The City of Darkness, 1914. (John E. Allen)

Chapter Five

CRIME

 

SCANDAL AND NOTORIETY

PUBLIC OPINION    Trial by newspaper is not a recent phenomenon. It was so common in the early part of the century that a film, Public Opinion (1916), was made on the subject by the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Margaret Turnbull wrote the scenario, which was directed by Frank Reicher.¹

The opening title read: “In law, the accused is held innocent until proven guilty, but when public opinion is poisoned by yellow journalism, it condemns the accused before the trial begins.” A nurse, Hazel Gray (Blanche Sweet), is employed by a wealthy philanthropist, Mrs. Carson Morgan (Edythe Chapman), whose husband is a doctor (Earle Foxe). This doctor, who had a brief affair with Hazel, is now after his wife’s money. He poisons her and manages to throw the blame on the nurse. The yellow press splashes the case across the front pages, and the girl is condemned before the trial has begun.

One young juryman (Elliott Dexter) is convinced of her innocence and succeeds in persuading the rest to deliver a verdict of not guilty. But public opinion is far from satisfied. The crowd outside the court is convinced she has got away with it because of her good looks. And although the girl is released, the newspapers make her life a misery, and she is ostracized, a fate “almost more terrible than capital punishment.”²

A dope addict shoots the doctor when he refuses him drugs, and the doctor makes a dying confession, which exonerates Hazel. She marries the young juryman, a conventional end to a far from conventional picture.

The strangest comment came from Photoplay, which called the jury “pumpkin headed” for letting the girl off. “Though the woman is innocent, material evidence is against her.” They blamed it on the male jury’s traditional chivalry to the pretty thing, as though “material evidence” was all that counted.³

“While the story of Public Opinion may not be based upon a recent New York murder case,” said the New York Dramatic Mirror, “the resemblance is apparent.”⁴ Lasky publicity asserted that the big courtroom scene was “an exact replica of that in which the trial was held [and] upon which the story is based.”

Historian J. B. Kaufman has discovered that in September 1915, Dr. Arthur W. Waite of New York married Clara Peck, the daughter of a millionaire drug manufacturer in Michigan. Within six months, he had poisoned both his in-laws and had attempted to murder his wife in the same way. When the police came to arrest him, they found him in a drug-induced stupor. There was no parallel in this case to the Blanche Sweet character. “The closest thing to it was a black maid who testified that she saw Waite put some ‘medicine’ into the father-in-law’s food, and that he tried to bribe her to keep quiet.”⁵

What is remarkable about the case is that it occurred after Margaret Turnbull’s story was bought by Lasky. It is almost certainly the case referred to by the New York Dramatic Mirror and exploited by the publicity department, but Kaufman can find nothing similar that might have inspired Margaret Turnbull.

Earle Foxe as the guilty doctor in Public Opinion, 1916, directed by Frank Reicher. (Museum of Modern Art)

Curiously enough, for so intriguing a film, Blanche Sweet had not the slightest memory of having played in it and had to look it up before she could be persuaded that she had.

EVELYN NESBIT   America’s most distinguished architect, Stanford White, was shot by millionaire playboy Harry K. Thaw in 1906. This event has a fascination which sets it apart from most crimes passionnels, a fascination revolving around the girl in the case, Evelyn Nesbit. She was only sixteen when raped by Stanford White, “a great man,” in her view, however “perverse and decadent.”⁶ And she was only twenty when she became involved in “the Crime of the Century.”

The story has so many ramifications into the world of cinema that an entire book could be devoted to them. One of White’s studios, at 540 West Twenty-first Street, New York City, became the headquarters of the Reliance Film Company. Above White’s offices was the workshop of his friend Peter Cooper-Hewitt, whose mercury-vapor lights were so crucial to the motion picture studios. Evelyn—then Florence—Nesbit was sent by White to the DeMille School at Pompton, New Jersey, run by the mother of the future directors. (William was in residence at the time, writing his play Strongheart.) Nesbit was courted by John Barrymore. Thaw’s prosecutor, New York district attorney William Travers Jerome, later raised funds for the Technicolor Corporation. Thaw tried to become a producer in the 1920s and introduced Anita Page to Hollywood.

Evelyn Nesbit in 1902, before the scandal broke. (Ira Resnick)

The case itself had great significance for motion picture history, for it contributed to the beginning of censorship (see this page). And it provided a career for Evelyn Nesbit, thanks less to her talent than to her notoriety.

Evelyn was born at Tarentum, outside Pittsburgh. As a young girl she became an artists’ model and then went on the stage, joining the Floradora company and concealing her true age. When she met Stanford White, a much older man (he was fifty-three when he died), she was touched by his kindly, fatherly interest. He impressed both Evelyn and her mother as someone absolutely safe. On one occasion, her mother went out of town, leaving her in White’s sole guardianship. He gave her champagne, probably drugged, and she felt dizzy and faint. When she came to, she was in bed, naked. “It’s all over,” said White. “Now you belong to me.”⁷

Harry K. Thaw, a wealthy young man from Pittsburgh, saw her on the stage and bombarded her with letters. When she met him, she was both attracted and repelled. She soon learned that he was a drug addict, an accomplished sadist, and mentally unbalanced. Nevertheless, she felt sorry for him and agreed to marry him. (He was, after all, extremely rich.) When he demanded assurance that she was a virgin, she broke down and told him about Stanford White, a man he hated anyway. Now it was his turn to break down.

Harry and Evelyn were married. On June 25, 1906, they visited Mlle. Champagne at the dining theatre on the Madison Square Garden roof. They thought the show “putrid” and decided to leave. They had reached the elevators when suddenly Thaw ran back, shot Stanford White at point-blank range, and killed him outright. Incarcerated in the Tombs, he explained that his wife had been White’s “sex slave”—that was how the newspapers put it. Thaw made the “unwritten law” plea world famous.

Evelyn Nesbit played her role carefully in the witness box to ensure that Thaw was not sentenced to death. She knew, however, that to avoid a scandal in which they would all be exposed, “the inner circle” had persuaded district attorney William Travers Jerome to have Thaw locked up in an asylum. (They were all members of the conservative Union Club.)

Thaw’s lawyer, Delphin Delmas, persuaded the jury that his client suffered from “dementia Americana” at the moment he shot White—a neurosis, invented for the occasion, for Americans who believed every man’s wife is sacred. After a retrial, the jury obligingly returned a verdict of not guilty on grounds of insanity—and Thaw was sent to Matteawan, the New York State Asylum for the Criminally Insane.⁸

First to benefit financially from the murder, after the yellow press, was Madison Square Garden itself. The building had been designed by Stanford White, and the roof garden restaurant became more popular than ever as people flocked to stare at the scene of the crime.

To permit people to stare in larger numbers, the subject was hastily put on film. It was ideally suited to satisfy the audience’s scornful curiosity about “the idle rich.” At least one of these films still survives: The Unwritten Law (1907), made by the Philadelphia company, Lubin.⁹ It is a vivid reenactment, or, as Variety unkindly called it, “a fake.” Harry Thaw leaves the court a free man, which proved the film had been made in a hurry and suggested, too, that audiences expected the verdict to be fixed.

This little picture is as good as a Griffith Biograph in terms of technique and has similar marks of imagination—the vision in the prison, for instance. Painted interiors aside, there is no artifice to spoil the enjoyment. Perhaps Stanford White (here called Black) dies overdramatically, but otherwise the playing is as naturalistic as a documentary. The suggestiveness of the red velvet swing and “the boudoir of a hundred mirrors” must have been potent images for audiences from cold-water flats.

The red velvet swing became so notorious that the phrase passed into the language. (A film about Evelyn Nesbit, on which she served as consultant, was made in 1955 as The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.) Evelyn testified at the trial that when she was sixteen, she and a friend visited White’s studio on Twenty-fourth Street—the most gorgeous place she had ever seen—and he gave them a tour of the rooms upstairs. In one was a large velvet chair hanging from two ropes: “He would push us until we would swing to the ceiling. There was a big Japanese umbrella on the ceiling, so when he pushed us our feet would crash through.”¹⁰

In The Unwritten Law, slightly more sedately, White fastens a parasol to the door, and encourages Evelyn to swing until her feet touch it. (The other girl does not appear.) Later, Evelyn performed the trick in the nude, but of course the film does not hint at that. Instead, it proceeds to the next thrill, the Boudoir of a Hundred Mirrors. In an elaborately painted rococo set, White gives Evelyn the fatal drink. She becomes dizzy, and he places a screen around her. That is all we see. But those familiar with the yellow press could fill in the rest.

In the scene at the Tombs, Evelyn and her mother try to console Thaw. When they leave, he suffers alone, and a vision of the murder appears in the window above him. Actually, Thaw managed to maintain his way of life in prison; his meals came from Delmonico’s, whiskey was smuggled to him, and he continued to play the stock market.¹¹

The print in the National Film Archive is cataloged as featuring Evelyn Nesbit herself, but the girl who appears in it does not resemble her, being a different shape and lacking her beauty. Miss Nesbit was also said to have made her screen debut in The Great Thaw Trial (1907), which, like the Lubin film, covered the main events, but she was not in this one, either. At this stage, she said, she had an aversion to trading on her association with Thaw.¹² But Thaw, behind bars, must have been permitted to see the film, because he sent his attorney to the court where a proprietor of a theatre had been charged with imperiling the morals of young boys by showing it. “Mr. Thaw has requested me to inform the court,” the attorney said, “that the moving pictures which have just been under consideration are not what they are purported to be. He wants it distinctly understood that the picture of his wife is not a good one and that the other pictures do not show the marriage ceremony as it occurred, nor the principals in it. The same applies to the tragedy of the roof garden.”¹³

The Thaw film attracted twice as many spectators as The Life of Christ.¹⁴

Evelyn Thaw gave birth to a son, Russell. She declared he was Harry’s child, even though Harry had been locked up for several years. Filing for support, she explained that Harry had bribed a guard at Matteawan to allow her to spend “a heavenly and fruitful night” with him.¹⁵ Harry hotly denied this, and Evelyn eventually admitted another prominent man was the father, but she would take the secret of his identity to her grave.¹⁶

Evelyn appeared in vaudeville in 1913 at the astonishing salary of $3,500 a week and broke box-office records.¹⁷ Harry Thaw helped her box office by escaping from Matteawan, and Evelyn capitalized on that by telling the press of his death list, with her name at the top. Harry was captured in Canada, which guaranteed Evelyn Canadian bookings, and he was then deported to the U.S.

Hal Reid, who produced Harry K. Thaw’s Fight for Freedom (1913), had written and produced a play in which Thaw was portrayed sympathetically. He went to Sherbrooke, Canada, and New Hampshire and talked to Thaw in his cell. The prisoner agreed to be filmed, and Reid photographed 500 feet of him eating, looking out of his cell window, and talking. The promoters, the Canadian-American Feature Company, wanted $1,500 a week for the reel. Several other Thaw films appeared on the market, including one called Harry Thaw’s Escape from Matteawan,¹⁸ so Thaw had obligingly sent Reid a telegram from Quebec, which was used in the advertising:

THE ONLY MOVING PICTURE TAKEN OF ME IN MY CELL AT SHERBROOKE OR ANYWHERE UP TO DATE WERE TAKEN BY YOU. I AUTHORIZE YOU IF YOU SO DESIRE WITHOUT COST OR PREJUDICE TO ME TO LEGALLY PUNISH OR ENJOIN ANY AND ALL PERSONS WHO SHOW ANY MOVING PICTURES CLAIMING THEY ARE OF ME INSIDE ANY PRISON.¹⁹

(Ira Resnick)

Reid’s film was shown on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, although in some cities, such as Spokane, Washington, the censor refused to pass it. And a five-reel feature about Thaw was so badly mauled by the Detroit censor that only the last two reels survived. All the early scenes—the Red Velvet Swing, the murder—were cut.

“The real interest around Thaw,” said Commissioner Gillespie, who ordered the cuts, “is his escape. I think the masses are now in sympathy with him. I can see no objection to pictures of his escape, but nothing previous to that.”²⁰ The newsreels were able to run items on Thaw unmolested.

Hal Reid’s film, elaborated into Escape from the Asylum, “converted many people to the belief that Thaw had been sufficiently punished and that he deserved sympathy.”²¹

By May 1914, the public’s curiosity having been satisfied, the Evelyn Nesbit Thaw vaudeville show closed. She announced that hereafter she wanted to be known as Evelyn Nesbit, and she formed her own company.²² She went to Paris, where, just before the outbreak of war, she made her first motion picture appearance (newsreels apart), when footage was shot with Fred Mace and Marguerite Marsh in and around the Cluny Museum.²³

The Threads of Destiny (1914), a five-reeler directed by Joseph Smiley, was shot at the Lubin estate, Betzwood, and featured not only Evelyn but her young son, Russell Thaw, and her future husband, Jack Clifford.

In 1915, Thaw was pronounced sane by a New York court and he was released. He divorced Evelyn in Pittsburgh in 1916. The following year, she began her motion picture career in earnest. It must be admitted, however, that while she regarded her vaudeville career as something of enormous importance, her films did not mean much to her. She accords them a mere passing mention in her autobiography: “I made two pictures for Joseph Schenck then six for Fox at Fort Lee.”²⁴

She starred in Redemption for Triumph in 1917, which Variety called “the best thing she has ever done upon the stage or screen.”²⁵ Written by John Stanton, produced by Julius Steger, and directed by Steger and Joseph A. Golden, it showed a mother forced to confess to her grown son a mistake of her youth. (Evelyn was still only thirty-one!) “Redemption is continually suggesting it may be a revamp in part at least of her life’s history.” She played an actress who gained notoriety when young but who renounces the life at her marriage. Among the ghosts from her past is a wealthy architect! When she rejects him, he seeks a revenge which leads indirectly to the death of her husband and her own financial ruin.

Her son, Russell, again played in the picture. Wid admitted she screened well, but charged the picture with being a justification of Evelyn Nesbit’s errors. He advised exhibitors not to book it merely because of the star’s notoriety.²⁶ The picture turned out to be a “terrific draw”²⁷ and broke records. It guaranteed a film career for both Evelyn and her small son.

“Redemption is an illustration of the fact that those upon whom we look with averted eyes,” said Motion Picture Magazine, “may be more sinned against than sinning.”²⁸

When the picture came to England, as Shadows on My Life, controversy broke out anew, and even though it was made clear that there was nothing sordid, gruesome, or repellent about it, the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association’s General Council passed the resolution: “THAT ANY FILM EXPLOITING THE NOTORIETY OF EVELYN THAW IS PREJUDICIAL TO THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE INDUSTRY.”²⁹

The British Board of Film Censors had passed the film without comment (probably oblivious of Evelyn Nesbit’s identity). One exhibitor believed he was correct in saying that not one member of the General Council had seen the picture.

It was not the film, said a member of the General Council, but the exploitation of Evelyn Thaw’s notoriety to which the council objected. The thought of a young girl turning to her parent and asking “Who is Evelyn Thaw?” pained the chairman. They had been fighting to keep the screen pure, and it was absolutely wrong to show this film, owing to its publicity matter.

Evelyn Nesbit and Irving Cummings in The Woman Who Gave, 1918. directed by Kenean Buel. (National Film Archive)

After all the fuss, the (private) trade show was invaded by a large crowd of uninvited members of the public. The reviewers in the press were disappointed that all the objectionable features of the Thaw case had been sponged away. “It would not raise a blush on the cheek of your maiden aunt,” said the Glasgow Bulletin.

Nesbit’s contract with Fox led to a series of features, the first of which was The Woman Who Gave (1918), directed by Kenean Buel. The story included a scene of Evelyn posing, as she did in real life, for such celebrated artists as Charles Dana Gibson, and the brutal Thaw was symbolized by an even more brutal Bulgarian nobleman. Fox reported that bookings on the Nesbit pictures had broken all records.³⁰ Her name was advertised thus: EVELYN NESBIT!

I Want to Forget (1918) was a German spy drama written and directed by James Kirkwood, which teamed Nesbit with Henry Clive, an artist of some distinction himself. Her acting was praised—“she becomes more of an actress as her screen experience broadens,” said Wid,³¹ but the story was not worth bothering about.

Kenean Buel’s Woman! Woman! (1919) was greeted by Julian Johnson in Photoplay³² as the sort of picture which made censorship inevitable. “If we are to have slime of this sort dragged through our projectors, we shall soon have our photoplays in the hands of a Russian secret police system—with no one but ourselves to blame. William Fox is handing the complacent Evelyn Nesbit scenarios the like of which Theda Bara in her boldest days never attempted.” He added that “the filthy story” would not bear synopsizing. Variety was more accommodating: a country girl, Alice, comes to the city and gets mixed up with the Greenwich Village “free love” crowd. She marries a young engineer (Clifford Bruce). His employer, a multimillionaire (William H. Tooker), offers gold and jewels for the chance to make her his mistress. When her husband falls ill in the tropics she takes up the offer, thus earning the money to save her husband’s life. But when her husband comes home and learns the truth he throws her out, together with her child, whom the millionaire claims as his. After the divorce, she returns to the country, but her reputation precedes her and she is ostracized. Her husband eventually apologizes; she tells him she made the greatest sacrifice a woman can make, and he failed to appreciate it. The millionaire proposes, but she turns him down and remarries her young engineer.³³

My Little Sister (1919), also directed by Kenean Buel, was based on a novel by Elizabeth Robins, which caused something of a furor when it came out in 1913. It was the story of two country girls removed to London and trapped in a brothel patronized by the wealthy. “Sensational and brutally unpleasant,” said Wid, although he admired Nesbit’s acting: “She plays the part of the elder sister more effectively than it probably would have been played by many an actress possessing more technical accomplishments.”³⁴

This was her last film for Fox, although not the last to be released. Her contract expired, and she returned to vaudeville, where she faced a lawsuit from the tax authorities and a divorce suit from Jack Clifford.

She made a picture called The Hidden Woman for Joseph Schenck which was directed by Allan Dwan. It was released in 1922, probably some time after it was made. Dwan found her a pleasant, ordinary woman: “She was a rough sort underneath, and tried to be dignified—but she was a nut.”³⁵

In the film, Nesbit played a frivolous society girl who loses her fortune on the stock market and retires to the Adirondacks, where she incurs the wrath of local reformers.

“The murder didn’t make Evelyn Nesbit a big actress to me,” said Dwan, “just a dame that got into trouble. So I met her and saw she had limitations; she was squawking because she wanted to go to the country for the summer. She had a little place up in [Lake Chateaugay] New York, a cottage beside a lake, so I said fine, we’ll do it there so you can have a vacation and make some money. She thought that was fine. She was bedded down with a man who was a boxer. One day she says, ‘Won’t you do me a favor and come over tonight and referee a party I’m having?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘Come over and I’ll show you.’

“That night I went over with my assistant, I didn’t want to go in alone, and she was loaded up with these strange hangers-on, New York people, strange crowd, mostly pugilists, and they were having an ether party. I had never heard of an ether party; what they had to be careful of was that nobody had too much ether, or they would pass out and swallow their tongue. The referee’s job was to look them over and shake them up if they were too far gone. They started getting cock-eyed drunk on ether and my assistant and I were pretty busy until three in the morning waking up these people and tossing them out in the lake to sober them up. That pretty near turned me off.”³⁶

Dwan telephoned Joe Schenck and told him the situation; Schenck came up and persuaded Evelyn to abandon her ether parties until the picture was finished. Dwan did not see her again until he met her in Atlantic City: “She was running a nightclub, but was doing well, making money, based entirely on the notoriety she’d got from the murder case.”³⁷

Dwan did not know that her experiments with ether were an attempt to break away from cocaine and morphine, to which she had become addicted. She suffered from agonizing neuralgia and even tried suicide.³⁸

Author Samson De Brier knew Evelyn Nesbit in Atlantic City and considered her a remarkable woman: “In those hypocritical years, when scandal both shocked and titillated the public, Evelyn wore her notoriety with forbidding dignity. And she was shrewd enough not to reveal the whole truth. Thus she negated her past and, perhaps, any guilt she may have felt.

“She had a dichotomous attitude towards her position in the affair. She resented being considered only as a ‘succès de scandale,’ but her questionable publicity did afford the opportunity to provide a living for herself and her son.

“She had great presence and an assured manner and she could never become an obscure housewife. Curiously, she never again made a ‘brilliant’ marriage or alliance. Yet her beauty was only more striking as she matured.

“She did not talk about the ‘case,’ as I was in my teens when I first knew her and did not have the skill to draw her out. I just enjoyed knowing her as a fascinating and beautiful woman. She often had me to dinner at her tiny and sparsely furnished apartment in Atlantic City. Her son was living with her there—a quiet boy.

“Years later, when I was in the position to offer her an interview on a New York radio station, she refused. She was sick and tired of going through the old story again. And years after that, when we had both moved to California, she was apprehensive about Joan Collins playing her part [in Girl on the Red Velvet Swing], because she did not know of her. She thought she would be portrayed by a famous movie star. Of course, none of them were young enough. After she met Joan Collins, she was pleased. And she was glad to get the money—her final chance to get a sizeable sum for her declining years. If only she had collaborated with a ‘ghost’ she could have made a fortune. But by that time she was plagued by ill-health. She moved to a little hotel way out on Figueroa Street, a location where no one here would ever think of going. I never saw her again. I was settling in to a very busy social life, and she lived so far away. I shall always regret not making more of an effort to see her.”³⁹

BEULAH BINFORD   Beulah Binford was a seventeen-year-old girl who became notorious after the arrest of Henry Clay Beattie, Jr., for the murder of his wife in Richmond, Virginia, in 1911. Although she was repudiated by Beattie on the witness stand, she testified that her association with him had begun when she was thirteen.

The president of the Levi Company, Isaac Levi, signed a contract with Binford and filmed her brief life at his Staten Island studio. The New York Evening World appealed to public sentiment to prevent the exploitation of this girl on film or stage. At the behest of Mayor William Gaynor, the commissioner of licenses informed Levi that under no circumstances would the film be approved. Levi said the film was intended to carry a moral lesson and a warning to other girls “to shun the temptation to which she had succumbed.”⁴⁰

Leon Rubinstein, in charge of the picture and probably its director, too, had taken Beulah into his own house. He arranged a meeting for the girl and the members of the National Board and showed them the film. He was furious when they still refused to endorse it; he declared that Beulah was being robbed of her one chance to make an honest living. He would fight the ban. The Reverend Madison C. Peters declared that the picture was no more harmful than the play Way Down East: “The girl should have a helping hand extended to her. It is a blot upon the Christian ministry … that she had received no offers of aid or sympathy.” Surely, he said, she should not be held responsible for mistakes committed when she was thirteen. “Her story, instead of being one to damn her, is an indictment against a society that enables such things to be.”⁴¹

The film showed Beulah as a baby, left in the care of a grandmother while her mother played the horses. She grows up a tomboy and is seen taking automobile rides with a man, presumably Beattie. “Another picture shows her tear-stained and weary. It is labeled ‘Realization,’ ” said Moving Picture News. She tries to get work, but is harassed by men. The film ended with the murder and the third degree and scenes of the girl in prison. The picture was entitled The Wages of Sin.

The Board of Censors thought the film’s only appeal was to morbid curiosity: “The picture intrinsically fails to teach any lesson except one of sentimental toleration for the girl who takes easy opportunities to ‘go wrong.’ ”⁴²

Rubinstein wrote to the trade press saying that his film sounded the warning of the dangers of parental neglect and pointed to phases of the social system that needed correction: “Have moving pictures ever before been devoted to such serious work?”⁴³

Mayor Gaynor may have barred the film in New York, the Board of Censors may have condemned it for the rest of the country, but it was shown just the same. The publicity of the Beattie case aroused a tremendous demand, and the Special Feature Film Company announced in September 1911 that 116 towns—including New York—had shown it to 684,164 people.⁴⁴

Two months later, Henry Beattie was executed and Binford, having achieved only a small role in a Richmond stage play, was living in seclusion in the Bronx.⁴⁵

THE DE SAULLES CASE   So common had it become to feature the central character of a famous or infamous event in a film that it was inevitable some producer would merely pretend to do so. When William Fox set up a film about the De Saulles murder, The Woman and the Law (1918), he gave the job of direction to Raoul Walsh. He had his eye on Miriam Cooper, Walsh’s wife, who resembled Bianca De Saulles.

“I’d go into a store or a restaurant,” said Miriam Cooper, “and hear people whispering behind my back, “There’s Bianca De Saulles!”⁴⁶

Miriam Cooper fell ill; but Fox executive Winfield Sheehan wanted to produce the film while the story was hot, so the role went to a society girl. Sheehan soon called on Mrs. Walsh and told her the girl was lousy and, ill or not, she was needed for the lead. She gave in.

Exteriors were shot in Miami Beach, then just a long strip of sand, a few beach cottages, and a couple of big hotels. The co-respondent (based on dancer Joan Sawyer) was played by Follies girl Peggy Hopkins, later one of the most celebrated courtesans of the twenties as Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

The name De Saulles was changed to La Salle, but Fox had the brainstorm of omitting Miriam Cooper’s name from the credits, so an intriguing blank would appear opposite “Mrs. Jack La Salle.” Cooper said she would not tolerate that,⁴⁷ but evidently she had no option. Variety recognized Miriam Cooper, at least in the second half. The film carried the title “Based on the sensational Jack De Saulles case,” which Variety thought made the whole thing utterly morbid and mercenary. “The story of the De Saulles case—a young wife is divorced from her husband, with her little boy allotted to each parent for certain portions of each year. The child goes to visit his father and the mother is taunted with the declaration he won’t be returning to her. She goes to the father and shoots him, the jury acquitting her.”⁴⁸

Walsh’s direction was exceedingly classy, thought Variety, but the scenario was cheap and the situations obvious.

Fox might have employed a principal witness while he was at it and perhaps created a further sensation. His name was Rodolpho Guglielmi, an Italian immigrant who had played a few screen roles as Rodolpho di Valentino. (He had testified against his dancing partner, Joan Sawyer, in the divorce suit, but left New York when the murder took place—a journey which eventually took him to Hollywood.)⁴⁹

THE CLARA HAMON CASE   “No man or woman with the least trace of self respect would attend again a theater that slapped public decency in the face by defiling its screen with it.”⁵⁰

James Quirk was referring to a film called Fate (1921), which aroused so much anger one might be forgiven for assuming it to be openly pornographic or an apologia for Bolshevism. In fact it was, like so many other films, a murder story. The only difference was that the alleged murderess played the leading role, and, to all intents and purposes, produced the picture.

It is important to realize that in real life Clara Hamon was acquitted. There was no doubt, however, that she did shoot her husband; she admitted it when she gave herself up. So whatever the provocation, and whatever the sentiment in her favor, she was a killer. It was this unpalatable fact that caused her so much difficulty when she came to make her picture.

The plot of the film, as related in the AFI catalogue, was the story of Clara’s relationship in Oklahoma with middle-aged Jacob Hamon (played by John Ince).⁵¹ Clara is an innocent high school girl when she meets Hamon, who offers to help pay for her education and employs her as his confidential secretary. Although Hamon is married, they become lovers. Hamon arranges a marriage of convenience between Clara and his nephew, F. L. Hamon, which enables them to travel together as Mr. and Mrs. Hamon. Jake Hamon strikes oil and rises to influence in politics and business, but his excessive drinking results in increased debauchery and brutality. On one occasion, he is particularly violent to Clara and she shoots him. He dies a few days later, and Clara flees first to Texas, then Mexico. She later surrenders, returns to Oklahoma, and is tried for murder, but is acquitted, to the joy of the courtroom audience.⁵²

The promoter of the picture, W. C. Weathers, found the backing largely from men in the oil business who had been associated with Hamon. When Clara Hamon and he arrived in Hollywood, however, they had enormous difficulty persuading technicians to work on the film. The industry had apparently placed a ban on it. Such men as René Guissart, cameraman, and James P. Hogan, director, turned them down. And André Barlatier, who accepted $500 a week as cameraman, was drummed out of the American Society of Cinematographers as a result. The ASC was opposed to its members working on films in which people involved in public scandals were prominent. The group had specifically pledged that no member would be concerned in a picture exploiting the Hamon case. Barlatier took the job after this pledge had been made.⁵³

The making of the film was clouded by rumor and counterrumor. Apparently, a member of the technical staff hired two thugs to beat up a young man who refused a job on the film and revealed all he knew about it around Hollywood. (He was uninjured only because he turned out to be a skillful amateur boxer).⁵⁴

The film, which cost $200,000, was shot at the Warner Bros.’ small studio on Sunset Boulevard. When all the directors turned it down, declining a huge fee, John W. Gorman accepted $75,000 to make the picture. No one in Hollywood seemed to have heard of him. Born in Boston, he had been an actor on the stage, both legitimate and vaudeville, and claimed to be the author of six plays and 150 vaudeville acts. He started his film career with the Liberty Motion Picture Company and Pioneer, before setting up John Gorman Productions, for which he produced a handful of low-budget features.⁵⁵

Gorman also wrote the scenario, being careful to subdue the sordid side and emphasize the moral. During the making of the film, a romance developed between the director and the leading lady, and in August 1921 Clara Hamon became Mrs. John Gorman.⁵⁶

The picture had the desired effect. Once it was shown in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where the events occurred, sentiment toward Clara changed. A number of women subscribed for stock in the enterprise.⁵⁷ Although production was complete, money was still needed to distribute the film.

When Fate opened in San Francisco, W. C. Weathers, the promoter, was arrested on a charge of violating the ordinance forbidding the display of censored films. It was the wrong town in which to open. The Arbuckle case had aroused deep feeling against the entire motion picture profession.⁵⁸ District Attorney Matthew Brady announced that he was starting an inquiry into several prior affairs in which Hollywood people had taken part. An “unknown woman” was supplying the police with acres of information about such orgies.

Brady, encouraged by a local newspaper campaign, had banned Fate, which had been booked into the College Theatre on Market Street for an indefinite run. Branding the picture “thoroughly offensive,” a way for Clara Hamon (he referred to her as “Miss” Hamon) “to coin into money the blood of the man she murdered,” Brady promised legal action to prevent the showing of the picture following a private review by himself and police officials.⁵⁹ This suggested that he had not actually seen it, “thoroughly offensive” or no.

Weathers asked for a jury trial, and the jury acquitted him in ten minutes on the grounds that no crime had been committed in the presentation of the film. It returned to the College Theatre, but business was poor, largely because the local press refused to advertise it—both editors and theatre managers felt the picture should not have been shown at all. (One suspects they didn’t see it either.)

James Quirk agreed with them: “Despite the clearly voiced opinion of the country that Clara Hamon … should not try to capitalize her disgusting notoriety on the screen, she proceeded to make a picture. The National Association of the Motion Picture Industry is fighting to exclude it from the theatres. No decent distributor would handle it [and] any exhibitor that showed it in his theater should be run out of town.”⁶⁰

Other cities followed San Francisco’s example. Kansas City’s censors refused even to look at it. Undoubtedly a strong press campaign would have put the picture over, whether it was good or bad, but exhibitors dared not risk outraging the forces of reform so soon after the Arbuckle revelations. Clara Hamon’s sole plunge into the picture business was a disaster. But the press made play of that very fact: “Its reception has justified those people who maintain that pictures are daily growing better and cleaner—that the standard of production is far higher than it used to be. And that the public is still clinging to the right sort of ethics and ideas.”⁶¹

THE OBENCHAIN CASE   When the murder first hit the Los Angeles headlines, it was more properly called the Kennedy Case. J. Belton Kennedy was a handsome, well-to-do young man, the sort of character who appeared in many a silent picture. His girlfriend was ideally cast, too. Madalynne Obenchain was a product of the new consumer society; obsessed with fashion, etiquette, and her own appearance, she was attractive enough to carry her narcissism with style.

To complete the melodrama, there was a villain, a character of uncertain origin called Arthur Burch. He was the first to be arrested, which was a trifle odd. But there was something odd about the whole affair.

It began when Madalynne fell for young Kennedy. She was still married to Ralph Obenchain. Evidently she felt more for Kennedy than he for her, for when she divorced Ralph, Kennedy tried to give her the slip. She pestered him with phone calls until his mother put a stop to it. Then she inveigled him into giving her a farewell drive in his roadster and begged him to call at the little cabin he owned in Beverly Glen, and there she … or someone … shot him.

Arthur Burch had a gun of the same caliber as the murder weapon, so the police picked him up. Madalynne was later charged as his accomplice. He stood trial alone, but the jury could not come to a verdict and he had to endure a second one. Meanwhile Madalynne went on trial herself, watched by members of the movie colony such as Leatrice Joy (who based part of her performance in Manslaughter on her). Madalynne spun a scenario so implausible no movie producer would have touched it: she had lost her memory from the moment she heard the shot until she had “woken up” much later. Ralph Obenchain had rushed to the court from Chicago to act as a character witness, convinced of Madalynne’s innocence and offering to marry her again if she were willing. He became the hero of the case, creating an extraordinarily favorable impression. Everyone sympathized as he covered his head with his hand, a picture of misery, listening to her love letters being read out in court.

The letters proved the great attraction of this melodrama. They were full of purple prose and betrayed the influence of movie subtitles: “Some day we will go down to the ocean together, and all this pain will have been forgotten, as we watch the great image of eternity and listen to the mournful music of the waves.”⁶²

In the trials of both Burch and Madalynne, implausible stories were backed up by equally implausible yet curiously convincing witnesses. The story became more and more confusing, and then a second batch of letters, to another lover, were read out—in almost the identical phraseology. It must have been hell for Ralph.

But Ralph was not giving in to his misery. He was starring in a film, playing himself. A Man in a Million was a three-reeler, produced by an independent producer-director, Charles R. Seeling, who probably photographed it as well, as he was a former cameraman and specialized in making films as cheaply as possible.

According to Variety, A Man in a Million covered the early romance of the Obenchains at Northwestern University and showed Ralph’s youth, his entry into the army, “and numerous other events prior to Mrs. Obenchain’s arrest.”⁶³ Variety warned that since Ralph has had no stage experience, “the film will have to make a stand before being booked.” Seeling arranged for Ralph to make personal appearances whenever the picture played a big city. Ralph, man in a million to the end, insisted that the profits would go toward the defense of his former wife.

That lady was meanwhile causing havoc at the county jail, where the other inmates resented the privileges she was receiving—a maid and a regular supply of candy and bottled water. Neither she nor Burch was ever convicted. Their defense, preposterous as it was, could not be satisfactorily challenged, and after a couple of trials each and a year in prison they were released.

“Considering that they were almost certainly guilty of a very cowardly murder,” wrote Veronica and Paul King in Problems of Modern American Crime, “they got off very lightly.” Mrs. Obenchain, perhaps encouraged by the fact that Ralph had made a film, began to study the art of acting. But she had chosen the wrong time to exploit her notoriety. Will Hays was now in charge, and she had less chance of breaking into the movies than of remarrying Ralph. It was just as well. As the Kings put it, “The United States public is rather tired of bad women who are worse actresses.”

THE POLICE

In 1907, a photographer from the San Francisco company of Miles Brothers filmed the crowd outside the boxers’ training ring in Long Beach, California. When the film was shown in Chicago, three detectives recognized one of the men in the crowd and set out at once for Long Beach, where they arrested a wanted man called Rudolph Blumenthal.⁶⁴

A great many films, however, served as vinegar in the wound of the collective pride of the police. As early as 1902, a Mutoscope loop called A Legal Holdup showed an encounter between a silk-hatted drunk and a policeman. The cop snatches his cigar, robs him of watch and wallet, pushes him onto a park bench with his nightstick, and strolls off. It was intended to shock, and it still does so. Yet the policeman as criminal was an insistent theme for muckraking journalists.

The association between moving pictures and crime has long fascinated audiences, bothered censors, and (usually) maddened the police. Being portrayed as a hero did not aid the policeman’s job when crime victims expected miracles. Being depicted as a buffoon was humiliating to him and a source of satisfaction to his opponents. (The police were particularly upset by the Keystone Cops.)⁶⁵

Picture men learned to make films that would please the police because they were dependent on police cooperation. Filming in the streets, unless carried out by hidden cameras, often attracted vast crowds, impossible to control without the police. One wonders whether some of the early films were not a kind of gratuity on celluloid for favors past!

Stage people also found it essential to curry favor. Al Jolson’s first film was not The Jazz Singer, but a Vitagraph picture about traffic cops made in 1918 for the police benevolent fund and shown at a special benefit performance of Jolson’s Sinbad at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York.⁶⁶

Irrefutable proof of police corruption came with the revelations of the Rosenthal case (see this page). Thanhouser released One of the Honor Squad (1912), a portrayal of a heroic policeman, and had to justify it somehow. So their advertisement read: “While the country is agog over the ‘crooked’ policeman and his connivance at gambling and murder, we spring this story of the Honest Copper.… Take your mind off Police Corruption and think, for a change, of Police Heroism. This picture points the way.”⁶⁷

The Line-Up at Police Headquarters^* (1914), coming out after the flood of vice pictures, had to be advertised as “Not a White Slave Picture … Not a Sex Problem …”⁶⁸ It was a six-reeler, said to have been based on police records. Certainly, the police cooperated in the production. Former Deputy Commissioner George S. Dougherty appeared in it and undoubtedly wished he had not, for he was injured when a property bomb exploded during filming at the Ruby studios.⁶⁹ The film depicted “the Official (Inside) Workings of the New York City Police Headquarters,” which, enthralling as it must have been, did not quite justify the description bestowed upon it in its advertising: “The Sort of Story that has Thrilled Mankind Since the Creation of the World.”⁷⁰

In an era when female suffrage was a headline topic, people were intrigued by the idea of policewomen. To offset the illusion that they were used merely for a little light dusting, Balboa made The Policewoman, written by Frank M. Wiltermood, in 1914, and hired for the lead Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells, said to be the world’s first regular policewoman.⁷¹

Policewoman Alice Clements resigned from the Chicago force to accompany a motion picture in which she appeared on a lecture tour. Chief Garrity appeared in it, too, so it had the blessing of the department. But not the entire department. The film, entitled Dregs of a Large City, was supposed to be an educational depiction of life in the old Levee, the red-light district of a decade earlier, but when it came before the Chicago censors, they banned it.⁷² The Levee summoned up sickening memories for older members of the force. In this Wild West–style frontier town, a morals squad officer had been accidentally killed by another detective, and the closing down of the brothels was accompanied by a battle royal between the two squads of police.⁷³

What was unmentionable in drama was, oddly enough, acceptable in comedy. When the Girls Joined the Force, a Nestor comedy of 1914, directed by Al Christie, featured Miss Laura Oakley, the only woman police chief in the world, who was chief of Universal City.

In the film, a police chief is dismissed because of graft in his department, and the whole force is accused. Women take over, with Mrs. Van Allen (Laura Oakley) appointed to succeed the old chief. The entire police force of Universal City appeared in the film. Al Christie secured permission from the mayor of Los Angeles (not to mention the police!) to march the Universal City force through the city streets, headed by a band and followed by a line of political women. Moving Picture World wrote, “This incident, humorous for the dismay and disturbance it caused among the business sections of Los Angeles, is cleverly incorporated in the picture. Then we have scenes in the police station after the women come into power. What the women do not do to make the station a sublime dwelling place for the men isn’t worth doing.”⁷⁴

The number of pictures about honest policemen who withstand the lures of politicians indicates how wide was the spread of graft. A typical example was a three-reel Selig picture of 1915, How Callahan Cleaned Up Little Hell, directed by Tom Santschi from an I. K. Friedman story. Santschi himself played John Callahan, an honest police captain, in a documentary-style drama entirely without love interest. “A cast with more tough looking men would be hard to assemble,” said Variety.⁷⁵

Callahan refuses to release a pickpocket who is the crony of a ward heeler and is transferred to “Little Hell,” the worst district in the city. When the local political bosses set out to buy him, they find him incorruptible. But Callahan is in financial trouble—his daughter is ill and he cannot pay his mortgage—and the grafters make another offer. In real life, Callahan’s resistance would crumble at this point, or he would be beaten up or killed; in the movie, his detective colleagues come to the rescue. Callahan cleans up Little Hell, and he and the leading gangster become friends, the crook joining him in his fight against vice.⁷⁶

Few dramas of the twenties dared to deal with police corruption, but the comedies gave the game away. Paths to Paradise (1925), a Raymond Griffith feature, opens with a police raid on a gambling joint. A detective passes among the patrons with a hat—soon brimful with dollar bills. The raid turns out to be a stunt by rival crooks, but the point is inescapable.

The police used censorship to control the depiction of crime on the screen—particularly their own. In 1913, Royal A. Baker, censor of amusements for Detroit’s police department, drew up a list of the activities producers should avoid showing:

•The wrongs committed by the agents of the law … must never be shown in films

•Pictures must contain a moral ending

•Don’t show suicide (ever)

•Never show strikers rioting, destroying property, or committing depredation or violence

•Avoid tricks educational to crime, including:

a) taking impressions of keys on wax, putty, etc.

b) cutting telephone or telegraph wires

c) turning railroad switches

d) criminals using autos as an instrument to assist depredation, escape

e) picking locks, blowing safes, using a “jimmy” or a “pinch” bar

f) badger game, white slavery, street soliciting, and “vulgar flirtation”

Detroit would not have permitted the outstanding Detective Burton series of two-reelers produced by Reliance the following year, which went into remarkable detail about the methods of both criminals and police. Detective Burton’s Triumph is reminiscent in style of The Musketeers of Pig Alley, but it displays the more advanced technique of 1914 with bold close-ups and smoother editing. It shows how “yeggmen” (safecrackers) operated, cooking dynamite in order to extract the nitroglycerine, then straining this “soup” through a scarf and pouring it into bottles. We see how explosive is affixed to a safe and how that safe is blown. We see how the criminals are identified from the Rogues’ Gallery and watch the police close in on them in a saloon, using a barely noticeable system of coded gestures.

Broken Nose Bailey (1914), another in the same series, shows police using the Bertillon system of identification, measuring every inch of a criminal (played by Eugene Pallette), particularly his broken nose. Introduced from France in 1887, this method used the photographic mug shot together with precise anthropometric measurements which together added up to an individual’s unique portrait—the dimensions of the head, the length of the right ear or left foot.

In 1911 Captain Joseph Francis Faurot, known as the “thumbprint expert,” appeared in a film called The Thumb Print about this new method of identification recently adopted by the New York criminal courts. A wife is about to be convicted of the murder of her husband, when Faurot shows the court the difference between the wife’s thumbprint and that of a man who had left his mark on a pair of shears—the murder weapon.⁷⁷

Faurot, now an inspector and head of the NYPD Detective Bureau, worked with Vitagraph again in 1916 on The Human Cauldron, directed by Harry Lambart. The three-reeler had documentary sequences woven into a fictitious story about two gangsters and their girls caught by the police. One man is sent to Hart Island and a girl to Bedford Reformatory. Both these institutions were shown, as Commissioner Katherine Bement Davis led a tour of inspection. A number of other policemen also took part in the film, and Vitagraph player William Dunn was cast as a police applicant, among dozens of real ones.⁷⁸

All of which may give the impression that the police were the friends of the moving picture. It was not so. They were often hard on companies working on location, insisting that they display their permits when filming. “Any time you made a scene in Los Angeles,” said Hal Roach, “you were compelled to have two policemen to see you didn’t break any law.”⁷⁹ Confronted by cameras at scenes of serious accidents, the police would often stop the filming by arresting the photographers or smashing their equipment. The newsreel men covering the Passaic strike of 1926 were indiscriminately clubbed by police and had their cameras destroyed. (Next day, the newsreel men returned in armored cars!)

The police blamed the movies for the increase in juvenile crime and for giving the public an unflattering picture of their work. There had been much speculation about the “Third Degree” thanks to films like The Burglar’s Dilemma (1912), directed by D. W. Griffith for Biograph, from a scenario by George Hennessy. A murder is blamed on a young burglar (Bobby Harron). The police open their interrogation in brutal fashion, ramming the burglar’s face against that of the corpse. Then, in a naive and obvious manner, Griffith presents the hot-and-cold treatment of the third degree. An unpleasant cop threatens and intimidates the burglar, then a pleasant cop takes over and calms him down. Eventually, the corpse (Lionel Barrymore) recovers and the cops let the young burglar go—reluctantly.

In the antigambling picture The Wages of Sin (1913), a Mafioso is arrested; at the psychological moment, the blinds are raised and the corpse of a man he is accused of murdering is revealed outside the window. The Italian breaks down and confesses.⁸⁰

The Third Degree, a Broadway stage success by Charles Klein, was made into a film in 1913 by Barry O’Neil, for the Lubin Company. No one had any illusions about the subject; the picture was described as “the secrets of the modern torture chamber” and “the real story of the police method of torturing a confession out of a victim.”⁸¹ There was even an unscrupulous police captain (Bartley McCullum), determined to wring a confession out of his victim at any price. The confession is finally obtained through hypnotism, which stirred up a great deal of controversy in the newspapers.⁸² The picture was as huge a success as the stage play.

The viciousness of the third degree could hardly be exaggerated. Searching for the ringleaders of a riot of 1913, detectives pointed a loaded revolver at the head of a young worker and threatened to shoot unless he confessed; when he still refused, they pistol-whipped him. A detective on another case was sentenced to a year in jail for cruelty.⁸³

Police brutality was almost eradicated from the screen under Hays, but the occasional independent film obliquely referred to it. Edward Sloman’s The Last Hour (1923) showed a private detective leading a squad of policemen and committing a cold-blooded murder. Despite the presence of the law, he receives not so much as a reprimand. But by 1923, audiences would have regarded that as a flaw in the story, not the system.

From Moving Picture World, March 29, 1913.

THE GREAT DETECTIVES

When it was common practice for films to be reprinted—or duped—and illegally exhibited, a company called Monopol hired the William J. Burns National Detective Agency to prevent infringement of a valuable Italian film. It was little more than a publicity stunt (by Frank Winch, former press agent to Buffalo Bill), but it was an impressive one. Perhaps it awakened a producer to the possibilities of using William J. Burns in a film, for a year later he appeared as a central figure in a Kalem three-reeler about political fraud, The Exposure of the Land Swindlers (1913), with Alice Joyce. The trade advertisements, true to the spirit of a company upholding the law, urged exhibitors “Beg It—Borrow It or Steal It But Above All Get It!”⁸⁴ The enthusiasm was understandable, for Burns was regarded as “the greatest sleuth of all time.”^†85

Moving Picture World said the film “shines in the unwonted gloss of novelty.” The introduction of William J. Burns as a detective who investigates a land fraud using a dictagraph and other modern techniques⁸⁷ was carried out with “telling and sensational effect.”⁸⁸

Burns returned to the screen in 1914 with The $5,000,000 Counterfeiting Plot, a six-reeler, released by the Dramascope Company, written by George G. Nathan and directed by Bertram Harrison. The picture was produced under Burns’s supervision with the help of Clifford Saum and William Cavanaugh, and he appeared in nearly every shot, together with former members of the Secret Service.⁸⁹

It was based on one of Burns’s most celebrated cases, the Philadelphia-Lancaster counterfeiting mystery. Scenes were shot at the Treasury Department, Washington; Moyamensing Prison, Philadelphia; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and New York City. Burns showed on the screen how bogus Monroe-head hundred-dollar silver certificates were made. These counterfeits were so remarkable that the Secretary of the Treasury had to recall the entire issue of that currency, amounting to over $27 million.⁹⁰

Burns was hailed in the advertisements as “the greatest living detective,” and to give his reputation an even more Holmesian touch, he was brought together in the last scene with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who congratulated him on his many successes. He was also given credit for directing the film, which might not have pleased him had he read the scathing review in Variety, which reported his speech before the opening night in New York, when, apart from declaring that Leo Frank of Atlanta was innocent (see this page), he said the picture people had taken “picture license” in making the film.

“The picture people didn’t take a ‘picture license’ alone,” said Variety. “It was an all-night license covering everything.” Variety criticized details: a counterfeiter pulling a proof from a half-tone plate—“when you can pull a proof from copper with bare hands you are going some.” Burns in Washington leaving his cab without paying—“if Washington’s that easy, let’s move there”—and the building in Lancaster being blown up to destroy the evidence, even though that same evidence had been shown being burned in an earlier scene. “Badly padded and fails to convince,”⁹¹ was their conclusion. Said Moving Picture World: “Not one foot of noticeable padding.… The camera might have been on the job at the start and ‘got its story’ while the original players were not actors nor acting.”⁹² Burns came across as an accomplished actor. “He is as much of a professional as anyone in the picture. His facial expression gave one of its best touches of humor and made the only loud ripple of laughter at the first performance.”⁹³

The Great Detective William J. Burns assists director Raoul Walsh with his version of the Paul Armstrong–Wilson Mizner play The Deep Purple, 1920. (National Film Archive)

But the picture was involved in some unseemly squabbles over distribution and wound up in court.⁹⁴

Burns did not have a high opinion of the new medium as entertainment. He thought most plots were so implausible they did nothing but harm. Crimes were committed with such ease on the screen that a potential wrongdoer could take in the technique at a glance, try it out for himself, and, before he was aware of it, be embarked on a criminal career.⁹⁵

This was not enough to keep Burns out of pictures. He cooperated on several silent detective dramas, including Raoul Walsh’s The Deep Purple (1920). In 1930, he was tempted back by the production of twenty-six shorts dramatizing the crimes he and his coworkers had solved. One was The McNamara Outrage, about the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building; another was The Philadelphia-Lancaster Counterfeiters. All were produced by Educational Pictures.

Burns revealed that for years his men had watched movies, not only for entertainment but to catch fugitives: “When Lon Chaney made The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I remember, one of my men spotted an extra in a mob scene who was wanted for forgery. A wire to the Hollywood police did the trick and he’s still serving time.”⁹⁶

Even more famous than Burns was William J. Flynn, the former chief of the U.S. Secret Service. During the war he had enjoyed great acclaim for his serial of sabotage and espionage, The Eagle’s Eye.⁹⁷ In 1920, he decided once again “to tell all” for the motion picture screen.

J. Gordon Cooper directed the Chief Flynn stories, with Herbert Rawlinson in the lead. The official records of the Secret Service provided the basic plots, but the scenarios were written by Wilson Mizner. A celebrated humorist, Mizner could have given each episode a rare degree of authenticity, for he knew the underworld and was a gambling crony of the gangster Arnold Rothstein, who virtually ran New York City.⁹⁸ Instead, he smothered them in hokum.

Photoplay wrote, “The first three pictures in the series are The Silkless Banknote, Outlaws of the Deep and The Five Dollar Plate. There is enough material in each of them for a five-reel picture. For terseness of action and for human interest, they rank with the O. Henry series … The ‘crook stuff’ is lightened with plenty of comedy and many scenes of unpretentious pathos.”⁹⁹

 

INTO THE NET   Richard E. Enright, Police Commissioner of New York for eight eventful years, wrote a story about a heroic detective that was picked up by Malcolm Strauss, a producer. Frank Leon Smith was assigned to write the screenplay. “The story that became Into the Net (1924) was hard to write because of an embarrassment of riches,” said Smith. “When I asked Malcolm Strauss what good the Enright tie-up was to us, with some irritation he said: ‘Well, what do you want?’ In desperation I exclaimed: ‘The Brooklyn Bridge!’ To my amazement he asked, ‘When, and for how long?’

“It was as easy as that! The cops roped off the Brooklyn Bridge for us and George Seitz, the director, staged some good fights at mid-day in the middle of the bridge. Chase scenes up and down busy Manhattan streets became common and ritualized. First Enright’s official car and his personal aide ran interference; second, the car with the villains; third, the car with the heroic element; fourth, the camera car, with the director. Traffic cops had no advance notice. When they saw Enright’s car, they leapt aside, blew their whistles, and along we sped.

“We had good luck throughout the production—except once. Seitz was staging a street fight in Harlem between heroes and heavies when a plainclothes cop, not in on the act, ran up, and, reaching over the crowd, rapped one of our guys on the head with a blackjack.

“During the weeks Into the Net was in production, the newspapers seemed unaware that the Police Department was being used by a movie company. New York cops were even taken to Fort Lee to appear in interiors (they got $5 a day as extras, in addition, of course, to their city pay).

“As for Police Commissioner Enright, none of us ever saw him—until after the serial was finished.”¹⁰⁰

When it was over, Smith was taken to police headquarters to meet the commissioner: “I was introduced as ‘the young man who wrote the scenario’ and I put out my hand. Enright took my hand, pulled me forward a little; big smile—and I thought he was going to say something. Nuts. Not a word for the guy who’d ghosted a 15 episode serial for him. He was pulling me ahead and out of the way so he could greet Miss Edna Murphy, who was in line behind me.”¹⁰¹

Into the Net, 1924, in production on Brooklyn Bridge. Jack Mulhall, right, is in danger of being hurled off. George B. Seitz directing, Edna Murphy center, and no sign of Police Commissioner Enright. (Note second camera lashed to girders, extreme right.)

But not only was the picture advertised as “Written by Police Commissioner Richard Enright of New York,” a poster contrived to suggest that he had directed it, too.¹⁰²

Photoplay thought Into the Net sustained interest throughout and credited George Seitz for his exceptionally good direction. (The leading players included Jack Mulhall, Edna Murphy, and Constance Bennett.) The English were more critical: “However prominently the police may figure in their assistance to the hero, it says little for the Detective Force which could allow an exponent of the White Slave Traffic to carry on so elaborate an organisation in the centre of Long Island until it is brought to the notice of the police by means of a private detective.”¹⁰³

As Frank Leon Smith pointed out, every serial involved the kidnapping of girls; these beautiful victims were the descendants of the “disappearing women” of the white slave films.

While I was writing this book, Into the Net was discovered in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française—a total jumble, restored and retitled by Renée Lichtig.

It was a version of the serial cut down to feature length in the twenties. As such, it has astonishing similarities to Traffic in Souls and was clearly an attempt to cash in on the same subject. This being the twenties, the white slave racket is run not by a reformer but by the obligatory Evil Oriental of so many serials. A police raid on a gambling den is directed in an identical fashion to the climactic police raid in Traffic in Souls; some shots might almost have been borrowed from Tucker’s film. Documentary authenticity is undermined by the use of interior sets—although there is location shooting at a night court. But the exteriors are exceptional in every way. Very well shot—they include high angles, rare at the time—they form a valuable record of old New York. One wild chase sequence contains shots racing down Broadway from above Times Square, past the Flatiron Building down to Washington Square. The final race to the rescue is beyond parody; not only are there powerful police cars and motorcycles, but columns of police horses, so Seitz can shoot it like The Birth of a Nation, and even motorboats so the Oriental, escaping aboard a steam yacht with a heroine, can be apprehended at sea. (He dives overboard, presumably to reappear in a future serial.)

Richard Enright was later responsible for organizing a special squad of policemen to cope with the crowds at movie premieres in New York City.¹⁰⁴

Publicity for Into the Net, 1924. From Photoplay, November 1924.

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

The fear that films about criminals would create criminals began, appropriately enough, with The Great Train Robbery (1903)—the famous Edwin S. Porter “Western.” In 1912, the Philadelphia Record carried this headline:

BOY IS TO HANG FOR PICTURE PLAY ACT

Young Bishie’s Express Robbery Tragedy
an Exact Reproduction from “Movies”
Slew Trusting Friend
Waited for Whistle at Long Curve So the Shot
Would Not Be Heard¹⁰⁵

The paper stated that at the time of the crime, December 1911, The Great Train Robbery was being shown in a Scranton theatre. Moving Picture World disputed this charge, pointing out that The Great Train Robbery could not have been seen in Scranton or anywhere else in December 1911 since “the age and physical condition of the film forbade its going through a moving picture machine.” The film survived to be copied, and dupes are still being shown more than eighty years later, so that ends that argument. The boy could not have learned from the film to wait for the whistle so the shot would not be heard, but otherwise the facts fitted, so why not blame the film? Citing the moving picture as the inspiration for one’s evil deeds had already become such a common practice that reformers looked upon the medium as wicked and deplorable, a perverter of youth and a breeder of crime. Those who studied children were, for the most part, convinced that moving pictures had a great deal to answer for. Asked what proportion of disciplinary cases were attributable to the movies, a Chicago superintendent of child study replied, “I should almost say they all were.”¹⁰⁶

But in a survey of forty-two probation officers, conducted by the National Board of Review, five called motion pictures responsible for much juvenile delinquency, ten thought they contributed, and twenty-seven maintained they were not directly responsible to any appreciable extent.¹⁰⁷ And in his 1926 book The Young Delinquent, Cyril Burt wrote that only mental defectives took the movies seriously enough to imitate their criminal exploits.

Yet the movies were the main source of excitement and moral education for city children.¹⁰⁸ As early as 1909, Jane Addams wrote of the impact of the five-cent theatres on young minds: “Nothing is more touching than [to] encounter a group of children and young people who are emerging from a theater with the magic of the play still thick upon them. They look up and down the familiar street scarcely recognizing it and quite unable to determine the direction of home. From a tangle of ‘make believe’ they gravely scrutinize the real world which they are so reluctant to re-enter, reminding one of the absorbed gaze of a child who is groping his way back from fairy-land whither the story has completely transported him.”¹⁰⁹

Youthful revellers stage a car fight—charging each other’s vehicles until one is wrecked—at a roadhouse. From Walking Back, 1928, directed by Rupert Julian, although this sequence may have been directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

While realizing that “the drama and the drama alone performs for them the office of art,” Adams added: “An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they have been so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims of hallucination and mental disorder.”¹¹⁰ She was also convinced that for every child driven distraught, a hundred permanently injure their eyes watching the moving films, and hundreds more seriously model their conduct upon the standards set before them.¹¹¹

A survey of the effects of the cinema on children was carried out in Britain during the war. The Report of the Cinema Commission of Inquiry, instituted by the National Council of Public Morals, was published in 1917.¹¹²

One probation officer said he regularly took his charges to the pictures “with beneficial results.”¹¹³ If cinemas were closed down, there would be an immediate and immense increase in hooliganism, shoplifting, and street misdemeanors: “Fifteen years ago, street hooligan gangs were a real menace. Now such gangs are unknown in my district.”¹¹⁴

“Just imagine,” said a social worker, “what the cinema means to tens of thousands of poor kiddies herded together in one room—to families living in one house, six or eight families under the same roof. For a few hours at the picture house at the corner, they can find breathing space, warmth, music (the more the better) and the pictures, where they can have a real laugh, a cheer and sometimes a shout. Who can measure the effect on their spirits and body?”¹¹⁵

The commission was shocked by the revelation that the least desirable picture house was a better place for children than their homes or the streets and that no alternative entertainment was provided for them. “Except,” as one schoolmaster said, “the appalling entertainments provided by the Churches in the way of bands of hope and mission rooms. They are absolutely dreadful.”¹¹⁶

A magistrate was more complacent. “If the child is in the cinema seeing horrors, that child will not be in the streets stealing things off a barrow.”¹¹⁷

When the National Board of Review asked the chief probation officers of the principal American cities for their views on juvenile delinquency and the movies, the response was strikingly similar to the English report. Of forty-five who replied, only five indicted motion pictures as an important cause of delinquency—and two of those were in states with strict censorship, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But religious groups responded as though it were still 1649. “Most of the pictures glorify crime,” said the Christian Advocate in 1925, “or depict the rotten trail of sensuality. It is sought to justify their exhibition by the explanation that they point a moral. As sensible would it be to drag a child through flames so that later he might feel the soothing effect of salve! Sear the mind of a child with rottenness, and no moral will ever produce relief, much less a cure.”¹¹⁸

The unconventional Mayor House of Topeka, Kansas, put it more succinctly: “If you have a boy who can be corrupted by the ordinary run of moving picture films you might as well kill him now and save trouble.”¹¹⁹

SAVED BY THE JUDGE   Thanks to the liberal legal requirements of the time, Ben Lindsey was already an experienced lawyer when he was admitted to the Colorado bar in 1894, at the age of twenty-four. He became a judge in 1901 and discharged his responsibilities conventionally until a remarkable moment in his courtroom. He had just sentenced a young boy convicted of larceny when an appalling cry rang out. It came from the boy’s mother, crouched among the benches at the back.

“I was a judge, judging ‘cases’ according to the ‘Law’ till the cave-dweller’s mother-cry startled me into humanity. It was an awful cry, a terrible sight, and I was stunned,” recalled Lindsey.¹²⁰ He adjourned the court and retreated to his chambers.

The boy was guilty, but should he go to prison when he had a mother and a home? The only course was for Lindsey to accept personal responsibility for the lad. He had no idea what he was going to do, except visit his charge, but probation proved so much more successful than prison that it transformed Lindsey’s outlook. “The old process is changed,” he wrote. “Instead of coming to destroy, we come to rescue. Instead of coming to punish, we come to uplift. Instead of coming to hate, we come to love.”¹²¹

“The criminal court for child-offenders,” wrote Lindsey, “is based on the doctrine of fear, degradation and punishment. It was, and is, absurd. The Juvenile Court was founded on the principle of love. We assume that the child has committed, not a crime, but a mistake, and that he deserves correction, not punishment. Of course, there is a firmness and justice, for without these there would be danger in leniency. But there is no justice without love.”¹²²

Lindsey’s idea of trying youthful offenders in a special court spread across the nation. But he enraged those to whom property was more important than people.

Crime was the result not of character, but of environment, he asserted. What determined the environment? Ruthless private greed, flowering in an irresponsible capitalism. The true enemies of society were not the delinquents, but respected men in private life.¹²³ “I sometimes felt like suggesting,” he said, “that we empty the jails altogether in celebration of the fact that the bandits who robbed almost everybody never got in them at all.”¹²⁴

In retaliation, city officials and businessmen declared war on Lindsey. He was insulted and humiliated. Prostitutes were bribed to name him as a customer. The Democrats tried to drop him from their ticket, but he formed his own party and was elected unanimously.¹²⁵ He caused 151 new laws to be passed,¹²⁶ and delegations from many countries came to observe his methods. The Japanese even sent a photographer so the courtroom furniture could be accurately reproduced in Tokyo.¹²⁷

Damned for his sympathy with the criminal, Lindsey received little official praise for his successes—the hundreds of delinquents who passed through his hands to become good citizens. He found an unexpected ally, however, in George Creel, a journalist appointed Denver’s police commissioner, who was to find fame during the war as chairman of the Committee on Public Information. Otis B. Thayer, a former Selig man, persuaded Creel to write a scenario about the Lindsey method for a three-reeler called Saved by the Juvenile Court (1913), or Fighting Crime. The story was in two parts. In one, fourteen-year-old Bob is arrested for picking coal in a railroad yard to save his poor family from freezing. In prison, Bob finds himself in the company of hardened criminals and becomes one himself. Released, he robs a bank and is killed in a gunfight with his pursuers.

In a contrasting story, Charles, a street waif, is arrested for attempted robbery. He is taken before Judge Lindsey, who gives him commitment papers and trusts him to make his own way to the Industrial School at Golden, Colorado, for training.¹²⁸ Meanwhile, Alta, the boy’s sister, has been frequenting low dance halls. She is picked up by a policeman just as she is about to take her first drink, and Lindsey commits her to the girls’ school at Morrison, Colorado, where she receives an education. When the children return from school, they find that their widowed mother, under Lindsey’s influence, has opened a bakery shop and Charles has joined the motorcycle brigade of a large department store. One day, he stops the runaway horse of a banker’s daughter, and his heroism is rewarded with a job in the bank. He falls in love with the banker’s daughter, Beatrice. Alta assists her mother in the bakery and meets the man she wants to marry. Judge Lindsey is eventually called upon to officiate at a double wedding.¹²⁹

Terry Ramsaye describes how this picture was pepped up with footage shot at the Cheyenne rodeo, and, after Creel’s drive against the red-light district, retitled people as with their parents; firm discipline was the only way to stop children from becoming criminals.

Judge Ben Lindsey (right) puts the case of the boy (Lewis Sargent) to Patrolman Jones (Russ Powell), in a scene from William Desmond Taylor’s Soul of Youth, 1920, written by Julia Crawford Ivers. (Museum of Modern Art)

Denver’s Underworld.¹³⁰ The director, Otis Thayer, should have had a talk with the judge, for apparently he skipped the state owing a lot of money.¹³¹

The Columbine Film Company received many letters from child-betterment organizations pleased at having the work of Judge Lindsey introduced by means of the motion picture.¹³² Thus encouraged, Lindsey let it be known that he was considering directing features on the child labor question, following a series of articles he had written for the popular magazines.¹³³ Sadly, nothing came of it.

In 1920, William Desmond Taylor followed the success of his Huckleberry Finn with The Soul of Youth, written by Julia Crawford Ivers. In this pre-Hays period, Taylor was at liberty to portray an orphanage in muckraking style, as a sordid dump, full of wretched boys who fought each other at the slightest opportunity. The most troublesome youngster (Lewis Sargent) escapes and lives rough on the streets until he is arrested during a burglary. He is brought before Judge Lindsey, who plays not merely a cameo but a proper role, with close-ups, titles, and reaction shots. (In one scene, he appears with his wife.) The judge comes across with warmth and sympathy, and the film itself is exceptional. The odd touch of sentimentality is offset by the realism of the orphanage scenes, the beautiful photography (by James Van Trees), and the atmospheric art direction of Wilfred Buckland.¹³⁴

Lindsey testified before the Committee on Education of the House of Representatives in 1926, saying that he had yet to find a single case of crime among youth that could fairly be traced to the movies: “But I do know thousands of children who have been elevated, inspired and made happier because of the movies; who have been kept off the streets, out of the alleys.… If we did not have any motion pictures at all we would have far more crime than we have. Nothing in the last fifty years of the most eventful history of all time has done more to reduce sin and crime and add to the happiness, education and progress of the human race than the motion picture. And it is going to do more and more in this regard in the years to come.”¹³⁵

Judge Willis Brown was a man of the Lindsey type. He came to fame with the scheme of “Boy City,” on the lines of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town, immortalized in the Spencer Tracy film. He first established “Boy Cities” in Charlevoix, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, in the 1900s. (Selig made a one-reeler about these operations.)

Brown then presided over the juvenile court of Salt Lake City. Invited by the editor of the Publishers’ Guide to comment on motion pictures, he wrote, “If I owned a motion picture house, I would show children the pleasing, helpful things of life. I would make it possible for all parents to send their children to my house.”¹³⁶

The editor challenged him to write a scenario which would meet his requirements yet still be a draw to the public. The judge did so and took it to the editor, who showed it to several producers. The result was that the judge himself directed a five-reeler about an immigrant lad who benefited from “Boy City.” The actual boy, Willie Eckstein, and the judge each played himself in the film, which was called A Boy and the Law (1914).

The Chicago Herald made arrangements for all children under sixteen to see the film free at special matinees. Willie Eckstein traveled with the picture and delivered a running commentary while it was shown.

Judge Brown either had too little time, or too little faith in his ability as a director. For his later films, he hired the young King Vidor first to write, then to direct his scripts. 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:¹³⁷ “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.”¹³⁸

BROKEN LAWS   During her personal appearance tour in connection with Human Wreckage, Mrs. Wallace Reid visited hospitals, prisons, and reformatories and saw a phase of life she had never encountered before: the plight of the juvenile offender. The fault, she was convinced, lay not so much with the young

Broken Laws, 1924. Arthur Rankin as Bobby Allen—“at sixteen, arrogant and lawless” —with Mrs. Wallace Reid as his mother. (National Film Archive)

Under the Thomas H. Ince banner once again, she starred in a drama written by her friend Adela Rogers St. Johns, adapted by Marion Jackson and Bradley King. It was directed by Roy William Neill.

Bobby Allen is spoiled as a child by his indulgent mother (Mrs. Reid), who never resorts to corporal punishment. Bobby causes trouble at school and grows up arrogant and lawless. When his mother buys him a Stutz Bearcat he begins to lead a wild life. One night, returning from a “disreputable roadhouse” (roadhouses which served liquor were notorious for prostitution), his car crashes into a wagon and kills an old woman. He is convicted of manslaughter in the first degree. His mother pleads with the judge to allow her to serve his term, acknowledging that she is responsible for his conduct. The mother wakes up, and, realizing that she has just had a nightmare, gives Bobby—still aged eight—a good spanking and makes him return to school to apologize for his poor conduct.¹³⁹

Said Picture Play: “There is something so sincere and so steadfast in Mrs. Wallace Reid’s picture, that before the first reel is over you are completely won by it. People who have a ‘message’ are usually great bores. But Broken Laws isn’t a bore; it is an excellent study of family life as waged in the Great American Home.… I hope you see Broken Laws because I want you to feel that Wallace Reid’s widow can do braver things than Human Wreckage.”¹⁴⁰

Despite such reviews, and despite all that press agents could do, neither Broken Laws, nor Mrs. Reid’s personal appearances, were as successful as before.¹⁴¹

Mrs. Reid was a reformer at heart, but she had a showman’s outlook. Brought up in the theatre, and a pioneer in Hollywood, she believed that the primary mission of the screen was to entertain.¹⁴² Combining propaganda with entertainment was a difficult exercise in an industry ruled on one side by Hays and on the other by exhibitors, and it was not surprising that her later pictures—such as The Red Kimono—veered toward exploitation. And those involved with her, as if learning how to do it, made “propaganda pictures” on their own which proved to be pure exploitation films. The most startling of these were directed by Norton S. Parker.

THE ROAD TO RUIN   Norton S. Parker’s The Road to Ruin (1928) was a cheap exploitation picture, shot in ten days, which held some kind of record for its box-office success. It cost a mere $2,500—Variety claimed it grossed more than $2,500,000.¹⁴³

It holds another sort of distinction, too. In the American Film Institute’s catalogue of feature films of 1921–1930, it has the synopsis which has drawn the most attention. It is impossible to parody or even to paraphrase, so here it is in full: “Lack of parental guidance leads Sally Canfield down the ruinous road. Exposed to liquor and cigarettes, she succumbs to their effects and drifts through a series of love affairs with older, worldlier men. Apprehended by the police one evening during a strip poker game, Sally is reprimanded and sent home. She discovers several weeks later that she is pregnant, submits to an illegal abortion, and dies of shock the next evening after unwillingly being paired off with her father in a bawdy house”¹⁴⁴ (The AFI catalogue lists the subjects included in this film as Parenthood, Adolescence, Abortion, Alcoholism, Incest, Smoking, Whorehouses.)

This would hardly have received the blessing of the Hays Office. Produced by Cliff Broughton Productions, distributed by True Life Photoplays, it was the sort of thing one would expect to see in the company of tramps, seeking shelter from the cold. Yet it was sponsored by the juvenile authorities as an exposure of juvenile delinquency and was shown by them in the high schools.¹⁴⁵ “It is a sensational portrayal of a deplorable social evil, with all Ts crossed and all Is dotted,” said Photoplay.¹⁴⁶

The Road to Ruin was banned in a number of cities,¹⁴⁷ and it is safe to assume that state censors, regarding it as a catalogue of all they objected to, would have burned at the stake rather than let it be shown in the area under their jurisdiction. It was popular, however, on the road-show circuit.

The picture survives, and makes doleful viewing. Even though it was photographed by the pioneer Henry Cronjager (who shot Tol’able David), it has a lack-luster look to it. The action moves agonizingly slowly because it was shot intentionally fast—perhaps even more than twenty-four frames per second—to fill the reels as quickly as possible.

I managed to contact someone who remembered the film. “I saw it when I was only thirteen in Salt Lake City,” she wrote. “I suppose it would be considered an X-rated movie by today’s standards, and it was advertised with lurid billboards emphasizing ‘No one under 16 admitted.’ My girlfriend and I were so intrigued with all this that we ‘borrowed’ our mothers’ lipsticks and hats and high heels and managed to get by the ticket taker at the old Rialto Theater. And there we sat in the darkened movie house, our eyes as big as saucers as we watched Helen Foster’s virtue being destroyed by Grant Withers.”¹⁴⁸

My correspondent subsequently married the director of The Road to Ruin, Norton S. Parker:

“He told me Helen Foster was a lovely, innocent, blue-eyed brunette and he used to have to keep a case of gin on the set and keep her half smashed so she would take off her clothes in the famous strip-poker scene.¹⁴⁹

“Also, the picture could not be released unless it had a moral. So at the end where Helen lay dying after an abortion, Norton conceived the brilliant idea of having letters of fire appear over the bed as though forged by the hand of God, ‘THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.’ ”¹⁵⁰

Mrs. Parker assured me that the picture was a collaboration with Mrs. Wallace Reid, but I have found no evidence to support this and her name is not on the credits. However, Mrs. Reid was kind enough to write a letter of endorsement, as did Kate H. Brusstar, Superintendent of the Detention House of Camden County, who described the film as the most gripping she had seen for years: “Among the guests who saw the picture was a clergyman. He called to see me this morning and said he could not get the picture out of his mind. I think you deserve the highest commendation for putting out this picture and you have portrayed in a wonderfully artistic manner a very unpleasant subject.”¹⁵¹

I am astonished that such a picture won the support of the authorities. To indicate the high-minded nature of Willis Kent, the man behind the picture (who also wrote the story), here is his statement to exhibitors: “MAN, MAN, what a box office picture and what a really worthwhile story. Oratory couldn’t sell these seasoned picture men, high pressure wouldn’t move them; they are impervious to ‘bull’ but THE ROAD TO RUIN sold itself and adorable little Helen Foster won a permanent place in every heart.”¹⁵² Or, as the posters put it, “The Mantle of False Modesty Torn Ruthlessly Aside!”

THE GODLESS GIRL   What Judges Lindsey and Brown were trying to save children from were reformatories.¹⁵³ One would not, perhaps, place Cecil B. DeMille in the same evangelical class, but he, too, produced a remarkable indictment of these institutions—The Godless Girl (1928). Because DeMille tended to revel in sadism, one is tempted to dismiss his depiction of the savagery of reform school life as merely a Jazz Age version of the Inquisition.

And yet there was more to the film than at first seemed apparent. A journalist, Dorothy Donnell, was permitted to examine the research material at the DeMille studios, research which had allegedly cost $200,000 and consumed eight months. It was carried out, according to Miss Donnell, by a private detective. Eddie Quillan, who played in the film, said that DeMille had smuggled a young man into a boys’ reform school, and a young woman into the girls.’ They were not only observed but experienced many of the vicious punishments.¹⁵⁴ Stored in two immense books at the DeMille studios were sworn affidavits from paroled inmates. “I have seen these books,” said Dorothy Donnell, “and read in them things so revolting that they will probably never be printed.”¹⁵⁵

Authentic-looking reformatory re-created on the backlot by art director Mitchell Leisen for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Godless Girl, 1928. From Picture Play, July 1928.

DeMille was thus able to base every incident in the film on fact. In one scene George Duryea¹⁵⁶ filled a hand barrow with 200 pounds of rock, staggered a thousand feet across a yard to empty it, and then repeated the process. This form of punishment was used in a Midwest reform school and was guaranteed to break a boy’s spirit within a few hours. The bloodhounds used in the film were a feature of several state reformatories.¹⁵⁷

Dorothy Donnell was convinced that DeMille undertook this project in the same spirit that led Dickens to write Little Dorrit and close the debtors’ prisons of England forever or Thomas Mott Osborne to fight for a reformed Sing Sing. Seeing the film today, one cannot entirely share her faith, for the film has an element of exploitation about it. But one cannot deny, either, its remarkable power.

The idea of the picture was welcomed by prison reformers, said DeMille in his autobiography.¹⁵⁸ His researchers acquired as props an armory of implements: leg chains, manacles (as used in fifteen state institutions), human restraint gloves, straitjackets, adhesive tape to seal mouths, and a photograph of seventeenth-century-style stocks, still in use in a Southern reform school. Although a title was inserted in the picture to point to the existence of excellent reform schools, far too many were medieval institutions where a girl of fourteen might be left hanging by her thumbs for three hours for the offense of speaking to another girl in “the silence”… where twin thieves aged three were confined for stealing candy … where the instruments of torture were so sophisticated they were operated by electric motors.¹⁵⁹

Original caption: “ ‘NO CORPORAL PUNISHMENTS!’ SAY WOMAN’S PRISON BOARD AFTER DEMILLE REVELATIONS. Members of California Commission shocked by treatment of girls in worst type of institutions, which they observe reproduced from signed descriptions of eye witnesses, in Reformatory sequences of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Godless Girl. Later some of the reconstructed punishments are filmed for them by Patricia Kelly and Kate Price … while the following members of the Commission study the demonstration: Mrs. Ernest Wallace of Alhambra. chairman: Mrs. John Buwalda of Pasadena, secretary: Mrs. Ingram B. Slocum, of San Francisco, chairman, prison relations committee. Tying up the girl in the form of torture known as the Thumb School. The cord is stretched until the victim is on her tiptoes and part of the weight of her body is suspended from the tied thumbs—the ordeal sometimes lasting for hours.” (Museum of Modern Art)

Above: Lina Basquette as Judy, lashed to her cell as fire breaks out, reveals the marks of electrocution on her hand. From The Godless Girl, 1928. (Museum of Modern Art) Below: The electrified fence which separates girls from boys. (Robert S. Birchard Collection)

The film is seldom shown today, which is a pity, for it is one of the few silent films with a built-in appeal for modern audiences. It is exceptionally violent, and one cannot wonder that it appealed so little to American audiences of the time that it became a financial disaster. The brutality is startling, even today. The picture is a true forerunner of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1931), although it lacks the integrity of that film. It employs more melodrama than Mervyn LeRoy’s masterpiece, which was almost documentary in its approach. But the parallels are close; the film is authentic, exciting, and shocking. It also led to reforms.

Brilliantly directed—the film is one of DeMille’s best works—it betrays itself only in a couple of weak romantic interludes, and in the overwrought playing, particularly of Noah Beery as the sadistic head guard. J. Peverell Marley’s photography is magnificent, if seen in original prints, and the reform school sets are so convincing it is impossible to believe they were all constructed, by art director Mitchell Leisen, on the “Forty Acres” back lot at the DeMille-PDC studios, Culver City.

Technically elaborate, with a Seventh Heaven elevator for the stairwell tragedy, and the kind of dynamic editing and camera placement one associates more with DeMille’s second-unit directors than with DeMille himself, The Godless Girl rewards repeated viewings. It opens at a high school, where Judy (Lina Basquette) addresses a meeting of the Godless Society. Judy’s love for Bob Hathaway (George Duryea), a “son of the gospel,” does not protect her when he leads a storm troop to break up the meeting. Her pal “Goat” (Eddie Quillan) is beaten up, and a girl is killed when she falls from the top floor.

“DeMille had a factual basis for all this,” said Eddie Quillan. “Even in Hollywood High School they were passing pamphlets about atheism like the ones in the film. They had a Godless Society right in the school here.”¹⁶⁰ It was not, however, met with such ferocious violence as DeMille depicts.

Judy, Bob, and “Goat” are charged with complicity and sent to reform school, where we see them being processed. “What’s the big idea?” asks “Goat” as they take mug shots of him. “I’m not a criminal.”

“No,” comes the reply. “But it won’t be long now.”

Both boys and girls have their hair shorn, and when the girls protest they are warned that every word they say will mean one day added to their sentence. The haircutting scene could be shot only once; Eddie Quillan recalled DeMille using at least ten cameras.

The boys are issued trousers marked with a stripe—to make a strong target, they are told, for the warden’s rifles. And the girls have shoes with specially marked soles, to leave clear tracks in the event of escape.

When Bob steps out of line in the washroom, he discovers how swift and brutal punishment can be. The head guard turns a fire hose on him at full blast. Quillan recalled that the scene could not be faked, nor could Duryea be doubled. The hose proved very painful. When Quillan went to play his own part in the scene, remonstrating with Beery and being knocked down, he bounced straight off the water-soaked floor. It transpired that electric cables for the lights were lying in the water, and he had received a violent shock.

Electrocution provided the most savage moment in the film. Bob and Judy are assigned to garbage detail on opposite sides of the fence dividing the male compound from the female. Bob calls Judy over and tries to pass her an old glove to make her task slightly less revolting. The head guard sees them together, hands outstretched, about to kiss through the wire. He runs up to a watchtower, throws a switch, and watches their bodies gyrate, their fingertips smoke.

Even this was based on fact, although DeMille admitted it was a feature of only two institutions, where the electricity was switched off most of the time. But it was not simply an idea of Jeanie Macpherson, the scriptwriter.

With the current off, their flesh scorched, Bob and Judy find themselves in solitary, on bread and water, a punishment feared more than the whip.

In a well-organized escape, Bob and Judy get clear of the prison, but the guards set bloodhounds on them and soon they are back in their cells, manacled for safety. They are thus in appalling danger when fire breaks out.

“I did get burned in that fire scene,” recalled Lina Basquette. “They put asbestos on our clothes and fireproofed the set.” (Mitchell Leisen even flame-proofed their hair.) “We had some kind of thing we spread on our bodies. But my eyelashes and eyebrows were singed. Thank God my eyelashes came back, but my eyebrows never grew back properly. And I had an effect like horrible sun-burn—painful, though nothing like third degree burns. DeMille admired my guts because when the fire got too hot, George Duryea became scared and took off and DeMille yelled at me, ‘Stay there, Judy!’ and the cameras were grinding and I was screaming and carrying on and DeMille was very impressed with that kind of guts. He put poor George Duryea through such hell. DeMille was a typical tyrant—if he thought he could intimidate somebody and terrify them, God help them. But I kind of showed spirit and stood up to him right from the beginning and he loved that.”¹⁶¹

After astounding scenes of panic and amid the inferno of the prison, the three are released, and there is an ending which suggests that Judy, the atheist, has been taught to believe.

Photoplay said that no one who likes an extraordinarily good show should miss it: “If it sticks a knife into existing abuses—that’s just an extra for which parents, school-teachers and juvenile court judges will owe DeMille a prayerful vote of thanks.”¹⁶² But Picture Play regarded it as an example of judgment gone awry and values askew, rejecting the horror and declaring it as unreal “as life on an imaginary planet.”¹⁶³

Sound was in by the time the film was released, and talking scenes were added to the final reel. By this time, DeMille had left PDC and joined MGM, and Fritz Feld directed the sound sequences. The sound did not help. The film had cost $722,000; it grossed only $400,000.¹⁶⁴ And yet it was very popular in Germany and Austria.

“I received a fan letter written from Austria in 1929,” said Lina Basquette, “from Adolf Hitler. The name meant absolutely nothing—it came to mind only later when he became famous. It said I was his favorite American movie star.”¹⁶⁵ She received confirmation of this when she was invited to Germany in the late 1930s, to be considered for UFA stardom and met the Führer.

The Godless Girl shows how little distinguished certain prisons and reform schools in the United States from the early concentration camps of the Third Reich. How easily, as Sinclair Lewis warned, it could have happened here!

DeMille was not merely taking a religious stand with the early scenes of the film; behind this atheism he saw the specter of Bolshevism. He told John Hampton, many years later, that Communist Youth Societies began as Societies of the Godless, preaching Darwinism and atheism: “He then said that he had expected Russia would ban this film as they had The King of Kings and to his amazement he was told that it was being shown all over Soviet territory.”¹⁶⁶

When DeMille visited Russia in 1931, he found the film so popular that he was made to feel a national hero for producing it. The story of a girl’s redemption by gaining faith in God did not seem the kind of thing the Communists would embrace. “It was not until near the end of my trip,” he wrote, “that someone enlightened me. The Russians simply did not screen the redeeming reel, but played the rest of the picture as a document of American police brutality and the glorious spreading of atheism among American youth.”¹⁶⁷

The Russians could hardly have dropped the final reel, with its essential fire scene. DeMille forgets how ambiguously he handled the Gaining of Faith and how casually it is dealt with. They had merely to alter a couple of subtitles to achieve their aim. DeMille was far more interested in the Power than the Glory.

Variety¹⁶⁸ insisted that reform school stuff had been done much better before, and one must take the journal’s word for it. But with so many vital films missing, this stands among the most exceptional prison pictures ever made.

GANGSTERS

The Gas House Gang … the Plug Uglies … the Hudson Dusters … The nineteenth-century gangs of New York with the colorful names were mostly Irish. Silent films, often made by directors of Irish descent, took a nostalgic view when they dealt with the gangs, portraying them as raucous and rough but basically warm-hearted and funny. Even Lights of Old Broadway (1925), which showed the authorities using fire hoses on the mob, placed the accent on humor.

In reality, the gangs were murderous. Gouging out eyes and stamping on the injured with hobnail boots were the least of it. Unspeakable tortures were inflicted on the Negroes, soldiers, and policemen captured by the mob during the anti-Draft riots of the Civil War, and Gatling guns and howitzers had to be used to restore order. In one riot, thirteen acres of New York City were laid waste.¹⁶⁹

All of which was an embarrassment to Tammany Hall, the Democratic party machine that ruled Manhattan. The politicians, who owned saloons, gambling houses, and brothels, looked to the gang members as a private army. On Election Day they would turn out en masse to vote early and often (they were known as repeaters), to blackjack those who sought to vote differently, to stuff or steal ballot boxes, and occasionally to murder opponents. In return, the politicians provided the gangs with meeting places and boltholes and kept the police off their backs.¹⁷⁰

By the turn of the century, and the advent of the moving picture, big gangs such as the Five Pointers could field 1,500 men; smaller outfits such as the Gas House Gang numbered about 200. Jewish and Italian gangs added to the misery of the districts which they claimed as their own. Moving pictures could not reflect the scale of this gang warfare; they dealt with more modest aspects of criminal behavior—yeggmen, kidnappers, or burglars.

Street fighting on Avenue A. Production still from Allan Dwan’s Big Brother, 1923.

The first gangster film of any importance to survive is a D. W. Griffith one-reeler called The Musketeers of Pig Alley, made in 1912 for the Biograph Company. The Biograph studio was an old brownstone at 11 East Fourteenth Street, not far from “the nerve center of gangsterism,” Tammany Hall. The street even had its own gang under the leadership of Al Rooney. While the Biograph studio ground out dramas of crime and poverty, historic events were taking place nearby. In December 1911, gangster Julie Morrell was shot by Big Jack Zelig in a Fourteenth Street saloon.¹⁷¹ A month before Musketeers was released, Zelig himself was killed on a Second Avenue trolley car at Thirteenth Street.¹⁷² A famous gangster of a later date, Lucky Luciano, grew up on Fourteenth Street, and since he was fifteen in 1912, one has an image of him with the other kids, drawn as if by a magnet to where the exterior shots of Musketeers were made and staring with admiration at the Gish sisters.

Musketeers is an impressive film in which the gangster clichés seem freshly minted. Biograph claimed that real gangsters took part in it and went so far as to name them (“Kid” Broad and “Harlem Tom” Evans^‡).¹⁷³ One should distrust publicity claims on principle, but there is no reason why this should not be true. Biograph, in common with most picture companies, employed bouncers for protection when on location in the streets, and such men would of necessity belong to a gang. They were a protected species. If Jacob Riis could photograph them, why not D. W. Griffith?

Lillian Gish and Elmer Booth in D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley, 1912. (Museum of Modern Art)

This little picture even has its own James Cagney; Elmer Booth’s characterization of the Snapper Kid has Cagney’s looks, his humor, and his viciousness. The consciousness of the gangster as a social evil, the importance of territory, and the corruption of the police were all strongly suggested in this film.

It would be a mistake to make too much of the film merely because it survives. Biograph themselves acknowledged that the film “does not run very strong as to plot.”¹⁷⁴ It was simply intended to show “vividly the doings of the gangster type of people.” I saw the film at least a dozen times without being able to follow the plot; I thought the shots were in the wrong order. Not until I read Carlos Clarens’s graphic description in his book Crime Movies did I notice the almost imperceptible movement of a gangster putting knockout drops into Lillian Gish’s drink and causing the confrontation between the two gangs. Griffith’s audience would have spotted that instantly, having read about it in the yellow press and seen it in the many white slave and gangster pictures made before his.

The street scenes, shot on West Twelfth Street,¹⁷⁵ are unusually evocative. The scene with the elderly Jew, which so resembles a Riis photograph, was as staged as any of the interiors. Griffith had noticed, in actuality shots, that people tended to stare at the camera. By placing a girl at the center of the shot and instructing her to do just that, he makes the scene seem utterly authentic, even though the “old man” discarded his whiskers as soon as Mr. Griffith called “Cut.”¹⁷⁶

The sensation of 1912 was the murder of Herman Rosenthal, who had opened several gambling houses, had failed with all of them, and blamed the New York Police Department. A trio of gamblers, Bald Jack Rose, Bridgey Webber, and Harry Vallon, hired four gunmen, who shot Rosenthal on the sidewalk outside the Hotel Metropole on West Forty-third Street. Police Lieutenant Charles Becker, corrupt head of the anti-gambling squad, was made the scapegoat in a vast cover-up. Rose, Webber, Vallon, and Sam Schepps (who had paid off the gunmen) were only too pleased to cooperate with the district attorney. They were freed; Becker and the gunmen went to the electric chair.

Advertisement for Wages of Sin, the film that exploited the Rosenthal sensation. From Moving Picture World, May 31, 1913.

A real gangster in a crime film; Bald Jack Rose is given high-minded sentiments by the press agent. From Moving Picture World, May 31, 1913.

The case mesmerized New York, the newspapers gave it more coverage than any crime story in their history, and the participants became household names. Sam Schepps invested in a motion picture called The Wages of Sin, about the perils of gambling. It did not touch upon the Rosenthal case, and there was nothing exceptional about it beyond the fact that the leading roles were played by Bald Jack Rose, Harry Vallon, and himself. (Bridgey Webber, sick with remorse, refused to take part.)

“A Disgusting Film,” declaimed two editorials in Moving Picture News, which pleaded with exhibitors to ostracize The Wages of Sin: “All the worst elements in the youth in our cities will flock to see this film … All the moral, clean, upright, thinking people will once more refer to the degrading and disgusting condition of Cinematography.”¹⁷⁷

The National Board of Censorship initially rejected it, but the general committee overruled the board and passed the film, leading to a demand for the removal of the board. The chairman, Dr. Frederic C. Howe, explained that as far as he could see, the picture was just a harmless melodrama. There was nothing to suggest crime or to degrade moral standards. “All mention whatever of Messrs. Rose, Vallon and Schepps was eliminated from the main title and subtitles before the Board approved the film,” he said. “The Board did not consider that it had any right to prohibit these men from going on the film stage, but it had a right to prevent the morbid exploitation of these men’s reputations.” Rose, Vallon, and Schepps had not been convicted of a crime, but even if they had been, and had been sent to the penitentiary, the board would not have felt justified in forbidding them to appear in a film. “The Board is concerned with the moral effect of motion pictures, not with the moral character of the people who produce motion pictures or who act in them.”¹⁷⁸

The film was a three-reeler produced by David Horsley from a story by F. E. Farnsworth. “There is a realistic scene showing a table in a gambling house,” said George Blaisdell in Moving Picture World. “It is said to be authentic as to detail. Certainly it should be.”¹⁷⁹ The picture included references to the Mafia and the third degree. And since it was entirely concerned with thievery, blackmail, and murder, Dr. Howe’s comments about the absence of crime are baffling.

Said Moving Picture World: “Of course, the motive behind the making of this melodrama is simply to exploit three men whose names—and photographs, likewise—during the past year have been much in the public prints.… The three men under discussion are at liberty. Their friends will say they served the state. Their enemies and the friends of the five men under sentence of death at Sing Sing partly by reason of their testimony will use other language.”¹⁸⁰

The National Board of Censorship had no jurisdiction over posters, so while the names may have been expunged from the film, the picture was advertised as “The Three-Reel Moral Picture Enacted by Jack Rose, Sam Schepps and Harry Vallon.”¹⁸¹

In 1914, Bald Jack Rose wrote the story for Are They Born or Made?, directed by Lawrence McGill, which not only drew attention to the role of environment in the creation of criminals, but also blew the gaff on the link between gangsters and politicians. Intriguingly, it was one of the early films distributed by Warner’s, whose later gangster films are more famous.

But as long as most moving pictures hesitated to link the gangster with the politician,^§ some explanation had to be found for their antisocial behavior, for the gangsters of the early movies lived in a vacuum. Until Prohibition gave them a purpose, they were ordinary criminals. In The Musketeers of Pig Alley, the hoodlums are shown removing a man’s wallet, the kind of thing an East Side street kid could do in a flash. In Regeneration (1915), they hang around gambling and looking threatening, but committing no offense until one of them knifes a cop. Even as late as 1927, in von Sternberg’s Underworld, the gang leader, who in real life would have been running his team like the boss of a large corporation, is shown robbing a bank and a jewelry store on his own!

The Gangsters of New York,¹⁸² a Reliance four-reeler directed by James Kirkwood, hinted at the link between government and crime by blaming the existence of criminals on “the saloon of disreputable character”—the saloon being a center of machine politics. “The tough resort is depicted exactly as it is, a nuisance, a caterer to all that is low in man’s nature, blunting his moral sense and perpetuating organized crime.”¹⁸³

The only misdeed the gangster considers worthy of punishment is squealing, which was why, the film suggested, the police found it so hard to prove crimes. (It would be a brave film that suggested anything else.)

Variety criticized a sequence reminiscent of The Musketeers of Pig Alley, the two gangs prowling the streets looking for one another, “peeking round corners with their guns drawn, mostly repetition.”¹⁸⁴ Yet the story was bolder than the Griffith film. The Dugan gang breaks up the annual ball of a rival gang, and in the shootout the rival gang leader is killed. The Dugan brothers are framed and convicted, and the elder brother is executed. When the younger brother gets out of jail he sets out for vengeance and corners the man who squealed. But the influence of a girl persuades him to let the man go.

The picture was largely shot in powerful close-ups; Variety praised the “unusually good photography, a point this film appears to make being the close range of the camera in which eye expression may be plainly observed.”¹⁸⁵ The amount of publicity given to gunmen in the papers will make this a draw, they added. The acting of Henry B. Walthall and Jack Dillon was highly praised. And Variety pointed to an unusual subtitle, which apologized for the morbid scenes, such as the execution.

“The film cries out loud to the spectator in its agonizing appeal for a better understanding of conditions of crime,” said the New York Dramatic Mirror, which thought its power and its “wonderful handling” beggared description.¹⁸⁶

The majority of these early gangster pictures were shot in New York, sometimes in the very slums where the gangs operated. In 1914, Thomas Ince produced a two-reeler which was so carefully made, its locations so well chosen, that historians assume it was also filmed in New York.¹⁸⁷ But The Gangsters and the Girl (1914) was directed by Scott Sidney, from a Richard Spencer scenario, in California. The commercial district of Venice, a relatively quiet town on the coast near Santa Monica, was used for the scene of the pickpocket, and the hijacking of the police car took place in the Los Angeles Plaza district, near the Southern Pacific railroad yards, which also figure in the story.

Frame enlargement from The Gangsters and the Girl, 1914. Rooftop gun battle—the gangsters take a policeman hostage. (Gerald McKee)

The rooftop battle was filmed in the Los Angeles business district, where the tall buildings resembled those of New York, and the steel skeleton of a brand-new block completed the impression of a city of skyscrapers. (A sign in the background of another building reads, “WE SELL UPRIGHT PIANOS”—they would not find many customers in the Five Points or the Bowery!)

Molly Ashley (Elizabeth Burbridge), whose sweetheart, Jim Tracy (Arthur Jarrett), is leader of the neighborhood gang, is wrongfully convicted of being a pickpocket. Tracy’s gang hijack the police car transporting her to prison and take Molly back to their lair.

“Yuh couldn’t live straight now if yuh wanted to,” Tracy tells her. “Why, dere ain’t a ‘Harness Bull’ in de district but would pinch yuh at sight.”

Detective John Stone (Charles Ray) infiltrates the gang, bursting into their saloon and pretending the “bulls” are after him. One of the gang squeals to the police, who raid prematurely, before Stone has his evidence. The raid is a fiasco, but Stone’s identity is discovered by Molly, who has fallen in love with him. Tracy accuses her of squealing, and Stone is forced to kill him to protect her. The picture ends with Molly installed at business college, receiving flowers from John Stone, who will certainly be her future husband.

The Gangsters and the Girl, made a mere eighteen months after The Musketeers of Pig Alley, shows how proficient the Americans had become with crime-and-police pictures, spurred by competition from French serials. It is of particular value today in its crystallization of the public’s view of the New York gangsters, vintage 1914. Dressed like those in the photographs of Jacob Riis, they look convincing if you don’t examine them too closely. (The scruffy gang leader looks out of place in a Los Angeles park.) The film depicts the hoodlums as reassuringly disorganized, under constant attack from vigilant cops, liable to turn informer at any moment, their criminal activities restricted to a little mild burglary. Too poor to own automobiles, they can drive them nevertheless, a skill they will need in a few years when their world will revolve around rumrunning trucks and armor-plated sedans, when the amateurish crooks of this film will appear to belong to a long vanished era.

REGENERATION   Owen Kildare was a Bowery gang leader of the 1890s. At thirty he could neither read nor write; at thirty-eight he was earning his living as an author. This transformation was brought about by a schoolteacher, Marie R. Deering, with whom he had fallen in love. His autobiography was named for her—My Mamie Rose.¹⁸⁸

Kildare, half Irish and half French, ran away from an abusive foster father at the age of seven and joined a gang of newsboys led by Big Tim Sullivan. He developed into a strong fighter, boxed in the innumerable sporting houses in the Bowery, and worked as a bouncer. Society people who enjoyed “slumming” would hire him for a guided tour of the dives.

By the time these places closed (temporarily), Kildare was leader of his own gang. Outside Mike Callahan’s saloon on Chatham Square (which the film recreates), he met the schoolteacher who was to transform his life. Unlike the ravishing Swedish blonde who plays her in the film, she was somewhat dowdy. Marie, or Mamie as Kildare preferred to call her, not only taught him to read and write, she reformed him. Almost every night they went to Cooper Union—he often fell asleep, he admitted, in the more difficult lectures. Caught one night in a rainstorm, Marie developed “a trifling cold” and died a month before they were to be married. It took Kildare a long time to recover from her death, but eventually he entered a newspaper contest for a “True Love Story” and won. He became a staff writer on the New York Daily News, the paper he had sold as a boy thirty years before.

His book, which Hall Caine called the most remarkable ever written, was turned into a play by Kildare and Walter Hackett and became a Broadway success, with Arnold Daly. It was bought by William Fox (who had himself grown up on the East Side) and in 1915 was made into a film. The script, based more on the play than the book,¹⁸⁹ was credited to Raoul Walsh and Carl Harbaugh (his half brother), who was given a fictitious role as a district attorney.

But an uncredited influence is that of Rex Ingram, who joined Fox in May 1915, and wrote such scenarios as Yellow and White, released as Broken Fetters, about New York’s Chinese gangsters. (He quarreled with Fox and moved to Universal as a director before the year was over.) Ingram had a fascination with bizarre types, who are well represented in Regeneration. There is even a scene of a drunk staring at a goldfish in his glass, which Ingram repeated in The Four Horsemen. And the picture has the qualities of stylized naturalism, which quickly became his trademark.

Walsh does not acknowledge Ingram in his 1974 autobiography, Each Man in His Time, but he forgot that he was supposed to have written the script himself. “After I read the script of Regeneration,” he wrote, “the first picture I was to make for Fox, I was interested in the latitude the story offered.”

Rockcliffe Fellowes, from the New York stage, was cast as Owen Kildare—here called Conway—whom he resembled quite strikingly. The cameraman was a brilliant Frenchman, Georges Benoit. Together, they produced a film of such vigor, inventiveness and sheer filmmaking skill, despite all the changes made to the original story, that it is hard to believe it was made as early as 1915. In its bold technique, creation of atmosphere, use of locations and selection of players, it surpasses The Mother and the Law, the modern story of Intolerance, which Walsh’s mentor, D. W. Griffith, had begun the year before.

Regeneration gains immeasurably from being shot on the Bowery and using local people. The streets have a distinctly seedy look, impossible to re-create in California. Some of the faces Walsh selected are astonishing and some repulsive (such as a man whose nose has proliferated in a series of molehills, a combined result, presumably, of syphilis and alcohol).

There were more gangs in New York at the end of 1913 than at any other period,¹⁹⁰ and it was likely that many of them wound up playing extras. It certainly looks like it; the secondary gangsters are obviously nonactors. And Variety referred to the film using “several hundred Bowery dive supers.”¹⁹¹ Raoul Walsh told me he used to round up characters by going through the saloons and dives.¹⁹² Walsh was a great storyteller in the Irish tradition; he dressed up all his experiences like five-reelers, and how he really assembled these people is hard to tell. In his book, he says he went to Hell’s Kitchen (some distance from the Bowery) and found a pair of “typical hooligans” to help find extras for the boat scene. “Using basic English, I managed to get it through their heads that I needed a hundred or so men and about fifty women for passengers: “Don’t bring anyone who can’t swim. They’ll be paid five dollars and you’ll each get ten finder’s fee.”¹⁹³

The men showed up at the pier with a large crowd. “Some of the women were obviously hookers, many of the men looked as though they should have been on Death Row for every crime in the book,”¹⁹⁴ recalled Walsh. From journalistic color, Walsh’s story leaps into fantasy when he describes the scene of the fire aboard the boat, the women jumping into the river, their skirts ballooning up to reveal they were wearing nothing underneath. Faced with disaster, he hired a man to retouch every frame to provide the women with undergarments. Unfortunately, the film shows plenty of men jumping from the boat, but no women (a couple swarm decorously down ropes); no skirts balloon, no retouching needed.

He also claims to have been arrested for staging the scene (on charges of arson, indecent exposure, and malicious mischief!)¹⁹⁵ and summons William Fox’s secretary, Winfield Sheehan, to the rescue. Sheehan, later to become a producer, was the key to all this. For he had recently been secretary to Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo. A former Evening World reporter, Sheehan was one of the unofficial three-man committee that supervised gambling in Manhattan, allocating protection money by a method known as The Great Divide, to police and politicians. He figured in the background of the Rosenthal-Becker case (see this page) and was involved in several cases of police graft, but was never indicted, despite his mysterious wealth.¹⁹⁶ He was forced to resign in 1914 when a madam named him as “the Man Higher Up.”¹⁹⁷

As a former Tammany Hall man,¹⁹⁸ he would have had no trouble in organizing the gangs for picture purposes—and there would have been no reason for an arrest at the end of it. As secretary to Fox, he would have arranged for money to pass hands in the customary manner. As Walsh said, “He knew every cop in Manhattan and pulled a lot of weight.”¹⁹⁹ Sheehan first met Fox when the producer was fighting the Patents Trust. He organized Fox’s private army and joined up full-time in 1914. He maintained cordial relations with both the police and the underworld.²⁰⁰

Regeneration starts with ten-year-old Owen (John McCann) watching from the window of a filthy tenement as the wicker coffin containing his mother’s body is pushed into a hearse and driven away. An old couple across the hall take him under their wing, but they are drunken and violent and the boy’s life becomes a nightmare. He takes to the streets and sleeps at night on the warm grating of a bakery.

At seventeen, Owen (H. McCoy) finds work as a longshoreman and proves himself a first-class fighter. At twenty-five, Owen (Rockcliffe Fellowes) is leader of a gang opposed by District Attorney Ames (Carl Harbaugh). The D.A. is a frequent visitor to the home of the wealthy Deerings, whose daughter, Marie (Anna Q. Nilsson), leads a butterfly existence, “hiding, even from herself, her finer qualities.” The film contrasts the Deerings’ refined dinner party with a replica of McGuirk’s Suicide Hall in the Bowery, here called Grogan’s. Ames agrees to take Marie slumming, but his publicity precedes him and Owen’s gang makes it hot for him. His party scurries out of the hall, Marie silently pleading with Owen to intercede. Struck by her beauty, he escorts the party to safety.

Frame enlargements from Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration, 1915: Owen’s mother’s body is carried away. (Gerald McKee)

Owen’s new guardian, the ferocious Mrs. Conway, played by Maggie Weston.

John McCann as Owen aged ten, sleeping on the streets.

Outside, a socialist speaker holds forth, pointing an accusing finger at the high-society slummers. His words strike deep; they awaken Marie’s social conscience. She becomes a social worker and helps to organize the settlement house’s annual outing—a river excursion—which ends in catastrophe. Fire breaks out aboard the steamer and the passengers panic, scrambling for the lifeboats and jumping overboard.^‖201

Owen helps Marie restore a child to its mother at the settlement house. She persuades him that the settlement house needs him more than the gang does and teaches him to read and write. He makes splendid progress. But his old loyalty obliges him to help a vicious criminal, Skinny the Rat (William Sheer). When Marie goes to find Owen at the gang’s headquarters, she is set upon by Skinny. Owen bursts in, and a tremendous fight breaks out. The police arrive, and in the confusion Owen races upstairs and smashes into Skinny’s lair. Skinny, escaping through the window, fires once and hits Marie, wounding her.

Owen carries her back to the settlement house, but she dies. He sets out for revenge and is only prevented from strangling Skinny by a vision of Marie and a memory of her preaching. Skinny tries to escape by swinging hand over hand along a clothesline, four stories up, but Owen’s friend shoots him. The last we see of Skinny is a horrifying flash of staring eyes on the blood-soaked cobbles.

The film ends with Marie’s burial. “She lies here, this girl o’mine, but her soul, the noblest and purest thing I ever knew, lives on in me. It was she, my Mamie Rose, who taught me that within me was a mind and a God-given heart. She made of my life a changed thing and never can it be the same again.”

Fire aboard the pleasure ship.

Walsh’s memory of the film was very dim when he wrote his book, so he made up an ending: “the heroine kneeling at her slain lover’s grave and strewing it with fresh flowers … I wrote the epitaph for the tomb-stone: ‘To Lefty, a sinner who found peace.’ I had the camera move in for a closeup in best Billy Bitzer style. Anna’s beautiful face was wet with tears when I told her to look at the camera. It was so harrowing that I almost bawled with her.”²⁰²

As Walsh’s wife, Miriam Cooper, put it, “Raoul never bored you with the truth.”²⁰³

Walsh should have had more pride in his film; he should at least have kept a print of it. But it was a feature of the industry that its output was ephemeral. For sixty years the film was lost, and not until the late 1970s was it discovered by David Shepard and copied by the Museum of Modern Art just before it decomposed entirely. It is marred by mottled patches and blotches, but they do not completely erase Benoit’s magnificent photography, with its sophisticated tracking shots. The use of locations and the appearances by assorted bums, winos, prostitutes, and heavies make it the most authentic-looking gangster film surviving from the entire silent period.

This bit player was almost certainly a real gangster.

A cop questions the gang—William Sheer, right.

What is remarkable for a film of 1915 is the emphasis placed on environment. (One title says, “And so the days pass in the only environment he knows.”) Of course, the controversy over whether environment or heredity formed the criminal mind was in full swing, yet how few films ever tackled it! The titles of The Mother and the Law refer to it a couple of times, but the look of Regeneration makes one appreciate how much is missing from the Griffith film.

Owen’s environment is the Bowery and the Lower East Side, its streets choked with people and pushcarts. He is surrounded by squalor, drunkenness, and brutality. As a boy, he is sent to the saloon for beer. Too young to be allowed in, he squats at the entrance and passes the pail (“growler”) underneath the swinging doors. On the way home, he drinks some of the beer—the way so many slum children were introduced to alcohol. Yet when the adult Owen is shown drinking a glass of beer, a quick mix to him eating ice cream as a child indicates how harmless it is, a rare example of an anti-Prohibition comment in an early film.

That Walsh did not set the film in period proved an advantage, for he could turn his camera on the slums with the freedom of a documentary filmmaker. Traffic in Souls captured the life of New York as a background, but Walsh brings it up to the foreground: we see one of the city’s old flower women, selling a bunch and spitting on the money, and other close shots of picturesque inhabitants are dropped into the action throughout the film.

Fool’s Highway, 1924. A remarkable re-creation of a Bowery bar for a remake of Regeneration. (Museum of Modern Art)

Regeneration has its faults. Anna Q. Nilsson, later an actress of considerable charm and talent, registers blankly in this, as though Walsh had no interest in her role.²⁰⁴ The interior set of Chicory Hall is too obviously painted, as are the back-drops outside the windows of the tenement. The interior of Grogan’s saloon is lit by direct sunlight, and the editing is sometimes too snatched, although it usually gives the picture terrific pace.

Regeneration received excellent reviews and in 1916 was selected as one of the great American films, along with Ince’s The Wrath of the Gods and Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.²⁰⁵ Walsh fulfilled the promise of the film and became an important director whose gangster pictures were among the best ever made—Me, Gangster (1928), The Roaring Twenties (1939), and White Heat (1949).

The film was remade in 1924 by Irving Cummings, the star of so many social films and by then a director. Although it was set in its correct period, 1892, this time it was just a “routine melodrama.”²⁰⁶ The difference between the two versions sums up the gulf between the Reform Era and the Age of Hays: the remake was entitled Fool’s Highway after Kildare’s definition of the Bowery as the “Highway of the Foolish.” This time the schoolteacher (Mary Philbin) has become a seamstress in a secondhand clothing shop, not concerned about the environment or her lover’s lack of education but simply fascinated by his brute strength. (“Mike” Kildare was played by Pat O’Malley.) And once he reforms, Kildare joins the police force!²⁰⁷

THE PENALTY    A combination of gangster film, parable, and chilling melodrama, The Penalty (1920) is a remarkable piece of work, suggesting the direction such films might have taken had it not been for Hays. It also shows Wallace Worsley’s promise as a director brilliantly fulfilled—it is a far more cinematic film than his handsome but stately The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923).

Adapted from a novel by Gouverneur Morris and scripted by Charles Kenyon and Philip Lonergan, it depends upon symbolism, handled in such a way that the very symbols are entertaining. The theme of a gangster planning to take over a city could be seen as prescient, considering that “Scarface” Al Capone was, that very year, making his first big kill and inheriting an empire. The original story had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1912–1913; the situation in the film owed something to the Red Scare of 1919.

The Penalty is not the kind of picture one associates with the age of innocence. It equates Reds and immigrant workers with criminals and shows a killer who is never caught, a dope addict who carries out the gang leader’s dirty work.

It tells of a boy, a victim of city traffic, who is operated on by the inexperienced Dr. Ferris. The child recovers consciousness in time to overhear Dr. Ferris being reprimanded for amputating both his legs and mangling his patient’s life for no reason.

Blizzard (Lon Chaney), a gangster whose legs were amputated in childhood, takes his revenge on society in The Penalty, 1920.

“Twenty-seven years later, San Francisco is the richest city in the western world. She has one hideous blemish—the Barbary Coast.”

The place is still swarming with prostitutes and saloons, according to this freewheeling story, which is nonetheless given a contemporary setting. A prostitute is murdered and the killer sheltered by a cripple, Blizzard (Lon Chaney)—the injured boy grown up, the most vicious criminal the city has ever known. The Secret Service puts Rose (Ethel Grey Terry), its most daring operative, on the case. “We could get him for theft, arson, murder—but his criminal machine would still grind on,” says the chief. “Through the Master I must reach his slaves—the underground powers of the Reds.”

Blizzard runs a mysterious factory, where Barbary Coast dance-hall girls turn out hundreds of straw hats—all so innocent it must be sinister. Blizzard runs the sweatshop with an iron hand. Rose is warned that whoever enters that den risks worse than death, but she shrugs: “That’s all in a day’s work.” (Considering the implication, this was not the sort of response of which the censors would have approved.)

Meanwhile, Dr. Ferris has prospered. His daughter, Barbara (Claire Adams), a sculptress, advertises for a model for “Satan After the Fall,” and Blizzard applies for the job. Barbara and he develop a strange relationship which arouses the jealousy of Dr. Wilmot (Kenneth Harlán), Ferris’s assistant, who expects to marry Barbara.

Rose quickly becomes Blizzard’s favorite and grows very fond of him. Yet duty first—whenever he leaves to pose for Barbara, she searches the place. She soon discovers concealed switches and subterranean passages, but her most astonishing discovery is of a fully equipped operating theatre and a weapons cache.

Blizzard’s behavior disgusts Dr. Wilmot, who remarks, “That monster ought to be chloroformed and put out of the way.” Dr. Ferris finally tells his daughter the full tragic story. “If you have made him what he is, it is all the more our duty to help him,” says Barbara.

As Blizzard reveals his plans at last to his chief lieutenant, O’Hagan, so we see them in action. Blizzard has organized thousands of disgruntled foreign laborers. They all wear the distinctive straw hats, and he issues them rifles and pistols. He plans to take over San Francisco. Ten thousand foreign malcontents will infiltrate the city in small detachments. At the signal, an explosion, the men will open fire on the police, stage riots and burn buildings, and slowly draw police and military out to the suburbs, leaving the city undefended and at Blizzard’s mercy.

One of the scenes that upset the censors: Claire Adams as the sculptress, with Cesare Gravina and Kenneth Harlan in The Penalty, 1920, directed by Wallace Worsley.

O’Hagan is shocked. “You talk as if you had legs. By God, you’ve gone mad!”

But Blizzard plans to have legs. He intends to kidnap Dr. Wilmot and force Dr. Ferris to amputate his legs and graft them on to his. “You’ve played the trick with apes,” he tells Dr. Ferris. “Now I’m putting human beings at your service.”

Dr. Ferris agrees to conduct the operation. But when Blizzard wakes up he is a changed man. Ferris has operated on his brain, removed a tumor, and restored him to mental health.

“The tyrant’s hand relaxed—the whirlwind breaks.”

The gangsters realize that unless they finish him, he will finish them.

Blizzard and Rose are happily married, but he is shot through a window. Dying, he says, “Fate chained me to Evil—for that I must pay the penalty.”

This was Lon Chaney’s seventh release since his triumph as the cripple in The Miracle Man (1919). The production had been hard on him: his legs were strapped back, and the straps had to be removed every ten minutes and his legs massaged as they grew numb. He was in bed for weeks afterward and suffered a permanent muscle injury to his knees.²⁰⁸ “The nervous strain was terrific,” said Chaney.²⁰⁹

Burns Mantle in Photoplay thought the film about as cheerful as a hanging. “But for all its gruesome detail you are quite certain to be interested in it.”²¹⁰ He described a final shot, missing from surviving prints, in which Chaney appeared with his legs attached and took a bow (to tremendous applause).²¹¹

The death of Blizzard could not offset the fact that the film was a compendium of all the scenes most loathed by censors—a naked model posing in a studio, a shivering drug addict being teased with a special dope kit (shown in close-up), a prostitute picking up a drunk outside a saloon, another prostitute being knifed in a dance hall—the real Thalia dance hall on the Barbary Coast²¹²—a female agent prostituting herself for her job and falling in love with a gangster. The story had been printed as a serial in the Hearst magazines, then compiled in book form, neither of which caused any kind of disturbance. The film, however, came under strong attack. Motion Picture Classic called it “an orgy of unpleasantness. We do not mind constructive unpleasantness, but this is clap-trap magazine thriller goo.”²¹³

Early in 1921, the journalist Frederick Boyd Stevenson mounted an attack against The Penalty in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Proposing to view crime in the movies with “an unprejudiced mind,” Stevenson based his remarks almost entirely on this one film, in his opinion, the strongest example of the current crop of “nefarious” crime and sex pictures: “It pretends to have a moral, but it has none … its only excuse is crime portrayed by a disgusting human beast. The whole thing was nauseating. The only motive is crime and an appeal to the worst sides of human nature—the licentious and the beast in man. You may imagine its effect upon young girls and young boys and even upon people of middle age in certain walks of life—the very people who attend motion picture theaters.”²¹⁴

Stevenson interviewed a member of the Review Committee of the National Board of Review. This exchange between a relentless interrogator and a moral guardian obliged to defend the board’s action captures with great immediacy the floundering of the censors that rendered them so unsatisfactory to both hard-liners and liberals.

Stevenson asks if the lady objected to anything in the film:

“ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I saw nothing at all in it that was objectionable.’

“I reached into my bookcase and brought out a picture of Blizzard, the disgusting beast of a half-man sitting on a chair with the stumps of his legs sticking out straight and across them drawn the frail form of a pretty young woman, whom he was kissing.

“ ‘This picture,’ I said, ‘was, of course, much more sensual and revolting on the moving screen than it appears here. Did you see that picture on the reel of The Penalty?’

“ ‘Yes, I saw it,’ said she.

“ ‘What did you think of it?’

“ ‘I thought it was just part of the play.’

“ ‘Did you object to it?’ I asked.

“ ‘No,’ said she.

“ ‘Why?’

“ ‘I didn’t see anything objectionable in it,’ she replied.

“ ‘Have you a daughter?’

“ ‘I have.’

“ ‘Would you care to have your daughter see that picture?’ I asked.

“ ‘I would not have any objection to have her see it,’ she replied. ‘I think she would be so disgusted that it would not have any effect upon her.’

“ ‘Why, because the man has no legs?’

“ ‘Well, because of the general character of the play.’

“ ‘But if he had two legs—then you might object—’

“ ‘Oh, I’ve seen worse kissing than that in the movies.’

“ ‘Did you object to it?’

“ ‘I don’t know that I did. There are worse scenes than that in The Penalty.’

“ ‘For instance?’

“ ‘Well, in the scene where Blizzard is in the studio of the surgeon’s daughter. I thought it very improper for a young lady to receive such a man there alone.’

“ ‘Did you object to it?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘Why not, if it were improper? You were there to review it—were you not?’

“ ‘Oh, well, you can’t cut out everything in life. You see we have no power of censorship, anyhow.’

“ ‘What is the use of having a Board of Review, then?’

“ ‘Well, we can make suggestions.’

“ ‘But you didn’t make even a suggestion in The Penalty?’

“ ‘No, I didn’t see any reason to.’

“ ‘Did you favor a real Board of Censors backed up by the law?’

“ ‘No, what’s the use? It wouldn’t censor.’

“ ‘What’s the use, then, of a Review Board?’

“ ‘It can make suggestions.’

“ ‘To motion picture producers that pay fees of $6.25 per reel?’

“ ‘Well, that is legitimate. But you will never get anywhere with motion picture reform.’ ”²¹⁵

The theme of revenge on society deserved a more realistic rendition, but this melodrama has a sadistic madness about it which admirably suits its subject. It was, alas, to be the last thoroughly vicious portrait of a hoodlum until the grand epoch of the gangster film, in the 1930s and 1940s.

Although the Hays Office would have preferred a moratorium on underworld pictures (as crime statistics rocketed), they remained enormously popular. But now that the industry was consolidated around studios, mostly in California, the realistic backgrounds of the big cities tended to be replaced by sets. This was so even in New York, where it was clearly more sensible to construct a slum at the Astoria studios than to take a film crew into the streets teeming with people, pushcarts, and other schedule-delaying obstructions. These sets were often so skillfully built that they were indistinguishable from the real thing and were usually peopled by ghetto residents. Nonetheless, something was missing. And when a director had the nerve to insist on filming on location, the difference was so apparent that reviewers drew attention to it.

Just such a film was Big Brother (1923), directed by Allan Dwan. By all accounts, this would have been a classic had Paramount permitted it to survive. Its vivid portrait of the tenement districts of New York might have made it one of the most treasured of all silent films.

James Quirk of Photoplay thought so much of it that he hailed it in an editorial: “Right on top of Pike’s Peak, with the thermometer below zero, I would take off my hat and make a low obeisance to Allan Dwan for his production of Big Brother. He has made a truly great picture. In my opinion it ranks with The Miracle Man. What Chaplin did for Jackie Coogan, Dwan has done for seven-year-old Mickey Bennett.”²¹⁶

The Rex Beach story (adapted by Paul Sloane) concerned a gang leader, Jimmy Donovan (Tom Moore), whose lieutenant, Big Ben Murray (Joe King), is shot in a gang war. Dying, he commits his son, Midge (Bennett) into his boss’s care with a plea to save him from his environment of crime and poverty. To keep the boy, Donovan finds that he must himself “go straight,” but in spite of his attempt the little fellow is taken by the juvenile court and placed in an orphanage. Donovan is accused of a holdup, is arrested, escapes, and goes out to get the gang that committed the crime so that he may vindicate himself, for if he ever hopes to get the boy back he has to keep his record clean.²¹⁷

Adele Whitely Fletcher of Motion Picture Magazine recognized that the film was propaganda for the Big Brother movement,²¹⁸ but it was so accurate a slice of New York gangster life that it aroused instant attention from the first scene.²¹⁹

Variety’s man was obviously au fait with the ways of the gangs, judging by his review: “One little detail will suffice to illustrate the knowledge of gangdom by the author and director. The leader of the rival gang arrives with his ‘moll.’ He wanders inside and is promptly ‘fanned’ for his ‘rod’ by the bouncers. He is ‘clean’ for he had previously slipped the gat to the dame. She had it planted conveniently in her handbag. Even in gangdom it is unethical to search a lady.

Big Brother. Director Allan Dwan (right, by camera) shoots a meeting of the Car Barn Gang against the background of the Manhattan Bridge and South Ferry Terminal. Hal Rosson at camera. (American Museum of the Moving Image)

“A stick-up by four auto bandits was just as intelligently handled. The much abused ‘cokie’ was rejuvenated by the character work of Raymond Hatton. His dope fiend is a sterling bit of character acting and another of the many details which make this picture stand out among underworld shots like the Woolworth Building in a Los Angeles suburb.”²²⁰

Allan Dwan wanted realism in this picture. The great days of the New York gangs were over, but Dwan sent out his assistants to enlist the remnants to work in the film. “They agreed,” he said, “because it was five dollars a day for each man. I was going to stage fights with them, but ones that I could blow a whistle on and stop. We engaged a big dance hall and put on a gangsters’ dance. The way the story was written, this was presumably a dance held by the Hudson Dusters and their girlfriends, but the Gas House Gang butted in and made a shambles of it all.”

The heavies assembled at the dance hall, agreeing to maintain a truce.

“While we were preparing, the Strong Arm Squad, as it was called in New York—the toughest gang of policemen in the world—turned up. A tipoff had been given that I had these two gangs up there and they knew that that wouldn’t be peaceful under any conditions, so they came in car loads, armed with billy clubs and brass knuckles, everything that’s necessary to subdue a crowd.”

Gangster Jimmy Donovan (Tom Moore) foster-father for Midge (Mickey Bennett) in Big Brother, 1923, directed by Allan Dwan. (George Eastman House)

Dwan assured them there wouldn’t be any trouble, and to reassure them (and himself), he went up to the balcony and made a speech, making everyone swear on their sacred word of honor that they would not start trouble unless he gave the order. “If I tell you to do anything, or any of my men tell you to do something, consider it an order and don’t do anything else.” They agreed. When they got a look at the Strong Arm Squad beginning to crowd in the doorways, they decided they’d better be good.

“We had to light this big place with Klieg lights—they were called broadsides, and they were double arc lights, and we dropped a scrim in front of them to subdue them. Those were called silks.

“The cameraman, Hal Rosson, took a look at the lighting and it looked fine except in spots it wasn’t enough. As the band was about to start up for the dance, and the men were all in position with their girls, ready to start waltzing, he hollered to his chief gaffer, ‘Take the silks off the broads.’

“The order was immediately obeyed, every girl was ripped almost nude by the obedient gangsters. The girls started to shriek and holler and that got the guys fighting. The Strong Arm Squad went to work and in no time there was real panic.

“All I could do was holler ‘Keep grinding!’ to the cameras and we got great shots of the mayhem. But when I wanted to release the picture I was stopped cold by the censors, not because it was rough but because the girls were over-exposed. So that spoiled one of the greatest shots I ever saw come out of a camera.”²²¹

Historians have to be wary of Irish raconteurs, even Canadian-born ones like Dwan; this splendid story is too good to be true, especially when he admits it was cut out of the film. But perhaps there is some substance in it; perhaps some of the scene survived, for Variety said: “A gang fight which started at the annual ball of the Pastime A.C. was another triumph of direction and technique.”²²²

One of the rare gangster films to link politicians and criminals was an unpretentious six-reeler from Preferred Pictures, B. P. Schulberg’s company, entitled Exclusive Rights. The title of the original story by Jerome Wilson was better: Invisible Government. Directed by Frank O’Connor in 1926, it hovers on the edge of resembling a typical Warner Bros. picture of the early thirties.²²³

A corrupt political boss, Allen Morris (Charles Hill Mailes), schemes to break the new governor, war hero Stanley Wharton (Gayne Whitman), who intends to execute one of Morris’s henchmen, Bickel (Sheldon Lewis), unless he reveals his employer. Boss Morris collaborates with Wharton’s fiancée (Lillian Rich) in championing a new bill for the abolition of capital punishment; together they frame a wartime friend of the governor’s, Mack Miller (Raymond McKee), with a murder. The governor’s resolve is not shaken, and when Miller is led to the chair, Bickel finally breaks and implicates Morris.

The Boss is constantly surrounded by bodyguards and gangsters of the new breed—sleek, well-dressed men-about-town with automatics in their jackets who never take their hats off. Although bootlegging is not mentioned, much of the action is set in the boss’s hangout, a nightclub called The Elite, with Grace Cunard, another veteran movie star, playing a Texas Guinan character. Variety’s man—who ought to know—thought all this was well-managed “with good pictorial shots of the semi-nude girls, the hard-boiled hostess and the specialty people, notably an eccentric dance by Jimmy Savo.… For some reason the producer does not exploit these night club bits in his billing matter, thereby missing a good bet. Instead, the billing emphasizes the death house angle and the political phase, which doesn’t mean a thing.”²²⁴

When the Boss orders the frame-up of Miller, we see another henchman, Flash (Gaston Glass), shooting a man (with a silencer) at the nightclub and tossing the gun on the body. Miller stumbles upon it, and a cabaret girl accuses him. When Miller is arrested, the Boss orders his men to get rid of Flash—he knows too much. In an imaginatively handled sequence, we see Flash preparing for a bath. The closet door slowly opens and a gunman emerges and tiptoes into the bathroom. Flash is now in the bath, and helpless, but he sees his jacket with a gun butt just visible in the pocket. He asks the man to pass it so he can get a cigarette. The gunman gives him one of his. Then the gunman lunges forward, and we see Flash’s bare arm trying to grab his throat, then slowly relaxing and falling away. The gunman eventually straightens up and dries his arm. Fade-out.

Although Variety thought it skillfully done, the acting “extraordinarily convincing for a melodrama,”²²⁵ Photoplay was surprisingly contemptuous: “Even if you are given free passes, don’t waste your time.”²²⁶

Many historians give the impression that Underworld (1927), directed by Josef von Sternberg, marked the start of the gangster cycle. Although it was adapted from a Ben Hecht treatment about the Cicero and South Side mob of Chicago—and although Hecht was a Chicago journalist who had witnessed the rise of the racketeers—the film was essentially a product of von Sternberg’s imagination. The incidents, cleverly elaborated in Charles Furthman’s story and Robert N. Lee’s scenario, would have made an outstanding social film; as it was, von Sternberg turned them into a brilliant and almost poetic melodrama about the ethics of loyalty. A drunk who was once a lawyer (Clive Brook) is picked up by gang boss Bull Weed (George Bancroft) and put to work for him. The boss’s girlfriend (Evelyn Brent) is magnetically attractive, but the lawyer keeps his distance until Bull is sent to prison. He then faces the choice: to run away with her or to rescue him. He chooses the latter course, but the gangster hears through the grapevine that the lawyer is meddling with his girl. He breaks out, returns to his hideout, and withstands a police siege. The lawyer and the girl risk their lives to rescue him, and, with proof of their loyalty, he gives himself up to the police and goes to his death.

“Jacob Kern, former State’s Attorney of Chicago, was pressed into service as technical adviser on scenes for Ben Hecht’s crime story Underworld.” This original caption was typical press agent stuff, making the best of a brief visit by a prominent person. Underworld, 1928, had little to do with the gangsters in the Chicago of the twenties—but was a brilliant picture, nonetheless. Fred Kohler (left), George Bancroft and Clive Brook (right). (National Film Archive)

The City Gone Wild, 1927. James Cruze’s gangster picture with Thomas Meighan as lawyer John Phelan, here calling on the gunmen to surrender. (Museum of Modern Art)

George Pratt, who points out that the siege sequence was derived from Ben Hecht’s story “The Man Hunt,” thinks that the script reflected far more of Hecht’s experience as a reporter than anything von Sternberg could add.²²⁷ But the world of the gangster, with which we were to grow more and more familiar in sound films, is barely sketched in Underworld. True, Bancroft makes a magnificent twenties-style crook, well dressed, with a fashionable moll, but he is shown in 1927 behaving like a thug of the old days—robbing a bank and a jewelry store. Bootlegging does not come into it. The rivalry of the gangsters is merely an elaborate version of The Musketeers of Pig Alley. And although Hans Dreier’s art direction is outstanding, the whole film was shot in the studio and Chicago is never mentioned (even though the film was entitled Nuits de Chicago in France).

Bull Weed’s rival, Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler), was based on Dion O’Banion, who was shot in a flower shop in similar circumstances to those in the film. This would make Bull a kind of Al Capone—but that would indeed be stretching a point.

According to von Sternberg, Hecht’s contribution was a treatment eighteen pages long—“full of moody Sandburgian sentences.”²²⁸ Von Sternberg wrote: “It had a good title and dealt with the escapades of a gangster. It was untried material, as no film had as yet been made of this deplorable phase of our culture.”²²⁹ Von Sternberg was not expected to stay the course as director, and Hecht was hostile to his being assigned to it, as he had worked with Arthur Rosson. Von Sternberg provided what Hecht derisively termed “half a dozen sentimental touches”²³⁰—the gangster feeding a hungry kitten, for instance. Actually, von Sternberg used the film as “an experiment in photographic violence and montage,”²³¹ and the result was a magnificent piece of filmcraft. And while it had a superficial connection to topical events, it had very little to do with reality. When Hecht saw it for the first time, he declared, “I must rush home at once. I think it’s mal de mer.”²³² But von Sternberg cared nothing for authenticity: “When I made Underworld I was not a gangster, nor did I know anything about gangsters.”²³³

The picture was an enormous hit; Ben Hecht won an Academy Award, and von Sternberg’s career received a tremendous boost. The gangster picture was established as top box-office material; within three or four years, Little Caesar, Scarface, and The Public Enemy would all appear.

There was an irony about Underworld which no reviewer picked up. Bull Weed is arrested for murder, and, more ironic still, executed. Since 1922, not a single murderer from the ranks of the racketeers had been executed.²³⁴

Faced with the success of Underworld, Paramount put another gangster film into production as a vehicle for Thomas Meighan. His career had been on the wane for some time, and not even an excellent film like The Canadian (1926) had revived it. They gave him Louise Brooks (in a minor role) and James Cruze, of Covered Wagon fame, as director. The picture was called First Degree Murder, later changed to The City Gone Wild (1927). The story was by Jules and Charles Furthman and the titles by Herman Mankiewicz. Cruze had entertained Al Capone at his home, so he had a certain knowledge of gangsters.

The plot verged on the revolutionary, for its hero is a gangster’s lawyer, John Phelan (Meighan), who always secures his client’s acquittal on some technicality. His clients are currently staging a violent gang war, and he manages to impose a truce while his friend, D.A. Franklin Ames (Wyndham Standing), investigates. Nada (Marietta Millner) loves both men. She is the daughter of a powerful businessman whom Ames discovers is “the man higher up.” Ames now knows too much, and he is killed. Phelan steps into his job to avenge his death.

The link between the criminals, politicians, and big business nearly popped into the open in this picture, which nonetheless blew the gaff on crooked lawyers. Unhappily, James Cruze shot in a hurry as a windup to his contract with Paramount. Variety said it was roughly handled by West Coast theatres; in San Francisco, Meighan’s name was blocked out on the billboards. Variety thought it quite good, however: “The gang stuff is a la Underworld—machine guns and plenty tough. The two main yeggs each have a moll carrying their gat in the pocketbook. Very authentic in these little details is the picture.”²³⁵

But it did nothing for Meighan’s career, and Paramount sold his contract to Howard Hughes. By doing so, it inadvertently contributed to a remarkable gangster film, one which finally told the truth.

Prohibition had changed the structure of the underworld. “A new type of gang came into being,” wrote Leo Katcher. “It had discipline and order. It possessed a chain of command. And, most important, it was financially independent.”²³⁶

The Irish and the Jews were replaced by the Italians, and the old gangs, who controlled a few blocks, gave way to organizations controlling cities and states. “No law enforcement agency would remain uncorrupted.”²³⁷

Only one silent film reflected this. There had been stories like Flash (1923), in which a police chief tries to clean up a city and arouses the anger of the gambling and political element,²³⁸ and The Last Edition (1925), in which a bootlegger is protected by an assistant district attorney. But these were low-budget independent films, of a kind usually made outside Hays’s jurisdiction. In the mainstream of American cinema only one film had the courage to tackle the new kind of gangster—a task not without danger.

Significantly, it was made from a play. Even more significantly, it was produced by Howard Hughes, who was independently wealthy himself, although his Caddo Company was a member of the MPPA.

THE RACKET    Bartlett Cormack, a society reporter on the Chicago Daily News and a friend of Ben Hecht’s, wrote the play The Racket. The film version was, by all accounts, the most important gangster picture of the silent era. It was directed by Lewis Milestone. Cormack did his own adaptation, and the scenario was written by Harry Behn²³⁹ and Del Andrews. If it survives in the Hughes vault, no one will reveal.

It was important not because it was unusually well directed, as most critics agreed it was, but because at long last a film dealt head-on with the link between gangsters, police, and politicians—a link, incidentally, which was so thoroughly American it went back to Colonial times.²⁴⁰

The play was set in Chicago, and true to that city’s tradition of fearless concern for the truth it was kept well away from there, for it included unmistakable references to Chicago’s City Hall and its crooked mayor, Big Bill Thompson, who had been mayor from 1915 to 1923, when a reform candidate was elected. When he ran again in 1927 his victory was assured; Al Capone offered his full support and $260,000 for campaign expenses.²⁴¹ The play referred to Thompson not by name but as “the Old Man” and at one point accused him of having a man “accidentally” killed.

When Cormack published the play in 1928, he took the precaution of denying any resemblance to living persons.²⁴² Most people believed he had based the character of the gangster, Nick Scarsi, on Capone (the stage role had been played by Edward G. Robinson). In February 1928, the Illinois state attorney announced he was considering ways to keep The Racket from touring Chicago. “While the play actually can’t be barred,” said Variety, “theatre managers know that any house taking it will have a tough time; also, that the house will lose caste considerably with city officials.”²⁴³

Leaving Chicago to be entertained by the real thing, The Racket went instead to Los Angeles, where it had a successful run. Robinson was rediscovered for the movies, although not for this one. Lewis Milestone cast Louis Wolheim (who had played in his Two Arabian Knights in 1927 and would play in his All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930) as Nick Scarsi.

The Racket, 1928. Thomas Meighan as Captain McQuigg and Louis Wolheim as gangster Nick Scarsi. (Museum of Modern Art)

“Scarsi is the first modern mobster leader of either stage or screen,” wrote Gerald Peary. “He controls not only his own organization but extends his influence into all segments of the ostensibly non-criminal world.”²⁴⁴ Scarsi is an Italian immigrant, and Capone was born to Italian parents in Brooklyn. Scarsi is older than Capone, who, in 1928, was a mere twenty-nine. In real life, Wolheim had been a professor of mathematics at Cornell University and had acquired his distinctive broken nose on the sports field, but he looked squat, brutal, and neolithic, which was why he had been cast as O’Neill’s Hairy Ape. He was a brilliant actor, but one wishes Robinson had repeated the role, for Wolheim resembled the old-style gangster. As a reporter in The Racket puts it, “In the old days, crooks were hard all right, but they were dumb, and you kind o’ liked ’em. Now they’re smart, and you don’t like ’em.”

While many of the new gangsters started out in the traditional way—and Capone received his basic training with the old Five Points gang in New York—they soon acquired such vast sums of money that they became the bosses of the politicians who had once bossed them.²⁴⁵

Playing the obstinate Irish police captain McQuigg was Thomas Meighan, whose contract Hughes had acquired from Paramount.²⁴⁶ Meighan and Milestone had been associated on a picture about the Florida real estate boom, The New Klondike (1926), which had won him a new contract. It was Meighan who saw The Racket on the stage and brought the idea to Milestone. Meighan had once known the heights of stardom, but The City Gone Wild had not been the success he had hoped, and he was all set to leave pictures if The Racket was not a hit.²⁴⁷

It was greeted with admiration and enthusiasm. Variety’s language suited the subject: “Nick Scarsi tries to make McQuigg, in the usual ways, but the copper won’t turn. Scarsi’s political connections are of the strongest through his control of votes and repeaters. He has the captain transferred to a section where the goats are the only traffic problems. Two district men on a daily, looking for news, complicate matters here by ribbing McQuigg about Scarsi. The Cap tells them he was switched, not because he was afraid of Scarsi, but because Scarsi was afraid of him. He tells them to tell that to Nick. They proceed to do just that, finding Nick attending the funeral of a rival he has croaked. A touch of humor here is Scarsi’s objections to a street calliope profaning the obsequies.

“Scarsi’s brother is picked up by one of McQuigg’s men (C. Pat Collins) as a hit and run driver. The kid brother has a yen for Helen Hayes (Marie Prevost), an entertainer. She’s poison to Nick, as are all broads. Nick has incurred her enmity at a birthday party he gave the kid brother. At the party, Helen, doing a Helen Morgan on top of a piano, is cooing to the kid brother at Scarsi’s table when the gorilla kicks the piano across the room. The gal flies back at him and bawls him plenty. Then she determines to make a play for the kid, just to burn Nick up. They are out in the kid’s roadster, prior to the pinch. She leaves him flat when he develops hand trouble, and a police auto passing, stops as she steps out of the car. The kid screws, with the copper chasing. During the flight a spectator is hit, but Joe continues stepping on it until he runs the car into a fence and is nailed …

“How Nick avenges his kid brother and how McQuigg finally wins out when the district attorney double-crosses Nick and has him shot as he attempts to escape, complete the thrilling yarn.”

The result, added Variety, was as nearly perfect a slice of screen entertainment as had run the gauntlet in months.²⁴⁸

Picture Play was equally impressed: “It has policemen who look like policemen, reporters who act like reporters, and crooks who look like crooks. Moreover, the policemen act like coppers, and not like Knights of the Round Table; the reporters are not handsome young men who solve the mystery that is baffling Scotland Yard, and the crooks perform as Chicago dispatches indicate they do. All of which is an excellent indicator of what a good director can do when he is not harassed by a supervisor.

“Lewis Milestone directed it, and, I was told, was given highly valuable assistance by the producer, Howard Hughes, in that he let him alone.”²⁴⁹

Photoplay thought it gave Meighan his best role since The Miracle Man, Wolheim’s interpretation was “a masterpiece,” and the film was a classic. “The role of Nick Scarsi is one of contemptible villainy, but Louis Wolheim imbues it, through his incomparable touch, with that subtle sympathy and fascination which, since time immemorial, have given glamor to the bad man.”²⁵⁰

According to Dunham Thorp, Milestone wanted some firsthand technical advice. He turned to a friend, “the biggest bootlegger in Hollywood” (probably Frank Orsatti, who had connections in Chicago), and asked for his help. “Eight genuine Chicago racketeers who, for various good reasons, were ‘on the lam’ and temporarily going straight in Los Angeles, were rounded up and induced to work in this crook melodrama. They were led to believe it was ‘just one of those things’; no hint was dropped at all that this was to be the real stuff.”²⁵¹

The group included five bootleggers, a safecracker, a drug peddler, and a forger. What difference did they make? Dunham Thorp said quite a lot. “This picture has been judged as altogether too realistic by the very men it tells of. Their testimonials have come in what is perhaps the most unique form in screen history. The very types of men it deals with have done their best to stop its showing.”²⁵²

Thomas Meighan, as the star, was regarded by the gangsters as the most responsible. He received death-threat phone calls, as did the manager of the Metropolitan Theatre (where the picture had its Los Angeles premiere), Hughes, Wolheim, and the leader of the eight fugitive gangsters. At first everybody thought it a great publicity stunt, including the chief jailer, Frank Dewar, but he changed his mind the minute he laid eyes on the chief crook: “I knew that guy well; and I also recognized other members of the cast as Chicago racketeers. If the friends or enemies of them babies had sent these letters, I knew it meant business.”²⁵³ He appointed himself Meighan’s bodyguard and advised him to change hotels at once. Meighan took every precaution and checked his car for bombs. (On one occasion, his chauffeur pressed the starter. Nothing. He tried again. No result. Meighan leaped from the car and fled.)²⁵⁴

Nothing happened. After all, once the picture was out, there was little point in shooting the men who made it—that would merely arouse the newspapers to give it massive publicity. The only sensible course was to get it banned via the politicians. This proved more successful.

The picture was banned in such cities as Chicago (surprise!), Dallas, and Portland, Oregon, where a newspaper said, “This was apparently a political decision, the chief reason offered being that the film showed city officials as being crooks. Pure minded Portland must never see an official on the screen who was not honest. It might begin suspecting the home folks.”²⁵⁵

The Hollywood Citizen editorialized: “Trouble is being experienced by the author and producers of The Racket … They find that in some cities the picture is barred while in others it is viciously censored … Crooked politicians do not like the picture at all … So political censors have in certain instances sought to destroy the effect of the production in getting over the message of political despoliation. That’s one argument against censorship that is hard to meet … If the metropolitan newspapers will not keep the public informed as to the actual conditions, a few plays and motion pictures, such as The Racket, are greatly needed.”²⁵⁶

The New York and Pennsylvania censors did not ban the picture because it was so clearly set in Chicago. They merely slashed it to ribbons.

The critics were unusually enthusiastic. “This is one of those movies that comes along once in a Transatlantic flight,” said Pare Lorentz.²⁵⁷ Lines three deep formed outside the Paramount Theatre on the hottest day of the year.²⁵⁸ It was transferred to the Rialto Theatre for an extended run.²⁵⁹

One fan, however, wrote to Picture Play with the complaint, “We don’t want reality; we crave entertainment … Who wants to spend two hours watching a typical, honest policeman fight crooked politicians and bootleggers? Give us more pictures like The Singing Fool.“²⁶⁰

^* Rediscovered by UCLA Film Archives. The film was directed by Frank Beal.

^† Burns began his career as a detective in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886, worked for the U.S. Secret Service for fourteen years, and in 1905 started the Burns and Sheridan International Detective Agency. In 1909 he bought out his partner to operate under his own name,⁸⁶ and he later became head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation—even later known as the FBI.

^‡ But the leading gangsters are played by actors. “Kid” Broad was an East Side prizefighter. He also appeared in A Romance of the Underworld (1918).

^§ Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) had a gangster using political influence—“The man higher up”—to frame the boy when he tries to go straight.

^‖ An event based on a 1904 excursion-boat disaster. See note 201.