Happy Easter!

Let's celebrate the upcoming holiday -- FF + SS style, of course!

Mary Carlisle is cute as a button bunny.

H B Warner is Cecil B DeMille's King of Kings (1927).

[image courtesy Criterion]

Little Mary and a big rabbit.

Speaking of rabbits and eggs...

Jack Barrymore writes to Dolores Costello.

(The little sketch kills me!)

From the Manger to the Cross (1912)

[image courtesy icollector]

Have a very Happy Easter everyone!

"Who Is That?" #1: Louise Closser Hale

There's always that one face -- you know what I mean, that one person that seems to follow you through every movie you watch.  The one constant that pops up so often that you finally throw up your hands (dramatic, I know) and say "WHO IS THAT?"

First one out of the box is this regal lady:

(image courtesy Cinema Fantastic)

Louise Closser Hale's face is well-known to 1930s film nerds: No More Orchids, Faithless, Shanghai Express, Movie Crazy, and Dinner at Eight (among others) all feature her.  She had, however, already enjoyed a long, varied career by the time she played her delightfully acid roles onscreen.

Hale was born in Springfield, Massachusetts (some sources say Chicago, Illinois) in 1872, and studied acting at both the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City as well as Emerson College in Boston.  Although she had her first stage appearance in 1894, it wasn't until Candida on Broadway in 1903 that people took notice -- and not until the London production of Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in 1907 that she became a theatrical household name. (Aside: what is it with Wiggs? Seems like every 20s/30s actor got their start in a production of that.  Must investigate.)

(image courtesy Moviesville)

Hale was also an author, penning such works as The Actress, Her Soul and Her Body (later made into a play), and a popular series of travel stories illustrated by her husband Walter Hale.  She was prolific; in
addition to her books, Cliff Aliperti at Immortal Ephemera states she wrote over 150 short stories.  Her signature even graces a former Greenwich Village bookshop door, now treasured as a veritable time capsule of 1920s bohemian literati.

Louise Closser Hale was well into her character-acting incarnation when she had a stroke, possibly brought on by heat exhaustion.  She was rushed to the hospital, where she suffered another stroke -- this one fatal -- the next day.  She was 60.

Breezy, the Littlest Cowboy

Ben-Hur would be nothing without its climactic chariot race, and that race would've been nothing without second unit director B. Reeves Eason.  His technical precision (using 42 cameras to film it) elevated it from mere action scene to nailbiting classic.



Like most people in the business, Eason started as an actor, and he had a son who, for a short time, followed in his footsteps.

(image courtesy Wikipedia)

B. Reeves Eason Jr, known as "Breezy" onscreen, was born on November 19, 1914.  An adorable, tousled-haired boy, he was featured in movies alongside Theda Bara and Thomas Meighan -- but his real specialty was Westerns, where he was billed as "Universal's Littlest Cowboy".

(Photoplay, March 1921, courtesy the MHDL)

It was right after completing one such Western, "The Fox" with Harry Carey, that Breezy was hit by a truck while playing right outside his home.

Allan Ellenberger recounts the tragic details:

Harry Carey was notified about the accident shortly after it happened. [...] Carey and Breezy had appeared in two films together and the actor had become very attached to the youngster. When he heard about the accident, Carey left the filming and raced to the hospital to be with Breezy.

For the next four days, Carey never left the hospital or Breezy’s side, holding his hand until the end. Despite the surgeons attempt, little Breezy died from his injuries on Tuesday, October 25, 1921. [Allan Ellenberger, "Breezy Eason Jr at Hollywood Forever", HOLLYWOODLAND]

Universal shut down the day of his funeral. 

(Photoplay, January 1922, courtesy the MHDL)

 Little Breezy was a month shy of his seventh birthday.  

Lost Colleen Moore Silents Found!

The two silents are being restored as we speak.  Ron Hutchinson of the Vitaphone Project:

Colleen Moore's final silent, WHY BE GOOD? (FN/'29) was long believed to be lost. About 10 years ago while introducing one of my Vitaphone shows at NYC's Film Forum, I mentioned I had just acquired the Vitaphone disks (music and effects) for this feature but, sadly, the film was lost. Film historian Joe Yranski was sitting in the front row and yelled out "No it's not! I know where it is!". The crowd cheered, and so began a decades-long effort to get the film back to American and restored...[t]he print of Moore's next to last silent with Vitaphone track, SYNTHETIC SIN (also thought lost) is also being repatriated now and restored.

Fantastic news!  

Myrtle Gonzalez, La Primera Estrella

(Motion Picture Story, August 1913, courtesy the MHDL)

Miss Myrtle Gonzalez (Mrs Allen Watt), one of the famous outdoor girls of motion pictures, daughter of an old Spanish family and native of Los Angeles, died yesterday of heart disease at the home of her parents.  [Los Angeles Times, “Myrtle Gonzalez Dead”, Oct 23 1918]

Only…she didn't.   Miss Gonzalez was one of many felled by the Spanish Flu epidemic.  So why would the obituary say otherwise?  We’ll get to that in a minute.  But first:

Myrtle Gonzalez was California born and raised, athletic, the epitome of what we’d call today the “all-American girl”.  Her entry in the Motion Picture Studio Directory for 1918 makes a point of mentioning she “swims and rides”, and the January 1916 Photoplay lists she is "a star at basketball and tennis".

(Photoplay, May 1917, courtesy the MHDL)

The daughter of Manuel Gonzalez, a grocer, and Lillian Cook, an Irish former opera singer (whose lovely soprano she inherited), much was made of Myrtle’s upper-class Spanish ancestry.  “Please remember to spell my last name with a ‘z’ twice…because that is aristocratic Spanish,” she (supposedly) told Motion Picture Story in their March 1914 issue.  The same article attributes her acting success to her “temperamental, fiery” background.  That success was unusual; in the teens, Hispanics/Latinos were often represented as villains, imposing and dangerous:

Most Latino characters in the 1910s weren't afforded the occasional sympathy shown toward other minorities, with most Latinos depicted as dastardly "greasers"…[g]enerally, Mexicans were depicted as lazy and deceitful…when [Mexican filmgoers] responded by boycotting Hollywood, American filmmakers responded by carefully applying the negative stereotype to all Latinos, not just Mexicans. [Eric Brightwell, ­¡Silencio! – The Hispanic & Latino experience in the silent era – Amoeblog]

This is where Gonzalez’s Irish heritage made the difference; with her pale skin, light brown hair, and hazel eyes, she didn’t look the way the average 1910s American audience expected. She was even referred to as the “Virgin White Lily of the Screen”.  This led to her being featured in over 75 pictures for Western Vitagraph and Bluebird (the more artistic division of Universal).  She was best known for the six-reel drama “The Chalice of Courage”, before her untimely death in 1918.

(Moving Picture Weekly, January 13 1917, courtesy the MHDL)

Which brings us back to her obituary. Why did the LA Times list her cause of death as heart disease?  The same reason a lot of trade papers/fan magazines, while mentioning influenza, tempered it with additions of a heart ailment or stunt injury: fear.  Or more correctly, an attempt to comfort readers from thinking it could happen to them by giving other reasons for her demise.  Photoplay openly addressed the state of Hollywood and the rest of the US:

You know what it did to your family and to every family in the neighborhood.   You all had it.  And the big movie family wasn’t immune.  […] Few companies, east or west, escaped the scourge.  [“Plays and Players”, Photoplay, January 1919]

(Yet they, too, list her death as “complication[s] of heart trouble and influenza…said to be indirectly due to a fall received a year ago while riding for a ‘stunt’ picture”.)

Yes, Myrtle Gonzalez was a victim, but this young lady wouldn't want that to be her legacy.  Instead, remember her as a wife, mother, singer, actress, and trailblazer:  the first Hispanic/Latino movie star.

(Motion Picture Story, May 1915, courtesy MHDL)

 

Noble Johnson and Lincoln Motion Pictures

I didn't want to let Black History Month come to a close without introducing you to a true pioneer:

Noble Johnson.

 (image courtesy Classic Horror Film Board)

A prolific character actor, his career spanned from the earliest days of cinema through the 1950s.  He is best known today for his roles in King Kong and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon.  His most important picture, however, is arguably The Realization of a Negro's Ambition -- the inaugural film for the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which he founded in 1916 along with Clarence A. Brooks (also an actor),  Dr. James T. Smith, and Dudley A. Brooks.

(image courtesy Wikipedia)

Jon C Hopwood writes:

In 1916 [Johnson] founded his own studio to produce what would be called "race films", movies made for the African-American audience, which was ignored by the "mainstream" film industry.  The Lincoln Motion Picture Co...was an all-black company, the first to produce movies portraying African-Americans as real people instead of as racist caricatures.  (Noble Johnson IMDb page)

Their first movie was a mature, intelligent drama:

The plot concerned a young engineering graduate of the Tuskegee Institute who leaves the family farm to try his hand in the oil fields of Los Angeles. Turned away because he is Black, the young man rescues a white woman in a runaway carriage. She turns out to be the daughter of the oil company owner, who offers the young man a job with the company's oil exploration team. Later, the young engineer realizes that his parents' farmland shows oil possibilities, and the company owner bankrolls the exploratory drilling tests that eventually prove successful. (Bob Birchard, "Lincoln Motion Picture Company", Hollywood Heritage Summer 2001)

For the average (read: white) audience, used to seeing Black performers relegated to comic relief (or worse), the idea that they could present a sophisticated picture was astonishing.  Seems crazy today, but in 1916 this was a big deal:

The Los Angeles Examiner noted with somewhat condescending amazement that..."colored players can develop histrionic talent above that required for straight comedy.” (Bob Birchard, "Lincoln Motion Picture Company", Hollywood Heritage Summer 2001)

Lincoln started off with moderate success, but financial difficulties, the pressures of leading a double career, and a limited audience caused it to shut down in 1921.  

This did not mean the end for Noble Johnson.  He worked with some of the biggest names of the 1920s:

These included Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, Hoot Gibson, Laura La Plante, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, George O'Brien, Richard Arlen, Richard Dix, Dolores Costello and William Haines. Of his silent films, several still exist. Some of them are: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1921; The Ten Commandments, 1923; and The Thief of Baghdad, 1924 and more. ("Noble Johnson, A Hollywood Original!", African American Registry)

(image, from Moby Dick [1930], courtesy Classic Horror Film Board)

Noble Johnson made his last screen appearance in 1966, and died in 1978 at the ripe old age of 96.

Fun fact:  Johnson moved to Colorado as a young boy, and became great friends with one of his classmates.  Many years later, working in Hollywood, they ran into each other and renewed that friendship.
The classmate?  Lon Chaney.

Black Lips and White Faces: Early Silent Film Makeup

Have you ever wondered why the makeup in movies of the 1910s looks so garish and pallid compared to those in the 20s?  

Note (after you stop laughing) how dark Buster's hands are compared to his face.

The secret lies in the type of film stock.  Not all black and white film was created equal!  Before 1922, almost all motion pictures were shot on orthochromatic, or blue-sensitive, film:

The film stock was sensitive to the blue-violet end of the visible spectrum but insensitive to the yellow-red end which meant that it registered reds and yellows as black and light blues as white. Some orthochromatic film may also have been used; it was very sensitive to violet light, considerably sensitive to blue and ultra-violet, much less sensitive to green and yellow light and insensitive to red.

("Early Movie Makeup", Cosmetics & Skin)

This is one of the reasons actors with blue eyes were not commonly utilized; their eyes simply wouldn't register.  I don't have the book in front of me, but I do remember Colleen Moore mentioning in Silent Star that she feared her movie career might be ruined for this very reason.

Because even the slightest tinge of red would register as uneven and dark, "photoplayers" laid their pink and white greasepaint on with an extra-heavy hand.  It worked, but also gave them a masked, ghostly look.  This also forced them to heavily blacken (or sometimes redden) around their eyes in order for them to be visible.  Actresses' lip rogue would also register as black, completing the odd transformation.

(Granted, Musidora is supposed to look ghoulish here, but you get the idea.)

By 1926, the price of panchromatic film stock was finally affordable to everyone, and the look of actors became softer and more natural.  Advancements in cosmetics by Max Factor and the Westmores meant stars no longer had to rely on stage greasepaint.  These new products however were still harsh:

The lovely Dolores Costello was blessed with a very fair, perfect, and delicate complexion, and she developed severe reactions to the harsh makeup then used in her movies. The skin on her cheeks began to deteriorate, and artists found her condition impossible to hide. Her beauty ravaged, poor Dolores was forced into retirement after her final film...

("Starrlight on Dolores Costello", Celebrity Entertainment Magazine)

The Goddess of the Silent Screen herself (image courtesy dolores-costello.tumblr.com )

I love learning about the history of cosmetics and their application, particularly how it developed in leaps and bounds thanks to the film industry.   They truly were sister industries.  

Tell me, readers: would you like to hear more?