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Tag Gallagher
King Vidor Biocritical-filmograhy
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King Vidor
Biocriticalfilmography Compiled by
Tag Gallagher. • = lost film. King Wallis Vidor, born February 8, 1894,
Galveston, Texas.[1] Died
November 1, 1982. Vidor was a
third-generation Texan; his father’s father had emigrated from Hungary and married
a Floridan of Scot-English descent; his mother’s family had long been
American. “My luck was my father not striking oil. He was there in
Texas at just the right
time for it. And he was just the
person to do it. He was kind of a
business speculator—not exactly a gambler, but always looking for something,
always finding some fortune-making scheme…, things like certain trees in the
Dominican Republic for the wood, but something always went wrong. If he’d stayed
closer to home, he might
have struck oil, and we’d have been rich.
I’d never have set out for Hollywood with
my camera, and I’d have had a
lot less interesting life.” [chan] “In
1900, at the age of six, I went through a flood and hurricane in which the
island was completely inundated with ten feet of water. Out of a population
of twenty-nine
thousand, ten thousand were either drowned or killed. The streets were piled high with dead people. I saw that the
bay was filled with dead
bodies, horses, animals, people, everything.” [dga] He went to grade school at the
Peacock Military Academy in San Antonio. “I detested that military school, I ran away. Nonetheless I did learn a bit of technique. Enough so that
when I shot my first
films I didn’t need an adviser.
Now I’m no longer the same individual as
at thirteen or fourteen.
I can’t remember any longer if it was
my father who sent me to that school or if I was the one why wanted to go
there.” [pos]
He ran
away, too, from a private high school in Maryland, three time. He went once to New York where he
haunted film studios, spent his money seeing movies and slept under a
bridge. At 16 he dropped out of
school and got a job in a storefront nickelodeon in Galveston selling tickets
and sometimes projecting.
“The first movie I
saw was A Trip to the Moon. It was
shown in the Grand Opera House in Galveston when I was about fifteen. I did not know
that the movie had been
made in Paris, by Georges Méliès, seven or eight years earlier. I sat with two
other boys, and our
discussion centered on the question of how moving pictures were made. I claimed it was done by photography,
at which the other two vigorously stood me down, the older boy claiming that
all images were painted on the film, frame by frame. “I
saw the two-reel Ben Hur, made in
Italy, twenty-one times each day or one hundred and forty-seven times in its
week’s run.…At one showing I would concentrate on the actors’ pantomime as
expressed by their arms and hands; at the next I would decide to study only
their facial expressions; at another I would watch the thought expressed
solely by the attitudes of their bodies.” [tree] “I
tried selling used cars in east Texas.
It didn’t last long. I
guess that was my good luck too, that I didn’t show more promise at it, or I
might have been an automobile dealer in Texas. But I don’t really think so. More and more, I believe each one of us has something he’s
meant to do. You know, the movies
and I were born about the same time.
I’ve always felt it was my destiny. I couldn’t have escaped it. You have a destiny in life, and luck is finding that
destiny. Some people
are unlucky
and don’t find their destiny.” [chan] •1909.
[Footage of hurricane in Galveston.] Prod.-Ph.: King
Vidor, Roy Clough. “I
wrote to the New York office of Mutual Weekly (nesreels were theen called
‘weeklies’) and requested that I be made their cameraman in the state of
Texas. I immediately received the
following telegram: longest march of massed troops
in this history of the united states army will be undertaken beginning next
week.
over eleven thousand
officers and men will march the hundred miles to houston and return. we will pay sixty cents per foot
for all usable film. you are
hereby appointed our representative for texas.” [tree] •1914.
[10,000 Army troops parade in Houston.] Footage
for Mutual Weekly.
Prods: King Vidor, John Boggs. Dir.-Ph.: Vidor. •1914. WHO
IS BARBARA? Cited
in La
Revue du Cinéma, June 1930, as the first of a number of little
comedies that
Vidor shot with $600 earned from shooting newsreels; not cited by any
subsequent source. •1914. IN TOW. 2 reels. Exhibited locally.
Completed in August. Dir.-Sc.:
King Vidor. Prods.: Vidor, John Boggs. Ph.: Boggs.
With King Vidor (Carson, a race driver; and comic
role), Pansy Buchanan
(Helen), D.Y. Cole (Abie).
With
Edward Sedgwick, also from Galveston and later Buster Keaton’s director at MGM,
Vidor formed the Hotex Film Manufacturing Company, and tried to attract
investors. •1914. Beautiful
Love. 1-reel(?).
Hotex. Completed
in
September. Dir.: Edward Sedgwick. Prod.: King Vidor.
Sc.: Sedgwick, Vidor. With King Vidor,
Eileen Sedgwick, D.Y. Cole. •1914. The
Heroes. 1-reel(?).
Hotex. Completed
in
September. Dir.: Edward Sedgwick. Prod.: King Vidor.
Sc.: Sedgwick, Vidor. With Edward Sedgwick,
Eileen Sedgwick, D.Y. Cole,
Josie Sedgwick. “They cost no more than the stock and lab costs, about
ten cents a foot: approximately two or three hundred dollars each. [hgm] I met a girl who had ambitions, a beautiful, lovely girl who
wanted to be an actress in films.”
[schic] In
October 1914 Vidor married Florence Arto.
The same day they left for New York and contracted with Sawyer, Inc., to
distribute Hotex’s films. Sawyer
failed a few days later and was taken over by The Colossus Feature Film
Company, which accepted Hotex’s negatives, distributed them nationwide and
never paid a cent in royalties.
“By that time we had
a camera of our own mounted on a
surveyor’s tripod and costing no more than a hundred and twenty-five dollars
and finally we put together a laboratory.
Our open stage consisted of some telephone poles
with cloth stretched
over the top. At that time, I didn’t
know if I was going to be an actor, a cameraman, a writer, or what. There was no planning;
it was a
hand-to-mouth existence, whatever you could scrounge.” [hgm] •1915. [Houston
sugar refining documentary.] Dirs.-Sc.: King Vidor,
John Boggs. With Florence Arto
(Vidor).
Mitry gives title, The Sugar
Industry. •1915. [Documentary
on title insurance business.] •1915. [Simulated car theft in Fort
Worth.] Sent to Ford Motor Company; never shown. Dirs.:
King Vidor,
Clifford Vick. Mitry gives title, The Upper T. •1915. [Documentary
on industrial patents.] •1915. [Newsreel footage.] for Ford
Weekly. Phs.: King Vidor,
Clifford Vick. “We
bought a Ford automobile with a $25 down payment
and I figured out that if I could shoot enough footage for the Ford Motor
Company to use in their films, we could make sixty cents per foot and be able
to finance the trip.
We ran out of
money long before the trip was over.[dga]
There were three of us: myself, my wife Florence Vidor, who later became
a star, and a boy from Texas [Clifford Vick] who didn’t stay on.” [hgm] Kevin
Brownlow: There were virtually no good roads outside the
East, and their journey had all the drama of a covered-wagon trek. It was still necessary to wait
patiently while cowboys drove great herds of cattle past. On a railroad embankment in New Mexico,
the Vidors encountered a line of covered wagons. [brown war] “They
were gipsies, the men with knives in their belts, the women with wild, flowing
skirts. The embankment was so
narrow that we couldn't get by if they didn't pull over a bit. We stopped, and
suddenly the women were
all over us, taking whatever they could, putting their hands into pockets of
clothes in the car. We had stuff
tied all over the car, food, buckets, guns. One of them reached over and turned off the ignition
switch. I kicked it back with my
foot just before the engine died—otherwise it meant getting out and using the
crank. The car started off with
all these women hanging on the running board. I started going faster and faster and two or three of them
got frightened and jumped off, but some of them stayed on. We could still
hear the men laughing
and yelling, the women were still trying to grab stuff out of our pockets and
claw our faces—so we pushed them off, prising open their fingers and pushing them
in the face, and they went whirling through the air, skirts flying, hitting the
dirt. That's how we got away. Soon
afterwards, we met three fellows
in a car with guns—a sheriff and two deputies. They asked us if we'd seen a band of gipsies. We told them our story and they said
they had gone into a restaurant in Raton, New Mexico, and cleaned out all the
shelves. [brown war] “At the end of that trip we stopped in San
Francisco. We were absolutely
broke with twenty cents between us.
The Birth of a Nation
was
showing then, and reserve seats were $2.50, and that was a tremendous
price. When we sold the automobile
we had enough money to go see The Birth of a Nation, with just enough money to get down to Los Angeles by boat.” [dga]
Corinne
Griffith, an old flame from Texas who was just starting her career, helped
Florence find steady work acting at Vitagraph. King took every odd job he could
find, including a few days
as an extra in Griffith’s Intolerance. “I
would do anything just to get inside a studio and watch directors working. [hgm]
“I really developed out of watching and studying Griffith
films a thing I call silent music, which was to see how I could put into a
silent film tempo and rhythm and crescendo and so forth, as in a musical composition. And,
of course, in the Griffith films
he would have an orchestra playing with the films and he would use recurrent
themes in Hearts of the World, Birth of a Nation and so forth. All
were worked out musically.
This inspired me to carry this idea
on—to more study and more experimentation.” [schic] Vidor wrote 52 scenarios before selling
: •1916. When
It Rains It Pours. Vitagraph.
1 reel. Jul.
15. Prod.-dir.: William
Wolbert. Sc.: King
Vidor. Copyright: 9-6-1918. With Mary Anderson (Sue
Monroe), Reggie Morris (Bobby), Otto Lederer (Mr. Monroe), Anne Schaefer (Aunt
Susan). 1916. The
Intrigue. Paramount/Pallas. 5 reels.
September. Dir.: Frank Lloyd. With Lenore Ulrich
(countess), Cecil Van Auker (hero), Howard Davies (villain), Florence Vidor
(countess’s maid), Paul Weigel, King Vidor (chauffeur). •1917. The Fifth
Boy. Universal/Victor. 1 reel. Oct.
29. Dir.: Raymond B.
Wells. Sc.: King Vidor. With
Buster Emmons, Guy
Hayman, Gilbert Kurland, Wesley Barry. •1917. What’ll
We Do with Uncle? Univeral/Victor. 1 reel. Oct. 22 Dir.: William
Beaudine. Sc.: King Vidor. With
Henry Murdock
(Henry), Mildred Davis (Flossie), Milt Uhl (dealer), Edwin K. Baker. A
comedy. An artist attempts various
forms of suicide after mistaking Flossie’s theatrical rehearsal for infidelity. •1917. A
Bad Little Good Man. Universal/Nestor. 1 reel. October. Dir.: William Beaudine. Sc.: King Vidor.
Oct. 29. With Mattie Commont
(Idaho Ida), Henry Murdock (Texas
Tommy), Edwin Baker (Montana Joe). A
western. Dancehall girl with
six-gun protects Texas Tommy, who in turn saves her from Montana Joe. •1917. Dan’s Daring Drama; or,
Harem-Scare Em. Universal/Nestor. 2 reels. Dir.: Al Santell. Sc.: King Vidor. With Dave Morris (Sultan), Harry Mann (Harmon Naigs),
Gladys Tennyson (Lily White). Apparently
released under another title.
Listed here under Vidor’s original title. •1917. Just My Sister. Universal/Nestor.
2 reels. Dir.: Al Santell. Sc.: King Vidor. Apparently
released under another title.
Listed here under Vidor’s original title. “Finally
I got one as a writer in the story department at Universal. There I met a man
named George Brown
who was making a series of half-hour films. Although I hadn’t directed, I told him I had, so he sent me
out as a cameraman for two or three days on one of his projects. I did know how
to operate a camera,
however, and had in fact sold one of my short two-reel comedies of the
Vitagraph Company for thirty dollars. “Soon
after that, George Brown left Universal, founded his own company and hired me
as a director. I must have made
about fifteen or twenty half-hour films for him, mainly stories concerning
juvenile delinquency.” [hgm] Kevin Brownlow. Judge Willis Brown established “Boy Cities”
in Charlevoix, Michigan, and Gary,
Indiana, in the 1900s on the lines
of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town.
(Selig made a one-reeler about these operations.) Brown then presided over the juvenile
court of Salt Lake City.
[Challenged by an editor, the judge wrote and] directed a five-reeler
about an immigrant lad who benefited from “Boy City,” A
Boy and the Law (1914). For his
later films, he hired the young King Vidor first to write, then to direct his
scipts. Brown rented a group of
buildings in Culver City, California, where he hoped to establish a studio-cum-“Boy
City.” He called it the Boy City
Film Corporation. Vidor described
how he would pick up newsboys to play in these pictures, offering them a
two-dollar cash advance. [brown mas] “The
films invariably started with a group of boys seated around a large conference
table with Judge Brown.
The
parents of some unruly boy would present a seemingly insoluble problem of an
erring son. Judge Brown would
always prescribe some unorthodox but deeply human remedy. The main film story
would concern itself
with the manner in which these intensely human problems worked themselves
out. I deeply believed in these
films and I put my heart and soul into making them.” [tree.]
Kevin
Brownlow. When he first began making pictures,
King Vidor told his wife that he intended to become a second D.W.
Griffith. “He said this without
conceit. It was just a simple
statement,” said Florence Vidor. [brown
war] “From
one film to another, as with the canvases of a painter, it is indispensable
that a director be recognizable by his style. My ambition was always that people would recognize a Vidor
the way they do a Renoir or a Monet.”
[legu] 1918. BUD’S
RECRUIT. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Jan. 19. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With Wallis Brennan (Bud), Robert Gordon (Reggie),
Ruth Hampton (Reggie’s fiancée).
Kevin
Brownlow. One of the first propaganda objectives
[when America entered World War I] was directing public opinion against men who
evaded the draft. Children were
used to shame their fathers and
brothers into enlisting. One of
these, Bud’s
Recruit, featured a boy nmed Bud (Wallis Brennan), who organizes
his pals
into a military unit and drills them regularly. Bud’s elder brother Reggie
(Robert Gordon) is a slacker who
attends pacifist meetings with his mother, much to Bud’s disgust. Bud disguises himself in a mustache
and
goes down to the recruiting station, where he fills in an application in
Reggie’s name. “This,” [wrote Moving Picture World]. “results
in an awakening of Reggie’s manhood and also raises him in his sweetheart’s
estimation.” [brown
war] •1918. THE
CHOCOLATE OF THE GANG. Boy
City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Jan. 26. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With
Thomas Bellamy (Chocolate), Judge Willis Brown. •1918. THE
LOST LIE. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 2. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With William Vaugh, Mike O’Rourke (two boys),
Ruth
Hampton (Mike’s sister), Judge Willis Brown. Working
title: Two
Boys and Two Lies. •1918. TAD’S
SWIMMING HOLE. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Feb. 20. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With
Ernest Butterworth (Tad), Ruth Hampton (rescued
girl), Judge Willis Brown, Guy Hayman.\ •1918. MARRYING
OFF DAD. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 16. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With
Wallis Brennan, Ernest Thompson (two brothers),
Sadie Clayton (housekeeper/wife), Ruth Hampton (girl next door), Judge Willis
Brown. •1918.
Eddie Get the Mop.
Universal/ Nestor. 1
reel. Mar. 18. Dir.: William Beaudine. Sc.: King Vidor. With Harry Murdock, Mattie Commont. •1918. THE
PREACHER’S SON. Boy
City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 30. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With
Guy Hayman (Charles), Wharton Jones (his father),
Ernest Thompson, William DuVaull, Charles Force, Judge Willis Brown. •1918. THIEF
OR ANGEL. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 30. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With
Ruth Hampton (Antonetta/Tony), Charles Richards
(doctor), W.T. Horn (judge), Helen Muir, Ernest Thompson, Grace Marvin, Judge
Willis Brown. •1918. THE
ACCUSING TOE. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 3. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With
Dale Fath (Steve), Wharton Jones (miller), Judge
Willis Brown, Sadie Clayton. •1918. THE
REBELLION. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Apr. 27. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With
Doug Lansing, Robert Planett, Martin Pendleton
(three boys), William White, Wharton Jones, J.G.Underhill, Sadie Clayton, Hugh
Saxon, Judge Willis Brown. •1918. I’M
A MAN. Boy City Film Corp.—General
Film Corp. 2 reels. Apr. 21. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.-Sc.: Judge Willis Brown. With Martin Pendleton (Frank Eisel), Wharton Jones
(Jules de Courcey), Ruth Hampton (Ruth Eisel), Lloyd Hughes (David Smith),
William Davenport (Simon Eisel), Judge Willis Brown. •1918. There Goes the Bride. Universal Star Comedy. 1
reel. Jun. 8. Dir.: Roy Clements. Sc.: Eddie Lyons, Lee Moran. Story:
King Vidor. With Eddie Lyons, Lee Moran, Betty
Brown, Margaret
Culington, Beatrice Van. •1918. The Pursuing Package.
Universal/ Nestor. 1 reel. July
1. Dir.: Al Santell. Sc.:
King Vidor. With Harry Mann,
Kathleen O'Connor, William Carlock. •1919. THE
TURN IN THE ROAD. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors
Mutual. 5 reels. March 8. Dir.-Sc.
: King W. Vidor. With Helen Jerome Eddy (June Barker), Lloyd Hughes
(Paul Perry), George Nichols
(Hamilton Perry), Ben Alexander (Bob), Winter Hall (Rev. Matthew Barker),
Pauline Curley (Evelyn Barker), Charles Arling. “I realized
that in order to get a
job as a full-length feature director, I had to write my own story, and make it
good enough for someone to buy it.
I would only sell it if I could direct it. I went to a play called The Light of Asia at the Kratona Institute. It was the story of the Buddha’s search
for the truth. During the
performance I thought, Why not have a young American search for the truth? I went home and
wrote the whole story
that night. “The Turn of the Road was a metaphysical, more or less religious type of
film, inspired by the teachings of Christian Science. It was about a man
whose wife dies in childbirth.
This tragedy makes him run away from his home,
his friends, and his
family, and wander the world in search of truth. “We
didn’t have enough money to shoot abroad—in India, for example—but we did show
his return home. Thrown off a
freight train, he sleeps in a barn and there meets his young son, who teaches
him that truth is within us.
[hgm] The
little opened a window in the barn loft and
said, ‘The darkness is only the absence of light.’ Just to be conscious is a miracle in itself, just as life
and the awareness of consciousness of living is itself harmonious and
good. All the fear and suffering
could be dissolved just like the darkness by opening the windows of our minds.
“I went to the doctors who put up the
money for the boys films and I sold them the idea of making this feature. We formed the Brentwood
Film Company. They belonged to the Brentwood Country
Club and we played some golf there.
There were nine active doctors who each put up
a thousand dollars.
[dga]
“There
was a general feeling of antagonism between doctors and Christian
Scientists. [dga] One of them, the
president of the
company, said, ‘Isn’t this a little Christian Science?’ I said, ‘No,
not particularly.’
And they wanted me to change something
and I said no. So they made the
film. [schic] “We
only had enough money for one print, and one of the [doctors] wanted to take it
to New York and get a big distribution company. They had to pull it out of the theatre in the eleventh week,
with standing-room-only crowds going around the block. I got an offer
from every star and
every company to direct
films. It was great after having
such difficulty. “When
I wrote the next picture
the
president of the company said, ‘There is no Christian Science in it. We want you to
put some in!’ We finally compromised with the
agreement that I would put some in the [third] picture, The Other
Half. [dga]
Unsigned. New York Times. Mar. 30, 1919. Mr. Vidor shows that he has a
grasp upon the fundamentals of pictorial composition and the techniques of
making pictures dramatic and meaningful.
Yet he does not depend upon pictures to tell his story. He relies upon uninspired subtitles at
points where the full force of moving pictures is essential for the strength.
Beccause he sometimes uses pictures so effectively one is disappointed when he
leans on the broken crutch of words. The production is frankly a preachment
but
the picture has dramatic appeal that is
not likely to be destroyed by the sermonizing. Apparently Mr. Vidor was anxious
to make The Turn of the Road proclaim his
belief that God is Love and Light.
Unsigned. Variety, Mar. 31, 1919. Intensely human…Comedy and tragedy
are about equally divided and there is a big thought back of the whole
thing. The settings are handsome
and there are many picturesque scenes …The direction under the guidance of the
author is excellent, none of the smaller details being overlooked. “All
the big stars and companies made me offers, but out of loyalty I stuck with the
Brentwood Company for a year.
We
had no budget to buy stories so I wrote my own, drawing on things that had
happened to me and things I’d seen. [hgm] “Christian
Science is really a science, the science of what is real. Doctors have little
by little
discovered that the fundamental material is the spirit, the conscience. It’s something
one has realised little
by little.…My mother was interested in Christian Science. I remember that,
thanks to what she had
told me about Christian Science, I was able to establish what the real
connections were between what was going on in me and the world outside. As a child, I had
been sick. I had been stricken by a nerve
disease. I had seen a lot of
doctors whose diagnoses had been quite uncertain and it’s from this point that
I became interested in Christian Science.…In brief, nothing exists beyond the
conscience. And what is the
conscience? It’s the universal
spirit. I believe that there is a
single spirit, as there is a single ocean, a single world, a single atmosphere,
and that we all use this spirit.
The question, then, is this: Do two powers exist,
God and Evil? If you imagine that God exists, that
he is infinite, you don’t need to oppose him with a force like the Devil or
Evil. So there is only a single
cause. And it is this cause that
you have to use against difficulties, illness, poverty, war.…The theme of love
that conquers all was already present in my first film, The Turn
in the
Road, and
in plenty of the others.
And I think that if your spirit is
strong enough to concentrate on something, well, it is possible to solve
everything.” [pos] •1919.
BETTER TIMES. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors
Mutual. 5 reels. June 22. Dir.-Sc.:
King W. Vidor. Ph.: William Thornley. With
ZaSu Pitts (Nancy Scroogs), David Butler (Peter), Jack MacDonald (Ezra
Scroogs), William DuVaull (S. Whittaker), Hugh Fay (Jack Ransom), George
Hackathorne (Tony). “I had discovered ZaSu Pitts on a
bus, and I wrote this story around her.” [dga] Unsigned. Variety, Mar. 3, 1919. King W. Vidor is both author and director. On the whole
his work is well done,
though it is this reviewer’s opinion that the production would have been better
with less farce and more straight and appealing comedy. 1919. THE
OTHER HALF. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors
Mutual. 5 reels. August 18. Dir.-Sc.: King Vidor. Asst. dir.: Roy H. Marshall. With
Florence Vidor (Katherine Boone), Charles Meredith (Donald Trent), ZaSu Pitts
(The Jazz Kid), David Butler (Corporal Jimmy), Thomas Jefferson (Caleb
Fairman), Alfred Allen (J. Martin Trent), Frances Raymond (Mrs. Boone), Hugh
Saxon (James Bradley), Arthur Redden (reporter). 1919. POOR
RELATIONS. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors Mutual. 5 reels. October 26. Dir.-Sc.:
King Vidor. Asst. dir.: Roy H.Marshall. With
Florence Vidor (Dorothy Perkins), William DuVault (Pa Perkins), ZaSu Pitts
(Daisy Perkins), Charles Meredith (Monte Rhodes), Lillian Leighton (Ma
Perkins), Roscoe Karns (country yokel). Fred. Variety, Oct. 31, 1919. …just a ‘small time’ feature that
gets by with its
little comedy touches. Exhibitors’
Trade Review, Oct.
25, 1919. The slender, fragile story has just
about all it can do to make its way through the new-mown hay atmosphere. Vidor
signed a three-picture deal with First National, a distribution company formed
by theater owners. He was now an
independent producer. With their
advance money, he built a studio, “Vidor Village,” on fifteen acres. His father helped him; King had brought
him to Los Angeles after the lumber company’s fortunes had declined. Vidor Village’s investment brochure
included a signed promise: A
Creed and a Pledge— I believe in
the motion picture that carries
a message to humanity. I believe in the picture that will help
humanity to free itself from the shackles of fear and suffering that have so
long bound it with iron chains. I will not knowingly produce a picture
that contains anything I do not believe to be absolutely true to human nature,
anything that could injure anyone, nor anything unclean in thought or action. Nor will i deliberately portray anything
to cause fright, suggest fear, glorify mischief, condone cruelty or extenuate
malice. I will never picture evil or wrong, except to prove the fallacy of its lure. So long as i direct pictures, I will make only those founded upon
the principle of
right and I will endeavor to draw upon the inexhaustible source of Good for my
stories, my guidance, and my inspiration. [signed] King
Vidor. “I
believe [in 1971] that to restrict yourself in the work that you do will only
limit yourself as a person.
I might have been stupid enough in my first few
pictures to put out a
creed that I wouldn’t make pictures with violence or sex. Adela Rogers St.
John probably wrote
it, and I signed it.
It was an
advertisement, you know.
It said
that I wouldn’t have anything to do with violence, and that I wouldn’t have any
emphasis on sex. Right after it came out in
the paper I got arrested
for playing dirty poker in a sixty-cent poker game. The headlines were pretty awful. It didn’t go with this idealistic statement.” [dga] 1920. THE
FAMILY HONOR. King Vidor Prods.—First National. 5 reels. March 15. Dir.-Prod.: King W. Vidor. Sc.: William First Parker, from a story by John Booth
Harrower. Ph.: Ira H. Morgan. With
Florence Vidor (Beverly Tucker), Roscoe Karns (Dal Tucker), Ben Alexander
(Little Ben Tucker), Charles Meredith (Merle Curran), George Nichols (Mayor
Curran), John P. Lockney (Felix), Willis Marks (Dobbs), Harold Goodwin (grocery
boy). 1920. THE
JACK-KNIFE MAN. King Vidor Prods.—First National. 5 reels. August 8. Dir.-Prod. : King Vidor. Sc.: William Parker, King Vidor, from the novel (1913) by
Ellis Parker Butler. With
Fred Turner (Peter Lane), Florence Vidor (Mrs. Montgomery), Harry Todd (Booge),
Claire McDowell (Liz Merdin), Bobby Kelso (Buddy), Willis Marks (Rev.
Briggles), Lillian Leighton (Mrs. Potter), James Corrigan (George Rapp),
Charles Arling (doctor).
“I must have seemed
a rebel at the
time. I was under contract to
First National and I had shot The Jack-Knife Man for them. I hadn’t used all the money they had allocated me [$75,000]
and I had returned what was left [$10,000]. But my film didn’t fit into the norms of the time: I hadn’t
used stars in beautiful costumes and lovely settings. My situation was not very good. But I had done what I wanted, what I felt, what interested
me. And I am very surprised that I
did this so early in my career, instead of accepting what was usual. I realised that
by doing what I truly
felt, the public could feel the same things. And my work was much better on a film that interested me
than on a film that left me indifferent.
[pos] “[The
reason] you see many scenes in pictures [of this era] of someone arriving in a
carriage, getting out, walking through the gate to the front door, knocking,
and when the door is opened, going into the house. Well, eventually we forgot the carriage and the automobile,
and we even forgot about going up the path. You just go inside and they are there. That was a series of developments
that
took audience acceptance.
That’s
why titles all appear superfluous now.
At that time they seemed necessary to explain the
action.” [dga] Unsigned. New York Times, Aug. 2, 1920. The photoplay gives the
impression that Mr. Vidor said, before starting it, “Now I will be wholesome
and optimistic” and kept his declaration in mind in the making of every
scene.…Spectators do not want to be aware of the missionary intent of what they
go to enjoy, and in many scenes of The
Jack-Knife Man they are aware if little else. Jolo. Variety, Aug. 6, 1920. One
of those tales that you take
extreme delight in reading, but which, somehow, isn’t quite the same when
visualized.…It is admirably done by a clever cast in which each individual
player stood out in his or her particular role. [After surveying ten or so viewers] the consensus
of opinion was, “It’s
very nice, but--oh, I don’t know.”
In other words it failed to satisfy. As
James Card notes, films were not respectable in the twenties, and insightful
criticism was usually in the fan magazines rather than in publications like The Literary Digest, Theatre Arts—or
The New York Times. Card cites Frederick James Smith,
below, as one of the best critics of his era. Where more respectable reviewers
saw clichéd plots and
picturesque photography, Smith saw Vidor already in 1920s in terms that, a
quarter century later, would be reserved for Rossellini and De Sica: Frederick
James Smith. Motion Picture Classic,
September 1920. King Vidor has proved himself
again. Mr. Vidor it was who
startled the celluloid world somewhat over a year ago with his Turn in the Road which revealed
its producer as possessing a singularly human touch. Being sure of his ability, we have
waited for Mr. Vidor to
do something bigger. The bigger
thing has occurred—Ellis Parker Butler’s The Jack-Knife Man. Here is a gently drawn little genre
study, finely conceived
and done with admirable workmanship and an excellently restrained sympathy.…The Jack-Knife Man is worthy of
your attention for it belongs to the photoplay school of tomorrow. No pasteboard melodramatic characters,
no machine made plot development, no trite methods of screen telling are
here. For Mr. Vidor—we are sure of
it now—is just finding himself and before long he is going to turn out a big
and human celluloid document. James
Card. The rural, outdoor setting of
barns, stables, country roads, buggies, country stores and snowy village
streets doesn’t simply bring authenticity to the film, but with the passing of
years, those actualities have made the picture a precious document of a kind
of countryside lost to us forever.…With wry humor, [Vidor] keeps his people
honestly human—a skill that marked Vidor’s best work throughout the whole time
of his predialogue period. This
film, devoid of sentimentality, is the earliest example we have of Vidor’s
greatest strength—his ability to use professional players, strip them of their
standard theatrical-behavior specialities and allow them to perform with the
naturalism that Vittorio De Sica achieved from his auto-worker star of The Bicycle Thief. 1921. THE
SKY PILOT. Cathrine Curtis
Corp.—Associated First National. 7
reels. 6305 ft. April 30. Dir.:
King Vidor. Prod.: Cathrine Curtis. Sc.: John McDermott.
Adapt.: Faith Green, from the novel (1899) by Ralph
Connor (aka Charles
William Gordon). Ph.: Gus
Peterson. With
John Bowers (The Sky Pilot), Colleen Moore (Gwen), David Butler (Bill
Hendricks), Harry Todd (The Old Timer), Kathleen Kirkham (Lady Charlotte),
James Corrigan (Hon.
Ashley),
Donald MacDonald (duke).
Independent
production was
impossible financially and Vidor Village failed, exacerbated by problems with The Sky Pilot, Vidor’s
infatuation with his star, Colleen Moore, and snow.
“I do not believe The Sky Pilot is about Christian Science. There is a miracle
in the film, or
something close to one.
But in
fact Christian Science maintains there are no miracles.” [pos] Unsigned. New
York Times, Apr. 18,
1921. …despite…an overdone ending, it
is a corking melodrama.
Pictorially it is exceptional.
Mr. Vidor’s chief talent seems to be for making magically lighted,
atmospheric moving pictures which convey meanings to spectators, though he
seems to take special pride himself in his moral earnestness.
Jolo. Variety, Apr. 22, 1921. A really remarkable screening of a round-up is
depicted, showing the hero standing over the prostrate body of the heroine and
“shooing” the cattle to either side …The steers are shown running apparently
into the very eye of the camera, making the scene as vivid as is possible to
photography. Motion
Picture News:
A Western way above the ordinary. Vidor actually shows a roundup and
stampede of steers which is about the most blood-curdling thing
imaginable. Strange that such a stunt
has not been used before. 1921. LOVE
NEVER DIES. King W. Vidor/Thomas Ince—Associated Exhibitors. 7 reels. 6751 ft.
November 14. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Thomas Ince.
Sc.: King Vidor, from The Cottage of Delight (1918) by William Nathaniel Harben. Ph.: Max Dupont. With
Lloyd Hughes (John Trott), Madge Bellamy (Tilly Whaley), Joe Bennett (Joel
Eperson), Lillian Leighton (Mrs. Cavanaugh), Fred Gambold (Sam Cavanaugh),
Julia Brown (Dora Boyles), Frank Brownlee (Ezekiel Whaley), Winifred Greenwood
(Jane Holder), Claire McDowell (Liz Trott). “No
doubt there is still influence from Griffith. But in certain films by Ince there were also train
accidents. At this time I had my
own studio, but I didn’t have a lot of money to make the film. So I shot the train
accident scenes
first, with some specialists and a small budget. And then I showed this sequence to Ince. That was how I
was able to complete the
film. Anyway, part of the accident
was shot with miniature cars.
I
knew a great specialist for this kind of scene. We had no need of stars. The story itself was in effect influenced by Griffith,
especially the love scenes, obviously.
The ending too, when the two heroes chase each
other on the river, I owe
to Way Down
East.” [pos] Florence
Vidor had become a leading player at Paramount, and a four-picture was
arranged, but toward the end their marriage broke up. •1922. WOMAN,
WAKE UP! Florence Vidor Productions—Associated Exhibitors. 6 reels. 5241 ft.
March
25. Dir.: King Vidor. Sc: C.B. Manly, from a story by Ben Moore Clay. Ph.: George Barnes. With
Florence Vidor (Anne), Charles Meredith (Henry Mortimer), Louis Calhern (Monte
Collins). Vidor
lists this among his films in A
Tree
Is a Tree. Variety
and the American Film Institute
Catalog credit direction
to Marcus Harrison. Positif 163, however, states that Vidor told them:
“The information published on page 295 of the American edition of A Tree Is a Tree concerning Woman, Wake Up! was correct. The attribution to Marcus Harrison was
absolutely erroneous.” Vidor also
claimed Woman, Wake Up! in his
interview with Charles Higham. 1922. THE
REAL ADVENTURE. Florence Vidor Prods./Cameo
Pictures—Associated Exhibitors. 5
reels. 4932 ft. JMay 28. Dir.:
King Vidor. Prod.: Arthur S. Kane.
Sc.: Mildred Considine, from The Real Adventure (1915) by Henry Kitchell Webster. Ph.: George Barnes. With
Florence Vidor (Rose Stanton), Clyde Fillmore (Rodney Aldrich), Nellie Peck
Saunders (Mrs. Stanton), Lilyan
McCarthy (Portia), Philip Ryder (John Walbraith). •1922.
DUSK TO DAWN. Florence Vidor Prods.—Associated
Exhibitors. 6 reels. 5200 ft.
September 2. Dir.: King Vidor. Sc: Frank Howard Clark, from The Shuttle Soul by Katherine Hill. Ph.: George Barnes. With
Florence Vidor (Marjorie Latham and Aziza), Jack Mulhall (Philip Randall),
Truman Van Dyke (Ralph Latham), James Neill (John Latham), Lydia Knott
(Mrs. Latham), Herbert Fortier
(Mark Randall), Norris Johnson (Babette), Nellie Anderson (Marua), Sidney
Franklin (Nadar Gungi), Peter Burke (Rajah Nyhal Singh). “[Love
Never Dies] was followed
by a group
of romantic melodramas starring my late wife, Florence Vidor. They included
Conquering the Woman,
an Admirable Crichton-type of yarn about a woman sent off to an island with
a man; Woman, Wake Up; The Real Adventure, about a woman in business; and Dusk to Dawn, which was a dual-personality fantasy about the soul
of a girl in India transmigrating into an American girl: when the latter went
to sleep, the other girl woke up in India. Florence Vidor played both parts.” [hgm] Motion
Picture News:
This feature has one of the finest
mountings of any seen this year.
The opening scenes showing the receiving of election returns and their
broadcasting by radio are unusually well done. The shots of India are artistic gems…Beautiful
photography
and lighting. •1922.
Screen Snapshots No. 11. Pathé Exchange. 1 reel. Oct. 11. With
Florence Vidor, King Vidor, Douglas MacLean, Babe Ruth, Eva Novak, Ben Turpin,
Hope Hampton, Anita Stewart, Richard Barthelmess, Edward Earle, Mary Carr,
George Walsh, Grace Darmond, Zene Keefe, Mae Murray, May Allison, Billie Dove. 1922.
CONQUERING THE WOMAN. King. W. Vidor Prods.—Associated
Exhibitors. 6 reels. 5887 ft. Dec. 10. Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Frank Howard Clark, from Kidnapping Coline (1913) by Henry Cottrell Rowland (serialized in Everybody’s, September 1913—January 1914). Ph.: George Barnes. With
Florence Vidor (Judith Stafford), Bert Sprotte (Tobias Stafford), Mathilde
Brundage (Aunt Sophia), David Butler (Larry Saunders), Roscoe Karns (Shorty
Thompson), Peter Burke (Count Henri), Harry Todd (Sandy MacTavish). Motion Picture News, Dec. 30,
1922. The picture, while directed by
King Vidor, who when given a chance can show something in the way of
imaginative ideas, does not leave its orthodox groove. •1922.
Alice Adams. Encore—Associated Exhibitors. 6 reels. 6361 ft.
April,
1923. Dir.: Rowland V.
Lee. Prod.:
King
Vidor. Sc.: Lee, from the novel
(1921) by Booth Tarkington.
Ph.:
Goerge Barnes. With
Florence Vidor (Alice Adams), Claude Gillingwater, Harold Goodwin. Remake,
Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935,
with Katharine Hepburn).
“I had been such a
Booth Tarkington
fan, I thought that everything he wrote should be made into film. We somehow got
the money to make [this
one], but at the same time I had a chance to make Peg o’
My Heart. I decided to take the job and perhaps use the money to keep
my studio going. We got Rowland V.
Lee to direct Alice Adams. I had a few
conferences with Rowland
and
perhaps put more time in on the script than supervising the direction.” [dga] 1922. PEG
O' MY HEART. Metro Pictures. 8 reels. 7900 ft.
Dec.
18. Dir.: King Vidor. Superv.: J. Hartley Manners. Sc.: Mary O'Hara, from play Peg o’ My Heart (1912) by J. Hartley Manners. Ph.: George Barnes. With
Laurette Taylor (Margaret O'Connell - Peg), Marion Hamilton (Sir Gerald Adair:
Jerry), Russell Simpson (Jim O'Connell), Ethel Grey Terry (Ethel Chichester),
Nigel Barrie (Christian Brent), Lionel Belmore (Hawks), Vera Lewis (Mrs.
Chichester), Sidna Beth Ivins (Mrs. Jim O'Connell), D.R.O. Hatwell (Alaric
Chichester), Aileen O'Malley (Margaret, child), Fred Huntly (headwaiter), the
dog Michael. Remake,
Peg o’ My Heart (Robert Z.
Leonard, 1933). Ephraim
Katz. Laurette Taylor , the famous
Broadway star who was the toast of New York in the 1910s and 1920s, appeared
in only three films. [katz] Unsigned. New York Times, Jan. 22,
1923. [Laurette Taylor had played the part
on stage with tremendous success.]
The picture is full of spoken subtitles, taken from the stage dialogue,
and upon these the photoplay largely depends for its humor and its human
interest. So it is not a distinctly
cinematographic piece that has come out from the adaptation. The screen version is rather a
transliteration than a translation of the play.…The true and pointed pantomime
of Miss [Laurette] Taylor…make[s] the photoplay momentarily a genuine motion
picture. “We
used Miss Taylor in it, and although she was then forty-five years old, we had
her playing an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl: miraculously, we made her
look quite convincing.” [hgm] Laurette
Taylor was 38. “She got D.W. Griffith’s cameraman,
Billy Bitzer, and they made a photographic test of her. They sent the test
out to me, and I
gasped. I thought it was just
impossible. You could not make a
picture with a woman who looked as old as she did in the test trying to play an
eighteen-year-old. It was
frightening. She had on this
terrible wig. I just thought we
couldn’t do it.
Soon after that,
they decided to come out and make the test in the studio. When I saw her
again, my hopes
fell. She had done quite a bit of
drinking in her time, and I didn’t know how she could do it.
“I
had the lucky remembrance that in Love Never Dies the stills had looked excellent. I thought, Why couldn’t we use the lens
on the eight-by-ten still camera?
George Barnes, the cameraman on Peg o’ My Heart, said we could.
We had to set up the camera lenses in
front of the motion picture cameras, but there was such a long telephoto lens
on the still camera that for a big close-up, Laurette Taylor was all the way
across the stage. However, Barnes
worked out a type of rifle lighting.
He used a key light that he put sights on, just
like a gun. Wherever she went, the electrician
followed her with those sights.
[The light] was at such a height that it threw
a false shadow around her
chin. This eliminated the wrinkles
around her throat. It made her
face into a round, pear-shaped face.
In this trick lens it was distorted just enough
to make her face more
round than long. The distortion
wasn’t supposed to be apparent, it just happened. The result was that after several days of tests, we finally
accomplished a test where she looked very young and very lovely. We took the wig
off, and she had
beautiful hair of her own.
In
running the film today I noticed that her long blonde hair was just beautiful,
and made all the difference in the world.
When she was in a good mood, when she was laughing
or smiling, her face
was up and right and round, and when she was sunk, her whole face and expression
would go down. Every scene was
shot by kidding and laughing and making jokes and doing all kinds of things to
keep her amused. “She
fell in love with me as a result of this.
She ran the film over and over for the rest of
her life. She would screen it for me whenever I
came over to visit, and she’d sit and hold my hand because I had made her look
eighteen. She had a print of it in
New York and she used to call people up just to show it. I remember what
Ethel Barrymore said
when Laurette asked her to dinner.
She said, ‘I’ll come over to dinner
if we don’t have to sit through Peg
o’ My Heart again
afterwards.’” [dga] James
Card. Laurette Taylor’s whole acting career
had been limited to live theatre. Peg represented the peak of her
theatrical success, and stardom in living theatre was then accounted—by theatre
people—to be a far greater achievement than renown in the movies. Like every successful stage star,
Taylor was a perfectionist, cherishing the technique that had brought her to
the top of her profession. She was
not ready to modify her acting for the benefit of the motion picture
camera. In the past, comparable
stubbornness on the part of theatre actors proved to be disastrous if their
film directors, cowed by the stage performers’ prestige, were unable to
persuade them that film acting required quite different techniques. To his great credit, King Vidor was not
willing to be directed by Laurette Taylor. The first weeks of work…produced
a continuing battle between
stage and film director that presaged the impossibility of bringing in a film
version of Peg
with Laurette in her famous role.
At last Vidor resorted to the device of shooting several scenes just as
she wanted them. He had her look
at the tests, and, luckily for cinema, she readily recognized that her stage
mannerisms were just too extravagant for the intimate eye of the motion picture
camera. [card] •1923. THE WOMAN OF BRONZE. Samuel
Zierler Photoplay Corp.—Metro Pictures.
8 reels. 5643
ft. Feb. 23. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Harry Garsons.
Sc.: Hope Loring, Louis Duryea Lighton, from the
play La Rivale by Henry Kistemaeckens (U.S. premiere, 1920),
translated by Paul Kester (1920).
Ph.: William O’Connell. Art
dir.: Joseph Wright. With
Clara Kimball Young (Vivian Hunt), John Bowers (Paddy Miles), Kathryn McGuire
(Sylvia Morton), Edwin Stevens (Reggie Morton), Lloyd Whitlock (Leonard Hunt),
Edward Kimball (Papa Bonelli).
Moving
Picture World, Apr. 14, 1923.
Heavy emotional drama. “It
was out of my line. I still had
the studio, but by this time we had fired our lawyer who was also the only one
who knew where all of our accounts were.
He got a sheriff’s detachment to lock up
the gates of the studio.
My father was with me and he was able
to take the brunt of managing the studio while I worked on the outside. I remember the
sheriff even took our
automobiles. We were living on
Selma Avenue then, and I think I had somebody pick me up, and I got a job directing
Clara Kimball Young.
“We
made a settlement with our old attorney and we opened up the studio again, but
we didn’t make any films, and it was very soon after that that I sold the
studio to Sol Lesser, I think for $125,000. The real estate had gone up and made up for the loss we had
incurred in running our own studio.”
[dga] 1923.
Souls for Sale. Goldwyn Pictures. 8 reels. 7864 ft.
April
22.. Dir. -Prod.: Rupert Hughes. Vidor
appears beside several celebrities (including Florence Vidor) whom a small-town
girl (Eleanor Boardman) encounters while trying to get a job in Hollywood. 1924.
Vidor separates from Florence Vidor, with whom he has had a daughter,
Suzanne. 1923. THREE
WISE FOOLS. Goldwyn Pictures.
7 reels. 6946
ft. August 19. Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Vidor, June Mathis. Adapt.: John McDermott, James O'Hanlon, from the play (1919)
by Austin Strong and Winchell Smith.
Ph.: Charles Van Enger. With
Claude Gillingwater (Theodore Findley), Eleanor Boardman (Rena Fairchild and
Sidney Fairchild), William H. Crane (Hon. James Trumbull), Alec B. Francis (Dr.
Richard Gaunt), John Sainpolis (John Crawshay), Brinsley Shaw (Benny, the
Duck), Fred Esmelton (Gray), William Haines (Gordon Schuyler), Lucien
Littlefield (Douglas), ZaSu Pitts (Mickey), Martha Mattox (Saunders), Fred J.
Butler (Poole), Charles Hickman (Clancy), Craig Biddle, Jr. (Findley, young
man), Creighton Hale (Trumbull, as boy), Raymond Hatton (Gaunt, as boy). Remake,
Three Wise Fools (Edward Buzzell,
1948). “Eleanor Boardman, one of [Goldwyn’s] rising
young contract
players, was to star in the picture.
They were trying to develop her into a star. I had never met her, but the play was over at the Pasadena
Playhouse, and I asked her if she would go with me to see it. It wasn’t
very long before I was separated
from Florence, and I fell in love with Eleanor. I had actually fallen in love with her from a big
advertisement for the Eastman Kodak Company. They had a picture of a girl on top of a hill in a wheat field,
with a striped dress on which was being blown by the wind. She had posed for
it. So it was a fast romance from then on. “I
suppose with this film Eleanor Boardman emerged into stardom. [dga] “I’d
been hired for [Goldwyn] by a man named Major Bowes, then a studio executive
and later host of radio’s Comedy Hour, an amateur talent programme. I was trying to
get an option on a
story called Three Wise Fools when
he offered to buy it for the studio and let me direct it for them. I accepted, and
subsequently spent
twenty years at MGM.
I never
signed long-term contracts, only for terms of two or three years; that’s why I
missed out on MGM’s pension plan. “I
was very enthusiastic about Three Wise Fools, a story of three older men and a
young girl, released in 1923.
It
gave me a chance to explore these people’s deeply human feelings, a theme which
I’ve been told runs through all my pictures, although I haven’t been too aware
of it myself. I’ve only been
conscious of what stories interested me, of the kind of stories I like.” [hgm] Unsigned. New York Times, Jul. 23,
1923 While Miss [Eleanor] Boardman is
a captivating Sidney the interest of this photoplay naturally centres around
the three old bachelors, and it is their sincere portrayal of their respective
parts which makes for the success of this production.
Moving
Picture World, Jul 14, 1923.
King Vidor has reproduced the
atmosphere, comedy and romance [of the stageplay] with great success, and
elaborated considerably on the suspense angle. Could
you describe the method you were using at this point to direct? “I
was so much aware of Griffith’s
handling of mounting excitement, I was trying to get the same sort of an
effect, and that’s how I ran into speeding up each scene. I felt that the
most important thing
about motion picture directing was tempo.
In order to have an exact diagram of speeding up
the end of a film to
reach an exciting climax, I worked out the metronome idea. I simply made each
scene progressively
faster, according to the beat of the metronome. There was nobody walking and keeping exact time to the
metronome, but it gave me a basis.
If I said, ‘Camera, action, fast!’
that meant the actors would all move
faster. “My
voice didn’t carry too much, and I had a theory that if you talked too much you
would distract the actors.
We used
a sort of shorthand by saying, ‘That’s good,’ or ‘Enough,’ or you might say,
‘More,’ or ‘More of that,’ and try to say it quickly and unobtrusively so that
it wouldn’t distract, wouldn’t pull the actors always. In fact, with Gilbert
I developed almost
a type of telepathy.
We knew each
other well. It was also partly by
gesture. Maybe he’d see a gesture
of mine outside the corner of his eye, as a person in an orchestra sees a
small gesture the conductor makes.
He claimed he knew what I was thinking. “Some
directors did lots of talking, and lots of acting. I would try to make it very clear to the actors exactly what
it was that I wanted from them, but if something were to develop during a scene,
which often happened, I would keep the camera going. This is particularly true of comedy. We’d keep the camera going
and the
actors would know that we had run onto something and I would say, ‘Don’t stop
now, that’s great!’
I gave them
encouragement. That was very
important. “I
felt that those actors who had been on the stage were like children and they
missed the applause of the audience.
The director had to take the place of the audience. The director is like a
psychiatrist. The women stars are
always falling in love with the director because he gives the whole reaction of
whether they are good or bad, and I don’t think anyone who has ever been an
actress isn’t precarious about her performance. “The
rehearsal was to know exactly where they should go, where they should stand,
just to get the blocking straight.
I always felt there was one take that would be
the right one, and from
there they would all go downhill.
I would try to set everything to photograph the
good take so it
wouldn’t get stale.
I never did
indulge in too many takes because I thought the actors would get
mechanical. I always tried to
capture some spontaneous quality in the acting. “What
you can do is tell the actors exactly what you want, not from the acting
standpoint, but what idea it is that you want communicated. I avoided giving
them a performance as
an example. That is getting in and
acting and expecting them to copy you, which is what Griffith did. I wanted it to
come from them so that
each person would have a different individuality, rather than just copying my
performance. All of the Griffith
people looked alike.
He had been
an actor at one time himself. “We
had a portable organ and a violin [on the set]. In the case of Marion Davies, she had a quartet which
included a cello, bass fiddle, and two violins. It was marvelous, just beautiful. It was surprising how much you could control by the music
you selected. John Gilbert liked
‘Moonlight and Roses.’ In The
Crowd we used a
phonograph and a record of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. If you had any king of emotion going on, the stars would
say, ‘Where’s the music?’” [dga] 1924. WILD
ORANGES. Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan Distributing Corp. 7 reels. 6837 ft.
January
20. Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Vidor, from the novel (1919) by Joseph
Hergesheimer. Ph.: John W.
Boyle. Art dir.: Cedric
Gibbons. Cost.: Sophie Wachner. Editor:
June Mathis. Titles: Tom Miranda. With
Virginia Valli (Nellie Stope), Frank Mayo [and in some exteriors, James
Kirkwood] (John Woolfolk), Ford Sterling (Paul Halvard), Nigel De Brulier
(Lichfield Stope), Charles A. Post (Iscah Nicholas). “We next
went all the way to Florida to capture the
intense atmosphere of Joseph Hergesheimer’s book Wild Oranges:
one
of the first films I know of for which a company travelled that far. Strange as it may
seem today, when we
shoot movies all around the world, nobody thought in those terms then. If you talked atmosphere,
if you talked
of the importance of a film’s ambience, they’d say: ‘Why do you want to go all
the way across the country?
What’s
wrong with Griffith Park?’
That’s
what the title of my book is about: ‘A tree is a tree, a rock is a rock: shoot it
in Griffith Park.’ “Hergesheimer’s
book described such things as Florida’s oppressive heat, the moss on the trees,
the tropical foliage, things like that.
We went all over Florida trying to capture this
atmosphere, and that’s
what made the picture so successful.
Reviewers hailed the break-away from the studio
which Wild Oranges represented as a milestone in the art of motion
pictures. [hgm] “James Kirkwood
had been scheduled to
play the lead in the picture and actually did in Florida, but the day we got
back to California he was thrown by his horse and fractured his skull. We were faced with
returning to
Florida and redoing the picture, but we found an actor, Frank Mayo, who looked
and walked like Kirkwood and wore his clothes without the slightest
alternation. We simply
re-did the
close-ups against simulated backgrounds (this was before the day of the photographed
process background) and used the longer shots of Kirkwood.” [tree] Unsigned. New
York Times, Mar. 3, 1924. Fear
is a dominant factor in this rather sketchy story,
from which King Vidor, as the diretor, has obtained some really excellent
results.…Entertaining and thrilling…The story itself does not contain much in
the way of detail and its strength lies in the way in which it is told upon the
screen. If Vidor had had a more
fluent and plausible vehicle this picture would have been even better than it
is.
Some of the last sequences of
Wild Oranges are
strong enough to impress themselves upon one for some time. Skig. Variety, Mar. 5, 1924. The major share of the credit must
go to Vidor,
who has done so well with a script which might so easily have been grossly
exaggerated. The photography
meets all requirements to roundout Wild
Oranges as a convincing argument against those who
believe there is little or no merit connected with the art of celluloid story
telling, and it certainly has been well made. James
Card. The…violence and terror are
enough to nearly satisfy Stallone and Schwarzenegger fans of current cinema,
but the style of King Vidor in developing the tale is far more elegant than
encountered in the Golan and Globus Michael Winner bloodlettings. [card] 1924. HAPPINESS. Metro
Pictures. 8 reels. 7745 ft. March 8. Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: J. Hartley Manners from his one-act play (1914). Ph.: Chester A.
Lyons. Technical dir.: John J. Hughes. Titles:
Jack W. Robson. With
Laurette Taylor (Jenny Wreay), Pat O'Malley (Fermoy MacDonough), Hedda Hopper
(Mrs. Crystal Pole), Cyril Chadwick (Philip Chandos), Edith Yorke (Mrs. Wreay), Patterson
Dial (Sallie
Perkins), Joan Standing (other Jenny), Lawrence Grant (Mr. Rosselstein),
Charlotte Mineau (head saleslady).
“As a result of Peg o’ My Heart, Laurette Taylor and the Metro
Company were a big success.
By now
I was very much in love with Eleanor and I did not want to be away too
long. I didn’t feel at the time
that I had concentrated enough and dedicated myself enough to get everything
there was to get out of this picture, but I was wrong. Looking at it today,
maybe it was a
good idea that I didn’t take it too seriously. I sort of light-heartedly went through it. Well, there was
a love affair going on
between Laurette Taylor and me, and there was a wonderful rapport and spirit
between us. It seemed to show up
in the film, because there was a sort of delighted expression on her face all
the time, and she moved with the freedom I liked to see actresses and actors
move with, a certain unexpected freedom.
Most of the gags were probably mine [not things
she had done in the
play].” [dga]
Unsigned. New York Times, Mar. 11, 1924.
Laurette Taylor saves the film
from being a most ordinary picture.…Judging from the handling of some scenes in
this picture, one surmises that Miss Taylor did part of her own directing. Fred. Variety, Mar. 12, 1924. Seemingly
Miss [Laurette] Taylor is not going to
permit anyone but herself to be seen in the screen versions of any of the plays
she has been in on the stage.…[She] seems a little too mature to take an errand
girl on the screen. In trying to
get over the impression she is a youngster, it forced kittenish stuff that
didn’t register.…King Vidor in directing overlooked many little touches of
detail; one particularly was the death scene of the mother. She was still breathing after supposed
to have passed out. James
Card. Once again King Vidor showed that
his special forte was keeping his shadow players magically human—even when
some of them, by long movie habit, fought hard against it. [As in Peg] Laurette Taylor was cast as
a teenager. She was a woman in her
middle thirties, and the vast discrepancy between the characters’ age and her
own threatened the most willing suspension of disbelief on the art of film
audiences [and] had to be offset by a personality…bubbling with appeal.…In Happiness,
both her performance
and Vidor’s sensitive handling of so great a hazard overwhelmed the
problem. It was an achievement of
major proportions for both star and director.…Happiness is an irresistible
film. In almost the same way that
Cher shed years and a long-established mystique in Moonstruck, Laurette Taylor was
able to charm film fans…to accept [her] as an exception—a nonmovie queen
worthy of their warm response. [card] 1924. WINE
OF YOUTH. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures. 7 reels.
66OO
ft. August 10. Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Presented by Louis B. Mayer. Sc.: Carey Wilson from the play Mary the Third (c. 1923) by Rachel Crothers. Ph.: John J. Mescall.
Art dir.: Charles L. Cadwallader. Asst. dir.: Davld Howard. With:
Episode of 1870: Eleanor Boardman (Mary), James Morrison (Clinton), Johnnie
Walker (William). Episode of 1897:
Eleanor Boardman (Mary), Niles Welch (John [“Robert” in credits]), Creighton
Hale (Richard). Modern Story: Eleanor Boardman
(Mary), Ben Lyon
(Lynn), William Haines (Hal), William Collier, Jr. (Max), Pauline Garon (Tish
Eulalie Jensen (mother), E.J. Ratcliffe (father), Gertrude Claire (grandmother), Robert Agnew (Bobby), Lucille
Hutton (Anne), Virginia Lee Corbin, Gloria Heller (flappers), Sidney De Grey
(doctor). James
Card. Wine
of Youth…strikes positive
resonance with today’s youthful viewers far more than most silent films. Women’s liberation has provided
a
perpetual theme in novels, dramas and films. A concomitant of course is sexual
liberation.…In Wine
of Youth, the way of life
that has become standard in the 1990s was presented with King Vidor’s firmly
developed style of breathing believable life into his players. Led by Eleanor Boardman, an actress
exuding intelligence and integrity rather than movie glamor (the Merryl Steep
of the silents), the young people challenge the hypocrisy of their parents. [card] Unsigned.
New York Times,
Aug. 11, 1924 It is not bad as a warm weather show, but as usual
in such efforts the doings of the young people are exaggerated. No such picture would be considered
properly finished without a number of scenes depicting the shaking up and
drinking of cocktails and their resulting effect on those who partake of
them. Skig.
Variety, Aug.
13, 1924. A first rate picture that is at
once serious, sardonic, humorous and instructive in more than a subtle way. 1924. HIS
HOUR. Louis B. Mayer Prods/Metro-Goldwyn Dlstributing Corp. 7 reels. 6300 ft.
September 29. Dir.: King Vidor. Superv.: Elinor Glyn.
Sc.: Elinor Glyn from her story (1910). Titles: King Vidor, Maude Fulton. Ph.: John Mescall.
Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons.
Asst. dir.: David Howard. Dresses:
Sophie Wachner. With
Aileen Pringle (Tamara Loraine), John Gilbert (Gritzko), Emily Fitzroy
(Princesse Ardacheff), Lawrence Grant (Stephen Strong), Dale Fuller (Olga Gleboff),
Marlo Carillo (Count Valonne), Jacquelin Gadsdon (Tatiane Shebanoff), George
Waggoner (Shasha Basmanoff), Carrie Clark Ward (Princess Murieska), Bertram
Grassby (Boris Varishkine), Jill Reties (Sonia Zalesklie), Wilfred Gough (Lord
Courtney: Jack), Frederick Vroom (British minister), Mathilde Comont (fat
courtlsan), E. Eliazaroff (Khedive), David Mir (Serge Grekoff), Bert Sprone
(Ivan). “His Hour[was]
a sex story wntten by Elinor Glyn, author of Three Weeks and inventor of the term ‘it,’ meaning sex
appeal. Miss Glyn, who was present
throughout the making of His Hour, was
quite weird, probably the weirdest person I’ve ever come across. Her dress, her
talk and her appearance
were altogether strange.
She had
false gums that startled you by turning purple under the copper-hued vapour
lights whenever she smiled, and she was overly interested in tiny details that
made no difference to the film. “She
worried, for example, whether the seating arrangements for the story’s
aristocrat characters were correct according to protocol, because it was set
in Czarist Russia which she had known and still remembered. They were just
extras as far as we were
concerned, but to her they were real princes and princesses, counts and grand
dukes and she would fuss over details of dress or furnishings that were not
being photographed. We humored
her, however, because it did no harm and maintained her interest in the
picture. “In
those days we’d put a lot of effort into films that would come to town and play
for only a few days and then be forgotten. There weren’t any neighbourhood theatres all over the city
as there are now, and films would just play briefly in one Los Angeles theatre
and then vanish for ever.
[hgm] “John
Gilbert and I got along very well. He was a dashing type of fellow. I remember thinking up pieces of business to play love
scenes that he would like.
Gilbert
was a great lover and we got along very well. We seemed to become good friends right away. In fact, I had
one of the first houses
in the hills in back of Beverly Hills, and he moved in with me. We played tennis
together and were part
of a group that included Joe Cohen, the studio manager, Donald Ogden Stewart,
the writer, myself, and Laurence Stallings. John built a house right next to mine.… “We
were all called up to the projection room by Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer. He started to run
about a thousand feet
of film for all the directors at MGM. They were all clips from our pictures,
and he was illustrating why they had emploed Will Hays and why they were
setting up the Hays Office.
I
remember it started out with a couple of hundred feet from His
Hour, with John Gilbert kissing
Aileen Pringle. His arm was under her robe, and there
was just a tremendous amount of energy while he was working her over. This was lifted
out as one of the
scenes that illustrated why they had to have the Hays Office.” [dga] •1924. WIFE
OF THE CENTAUR. Metro-Goldwyn Plctures. 7 reels. 6535 ft.
December 1. Dir.: King Vidor. Presented by Louis B. Mayer. Sc.: Douqlas Z. Doty, from novel (1923) by Cyril Hume. Ph.: John Arnold. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Asst. dir.: David Howard. Cost.: Sophie Wachner.
With
Eleanor Boardman (Joan Converse), John Gilbert (Jeffrey Dwyer), Aileen Pringle
(Inez Martin), Kate Lester (Mrs. Converse), William Haines (Edward Converse),
Kate Price (Mattie), Jacquelin Gadsdon (Hope Larrimore), Bruce Covington (Mr.
Larrimore), Philo McCullough (Harry Todd), Lincoln Stedman (Chuck), William
Orlamond (Uncle Roger).
“It was probably a
triangle affair,
a man between two women, which is the basis of many of my pictures. I think he was
married, and he had a
mistress on the side.
I suppose it
was the same situation as you would see in The Crowd when she says, ‘I think I
understand you.’
The basis is
probably the wife accepting Gilbert having some love inetrest other than
herself. Eleanor was certainly
more the wife type than Aileen Pringle.”
[dga] Mordaunt
Hall. New York Times, Jan. 7,
1925. Doubtless this film will please
many persons who want a light, frothy entertainment which never taxes the imagination. Skig. Variety, Jan. 7, 1925. For 73 minutes Sunday afternoon
there wasn’t a stir in
this house, which seats 5300, until Aileen Pringle, in a somewhat vampish role,
threw on a transparent negligee.
That drew a titter. The
tenseness which those present manifested was an achievement few films in the
Broadway program theatres have been able to accomplish.…Vidor’s treatment of a
house party, a cafe scene and a swimming party have caught the collegiate
atmosphere (interspersed with comedy) to a greater extent than most of his
contemporaries have ever done.
Motion Picture News, Jan. 17,
1925. [John Gilbert’s performance is
“masterly” but “neurotic” and likely to arouse “disgust.”] 1925. PROUD
FLESH . M.G.M. Pictures.
7 reels. 5770
ft. April 25. Dir.: King Vidor. Presented by Louis B. Mayer. Sc.: Harry Behn, Agnes Christine Johnstone from novel (1924)
by Lawrence Rising. Ph.: John
Arnold. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons,
James Basevi. Cost.: Ethel P.
Chaffin. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Asst. dir: David
Howard. With
Eleanor Boardman (Fernanda), Pat O'Malley (Pat O'Malley), Harrison Ford (Don
Jamie), Trixie Friganza (Mrs. McKee), William J. Kelly (Mr. McKee), Rosita
Marstini (Vicente), Sojin (Wong), Evelyn Sherman (Spanish aunt), George Nichols
(Spanish uncle), Margaret Seddon (Mrs. O'Malley), Lillian Elliott (Mrs.
Casey), Priscilla Bonner (San Francisco girl), Joan Crawford (girl at party). Mordaunt
Hall. New York Times, Apr. 14,
1925. Handled most adrotily and is
filled with original ideas.…Miss [Eleanor] Boardman is charming…she is alert
and convincing in her acting and never at a loss for a winning expression. Skig. Variety, Apr. 15, 1925. Some of the comedy touches are so
lightly and
finely drawn that it’s doubtful if any audience habituating less than the
middle class theatres will give this film its due…Vidor has injected any number
of subtleties that more than lift this picture above the average. 1925. THE
BIG PARADE. M.G.M Pictures.
12 reels. 11,519
ft. (originally: 13 reels. 12,550
ft.). November 19. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Irving Thalberg. 2nd unit: George Hill.
Sc.: Harry Behn, from a story by Laurence Stalllngs. Titles: Joseph W. Farnham. Ph.: John Arnold
(some Technicolor
sequences). Mus.: William Axt,
Davld Mendoza. Art dir.: Cedric
Gibbons, James Basevi.
Ed.: Hugh
Wynn. Cost.: Ethel P.
Chaffin. Asst. dirs.: David
Howard, George W. Hill.
Asst. dir.
war scenes: Robert Florey. With
John Gilbert (James Apperson), Renée Adorée (Mélisande), Hobart Bosworth (Mr.
Apperson), Claire McDowell (Mrs. Apperson), Claire Adams (Justyn Reed), Robert
Ober (Harry Apperson), Tom O'Brien (Bull O'Hara), Karl Dane (Slim), Rosita
Marstini (French mother), George K. Arthur (George). Exteriors
San Antonio, Legion Park, Santa Monica, Griffith Park. “I
wanted to make films like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
that ran longer.
[hgm] I
went to Thalberg
and said, ‘I would like to make a film that runs longer than just one
week. I would like for a lot of
people to see it.’
So he said,
‘Have you got something in mind?’
I said, ‘Wheat, steel, or war.’
He said, ‘Well, you better start looking
for stories.’ Right away I started on a war story. [dga] Meanwhile, Thalberg had seen Laurence Stallings’s play What
Price Glory? in New York,
and wired
me that he’d spoken to the author who was available to write a picture for me
if I wanted him. I accepted
immediately, and Stallings, who’d lost a leg in France in World War I, arrived
here shortly afterwards with a five-page story. I spent about a week discussing it with him, then accompanied
him back to New York to work out the plot. [hgm]
“Up until that
time, all the war pictures had been glamorous—fellows
with shiny boots and epaulettes and medals and beautiful costumes. And there never
had been one about a
G.I. Just the ordinary guy. And
at that time I was playing with the
idea [that] the man caused nothing in this film—he only reacted. He only went through
the war and
observed it. And he was…neither a
patriot nor a pacifist.
He wasn’t
a hero—he was just a guy that went along.
And he [Stallings] went for this in a big way and
came up with these
five pages, which I still have. [schic] “Chaplin
was a big item at that time and his films were tremendous when he used
pantomime. What I remember very
distinctly was how wonderful it was to have a girl who could not speak English,
and a man who could not speak French—there was the excuse for all of the
pantomime that you could want.
I
thought at this time that I was going to have people in all of my pictures who
couldn’t speak the same language.
The scene with the American soldier introducing
gum to the French girl
was improvized right there.
It was
all done in one set-up.
To let a
shot run three hundred feet was an absolute innovation in motion picture making
then. “I
was looking at Signal Corps footage and on came a scene with soldiers marching
at a tempo that looked like death.
It was a funeral and then I thought I would do
the whole walk through
the woods in this tempo.
We had a
big bass drum [and] we hit this drum to keep the proper tempo. If you got hit,
you had to wait until
the next beat of the drum.
Everybody
was instructed that no matter what they did, they must do it in time to the
beat. It’s all so relentless. [In
theaters] I wanted to cut out all
of the music. In the Egyptian
Theatre in Hollywood I was able to have just a muffled bass drum beat. It was very effective,
so much more so
than any type of msuic.
I tried to
get it done in New York [but they] thought they knew better. [dga] “I
sent a second unit down to Texas.
See, we used to do a lot of drawing beforehand
on some important
shots—[to] design them.
I wanted
a straight line of—what was it, four hundred trucks, four thousand men? And
they went down there and the Army
talked them out of the straight line.
[They said we should] have a zigzag line [because]
that’s the way it was
in France. And after all this film
came back, I went down and said, ‘We’re going to find a straight line’ and went
out and got the straight line.
We
also used some of the zigzag later.
But I did get the straight line, which meant more
than broken crooked
lines because it just went into infinity.
You know, it just suggested the endless amount
of the machines and men
that we poured in—were poured in by the Allies. So my life was, and my thoughts were, filled with
imagery. That’s the way you went
to bed at night, thinking about images.
[schic] “There
was 12,800 feet in the cut when it opened in the Egyptian Theatre. They wanted to
take out 800 feet so
that they could get in another show every day. They had given [Joseph] Farnham, the title writer, the job
of shortening it when I was working on La Bohème. He had
cut out laughs and very important scenes.
I had to go down to the trash and pull out all
the piece he had cut
out. I put up a big complaint and
Thalberg told me, ‘All right, you can put that material back in, but I wish you
would cut 800 feet somewhere.’ I
went through the film carefully and took a foot and a half before and after
each splice. “The
film opened up in New York at the Astor Theatre on Broadway. There was a big
sign up on the front of
the theatre and it played to standing room only crowds for two years. It took in a million
dollars at the one
theatre. Eighteen men would stand
backstage with bugles and little wagons with iron in them making noise like
real battle sounds. They also had
tremendous ten-foot metal drums to give the sound effects for the big
explosions. The theatre would
shake, and the pit of your stomach would go in. [dga] “The Big Parade…was
not originally planned as a big film, but that was what
I really had in mind.
I brought it
in at $205,000 and then, when I was on another picture they increased it by
getting a director named George Hill to shoot some additional night
battlescenes which didn’t involve any cast members.” John
Gilbert. No love has ever enthralled me as
did the making of this picture. No
achievement will ever excite me so much.…No reward will ever be so great as
having been a part of The
Big Parade. It was
the high point of my career. All
that followed is balderdash.…The chewing gum episode with little Renée Adorée. Only a suggestion was offered in
the
script, and no one really knew what would happen. Cameras started and away we went. Minute after minute; impromptu;
inspired; both Renée and
me, guided by some unseen power, expressing beauty. And when the film was exhaused, old Pop Vidor, age 30,
murmuring ‘I’ll be damned if I ever saw a scene as good as that.’ Mordaunt
Hall. New York Times, Jan. 10,
1926. The top-notch photoplay [of 1925]
was without doubt The
Big Parade.…There are many producers who would not have dared
to insert some
of the action contained in this photoplay, because it is the common idea that
a hero must always be
heroic and that he should be immaculate no matter what he is doing. …There is a good deal of subtlety in obtaining
in the pictorial scenic effects an expression on [Renée Adorée’s] countenance
that hails from the land of Joan of Arc.…There is tense drama in this glorious
tale, and sequence after sequence builds up the thrilling interest in the
battle scenes, themselves pictured differently from any others put on the
screen. Robert
E. Sherwood. Life, Dec. 10, 1925. A marvelous picture, a picture that
can be ranked among the
few genuinely great achievements of the screen. The initial credit must go to [writer
Laurence] Stallings,
but the final honors belong to King Vidor, who thus substantially justifies all
the loud salutes that, I am happy to say, have been fired in his behalf in this
department. He proves here what he
indicated in Wild
Oranges: that he is a director of intelligence and imagination. He has made
war scenes that possess
infintely more than the usual spectacular thrill; he has made war scenes that
actually resemble war. Herbert
Howe. Photoplay, June 1926. Speaking of great directors, where
are they? King Vidor stands unchallenged in the
lists today, save possibly by Lubitsch.
D.W. Griffith has gone stale.
Cecil B. DeMille is wandering some place in the dark ages with his
flash-backs. Von Stroheim is
uncertain. Matthew
Josephson. Motion Picture Classic, August
1926. In the modern period of the movies,
the films of Messrs.
Lubitsch, Chaplin, Stroheim, Vidor, Cruze, have developed a complete character
of their own as an art, instead of being a mawkish rendering of cheap successes
in photos. The
eye is struck first by the immense improvement in the quality of the camera
work, the cleanness of line, the absence of waste detail. All of them manipulate their groups,
their sets, as well as the light they spill over the scene, to get a balance, a
form that keeps your eye unswervingly on the things that count most. Not
only have they learned to paint with the camera, but also to suggest,
by the interplay of sequences, by the
terrific power of concentration in a close-up, by the shrewd angles they catch,
almost a new understanding of life.
The modern film, in short, becomes an instrument fit for artists to
express the highest flights of their imaginations, their most delicate and
subtle fancies. [These paragraphs begin a review of
Murnau’s
The Last Laugh.] Matthew
Josephson. Motion Picture Classic, September
1926. Dudley Murphy thinks that the chef
character of the film is motion, the rhythm of things in motion. I must stop and tell something about
Dudley Murphy. He is one of the
figures in the art-film movement.
His revolutionary Ballet
of the Machine [Ballet mécanique] was booed and hissed and
laughed at.…He is home talent which has absorbed the ideas about modern art
that are current in Europe.…“King Vidor is probably our greatest director right
now,” [he said]. “The first half
of The Big Parade
had some of the finest motion picture technique ever done. The ‘business’ between Gilbert and
Renée Adorée was marvelously carried out and conceived. Vidor has a miraculous sense of
timing.” Alexander
Woollcott, New
York World, March 1926. Millions
of
good people in this land will really learn for the first time just what manner
of hell on earth it was to which they gallantly sent their able-bodied youth. Boston Transcript, March
1926. To watch it unroll is to realize
anew all the shallow bombast, all the flatulency and all the saccharinity with
which previous picture-makers have encumbered the trade of war. London
Sunday Express, 1926.
Hollywood’s deliberate exclusion
of the Allies from this war film makes the production one which the American
Ambassador to London, in the interests of his country, should ask the owners to
retire from Great Britain.
New York World,
1925. [In London] the entire press
condemns the film as arrogant and presumptuous.…But Bernard Shaw calls it “a
fine pacifist study of war,” and recognizing it as “an American film,” asks,
“If we produce a British picture, would we put American soldiers in it?” Montreal Star (Canada),
1926. The house rocked with laughter or
sat tense with thrills or shaken by emotional memories. B.G.
Braver-Mann. If The Big Parade had been a report
of the war…, it would have sent spectators home with a hatred of militarism and
of the forces that inveigled us into the war. But Vidor centered his comment upon
the war in an absurd
love affair between a French peasant girl and an American doughboy while men
were being blown to bits. He
omitted entirely any reference to the financiers and dollar-a-year men who were
amassing fortunes. The
Big Parade followed the beat
of drums, and wove a halo around flag-waving and woman-hunting instead of
bredding a great hatred of war and a profound pity for the millions of war’s
victims. No wonder that Eisenstein
pronounced The Big
Parade as war propaganda. [Experimental
Cinema, 1931] Kevin
Brownlow. In retrospect, Vidor achieved his
aim [to become a second Griffith].
In the last years of the silent film, he directed an almost unbroken
series of superlative pictures.
But had The
Big Parade been his sole contribution to the art of the cinema,
his place
among the screen’s greatest artists would still be secure. [brown war] “The
famous scene in which the girl, played by Renée Adorée, clings to the back of
the truck was done not with one but with three trucks, which we kept circling
around the camera; we shot it in Griffith Park near GIendale. Renée Adorée was
wonderful. I was mad about her. She was actually
French—not at that
time a star, perhaps a minor young MGM contract player—and because of her background
there was never any argument against using her. “John
Gilbert, on the other hand, was a
star, and, in order to get him to appear in The Big Parade, they had sold it to exhibitors among a series of his
“star films.”
I won’t say I didn’t
object to him, but using him was part of the deal. When the picture was finished and became a smash hit, they
had to go around and cancel and buy out those contracts in which it had been
included as just another John Gilbert starring vehicle. It became a big
“special” film, sort of
put MGM on the map. “It
put me on the map, too.”
[hgm] The
Big Parade was by far the top-grossing film of the 1920s. Final cost
was $382,000. Earnings were $3,485,000.
“I
lost a fortune by selling the percentage that I had. They did all kinds of things to get it away from me and they
succeeded. I was making La
Bohème and it was
turned over to a lawyer to handle it for me. Later on I heard that the lawyer had accepted a big bonus
for selling me out. It even got
into Congress, and they tried to prevent me from talking about it by paying me
off again. I didn’t talk too much
about it. I didn’t want to ruin my
life, but my twenty-five percent interest would have really been a
fortune.” [dga]
1926. LA
BOHEME. M.G.M. Pictures.
9 reels. 8781
ft. February 24. Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Ray Doyle, Harry Behn. Story: Fred De Grasse, from Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1851) by Henri Murger. Titles: William Counselman, Ruth Cummings. Ph.: Hendrik Sartov. Mus.: William Axt. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, Arnold
Gillespie. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Asst. dir.: Robert
Florey. With
Lillian Gish (Mimi), John Gilbert (Rodolphe), Renée Adorée (Musette), George
Hassell (Schaunard), Roy D'Arcy (Vicomte Paul), Edward Everett Horton (Colline), Karl Dane (Benoit), Frank
Currier (theater manager), Mathilde Comont (Mme Benoit), Gino Corrado
(Marcel), Gene Pouyet (Bernard), David Mir (Alexis), Catherine Vidor [King Vidor’s
sister](Louise), Valentina Zimina (Phémie), Blanche Payson (factory director). Remake
of La Vie de Bohème (Albert
Capellani, 1916). “Lillian’s theory of a love story
was that they shouldn’t kiss or touch at all. She thought that would make it more exciting and we ended
up doing it her way.
When we
showed the whole picture to Louis Mayer, he said, ‘I was expecting a great love
story, and they never even kissed in the picture!’ Well, after that we went back and spent a couple of days
putting in love scenes in which they touched and kised.” [dga]
Phyllis
Moir. Both King Vidor and John Gilbert
fell in love with Lillian [Gish].
For two or three days, when they rehearsed love scenes, Lillian would
say with a sigh, “Oh, dear, I’ve got to go through another day of kissing John
Gilbert.” Gilbert soon went from
fantasy to reality. He fell in
love with Lillian. He started
writing her love letters and quarrelling with King Vidor. Lillian wouldn’t go out in public with
Gilbert. She did not want it to
get into the papers.” [gish] Mordaunt
Hall. New York Times, Feb. 25,
1926. A photoplay of exquisite beauty,
an effort that constantly stirs the emotions… Miss Gish is marvelously clever
in her portrayal of Mimi.…Mr. Gilbert shows throughout his portrayal that he is
thinking the part. You can detect
it in his eyes, and the same earnest effort is made by Miss Gish.…Here is a
picture in which Mr. Vidor demonstrates that in length there is strength—that
is in the length of the scenes. It
is a production which is virtually flawless and one that will do its share to
bring the screen to a higher plane. Charles
Affron. Gish, impressed with Vidor’s The Big Parade
(1925) and its
star John Gilbert, requested and obtained both for her first effort [at
M.G.M.], La Bohème.… Lillian
Gish’s whole body renders the essence of a particular gesture or
situation.…When [she] warms herself near Gilbert’s stove it is not just her
hands or her nose, but the whole of herself, turning around, exploiting the
opportunity…, the hands, the nose, and the body ceaselessly redefine the space
and the object—stove. The
first extended love scene demonstrates the actress/director relationship. The teasing stand-offishness of Mimi
is
Gish’s invention….The sequence’s energy and movement, that headlong quality,
are characteristic of the director who, from The Big Parade to Duel in the Sun
(1947), and Ruby Gentry (1952) keeps his
lovers on the go. The combination
is irresistible, and John Gilbert’s participation is far from negligible.… Gish’s
Mimi animates the [picnic] scene, clapping her hands, darting about in a
variation on her Griffith little-girl joy served up here with maturer
ecstasy. Until this point in the
film she has avoided the physical advances of Gilbert; her Mimi is a cloying
and almost unbearable tease. (One
wonders how the film would have turned out if, as intended, she had never
kissed Gilbert.) The silliness and
unpleasantness of this attitude has a purpose. She dances off into the woods, pursued
by Gilbert. Averted kiss becomes yet another
dance. Love is best expressed through distance—through
the correlatives of the dance, the chase, the forest.…Because of Vidor, the
frame is worthy of Gish’s pattern, which is to answer energy with energy.… One
of Vidor’s key obsessions—the heroine dragged or crawling—finds perhaps it most
apt exponent in Lillian Gish, hanging onto the back of a cart and, in an
unfaked shot, being pulled over the cobblestones. Renée Adorée in The Big Parade, Jennifer Jones in Duel
in the Sun and Ruby Gentry, and Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest all grovel and
stretch, but their sufferings are incidental to their careers; Gish was bred to
the manner of pain. [aff] Lillian
Gish. Actually, the most trying
sequence was the one in which Mimi runs through the streets of Paris trying to
reach Rodolphe’s room. Jostled by
the crowds, Mimi grabs a chain on a cart and is dragged on the
cobblestones. Finally she jumps on
the back step of a bus drawn by horses.
At the end I was scratched and bruised and dirty, and a moment after
the scene was completed the rear wheel of the vehicle broke away. Had I still been sitting there, my legs
would have been crushed. [The Movies…] Vidor:
“The death scene she
wanted to know
[about] three or four days ahead so she could get all the saliva out of her
mouth, and her checks began to look sunken, her eyes began to be sunken and it
began to show in the physical makeup.
When we shot the scene, it was so realistic I thought
she had
died—because she also had controlled her breathing to such a point that I was
looking at her breast and I didn’t see it moving. [schic]. “I
didn’t know the opera at the time.
I saw it much later. [pos]
They couldn’t buy the rights to it.”
[dga] Robert
Florey. Vidor was the clamest man in the world. He would arrive, sit lazily in his
chair, study the script and not speak to anyone. Then abruptly order a scene.…Vidor
never opened his mouth
but suddenly, interested by a gesture, would say it was fine and give the
order to shoot. The scene would be
redone several times, then photographed from every possible angle. Vidor never screamed, never lost his
calm. To tell the truth, he gave
the impression of not doing anything, yet not a single detail escaped him of
what was happening under his eyes.
[Hollywood
d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Prisma, 1948)] 1926, September. Vidor marries Eleanor Boardman at
Marion Davies’ Beverly
Hills house, as part of a “surprise” double wedding involving John Gilbert and
Greta Garbo, which did not occur but led to a famous fistfight between Gilbert
and Louis B. Mayer. •1926. BARDELYS
THE MAGNIFICENT. M.G.M. 9 reels.
8536
ft. September 30. Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Dorothy Farnum from novel (1905) by Rafael
Sabatini. Ph.: William
Daniels. Sets.: Cedric Gibbons,
James Basevi, Richard Day.
Cost.:
Andriani, Lucia Coulter.
Asst.
dir.: Robert Florey With
John Gilbert (Bardelys), Eleanor Boardman (Roxalanne de Lavedan), Roy D'Arcy
(Chatellerault), Lionel Bellmore (Vicomte de Lavedan), Emily Fitzroy
(Vicomtesse de Lavedan), George K. Arthur (St. Eustache), Arthur Lubin (Louis
XIII), Theodore von Eltz (Lesperon), Karl Dane (Rodenard), Edward Connelly
(Cardinal Richelieu), Fred Malatesta (Castelroux), John T. Murray (Lafosse),
Joseph Marba (innkeeper), Daniel G. Tomlinson (sergent of dragoons), Emile
Chautard (Anatol), Max Barwyn (Cozelatt). An
extract appears in Show People. Unsigned. Comoedia, Feb. 20, 1928. The great plumed hats, the velvet
jerkins, the
lace collars and the unsheathed swords forms an ensemble that adapts very well
to the screen and when the stage manager …is a master of his art as is King
Vidor…the result is both surely animated and graceful.” [Comuz., 35]. Moving Picture World, Nov. 13, 1926. Not intended to be taken seriously
but it should provide genuine
pleasure for all who go to the movies looking solely for entertainment. “I
didn’t much like Bardelys the Magnificent, a Rafael Sabatini story that attempted to establish
John Gilbert as a Douglas Fairbanks-type swashbuckler. I was a little
ashamed of it, and it
wasn’t very successful.” [hgm] 1926.
October 17. In an article
in the New York Herald, Vidor
remarks, “Personally,
among my
favorites and among those I consider the great works of the screen are the
International Newsreel and “Felix the Cat.” Why? Because I
can always look at them and be entertained, also instructed.” 1928. THE
CROWD. M.G.M. Pictures.
9 reels. 8538
ft. February 18. Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Irvlng Thalberg. Sc.: Kinq Vidor, John V.A. Weaver, Harry Behn, from story by
King Vidor. Titles: Joseph W.
Farnham. Ph.: Henry Sharp. Sets.: Cedric Gibbons,
Arnold
Gillespie. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. With
Eleanor Boardman (Mary), James Murray (John), Bert Roach (Bert), Estelle Clark
(Jane), Daniel G. Tomlinson (Jim), Dell Henderson (Dick), Lucy Beaumont (Mary’s
mother), Freddle Burke Frederick (the son), Alice Mildred Puter (daughter),
Philippe de Lacey (John at 12). According
to Vidor, seven different endings were previewed and the film was distributed
(but virtually never projected) with an alternate, happy ending: John and Mary
celebrating Christmas in the mansion John’s successful advertising slogans have
earned, and Mary saying, “Honest, Johnny, way down deep in my heart, I never
lost faith in your for a minute.”
Yet another ending had John and Mary in old age—as can be seen from a
still reproduced in [brown war], p. 296.
• Oscar nominations:
Directing; Artistic Quality. “[MGM] had wonderful departments—art
department and special-effects department—they were great. And they had the
money. When they said go, you didn’t have to
do any promotion. I’m not a good
promoter at all, and that’s really what happened to my career. I didn’t
like to spend so much time
promoting, packaging things, [so] I sort of lost interest [after 1959]. But then at M-G-M
[you could make
something like The Crowd just on the basis of an idea. Well, a few years later it was ‘Let’s see the script; let’s
see the play; let’s see what stars you’ve got’—and you had to package
a thing more. And I found that not so suited to my
taste. So big studios, to me, were
a big help. And you had enough
competition right in the studio itself.
[schic] Kevin Brownlow.
“MGM was pretty liberal about letting me do the
film” said Vidor. But it was only
because of his amazing commercial success [with The Big Parade] that the company
looked indulgently on the idea.
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