete 2-reelers. But perhaps the most curious example of such creative reconstruction was His Nibs, the first screen appearance of the American vaudevillian Charles “Chic” Sale.
In December 1919, Sale signed a multi-picture contract with Robertson-Cole for a series of feature films in which he would appear as the comical “rube” character he had created in his vaudeville act. Exceptional Pictures was created to produce the films, the first of which, The Smart Aleck, was to be made in Los Angeles as soon as Sale’s current West Coast theatrical tour had finished. It would be based on an Irvin S. Cobb story of the same name which had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Cobb was a prolific author of regionalist humor whose stories were filled with loveably eccentric characters and carefully rendered depictions of American small-town life (in fact, “The Smart Aleck” later appeared in a 1916 Cobb anthology called Local Color). Cobb is best remembered today for his association with John Ford: Judge Priest and The Sun Shines Bright were based on Cobb stories, and Cobb appeared as an actor in Steamboat Round the Bend. Bringing Cobb together with “Chic” Sale would seem to have been a logical idea, and it was announced at the time that Cobb had personally chosen Sale for the part.
“The Smart Aleck” is the story of Gashney Tuttle, a hick from the small town of Swango, who is celebrated for what the locals consider his rapier wit. But when Tuttle visits a larger neighboring city to take in its “Great White Way” he is quickly swindled out of his bankroll and run out of town. Penniless, he returns to Swango in a freight car, where he is happy to find himself reinstated as the unchallenged village wit.
Production began at the Christie Studio on 1 March 1920, under the direction of Al Christie. The film was not a Christie production, but was made under contract by Christie for Exceptional Pictures. Christie also supplied some of its own contract talent, notably Colleen Moore, who played the love interest required by Hollywood convention (there is not a single female character in the original story). Other than general atmosphere and the notion of the country hero being swindled in the big city, the film appears to have taken very little from Cobb’s story. Press accounts promoting The Smart Aleck appeared throughout the spring, but suddenly stopped in June of 1920.
This is where the story gets interesting, and where a conventional Hollywood hick comedy turns into an ironic East Coast parody of Hollywood conventions.
I have been unable to discover why The Smart Aleck was never released, or why Arthur Hoerl and Gregory La Cava revamped Al Christie’s footage, turning it into a very different film called His Nibs. Between 1916 and 1920 Gregory La Cava had directed dozens of animated cartoons for William Randolph Hearst’s studio in New York. He subsequently began writing for the short series comedies that C.C. Burr was producing at the Mirror Studio, a small rental facility in the New York suburb of Glendale. In the summer of 1921 La Cava directed new scenes for the old Chic Sale picture (possibly at the Mirror Studio), in which Sale appears in a framing story, playing the proprietor of the rustic Slippery Elm Picture Palace – and everyone else in town. His current attraction, a pot-boiler called He Fooled ’Em All, is all that is left of The Smart Aleck. As the projectionist, Sale provides a running commentary on his own film, a comic approach which suggests Pirandello more than Sennett or Roach. His Nibs is not only one of the first films to parody both exhibition practice and Hollywood narrative convention, but does so by dissecting an actual example of the genre. While there are many conventional satires of the movie business, from Maurice Tourneur’s A Girl’s Folly to Mack Sennett’s A Small Town Idol, His Nibs is more interested in the medium’s formal elements, a far more unusual approach.
While a little research now makes it apparent that the framing story is a response to the film-within-a film, this relationship was missed by the film’s original critics (and its few recent commentators), all of whom believed that His Nibs was simply a clever, if conventional, rural comedy directed in one go by Gregory La Cava.
The writer Arthur Hoerl, who seems to have been responsible for this peculiar strategy, had a long association with low-budget cinema on both coasts. He was an especially ingenious editor, and around this same time found a way of shaping the formless documentary footage taken by Martin and Osa Johnson into the documentary features Jungle Adventures (1921) and Head Hunters of the South Seas (1922). After His Nibs, La Cava began directing Burr’s Charlie Murray comedies in 1922, and Burr eventually promoted him to low-budget features; in 1923 he directed Sale again, at the Mirror Studio, in another Irvin S. Cobb adaptation, The New School Teacher. But Cobb’s name, of course, was never used in connection with His Nibs. – Richard Koszarski
ENCHANTMENT (Cosmopolitan Productions, US 1921)
Regia/dir: Robert G. Vignola; scen: Luther Reed, dal racconto/from the story “Manhandling Ethel” di/by Frank Ramsay Adams; f./ph: Ira H. Morgan; scg./des: Joseph Urban; cast: Marion Davies (Ethel Hoyt), Forrest Stanley (Ernest Eddison), Edith Shayne (Mrs. Hoyt), Tom Lewis (Mr. Hoyt), Arthur Rankin (Tommy Corbin), Corinne Barker (Nalia), Maude Turner Gordon (Mrs. Leigh), Edith Lyle (The Queen [in fairy tale]), Huntley Gordon (The King [in fairy tale]); data uscita/released: Paramount, 30.10.1921; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
With the death of his mother, Phoebe Hearst, in 1919, William Randolph Hearst gained complete control of the family fortune. His spending habits increased dramatically, and one of his first moves was to upgrade the quality of the films he had recently begun producing, bringing in the best writers, directors, and designers money could buy. According to historian David Nasaw, Hearst’s approach to the movies was the opposite of his tactic in the newspaper business, where he “extended the audience . . . downward” into the working class. Hearst’s films would be directed to the upper end of the audience spectrum, a market he felt was not sufficiently served by existing American producers. When Adolph Zukor complained about the cost of the initial Hearst-Paramount productions, Hearst responded with a statement of principles that made clear just how he intended to approach this motion picture business. “I admit that our pictures are expensive,” he wrote, “but that does not matter to me if I can make them sufficiently good. … Making pictures is fundamentally like making publications. It is in each case an endeavor to entertain, enlighten and uplift the public. In fact, the same material is used more and more in both publication and picture.” Hearst was, in fact, the first to recognize the tremendous possibilities of media synergy, cross-promoting his newspapers, newsreels, animated films, motion picture serials, and general-interest story magazines as far back as The Perils of Pauline (1914). Even more remarkable, in his desire to “enlighten and uplift” the filmgoing public he seems never to have taken financial considerations into account.
Cosmopolitan’s early features had all been made in a variety of rental studios scattered around New York and New Jersey. But while Frank Borzage was still shooting Humoresque, Hearst acquired an enormous property that could serve as the center of his motion picture empire. Sulzer’s Harlem River Park and Casino, a once popular beer garden suffering from the introduction of prohibition, would become the new Cosmopolitan-International studio. For $600,000 Hearst took a multiyear lease on the property, which occupied the entire block between Second Avenue and the Harlem River, from 126th to 127th Street. Hearst’s reasons for establishing his studio in New York were much the same as those cited by other local producers. “One of the most important of these is that the city is the center of stage play production,” he later told one industry trade paper. “It is folly to minimize the screen’s real need of the best artists on the stage in the casts of its worthiest productions.” For Hearst, even California’s sunshine had little practical value. “We prefer to produce our pictures in studios with artificial lighting, rather than to depend on uncertainty and varying degrees of sunlight, a condition for which no part of the country is at all seasons exempt.”
In the popular imagination, Cosmopolitan’s output in this period has been reduced to a series of overproduced Marion Davies costume spectacles. But Davies appeared in less than a third of the films produced by Cosmopolitan in this period, and only 4 of these could be described as costume pictures: When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), Little Old New York (1923), Yolanda (1924), and Janice Meredith (1924). More typical were modern romantic comedies like Robert G. Vignola’s Enchantment. Vignola, who was born in Trivigno, Potenza, in 1882 and came to New York as a child, was one of Hearst’s favorite directors. A member of the original Kalem stock company (he played Judas Iscariot in From the Manger to the Cross), he remained very active in East Coast production through the mid-1920s.
Cosmopolitan would quickly become one of the most important production companies in New York, making some 35 features before Hearst permanently moved his operation to California in 1924. Lewis Selznick, another local producer, had developed a business model which emphasized the production of a large number of films at relatively low cost. Hearst made fewer films, but they were all first-class productions, sumptuously mounted by one of New York’s greatest local talents, the architect and designer Joseph Urban. Trained in Vienna (where he had designed the city’s new town hall and the Austrian pavilion for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair), Urban was largely responsible for introducing the Secessionist style of architecture and design to American clients. He began working as a theatrical designer in New York in 1912, and from 1915 designed every edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. He was artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera from 1917 until his death in 1933. According to Léon Barsacq and Elliott Stein, Urban’s accomplishments made him “the only designer working in US films in the early 1920s whose name was a household word.”In fact, it was Urban who left the greatest mark on Cosmopolitan’s output, not only designing all the films, but also choreographing the stage prologues that graced many of their first-run showings, decorating the interior of the Cosmopolitan Theater, and (in 1923) rebuilding the Cosmopolitan studio itself. While Enchantment can be enjoyed today as a surprising “flapper” version of The Taming of the Shrew, recent histories cite it only for Urban’s décor, the first appearance of modernist interior design in an American film. – Richard Koszarski
THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN (Legend of Sleepy Hollow Corp., US 1922)
Regia/dir: Edward Venturini; scen: dal racconto/from the story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” di/by Washington Irving, ad:Carl Stearns Clancy; f./ph: Ned Van Buren; scg./des: Tec-Art Studio; cast: Will Rogers (Ichabod Crane), Lois Meredith (Katrina Van Tassel), Ben Hendricks, Jr. (Brom Bones), Mary Foy (Dame Martling), Charles Graham (Hans Van Ripper); data uscita/released: W.W. Hodkinson, 5.11.1922; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Because the Hollywood studios were factories geared to the mass production of a standardized product, nearly all experiments with sound, color, widescreen, stereoscopy, and other non-traditional technologies were pioneered in the East. Sample films might be privately financed, produced at one of the local rental studios, and distributed (maybe) along with other independent productions. The Headless Horseman is generally regarded as the first feature film shot entirely on Eastman’s newly perfected panchromatic negative stock (previous versions had very little shelf life). It was photographed by Ned Van Buren, a past-president of the A.S.C., who soon left studio production to work directly for Kodak’s Hollywood office (Barry Salt suggests that Eastman actually financed the picture). Van Buren took full advantage of the new negative, especially in a number of effective day-for-night exteriors. Although Eastman began marketing this panchromatic film (#1203) the following year, it was not widely used until prices were lowered to the same level as ordinary negative stock in 1926.
The Headless Horseman was shot in the summer of 1922 on many of the same “Sleep Hollow” locations described in the original Washington Irving story. Some exteriors may have been done in Fort Lee, but the main production facility was the Tec-Art studio in Manhattan, at 318 East 48th Street. Once a brewery, it had been converted to a film studio in 1917. This was where the first Arbuckle-Keaton films had been shot, and where Norma and Constance Talmadge worked through the end of 1921. The building was then acquired by Tec-Art, which catered to independent producers by supplying everything from office facilities to completed settings. Tec-Art was soon operating three different studios in New York, but left for California when local production fell in 1926. The 48th Street studio then became the home of De Forest Phonofilm.
Although Will Rogers appeared in a significant number of shorts and features between 1918 and 1924, he was better known at the time as a syndicated humorist and featured attraction in the Ziegfeld Follies. Within a few years, however, his appearances on radio and in talking pictures would make him one of the most important figures in the American entertainment business. – Richard Koszarski
THE GREEN GODDESS (Distinctive Productions, US 1923)
Regia/dir: Sidney Olcott; scen: Forrest Halsey, dalla pièce di/from the play byWilliam Archer; f./ph: Harry Fischbeck; cast: George Arliss (Rajah of Rukh), Alice Joyce (Lucilla Crespin), David Powell (Dr. Traherne), Harry T. Morey (Major Crespin), Jetta Goudal (Ayah), Ivan Simpson (Watkins), William Worthington (The High Priest); data uscita/released: Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan, 14.8.1923; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: UCLA Film & Television Archive, Los Angeles.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
One reason that the history of filmmaking in New York during the 1920s remains largely unknown is because those who were in the best position to know insisted for many years that nothing of the sort had ever actually existed. For example, Lionel Barrymore made dozens of silent feature films in New York, yet his autobiography, We Barrymores (1951), leaps directly from the Biograph shorts to his first job at MGM. The recollections of George Arliss were even more spotty. Arliss made half a dozen silent features in New York, most for his own company, Distinctive Productions, with highly publicized releases arranged through United Artists and Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan. But in My Ten Years in the Studios (1940) Arliss suggests that he never made any silent pictures. In Up the Years from Bloomsbury (1927), written at the height of the silent period, he admits to making only one silent film, The Devil (1921).
There is no space here to analyze why stars like Barrymore and Arliss, at the end of their careers, insisted that they never made all those films in New York. But the effect on the popular imagination is easier to quantify: celebrities like these said nothing about making movies in New York during the 1920s because, as everyone knew, American movies were only made in Hollywood.
Be that as it may, The Green Goddess remains an excellent illustration of how the peculiar character of the New York motion picture industry facilitated a new style of independent production, one that by the 1950s would supplant the traditional brick-and-mortar “Hollywood studio system”. George Arliss was the chief asset of Distinctive Productions, which financed its films through advances from distributors. Distinctive had almost no overhead, and acquired stage space, technical facilities, and production personnel only as needed. In the case of The Green Goddess, Distinctive leased space at the Biograph studio, then one of New York’s most active rental stages. Another tenant was Inspiration Pictures, which was producing Richard Barthelmess films for release through First National (interiors for Tol’able David were shot here in 1921).
The Green Goddess was one of Arliss’s most successful vehicles: he toured with the show for 3 years in America and an additional year in England. It would be easy to imagine this imperialist melodrama as just another racist screed, pitting His Majesty’s subjects against an especially wily oriental potentate. But Arliss – who stars as the villain of the piece – plays his role with such obvious post-modern glee that the audience, in on the joke, can have little doubt as to who is the most admirable character here. This 1923 film version was rated the fifth best film of the year in the annual Film Daily critics’ poll (behind only The Covered Wagon, Merry-Go-Round, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Robin Hood). Warner Bros. remade most of the Distinctive Productions as talkies, and in 1930 copied The Green Goddess especially closely, even bringing back Alice Joyce and Ivan Simpson to repeat their performances from the silent version.
Sidney Olcott was New York’s most prestigious free-lance director in the early 1920s, working for Swanson (The Humming Bird), Valentino (Monsieur Beaucaire), Arliss, and Hearst. His career began at Biograph before Griffith, and he was an original member of the Kalem stock company, directing their landmark productions of Ben-Hur and From the Manager to the Cross. – Richard Koszarski
LITTLE OLD NEW YORK (Cosmopolitan Pictures, US 1923)
Regia/dir: Sidney Olcott; scen: Luther Reed, dalla pièce di/from the play by Rida Johnson Young; f./ph: Ira H. Morgan, Gilbert Warrenton; scg./des: Joseph Urban; cost: Gretl Urban; cast: Marion Davies (Patricia O’Day), Stephen Carr (Patrick O’Day), J.M. Kerrigan (John O’Day), Harrison Ford (Larry Delavan), Courtenay Foote (Robert Fulton), Mahlon Hamilton (Washington Irving), Sam Hardy (Cornelius Vanderbilt), Andrew Dillon (John Jacob Astor), Louis Wolheim (The Hoboken Terror); data uscita/released: Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan, 4.11.1923; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Accompagnamento musicale/Musical accompaniment: Elizabeth-Jane Baldry
Little Old New York was William Randolph Hearst’s Valentine to the city of New York as it grew in size and power in the post-colonial era. Marion Davies starred as Patricia O’Day, an Irish immigrant who must masquerade as her own brother in order to obtain an inheritance. In the course of a very long film she encounters such famous 19th-century New Yorkers as Robert Fulton, Washington Irving, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, and the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck. But it was not just the opportunity to re-create the New York of a hundred years earlier that attracted Hearst to the project. It was a convention of the Davies films that excuses should be found to dress Marion in men’s clothing as often as possible, and in Little Old New York Davies plays in drag for most of the film (by comparison, there was only one such sequence in When Knighthood Was in Flower). The film’s dramatic highlight occurs when “Patrick” is tied to a pillory and publicly flogged by Louis Wolheim, an angry prizefighter known as “The Hoboken Terror”. An attraction develops between Davies and her cousin (played by the very busy New York actor Harrison Ford), and the film has a lot of fun with Ford’s efforts to overcome his feelings for his handsome young ward.
Director Sidney Olcott had completed about two-thirds of this peculiar film when, early on Sunday morning, 18 February 1923, a fire broke out in the driveway between the main studio building and a smaller storage facility. Within hours the entire studio was in ruins; everything on the main stage was burned up by the fire, and all the properties, costumes, and office areas were damaged or destroyed by water. All the positive prints in the building had been removed the night before, but firemen still had to save about 40 reels of negative from Little Old New York and a number of unreleased Cosmopolitan productions. Along with all the sets for the film, the fire destroyed many valuable properties, including antique mantels and furnishings, Waterford glass chandeliers, and several vintage portrait paintings, including one valued at $80,000. Joseph Urban, whose personal research library had also been lost, quickly shifted production to Tec-Art’s three local rental studios.
Hearst insisted that the fire would not delay release of the film, which was rushed to completion in time for its scheduled premiere at New York’s Cosmopolitan Theater on 1 August. As usual, Urban’s work earned special attention. “For costumes and settings and photography, Little Old New York is one of the most exquisite productions ever thrown upon a screen,” reported the New York Times. But to modern eyes, some scenes appear to be played before enormous painted backdrops, a cut-rate solution unknown in other Cosmopolitan productions, and very likely the result of pressures caused by the approaching premiere date. Audiences in 1923, however, had a very different experience of the film than we have today. In addition to Urban’s redecoration of the theater itself, Hearst brought in Victor Herbert to conduct the orchestra for the gala premiere. And as was the case with many prestigious releases in this period, first-run audiences were treated to elaborate color effects missing on surviving prints. Hearst had employed a hand colorist, Gustav Brock, to paint color highlights onto a limited number of prints for scenes showing the Stars and Stripes being raised over Robert Fulton’s Clermont and a blush on Marion Davies’s cheeks when, as “Patrick”, she overhears a risqué story. – Richard Koszarski
JANICE MEREDITH (The Beautiful Rebel; L'ombra di Washington) (Cosmopolitan Pictures, US 1924)
Regia/dir: E. Mason Hopper; scen: Lillie Hayward, dal romanzo di/from the novel by Paul Leicester Ford; f./ph: Ira H. Morgan and George Barnes; scg./des: Joseph Urban, [Everett Shinn]; cost: Gretl Urban; mont./ed: Walter Futter; cast: Marion Davies: (Janice Meredith), Holbrook Blinn (Lord Clowes), Harrison Ford (Charles Fownes), Maclyn Arbuckle (Squire Meredith), Joseph Kilgour (George Washington), Tyrone Power (Lord Cornwallis), W.C. Fields (a British sergeant), Ken Maynard (Paul Revere); data uscita/released: Metro-Goldwyn, 8.12.1924; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Considering that D.W. Griffith had already announced his own elaborate Revolutionary War picture, it seems odd that William Randolph Hearst should have decided to produce a similar film which would trail Griffith’s into theaters by nearly 6 months. Both America and Janice Meredith drew on the current colonial revival and the upcoming sesquicentennial of the American Revolution, and both restaged many of the same historic tableaux, including Valley Forge, Yorktown, and the Boston Tea Party. The New York Times admitted that Griffith’s battle scenes and historical re-creations generally surpassed the work of Hearst’s director, E. Mason Hopper, but judged that both the story and the acting were superior in Janice Meredith. Yet critics immediately noticed that the finest historical re-creation in Janice Meredith was an episode that was not in the Griffith film, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Historian William K. Everson claimed that this was no coincidence, and that in return for a free hand with this one sequence, “the Hearst papers extravagantly promoted and endorsed America when it was released”.
The sequence was certainly worth the effort Cosmopolitan put into it. A large portion of 18th-century Trenton was re-created at Plattsburg, New York, with 46 houses constructed on two large streets, each 800 feet long. The neighboring Saranac River had frozen to such a depth that demolition crews, led by local explosives expert “Dynamite George” Cline, had to blast out an 800 x 600-foot channel to film the crossing. 1400 extras were recruited from local towns and military bases, and anyone who could be induced to “fall” into the icy water for 5 or 10 minutes earned an additional $100.
Although Griffith strived for accuracy, Hearst’s film was, if anything, even more like a textbook account of the war. At times even Marion Davies gets lost in this canvas, in an underwritten part that has her popping up conveniently at all the key historic moments. Although the art direction is credited to Joseph Urban, trade press accounts published early in the shooting indicate that Everett Shinn was engaged as the film’s art director when Urban was put to work on Cosmopolitan’s next picture. Production sprawled over nearly every available studio in the city, including the Jackson, Biograph, Pathé, Tilford, and “Fort Lee” studios, as well as the Cosmopolitan Studio at 127th Street, newly reconstructed after the 1923 fire.
Janice Meredith is most often cited today (if at all) for the first appearance in features of W.C. Fields, playing a bit part as a drunken British officer vamped by Marion Davies – they had worked together during their Follies days. But the film is actually one of the better Davies spectacles, balancing costumes, scenery, thousands of extras, historic re-creations, comic episodes, and a very respectable performance from the star. It would be interesting to see it in its original form, but Janice Meredith survives only in a recut version known as The Beautiful Rebel, prepared for British audiences and shortened by almost 25 minutes. Given Hearst’s notorious anti-British sensibilities, one suspects that any real bite the film may have had has been considerably compromised. American schoolchildren still know that as Paul Revere rode off to warn the inhabitants of every Middlesex village and farm, he roused the populace with the cry, “The British are coming!” Here the best he can muster is, “The soldiers are coming!” Griffith, an Anglophile who produced propaganda films for the British government during the war, must have had quite a different take on these same events. But because all prints of America also descend from a cut-down British release (called Love and Sacrifice), no one can know for sure.
By the time Janice Meredith was released, Cosmopolitan had already abandoned New York in order to move closer to San Simeon, Hearst’s magnificent California castle. Ironically, the company’s first big West Coast production was yet another nostalgic homage to bygone New York, Lights of Old Broadway (1925), staged on the MGM lot at Culver City. – Richard Koszarski
THE SHOW OFF (Famous Players-Lasky Corp., US 1926)
Regia/dir: Mal St. Clair; scen: Pierre Collings, dalla pièce di/from the play by George Kelly; f./ph: Lee Garmes; supv. mont./supv. ed: Ralph Block; cast: Ford Sterling (Aubrey Piper), Lois Wilson (Amy Fisher), Louise Brooks (Clara), Gregory Kelly (Joe Fisher), C.W. Goodrich (Pop Fisher), Claire McDowell (Mom Fisher), Joseph Smiley (railroad executive); data uscita/released: Paramount, 16.8.1926; 35mm, ?? ft., ??’ (?? fps), tinted?/toned?; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
In 1920 Paramount consolidated its scattered East Coast studio and laboratory activities in one enormous facility in Astoria, New York. For the remainder of the silent period, 30% of Paramount’s releases were made in Astoria, peaking at 40% in 1926, when 26 feature films were made there. Although producing in Hollywood was more cost-effective, the availability of Broadway talent was a strong attraction, and Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky also wanted a studio near the home office so they could more easily supervise at least a portion of Paramount’s output. In addition, Lasky also believed that a competing production center would spur a friendly rivalry with West Coast production head B.P. Schulberg, a fatally misguided judgment.
Lasky appointed his protégé, Walter Wanger, as head of the East Coast studio in 1924, with William Le Baron in charge of production. Wanger and Le Baron brought in new stars like W.C. Fields and Louise Brooks, and young directors like Gregory La Cava, Mal St. Clair, and Frank Tuttle. More sophisticated story material was developed, and crews were encouraged to film on location as much as possible. Much of this new strategy can be seen in their adaptation of George Kelly’s great 1924 Broadway success, The Show-Off.
Like Sinclair Lewis and Zona Gale, Kelly’s subject was the quiet desperation of American middle-class family life, an antidote to the myth of bourgeois happiness more typical of the Coolidge administration. Kelly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his next play, Craig’s Wife, an award some considered compensation for the committee’s controversial rejection of The Show-Off the year before. Le Baron assigned direction of The Show Off to Mal St. Clair, who had recently been promoted to features after a long career in short comedies (including a stint with Buster Keaton). St. Clair shot much of the film in Philadelphia, not only opening up the one-set play, but taking advantage of the locations which had inspired Kelly’s original story, a naturalistic strategy more common in dramatic productions like Greed or The Crowd.
Ford Sterling, who had made his reputation with Mack Sennett, was never accepted by audiences in more serious roles like that of Aubrey Piper (played in subsequent film versions, with varying degrees of success, by Hal Skelly, Spencer Tracy, and Red Skelton). Both Sterling and Lois Wilson deliver fine performances, but the only excitement on screen is generated by Louise Brooks, appearing in a minor supporting role. Aspects of the Aubrey Piper character, however, were used to help create a new screen image for another comedian stepping up to features, W.C. Fields, whose So’s Your Old Man went into production in Astoria only a few months later. – Richard Koszarski
