Hello Everyone!

This blog has been silent (ha) for a long time, but it was for a very good reason.
May I present to you...

REELS & RIVALS: Sisters in Silent Film

The last year and a half was a flurry of scribbling, typing, editing, more typing, more editing...it was hard work and I loved every moment of it.  You'll find profiles of well-known sisters like Mae and Marguerite Marsh, obscure sisters like Alma and Olive Tell, even vaudeville acts like the Dolly Sisters.  Violent marriages, heartbreaking tragedies. drastic surgeries. secret identities...these were sisters with secrets!

If you choose to read it (and I hope you do), please let me know what you think!

Available from Amazon (click the photo) or directly from the publisher, BearManor Media.

Save the Vitagraph Smokestack 2.0

Those of you who have been following my blog for awhile might remember the petition I started back in early 2012, to try and rescue this piece of history from the wrecking ball.  Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in winning over the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, who claimed it was only a "fragment" of the original Vitagraph complex and, therefore, not eligible for status.

Today I was contacted by Melissa Friedling, founder of Slouch Productions and teacher at the prestigious New School; the smokestack has scaffolding around it and looks in danger of imminent demolition, an action sure to break the hearts of film and history-savvy New Yorkers.  So...

Ms Friedling is taking up the gauntlet and refusing to let the smokestack go without a fight.

Please, all of you, sign her petition and support this cause!   Perhaps it's not too late after all!

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/save-the-vitagraph-smokestack

© Frank H. Jump used with permission

Review Roundup: VIRTUE (1932) / SEARCH FOR BEAUTY (1934)

Hello Readers!  It's been way too long since I checked in -- hope everything's going well with you all.  Things are going great for me because every Friday in September, TCM is playing pre-Codes!  All the lurid goodness you can handle for 24 hours.  Paradise for this film fan!

Two that I enjoyed over the weekend (hooray for DVR):

VIRTUE (1932) is a gritty little melodrama about Mae (Carole Lombard), a prostitute ready to walk the straight and narrow instead of the streets, and Jimmy (Pat O'Brien), the taxi driver she begins a new life with -- only to have the old one rear its ugly, two-faced head.

I was going to write a full review, but Danny at Pre-Code.com has done a marvelous job of that already, so go have a look!   Allow me to add that Lombard is on par with Barbara Stanwyck in this -- the entire film feels more like a down-and-dirty WB production rather than Columbia.  Top-notch and I recommend it highly.

SEARCH FOR BEAUTY (1934) is crazy.  The plot of a health-and-fitness magazine trying to run a beauty contest almost doesn't matter; this whole film is sex on screen with a healthy thumbing-of-the-nose at the Hays Code.  It's gotta be the most salacious of the pre-Codes I've seen (and that's saying something)!  Danny at Pre-Code.com again does the honors with his review.  YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE.  Also: Toby Wing Speaks!  She gets actual billing!  

------------------------------

You may wonder why I'm no longer doing my own reviews.  Well, the fact is: there are so many other bloggers that are much, much better at it than I am!  So you'll continue to see poems, actor profiles, and other interesting tidbits on FF+SS, but reviews will be from other film bloggers worth your attention (and boy, are there some wonderful ones)!  I'll still be adding my two cents though. ;)

Follow Me, Boys (and Girls)!

Hello Dear Readers!

Don't delete me just yet -- every now and then I'll be posting here -- but if you haven't followed me on Facebook or Twitter, you should!  I'll be updating there regularly.

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Hope to see you!

Five Facts About: House Peters

[image courtesy The Loudest Voice]

1. Robert House Peters was born on March 12, 1880 in Bristol, England. He didn't stay put long, traveling extensively as a young man; he sailed to China, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Central Africa (where he served in the Boer War) before returning to the land of his birth.

2. He was already a well-known stage actor both in England and the US when he was chosen to enter pictures, by Jesse Lasky himself.  His first film was IN THE BISHOP'S CARRIAGE (1913), opposite Mary Pickford.  Not a bad intro to movies!

[image courtesy Please Pass the Popcorn]

3. Became a very popular star of the teens, and was billed as "The Star of a Thousand Emotions".  Unfortunately, those emotions were always of the "good guy", which he lamented:

I've always got to be the He-ro.  I don't mind rescuing the lovely maiden -- that's fair enough; but why must I always be condemned to marry the heroine, pay off the mortgage, and live happy everafter? I tell you it gets to be monotonous.  What do they think I am -- a Mormon?

[Allen Corliss, "They Won't Let Him Be Bad", Photoplay, August 1916]

4. His biggest film was THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST (1915), but after that, his career backslid.  He tried for a comeback in the early 20s, but by 1928 House Peters was effectively finished.  His last film was from that same year -- ROSE MARIE, starring Joan Crawford.  He came out of retirement for one movie in the 1950s, which brings us to #5...

5. He married in 1914, and had three children: Ian and Patricia, who dabbled a bit in film, and House Peters Jr, who worked extensively in B-movies and TV spots throughout the 1950s and 60s.  The vast majority of his resume was Westerns, one of which -- THE OLD WEST (1952) -- starred him alongside his father.  However, House Peters Jr is best known for one particular role he held from the late 50s to the early 60s:  the original portrayer of Mr Clean.

[image courtesy The National Enquirer (I know!)]

House Peters passed away in 1967.  His son died in 2008.

Manly P Hall and the Mysticism of 1920s California

This is Manly Palmer Hall.  He was born in Ontario, Canada, on March 18, 1901.  Striking, no?

[image courtesy The Manly P Hall Archive]

Young Manly, accompanied by his maternal grandmother, moved to California to reunite with his mother  in 1919.  (He never knew his father.)  California then was just as much Hippieland USA as it was in the 1960s, maybe even more:

The Victorian Era started the ball rolling with Spiritualism, Theosophy and The Golden Dawn. Between these, all the concepts that would grow and be experimented with through the 20th century emerged: mediuimship/channeling, clairovoyance, astral projection, astrology, mixtures of eastern and western religious concepts, past lives, ceremonial magick, cabalic esotericism for non Jews, the list is endless.

During the 1800s Lodges were how it was done. But in the new 20th century things were changing. People with interesting systems of alternative spirituality were discovering a way to actually achieve stability was to form a little hub in LA...[o]ver the decade as Los Angeles’ reputation grew, it attracted droves of occultists and those wanting to start their own systems of alternative spirituality as well as all the young Hollywood fodder.  ["Los Angeles and the 1920s Occult Explosion", A STEAMPUNK OPERA]

Mom fit in perfectly -- she was a Rosicrucian (a secret philosophical society, Wiki definition here) and a practicing chiropractor. Chiropractic was still in its infancy then, having only been founded in 1895; early on it was still considered a pseudoscience of sorts, containing  heavy doses of metaphysics and spiritualism, so it fit in beautifully to the cosmic Cali atmosphere.

Manly was fascinated and jumped in with both feet, becoming a student of Sydney J Brownson, a "doctor" of phrenology (yup, the "bumps on the head" thing).  Although he only possessed a sixth grade education, he was extremely bright, with a voracious appetite for all things occult and esoteric.   The intense young man took over as preacher for Church of the People in 1919, and became permanent pastor only a few days after his ordination in 1923.

Hall was already a well-regarded lecturer before the age of 21, and wrote over 200 books and pamphlets on mystical and spiritual topics between 1920 and 1950.  It was one such book that created his legacy:  The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), a GIGANTIC volume spanning almost every metaphysical topic known to man.  It is still incredibly popular -- over one million copies have sold to date -- and it has never been out of print.  Manly was brilliant, not only in the book's contents, but in its marketing; he created one of the first Kickstarter campaigns, offering copies at a reduced rate for contributions.  He funded Secret's $150,000 publication fees purely through these ads and word of mouth.  

[image courtesy Amazon]

The book made Hall a superstar.  He continued collecting metaphysical knowledge, crossing the globe for rare books and manuscripts.  His trips were funded by benefactors and members of his congregation.  One such benefactor, Carolyn Lloyd (and her daughter Estelle), had been sponsoring Hall since the early 1920s, and upon her death left him a home, $15,000 in cash, and a $10,000 annuity.

He founded the Philosophical Research Society in 1934 --  an organization devoted to "providing resources for the study and research of the world’s wisdom literature".  It is still active today.  Click the logo to visit.  

"But Jen," I hear you asking,  "where's the Hollywood connection?" 

Ah, dear Readers, it's in the stars...

WHEN WERE YOU BORN? (1938) is a crime mystery starring Anna May Wong as Mei Lee Ling, an astrologer who uses her knowledge of the zodiac to solve one murder and possibly prevent others.  Hall wrote the original story for the film, which did terribly on release but has since become quite the cult movie (as you can imagine -- I mean, look at that glorious prologue!).  TCM shows it from time to time, I really want to catch this one.

Hollywood not only knew him, he was friends with most of them  Elvis was a huge fan.  Ronald Reagan borrowed much of his later political posturing from him.  He even officiated at Bela Lugosi's wedding!

[image courtesy The Wild Hunt]

Hall's private life was nowhere near as successful; he married twice, the first ending in suicide, the second an unhappy one with a woman biographer Louis Sahagun refers to as "emotionally abusive".  

Manly P Hall died August 29, 1990, aged 89, under grotesque and suspicious circumstances:

In the ultimate, final tragedy, this man who believed in reincarnation and who had planned to leave the earthly plane consciously, might have been the victim of a greedy plot devised by his assistant Daniel Fritz, who rewrote Hall's will. Hall's body was found under suspicious and horrifying circumstances, apparently dead for hours and with thousands of ants streaming from his nose and mouth. The case was never solved. [Steffie Nelson, "Charting the Man Behind a Mystical City", Los Angeles Times, June 21 2008]

Corliss Palmer, The Million Dollar Beauty

Every girl is born a princess, blessed by the fairies with beauty, health, joy, charm...at the same time, the evil fairy also was present with her curse.

--Corliss Palmer, "In League With the Fairies", Motion Picture Magazine, March 1921

--------------------

Corliss Palmer was aimlessly thumbing through a fan magazine, just like any other teenager, when something caught her eye:  an unassuming little column at the back of the book, announcing the “Fame and Fortune Contest” for 1920.

“Fame and fortune,” she thought to herself.  “Could you just imagine?”  She could see herself swathed in furs, eating at the finest restaurants, admiring the diamond bracelet on her wrist – and the man on her arm. 

She was pretty, this she already knew.  So did everyone else, since she was crowned “Miss Georgia Peach”.  Sending a photo in seemed like a long shot, but it was worth a try, right?  She cut the coupon out of the ad and set to work.

**

Eugene Brewster, publisher of Motion Picture Magazine, sat listlessly at the heavy wood table.  He’d been rifling through the photos for that infernal contest all morning; he was tired, bored, and his patience was wearing thin.  Until he saw this:

Brewster was known for his eye for the ladies, but he had never seen one like her before.  He was speechless.  He was smitten.

He was also married. 

Had been since 1916.  At that moment, though, his wife was the furthest thing from his mind.

**

So begins the tale of Palmer and Brewster, a sordid little story all too common then – and now. 

Corliss would (surprise!) go on to win the “Fame and Fortune Contest” and was touted as “The Most Beautiful Woman in America”.  Her photos took up a good chunk of the publication.  She’s mentioned so frequently that, if you didn't know better, you’d think her the most famous woman in Hollywood! 

She appeared in a few films, most of which are lost and/or forgotten, save one comedy short: BROMO AND JULIET (1926), featuring a pre-Laurel Oliver Hardy and considered one of Charley Chase’s best.  

[image courtesy Fandor]

Brewster continued to make Corliss his personal project.  He founded a studio for her, CORLISS PALMER PRODUCTIONS, and gave her a (almost certainly ghostwritten) monthly beauty column in Motion Picture Magazine.  These columns led to a spinoff publication, BEAUTY, with you-know-who on the cover.  All his time was tied up in Corliss…and, by this time, the two had become a romantic item as well.

[image courtesy eBay]

“But Jennifer!” you might be saying.  “Didn’t you say he was married?”

Yes he was, Dear Reader.  Eleanor Brewster was NOT happy with the way things were going, calling Corliss “beautiful but dumb” and “nothing but trouble”.   You can't blame her;  Brewster continued to funnel money into Corliss, creating a cosmetics line he heavily promoted in his magazine...

...and buying her a $250,000 mansion to live in (with her mother, of course).  This house was the last straw:

Let him buy whatever houses he wants.  Let him move all over the country.  Let him get a divorce from me.  I'll let him -- at last!  But it will cost him EVERY CENT he has, and that means quite a lot of money.  No woman has ever been through such racking mental stress, such spiritual agony, as I have.  And I intend to see that I get some recompense. 

--"Woes of Lovesick Brewster." Buffalo Sunday Courier, circa 1924.

Eleanor sued for alienation of affection, naming Corliss as co-respondent, and the Brewsters divorced in 1926.  That October, Brewster and Palmer were married.

[image courtesy Fanpix]

From here, things went downhill rapidly.  After the success of BROMO AND JULIET, the rest of Corliss' films did poorly.  Didn't help that Eleanor was true to her word, draining Eugene of most of his fortune.  By 1931, he had filed for bankruptcy (citing "bad investments") and he and Corliss were living in a tiny one-bedroom bungalow.  Not long after, Brewster asked Palmer for divorce.  She agreed, admitting that she never really loved him.

Corliss turned to alcohol to numb the pain and confusion of losing her entire world.

[image courtesy Pieces of our Past]

I was blinded by self-pity...I thought if someone pitied me, they would again give me the fame, love, and fortune that I had let slip through my fingers.

While she did find true love towards the end of her life with Bill Taylor, a rodeo cowboy, she never truly came back from the spectacular rise and fall of the Brewster years.  Corliss Palmer died in 1952, in a California state hospital for the mentally ill.  She was only 50.

[image courtesy Movieart]

Bonus:  Fashion News of 1928.  Skip to 1:44 to see Corliss.

---

Other Sources:

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World / Love at the End of the Rainbow: Corliss Palmer - An Epilogue -- posted by Scott Thompson at PIECES OF OUR PAST

Lowe, Denise. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films, 1895-1930. New York: Haworth, 2005.

"Husband Broke, Beauty Still at Side".  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 7, 1931.

Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2010

Corliss Palmer -- IMDb

All images (unless otherwise noted) courtesy the Media History Digital Library.

Happy Olde-Tyme Halloween!

In lieu of a post this week -- mostly because your Humble Narrator is off begging for Kit-Kats and Three Musketeers -- here's some 1920s Halloween images for all you boils and ghouls to enjoy!

I've collected these from all over -- if any are yours and you want credit, just comment and I'll fix it.

Harold Lloyd and his daughter, Gloria, Halloween 1927

Costume suggestions from Dennison's Party Book, 1927

Festive twins, circa 1920s

A typical Twenties paper decoration

Clara sends you off with a smile!

Flawed Rubye

I feel kind of bad for Rubye de Remer.

Her story starts commonly enough: she was born Ruby Burkhardt in 1892, and as a young lady joined the ranks of Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic. Wasn't a long jump from there to film, her first being ENLIGHTEN THY DAUGHTER (1917).  Her success on both stage and screen was frequently - and almost singularly - attributed to one thing: her looks.

[image courtesy fanpix.net]

Everyone thought Rubye was gorgeous.  Ziegfeld called her "the most beautiful blonde since Venus".  Artist Paul Heller said she was the "ideal of American beauty".  She even posed for Harrison Fisher after winning (what else?) a beauty contest in 1916.  A typical fan magazine article about her went something like this:

The beauty of Rubye de Remer has steeped in me like tea steeping in a tea-pot.  It haunts its victim. The screen gives only half an intimation...[s]o cherubim have floated about the canvases of some of the Old Masters.
[Gordon Gassaway, "The Lady of the Big House on the Hill". Motion Picture, April 1922]

It seemed Rubye was blessed...

...but she often felt cursed by it.

She wanted to be a serious actress, but no one would take such a "pretty girl" seriously.  The Washington Post let her vent in a 1919 article appropriately titled "Beauty Often a Handicap":

"The actress that has been blessed with a fair measure of good looks," says Miss De Remer, "labors under the handicap imposed by the casting-director who insists that she play only such parts as afford her a chance to look her prettiest...I want people to say of my work 'she is more willing...to play strong character parts than she is to be dolled up in silks and satins'...[p]eople pay for seats in a theatre to see acting, not to witness a display of gowns or pulchritude."

Yet even they responded the same way, effectively erasing the whole point of the piece:

Personally we agreed with Miss de Remer's views...but did you ever see this little lady as a member of the "Midnight Frolic"?

Sigh.

I couldn't find anything further about Rubye, other than the same tired old fluff that exhausted her so much:

The secret of remaining young is never to wear an unbecoming hat.
["Some New Ideas About Dress", Photoplay, May 1922]

But there still was a spark in her, and she wasn't above letting it out:

[I]f I lost whatever looks with which the Almighty has seen fit to bless me, I wouldn't have a job very long.
["How I Keep in Condition", Photoplay, September 1921]

Rubye de Remer made a little over 20 films, her last being THE GORGEOUS HUSSY (1936) with Joan Crawford.  She married twice, once in 1912 (divorced 1916) and again, this time to coal/iron magnate Benjamin Throop in 1924 (he died in 1935, though I can't find if their marriage ended before that).  She passed away in 1984, aged 92.

Can anyone out there fill in the holes for me?  I'm still poking around, trying to find something, anything.  I'd feel this way about any actor/actress, but especially Rubye.  She so much wanted to be remembered as more than just a pretty face.

The Fleeting Aristocracy of Constance Binney

Constance Binney fairly leapt out of the pages of Blum's A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen, with the kind of eyes that "often fire first and with deadly aim" [Film Fun, Sept 1919]. In a volume filled with lovely faces, hers was different somehow -- her gaze held depth, sparkle.  Who was the woman behind it?

Constance was born in New York City in 1896. She was sent to Paris for her education, returning to Connecticut to attend finishing school.  It was at the latter that she began performing in student productions, both acting and dancing.  By 1917 she was back in New York and appearing on Broadway in Saturday to Monday.

1918 saw her first appearance on the screen in SPORTING LIFE, along with her sister Faire.  Both young ladies had a mildly successful (if short-lived) career, with Faire's list of credits lasting only two years longer than Constance's.

Coincidentally, both Binneys made films with John Barrymore, and both in 1919:  Faire in HERE COMES THE BRIDE, a breezy comedy of the sort Jack excelled in at the time, and Constance in his first dramatic picture, THE TEST OF HONOR.  (Both films are lost as of this entry.)

[image courtesy Corbis]

The fan magazines made much of Constance's background, calling it "Massachusetts aristocracy" and playing up her ancestry as a "direct descendant of one of the ten thousand families that came over on the Mayflower" [1].  As a result, the image they paint of her is composed, noble, almost patrician:

There was none of the usual histrionic flutter in this twenty-year-old...[s]he is a lovely thing facially and physically...plus the poise of breeding...[and] the saving grace of a vast underlying gund of New England common-sense. [1]

She was very small, cool...distinctively, pleasantly crisp...upon an interesting verge of flapperism.  That cool little something, poise, aplomb...prevents her from ever quite slipping over the edge. [2]

Binney had good notices for THE TEST OF HONOR; Linda "Mrs DW" Griffith herself called her "a darling little person, with...youth, beauty, personality, and a simple, unaffected, direct style of acting" ["Comments and Criticisms of a Free-Lance", Film Fun, June 1919].  Famous Players-Lasky was impressed enough to sign her to their prestigious RealArt division.

Yet, even with this stellar beginning, her career slid to a halt by 1923.  (Her sister Faire's would end by 1925.)  She did a little stage work in London in the early 1940s, and was briefly married to British war hero Leonard Cheshire.  But, unlike Faire, who did a little TV work in the 1950s, Constance slipped completely from the public eye by 1951.  At one point, she returned to the New York area, settling in Queens.  Constance Binney died on November 15, 1989.  She was 93.

---

[1] Julian Johnson, "Plymouth Rock Chicken". Photoplay, September 1919
[2] Kenneth Curly, "Constance: The Brute-Breaker". Motion Picture, May 1922
All images courtesy the Media History Digital Library unless otherwise noted.

Ode to the Trade Paper Introduction of Lina Basquette

"Little nine-year-old Lena Baskette"--
a fetching beauty, dark of hair and eyes,
a charming girl who loved to pirouette,
a star pupil Pavlova would have prized.
Your life would be a tempest, and your heart
would burst and knit and never be fulfilled;
despite all your hard work, one single role -
The Godless Girl - would be your lasting art,
forever known best by that one DeMille
and off-screen storms that you could not control.

Lina Basquette

My inspiration: the Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual from Oct 21 1916.
Click to enlarge.

Adults Only! -- Maniac (1934)

Oh man, I wanted to write a review for this -- I really, really did -- but all I managed to get out was "what the hell did I just watch?"  Well, that and  "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

The Bad Movie Report has a brilliant review here if you want something more intelligent and cohesive.  What follows will be notes I made (after wiping the tears out of my eyes).

THIS IS THE GREATEST BAD MOVIE I HAVE EVER SEEN.

The plot (as if it mattered), from IMDb:
A former vaudevillian gifted at impersonation assists a mad scientist in reanimating corpses and soon goes mad himself.  (Why the hell is a vaudeville guy even working with a scientist?)

Memorable moments:

• Dr Mierschultz listening for a heartbeat on his victim.  IN THE MORGUE.
• More ham acting than a roomful of Barrymores!
• Bizarre intertitles about mental illness that pop up at random times -- with happy music!
• LSD trip double exposures!  
• Suddenly, gratutitous nudity!
• Eating of cat eyeballs!  "It is not unlike an OYSTER or a GRAPE!"
• Continuity?  What's that?  Even the cat has a bad stand-in.
• T & A ending that was mercifully tacked on for the viewers.  

and my favorite line:

"The cats eat the rats, the rats eat the cats, and I get the skins!"

HOLY CRAP this movie is off the rails.  It's made by the same folks who made Reefer Madness, so that should be no surprise.  

Best part of all?  It's available on Youtube.  GO WATCH IT.

The Beautiful Eyes of Blanche Mehaffey

Imagine one of the most embarrassing things you’ve ever done.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

All set?  Cheeks burning with shame?  Okay.  Now imagine it being on television – your derpiest hour broadcast to hundreds of thousands of people.  You’d be horrified!  You’d be humiliated!  You’d be…

Blanche Mehaffey.

[Photoplay, November 1924]

Blanche was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but which year is anyone’s guess – 1906, 1907, 1908 have all been mentioned.  She made her way to New York, where she was a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies.  Florence Ziegfeld himself said she had the most beautiful eyes in the world!  She was also lovely enough to be featured in the more risqué rooftop “Midnight Frolic”. 

Her screen debut was in a Hal Roach production, Fully Insured (1923).  She made somewhat of a name for herself with in Roach shorts, supporting such stars as Snub Pollard and Charley Chase.  Blanche was on the rise, and was about to get even more famous: she joined Lucille Ricksen, Alberta Vaughn, and fellow July birthday girl Clara Bow as a WAMPAS Baby Star of 1924!  (That's her on the bottom right, next to Bow.)

[image courtesy Immortal Ephemera]

So from here she went on to superstardom, becoming a household name into the Roaring Twenties and beyond, right?  Right?!

Sadly, you’ve read enough of these profiles to know where this is headed:  being a Baby Star turned out to be the pinnacle of her career.  She made a few more silent pictures, the most memorable being Westerns with Hoot Gibson, and by the 1930s her output mostly consisted of incredibly low-budget films produced by her husband, Ralph M Like.  She also had the lead in a 1931 serial (also low-budget) called MYSTERY TROOPER. 

Mehaffey changed her name to “Janet Morgan” in the mid-Thirties, in an attempt to reboot her fading career, but to no avail; disillusioned by her body of work, she retired from films by the end of the decade.

[image courtesy The Old Corral]

 Fast forward to 1948.  Television was in its infancy, and a great deal of early programming came from 1930s films – quite the lucrative way for studios to recycle old pictures.  Blanche was startled to find MYSTERY TROOPER on the tube one day, and sued to keep the rest of her less-than-stellar output off the screen.  The suit was dismissed, and she was forced to watch her former films become “golden turkeys”, laughable trifles still featured at "bad" film festivals today. 

Blanche Mehaffey died on March 31, 1968, of natural causes.  She was only 59.

Coming back soon...but first, let's help Flo

Hello Friends!  I've been away far too long, and plan to remedy that very soon.  In the meantime, check out the fundraising efforts to get a proper grave marker for our Thanhouser darling, Florence La Badie.


You might recall the piece I wrote on her.  This has caught fire in silent film circles, and even outside of them -- recently CBS New York aired a story about it as well.

If you can, contribute!  If you can't, spread the word!

Happy Independence Day!

Flapper Flickers + Silent Stanzas is taking a week off to enjoy the holiday.  Have a happy Fourth, folks -- and a safer one than poor Joanie!

(Photo courtesy Amy Jeanne)

Thom's Sawyer

“Perhaps no picture player in the world is better known and more admired than Miss Laura Sawyer”, proclaims the April 1911 Motion Picture Story.   The very opposite is true about her today – she’s one of the most obscure of silent film stars.

 There’s not a whole lot available on her early life; indeed, all I could find was from Wikipedia, and even that was sorely lacking: her birthdate (Feb 3, 1885), her parents (Alvah Hayden and Laurette Sawyer), and that she was schooled at the Ursuline Academy in St Louis, Missouri.

She performed with the Otis Skinner theatrical troupe for four years before landing at Edison Studios, where she would remain until 1913.  Sawyer’s work there was highly regarded, and she was said to have been the favorite actress of Thomas Edison himself.

Miss Laura Sawyer, leading lady in the Edison company…commonly referred to by her intimates as “Dolly Dimples”, is as charming a young woman as she is a talented actress…” [Moving Picture World, April 26, 1913]

  

During her time at Edison, she headlined one of the first detective story serials:

Let it be understood that these stories will be absolutely independent of each other, each telling of an entirely separate case on which Kate Kirby, a girl detective, is detailed to work…[t]hese “Kate Kirby’s Cases” will be particularly interesting because of the mystery that will sorrund them. [“Kate Kirby’s Cases”, The Kinetogram (Edison’s own trade paper), July 15, 1913]

The Kate Kirby serials proved quite popular (matching the success of Edison’s own “What Happened to Mary?” with Mary Fuller) and got good reviews; Moving Picture World called the first installment, THE DIAMOND CROWN, “very commendable…as a one reel detective story this is unusually good”.  Future installments were just as well-received: “very good…the best regular release of the last two weeks” and “well-acted”.

Sawyer, too, was lauded for her performance…

[Sawyer’s] performances are invariably forceful and she shows remarkable powers of repression in scenes which less capable players would spoil by overacting.  [“Edison Studio Notes”, Moving Picture World, August 16, 1913]

…as well as other things:

“[A] girl with two noticeable dimples, dark ‘soulful’ eyes, a mass of chestnut hair and a debonair manner that will overlook formalities and put you at your ease”…[A]smile filled with California sunshine – a smile that radiated kindness, happiness, the joy of living and perfect health, was one of the chief attributes of his leading lady.

[“Laura Sawyer, of the Edison Company – Chats with the Players”, Motion Picture Story, August 1913]  (Anybody else think the reporter had a teensy crush on her? – JR)

 At any rate, by the end of August 1913, Sawyer had ended her tenure at Edison and moved to Famous Players, bringing Kate Kirby along with her.  The “girl detective” lasted three more installments; by 1915, after a couple of additional films, Laura Sawyer’s career was over.  Whether the choice was hers or the studios’, I cannot say.  As for her personal life, Wikipedia lists her as having married, but I have no idea if this had any say in her leaving movies or not. 

The last word on Laura comes from the ubiquitous “where are they now” section:

The author of that successful photoplay, “The Valentine Girl”, in which Marguerite Clark played the delightful lead, is none other than our old friend Laura Sawyer (Edison), who, after leaving the silent drama, has returned as a successful scenario-writer. [Lester Sweyd, “What They Are Doing Now”, Motion Picture, February 1918]

Her scenario-writing seems to have been limited to that one picture...after that, she completely vanished from the public eye.  Laura Sawyer died on September 7, 1970, at age 85.

[photo courtesy the Jonathan Silent Film Collection]

Five Facts About: Roy D'Arcy

[image courtesy eBay]

1.  He was quite the Renaissance man:  born Roy Giusti in San Francisco, he was educated abroad, studied art in Paris, worked odd jobs in South America, traveled Germany and Switzerland with a “gypsy” band, then hit vaudeville and toured Europe and Asia.  He eventually returned to the US, where Erich von Stroheim took one look at him on stage and chose him for Prince Mirko in The Merry Widow (thus beginning his reign as a villain of the silent screen).

2.  Was known for affecting a rather creepy rictus grin; Motion Picture described him as “leering”, the Milwaukee Sentinel labeled him “the erstwhile smiling heavy of the silver sheet”, and Eve Golden called it “death’s head grinning” in John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars.  My favorite is Louella Parsons, in a 1927 article entitled “Picture Stars Must Abandon Individuality”:

I have often wondered if Roy D’Arcy did not have his grin and forefinger how he could act.  They are props for him in every screen drama.  Mr D’Arcy made his success in The Merry Widow by affecting a leer…

[image courtesy Allposters]

3.  After he and his wife divorced, he was romantically linked to Lita Grey Chaplin for a time:

Lita and Roy D’Arcy, the dental screen villain [there it is again! – JR] admit to a serious interest in each other...[o]ne report says they will co-star on a vaudeville tour this fall at a large joint salary, another that they will marry and go for a tour to the Orient. [“Gossip of All the Studios”, Photoplay, June 1928]

Lita Grey Chaplin and her stage-door Johnny, Mr Roy D’Arcy…Roy is waiting for one of those leisurely California divorce decrees, to ask Lita to become the second Mrs D’Arcy. [“Gossip of All the Studios”, Photoplay, January 1929]

It all appears to have been for naught, however:

Roy D’Arcy has remarried his former wife, Laura…[a]nd all along we, and lots of other people, were believing that he would soon be the husband of Lita Grey Chaplin.  [“Hollywood High Lights”, Picture Play, December 1929]  (Sadly, the marriage would again be over less than six months later.)

4.  He possessed a lovely singing voice – he headlined as lead tenor in numerous theatre troupe productions, as well as in the stage show Oh Boy!  He later created a vaudeville show called The Greatest Array of Talent Ever Assembled on Any Bill in This Country, but returned to his monologist roots instead of singing.

5.  Although he did make some talkies – the most notable being the serials The Shadow of the Eagle (1932) and The Whispering Shadow (1933) for Mascot – his overwrought acting style was too old-fashioned for 30s audiences, and after a small part in 1939’s The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, he retired from the screen.  At age 45, he reinvented himself again, starting a profitable real estate business.  Roy D’Arcy died in 1969, at the age of 75.

[image courtesy www.celbcelb.com]