Immigration officials at Ellis Island inspect a mother’s eyes—a scene from a U.S. Government film, The Immigrant, directed by Edwin L. Hollywood and filmed at the Examination Hall, Ellis Island. (Museum of Modern Art)
THE LARGEST human migration in recorded history they called it—with 35 million people sailing to the United States between 1815 and 1920.1
Since emigration was often an escape from overcrowding, it was curious how the newcomers clustered together in the big cities of the North. They wanted to stay where people spoke a familiar language; it was difficult to survive in rural areas without a knowledge of English. And the excitement and novelty of city life was as attractive to immigrants as it was to natives.2 They were not all poor; the destitute could not afford the passage, and American poor laws kept them at bay. Yet immigrants were regarded as a threat; it was well known that they would work for low wages, thus undermining what American workers had struggled to achieve. They had brought cholera to the United States in the nineteenth century.3 So their welcome was anything but cordial. They were treated with coldness and blamed for everything from the existence of slums to the rising crime rate.
A tract written in 1914 by the prominent sociologist Edward A. Ross held that immigration was good for the rich employers but disastrous for the American worker. Immigrants were dirty and drunken, illiterate and often mentally unbalanced; they fostered crime and bad morals; they were the ones who read the yellow press, who wrecked the educational system with parochial schools, who caused the proliferation of cities, who, by selling their votes for protection and favors, aided the grip of the bosses on city politics. They threatened to overwhelm “American blood.”4
Several attempts were made at restricting immigration, but a constant supply of cheap labor was what an expanding country depended upon. Apart from the Oriental Exclusion Acts, not until 1907 was an act passed to exclude “undesirables,” for America was happy to receive every year an army of able-bodied laborers as a free gift from the nations of Europe.5
Few immigrants realized, once they had endured the appalling voyage, what awaited them at the end of it. Ellis Island, the receiving station from 1892 on, was where the undesirables were weeded out. Thousands were sent back, either because they were too poor, a potential burden to the community; because they had an infectious disease such as trachoma; or because they were suspected of anarchist tendencies.
Ellis Island had a reputation for brutality and corruption which the New York press sustained with frequent exposés. In 1900, it was poorly administered, the officials resorting to “roughness, cursing, intimidation and a mild form of blackmail.”6 But officials were not the only guilty parties; the concessionaires were pirates, the lawyers crooks, and even the railroad companies would send immigrants to their destination along the most circuitous route. From the moment he arrived on American soil, the immigrant became aware of the power of the dollar.
Winifred Greenwood in A Citizen in the Making, 1912. (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Ellis Island was hell on earth, according to a German-language daily in New York, “where only the knout was lacking to make it a Czarist prison camp.”7 William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers posed as the champions of the foreign-born (except Orientals!) called it “the Isle of Tears” and persuaded Governor William Sulzer to take up the crusade.8
Frederic C. Howe, the celebrated municipal reformer, even during his sojourn at the National Board of Censorship, did much to humanize Ellis Island in his role as commissioner. It was, he said, “a storehouse of sob stories for the press; deportation, dismembered families, unnecessary cruelties made it one of the tragic places of the world.”9 With enthusiasm, he wrought miracles. And in the winter of 1914–1915, a time of serious unemployment, he opened up the island to the homeless and unemployed.10
A number of factual films were made about Ellis Island, such as Gateway to America (1912), produced by Champion, probably in the course of filming immigrant scenes for its Russian pictures. It included shots of the medical staff, the boarding houses, and hospital, together with scenes of immigrant types.11
But the most fascinating films about immigrants came from the studios, most of which were situated in New York or New Jersey. It was no great distance to the Battery, where the Ellis Island ferries disembarked, and these films often contained footage of real immigrants.
Alice Guy Blaché, an immigrant herself, albeit a prosperous one, had been a director in France. She ran the Solax studios at Fort Lee, New Jersey. One of the films turned out there, Making an American Citizen (1912), was almost certainly directed by her (though there is no proof of this), for it was based on an incident which occurred at her own arrival. She watched a policeman stop a couple of immigrants, remove the baggage from the arms of the woman, and hand it over to the husband—“a lesson in American courtesy toward women,”12 as she described it. The film elaborated that moment.
A husband (Lee Beggs) and wife (Blanche Cornwall) who “belong to the most ignorant and lowest classes of peasantry”13 emigrate to the United States. On leaving the Ellis Island ferry, the husband loads a huge bundle on the back of his wife, attracting a crowd. Some laugh, others are indignant. A tall American pushes his way through the crowd, relieves the woman of her burden, puts the bundle on his own back, and orders them to march on.
“This is the husband’s first lesson in Americanism. Other lessons follow … until after he has been arrested and sent to jail for beating his wife, he becomes thoroughly convinced that old world methods will not do in this strange new world. A transformation is also worked in the character of the wife. Her animal-like patience and servile docility gradually give place to a spirit of independence, until at last she vigorously resents the brutality of her husband and asserts her rights as an American woman. The scenario closes with husband and wife working harmoniously together.”14
The immigrants’ nightmare was to arrive in America and find no one to meet them. (This happened frequently.) In Adrift in a Great City, a 1914 Thanhouser film, an immigrant has saved enough to bring over his wife and daughter and arranges to meet them at the pier. On the way, he is injured in an accident and taken unconscious to the hospital. The women are stranded. In reality, they would have been deported, or they might have been escorted to an Immigrant Aid Society. But here, the women are simply cast adrift and reduced to begging in the street. It was an unlikely tale, enlivened by coincidences of Dickensian proportions, but reaching a happy conclusion.15
Not all the films thought the New World’s methods were the best. A Leech of Industry, a 1914 three-reel Pathé drama directed by Oscar Apfel, was a study of Russian immigrants trying to earn a living in America. The parents retain the habits of their homeland, but the children rapidly become more American than Russian, picking up fast habits and wild ways.16 Films like these seemed to have an underlying motive; when shown abroad, they would have discouraged potential immigrants. Was that the idea?
Such discouragement would have been welcomed by Sweden’s National Society Against Emigration, for emigration from that country had reached a peak in 1909–1910 due to grim economic conditions. Swedish immigrants were looked upon with favor by the Americans, who far preferred them to those from Southern or Middle Europe, and it was felt that films should be made to discourage people from going.
Emigranten (1910), made by the AB Svenska Biografteatern in Kristianstad, was a one-reeler with amateur players designed to show how awful things were in America, and how farming folk should not abandon their responsibilities. The central characters are not young people but a middle-aged farmer and his wife. Working for them is an old couple and their son.17 The farmer sees an advertisement for sailings to America. With startling speed he decides to go. “What will become of us?” ask his workers. No time to bother with that; the farmer and his wife set off on the long journey to Gothenburg to buy their tickets and board the ship.
Emigranten, 1910. At the travel agent’s, the emigrants purchase tickets tn America. (Lars Lindstrom)
Emigranten, The film emigrants travel with these real emigrants. (Lars Lindstrom)
Swedish idea of a low-class saloon in New York. Amuletten, 1910, was another film made to discourage emigration to the United States. (Lars Lindstrom)
The departure of the ship is well photographed, and particularly poignant, as the people lining the deck and waving handkerchiefs are real emigrants. It is raining and the people on the dock have put up umbrellas, and they wave their handkerchiefs beneath them. There are excellent shots of the passengers on board, none of whom look poor.
The passengers disembark at “New York.” Lars Lindstrom, the former curator of the Kristianstad Film Museum, has tracked down the fact that the steamer in the film was the S.S. Ariosto, sailing on April 22, 1910, not to New York but to Hull. This was the usual route from Sweden; emigrants took the train from Hull to Liverpool and a transatlantic ship from there. But the filmmakers pretend that Hull is New York. A wall plastered with advertisements symbolizes the city, CITY V MEXBORO looked American to a Swedish eye, even if it did refer to Midland League football. The man goes into a “farm agent’s office” and puts down a payment on a farm. The scene shifts to the Swedish idea of wide-open spaces—a local park where rocks symbolize barren land. The farmer drops his ax in disgust when he surveys the terrain. He returns to his cabin to find his wife in anguish. He agrees the place is impossible, and they both pack up and return home, where their farm hands are delighted and give them a celebration.
Ironically, the film was written, directed, and photographed by Robert Olsson, eventually to emigrate to the United States himself.
Another film made by the same company, called Amuletten (1910), did not even go so far afield as Hull to re-create America. The picture was shot entirely in the Kristianstad studio and the streets of Stockholm. It was a reflection of dime novels and sensational American films. We see a disreputable saloon, peopled by prostitutes and thieves, into which a young man is inveigled. He is doped, robbed, and dumped unceremoniously into an alley. The police are surprisingly helpful and even arrange a job for him, but he fails, becomes a derelict, and expires. A friend returns to Sweden and visits the young man’s mother. Instead of returning the amulet she gave her son, he shows her his own solid gold watch to show how well her son is doing in America. The old woman dies in peace.
The film warned those left behind that even when emigrants sent home evidence of success, they might still be experiencing disaster.
Lindstrom is certain these films never reached the public screen—they may have been used on lecture tours—but the Swedes made other anti-emigration films, at least three of which contained footage shot in the United States in 1911 as well as scenes shot aboard the Lusitania.18
The American company Kalem traveled to Europe in 1910, and director Sidney Olcott made a number of films in Ireland, at Beaufort, near Killarney. One of them, The Lad from Old Ireland, had such a success with the Irish emigrés in America that Kalem returned the following year (probably passing the Swedish troupe en route). On its first trip, Kalem also visited Germany and made a film about a German girl emigrating to America, The Little Spreewald Mädchen.19
A frequent hazard for girls traveling alone was posed by ship’s officers, although, despite penalties, no officer was ever charged with assault. Valeska Suratt20 starred for the Lasky Company as a Russian girl in The Immigrant, written by Marion Fairfax and directed by George Melford. Masha, traveling steerage, attracts the attention of one of the officers, who tries to seduce her. A young American engineer (Thomas Meighan) protects her and secures a berth for her in second class, paying the difference himself. A political boss, traveling first class, tries to take her over, and the rest of the film is concerned with her romantic adventures.
“The opening scenes of the play are particularly good,” said Moving Picture World. “The contrasts between first and second cabin and steerage are brought out very cleverly.”21 But the New York Dramatic Mirror complained it was artificial: “The star appeared as an immigrant in the steerage, garbed in a dress that would not have been out of place on Fifth Avenue!”22
Charlie Chaplin made a comedy with the same title. It was his most beautifully constructed two-reeler, and yet an examination of the rushes, for the “Unknown Chaplin” television series,23 showed that it began as a completely different film. The original idea was a kind of skit on Trilby, set in the bohemian quarter of Paris. Then it became a series of mildly amusing gags set in a café. While he was working on this part of the film, Chaplin needed to know where his leading lady (Edna Purviance) came from. He made her an immigrant, set scenes aboard a boat, and came up with a comedy which has been shown more or less continuously since its release in 1917, not as an antique, but for its undying value as entertainment.
Chaplin himself was not an immigrant in the usual sense—he had come over with the Fred Karno troupe—but he had experienced something of what the immigrants had gone through. Judging from the film, his most vivid memory was the movement of the ship. He put the camera on a special tripod head which enabled it to rock from side to side. The interior of the dining saloon was shot at the studio, the whole set mounted on rockers. These boat scenes allowed Chaplin to indulge in every seasick gag he could think of.
He did not use the film to comment on the experience of immigration until the sighting of the Statue of Liberty. Then he included a sharp and savage little moment which historians have seen as political comment. I doubt that it was; Chaplin said he included nothing political in his pictures. It was the reaction of a comedy director: a title says “Arrival in the Land of Liberty,” so the officers rope the passengers together like cattle. Chaplin was aware, however, that the scene could be open to misinterpretation.
Carlyle Robinson, Chaplin’s press secretary, joined the studio on the very morning that the rushes of this sequence were being shown. Chaplin asked what he thought of them.
“Very funny and very realistic,” Robinson replied.
“Do you find anything shocking in it?”
“Not that I can recall.”
Evidently, the point had been raised by one of Chaplin’s associates and Robinson’s reply satisfied Chaplin. As Robinson said, “The scene was kept in the final version of the film and there was never the least complaint.”24
In the 1890s, the vast majority of immigrants were Italians, Slavs, and Russian Jews. The native Americans and older immigrants regarded them as “educationally deficient, socially backward, and bizarre in appearance” and disliked them on sight.25 Dislike combined with insecurity to produce fear, and racial theories were developed to strengthen the call for a firm restriction on immigration.26
The Knights of Labor complained about the deteriorating standard of immigrants; Hungarians and Lithuanians who “herded together like animals and lived like beasts” were crowding Americans out of the coal fields of Pennsylvania.27 A flood of Italians on top of a lingering depression led to mass deportation in 1896 and encouraged the Immigration Restriction League to urge a literacy test to reduce this “unwanted” influx. The bill was passed the following year, but President Cleveland vetoed it, pointing out that the same things were said about immigrants who, with their descendants, “were now among our best citizens.”28
Enrico Caruso: newsreel men U. K. Whipple and Emmanuel “Jack” Cohn persuaded him to crank Whipple’s camera on the legion of cameramen photographing the great Italian opera star—for Universal Animated Weekly. From Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915.
The most recent wave of immigrants were always the most despised; the Italians were the most despised of all. They were at the bottom of the social scale, paid less than any other worker, black or white.
The Irish-Americans, establishing political power in the nineteenth century, needed scapegoats for the violence for which they were so often responsible. The Italians were therefore characterized as lawless. One newspaper charged that the Italian government made a regular practice of sending its criminals to the United States. Horror stories of the Mafia and the Black Hand gathered momentum. The Italians and the Irish, once joined in friendship by their religion, clashed violently in industrial warfare. The victims of the worst lynching in American history were not blacks, but Italians.29
Such treatment failed to stem the flood of migration, for conditions in Italy were grim. More than 80 percent of the people worked on the land, living in medieval conditions. Wages were absurdly low, and food cost the peasant 85 percent of all he earned.30 Returning emigrants made a deep impression with their smart clothes, full wallets, and colorful stories. Another deep impression was made by the flow of money back home; the fact that a man could earn enough to live on and still send something to his family was enough to spur others to America.
When they arrived, the immigrants were at the mercy of a padrone (master), an Italian labor boss. A one-man employment agency, he advanced fares and served as interpreter, but his terms were extortionate, and the conditions to which he consigned the newcomers were often those of slave labor.31
“To an extraordinary degree,” wrote Maldwyn Jones, “Italian immigrants duplicated the experience of the Irish half a century earlier. They settled in the same parts of the United States, dominated the same unskilled occupations, occupied the same overcrowded slums.”32
Early films about Italians portrayed them as hot-blooded and violent, but the stereotypes were no more offensive than those for any other nationality. In Griffith’s 1911 Biograph Italian Blood, a wife senses her husband’s affection is cooling so she tries to arouse his love through jealousy. The plan misfires, the husband is driven into a frenzy, and he only comes to his senses as he is about to kill his own children.33
More sympathetic was The Immigrant’s Violin (1912), an Imp one-reeler directed by Otis Turner. An immigrant girl (Vivian Prescott) is separated from her parents. As she is a violinist of ability, a society woman arranges a public appearance for her. On a concert tour she encounters her parents and is on the point of passing them by, for she now has a rich young lover. But her strong sense of family obliges her to acknowledge them, and the family is reunited.34
The Italians formed a large proportion of any audience and could not be ignored. When Vitagraph made a film of the Tripolitan War between Italy and Turkey, showing Italian atrocities, the Italians created such an outcry the film was withdrawn as a “fake.”35 Furthermore, there was a flourishing film industry in Italy, which happened to be superior to the American. Many Italian films were imported, and the Americans began making their own Italian stories more authentic in the hope of a favorable reception in Italy. But then came the outbreak of war, and the source was cut off.
There was an Italian colony in San Francisco, where Hal Mohr had the idea of setting up Itala-American Films in 1914 to make Italian subjects in America. He put his own money, and that of his father, into it; his main supporter was Johnny DiMaria, who owned most of the real estate on the old Barbary Coast.
“I had a little Italian sweetheart whom I made the leading lady,” said Hal Mohr. “There was a jeweler by the name of Remy Taffuri, a little Italian fellow who was a natural-born actor, and I went to a theatrical agency and hired two or three of the local hams to play leading parts in the thing. It was made in the pure Italian style—the sets were Italian, the actors were all made to look like Italians. The idea was to compete, and it would have been a good idea if it had worked.”36
Mohr took the film to New York to sell it, but failed, and the company was dissolved while he was there. While the biggest American manufacturers produced Italian subjects, there was no need for a specialized company. The only problem was that their films were invariably about crime.
It was significant that one of the first films made about the Italian community had the title The Black Hand. Made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1906, it was photographed by Billy Bitzer. Its opening title proclaimed, “True story of a recent occurrence in the Italian quarter of New York.”
Hal Mohr, second from the left, the future cameraman, creates Itala-American Films at Berkeley, California, in 1914. Remy Taffuri, seated, with moustache.
There was nothing true about the interiors; the cellar where the Black Hand members write their threatening letter is crudely painted.
The letter is shown in close-up: “Bewar! We are desperut! Mister Angelo we must have $1,000.00, give it to us or we will take your Maria and Blow up your Shop. BLACK HAND.”
Maria is the small daughter of the butcher, whose shop is an elaborate set (lamb is twelve cents a pound) equipped with a cold store. When the butcher gets the letter he is furious, yells for his wife and daughter, and produces a pistol.
Once the picture leaves the artifice of the studio, it bursts into life. Bitzer has set his camera on Seventh Avenue to film a horse-drawn cab pulling up and the crooks jumping out and abducting the girl. But the action takes longer than he bargained for, and incidents occur quite unconnected with the film. A policeman strides past with an old derelict under arrest (they look as if they have blundered in from another film). People stare at the camera.
When the kidnappers come to collect the ransom, the police trap them by hiding in the cold store. This is described as “a clever arrest. Actually as made by New York detectives.” One gathers from the film that these two crooks are amateurs, operating on their own and using the name “Black Hand” to frighten their victim into a prompt response.
As Martin Short points out, the Black Hand was not a single organization: “The threats usually came from freelance hoodlums who found it easier to shelter behind the symbols of a feared if mythical society than to invent a new one.… For quick payoffs no emblem was more effective.”37
Al Capone’s father was the victim of Black Hand extortion; Capone found out who the villains were and killed them.38 When he moved to Chicago, he rid the city of Black Handers (in order to substitute his own racketeers), which some people still think was his greatest service to the Italian community.39
At the height of the Black Hand scare, however, Francis D. Culkin, a district attorney who had spent his political life among immigrant groups, declared, “There are no more law-abiding people in the country than those from sunny Italy.”40 But the Black Hand provided sensational copy, and newspapers exploited it as they had the Mafia and Comorra a few years earlier.41
Even so innocuous a title as The Organ Grinder (Kalem, 1909) turned out to involve the Black Hand. “Renegade Italians concoct a ‘blackhand’ plot. They abduct a child and bring her back to a hovel. The organ grinder happens to catch sight of the child and informs her parents. Through his information she is restored and the organ grinder receives the reward of his service. The views are startlingly correct in the smallest detail and make a capital bit of film work.”42
Kalem also produced The Detectives of the Italian Bureau in 1909. The company’s comments were enlightening: “For years it was found almost impossible to cope with a certain class of Italian criminals because the detectives had little or no knowledge of the Italian language and were not sufficiently familiar with the methods employed by the blackmailers and kidnappers who come to our shores from the dregs of Italy. But now things are greatly changed. Every big city has a distinct section of the detective force made up of courageous and honest men of Italian birth, and these men are devoting their whole time to rounding up and punishing Italian criminals. And so successful have they been that Black Hand crimes have been practically blotted out in all of our large centers.”43
The Kalem picture was in eight scenes. Nine-year-old Rosa is captured by the Black Handers after the premature explosion of a bomb. She escapes and alerts the Italian Bureau detectives, who round up the kidnappers and return Rosa to her parents.44
The picture was well timed. The head of New York’s “Italian Squad,” Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, had carried out a one-man campaign against the Mafia and Comorra, identifying criminals as they arrived and deporting them and tackling gangs single-handed. (He declared that as a large organization, the Black Hand did not exist.) Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham sent Petrosino to Italy in 1909 to establish relations with the Italian police “so that the Comorra and the Mafia may be watched on both sides of the ocean.” His journey was supposed to be a secret, but the New York papers provided full details and in March 1909 he was shot dead in Palermo. “His assassins had definitely murdered the right man,” wrote Martin Short. “With Petrosino dead American law enforcement lost sight of the Mafia for almost fifty years.”45
The movies maintained their interest. In Mary Pickford’s Poor Little Peppina (1916), a member of the Mafia commits murder and kidnaps a child, who grows up in Italy. She escapes an overattentive padrone by stowing away to America, where she becomes involved in a counterfeiting gang run by the same Mafia man.
In The Criminals (1913), the Black Handers kidnap a little Italian child, and when the father refuses to pay the ransom they kill the youngster. The father is mistaken by the police for one of the criminals and imprisoned—the kind of irony which often appeared in films about Italian immigrants. Produced by Mecca, “the sets, acting and photography are commendable,”46 wrote Moving Picture World.
Criminals were again offset by innocents in The Padrone’s Ward (1914), a two-reeler from the Powers Company. The padrone, leader of an East Side gang of thieves and blackmailers, is the guardian of a girl who is rescued by an Italian-American banker. The banker becomes the target of the Black Hand, but he refuses to respond to the threatening letters and seeks the aid of the protective association. The blackmailers decide to kill him, but the man assigned to the job is the girl’s sweetheart, a cripple. He tries to carry out the killing, but fails and finally warns the girl. The banker escapes death, and the blackmailers are rounded up.47
Many criminals who were not Italian at all used the symbol of the Black Hand. This formed the basis of a vaudeville sketch, written and performed by George Beban, which became known as “the sketch that never failed.” So famous did it become that Klaw and Erlanger produced it as a four-act play on Broadway. Thomas Ince turned this into a film and as a coup de théâtre had Beban appear onstage and carry the story to its conclusion. This “Combination of Silent and Spoken Drama” was nine reels and one act and was entitled The Alien (1915). Raymond West directed (and turned his own camera, with Bob Newhard on second).48
Beban’s aim was to introduce the real Italian to the screen instead of “the individual with a long black mustache and a bandana handkerchief, armed with a stiletto.”49
A rich ne’er-do-well called Phil Griswold (Jack Nelson), in desperate need of money, turns to his elder brother, William (Hayward Ginn), for help. He is refused, so he kidnaps William’s daughter, Dorothy (Thelma Salter), and writes “Black Hand” letters demanding a heavy ransom. He had noticed the child’s fear when Pietro (Beban) delivered a Christmas tree. William instantly thinks of Pietro and sets off for Little Italy. En route, his automobile runs down little Rosa, Pietro’s daughter. After taking her to her home and realizing she is dead, William escapes from the angry mob (“a scene that was unusually well handled,” wrote the New York Dramatic Mirror).50
On Christmas morning, Dorothy’s mother receives a ransom demand for $10,000, to be delivered to the flower shop and given to a man she will know “by the sign of the rose.” Meanwhile, William has taken the case to the police, who are on hand waiting for the kidnapper. As the trap is set, the picture fades, the screen rises, along with the curtains, and a duplicate of the flower shop is revealed, with the characters in the same positions. Reviewers thought the players, excellent on the screen, were not strong enough for the stage and that there was too much unnecessary exposition. But when Beban appeared, the sketch caught light: “He never played the role with greater fire and sincerity.”51
Few films showed what the immigrants went through on the voyage across, Camille Ankewich (better known later as Marcia Manon) played the Italian immigrant wife, with May Giraci as her daughter, in One More American, 1918. (Museum of Modern Art)
The moment the immigrants dreaded: The Ellis Island doctor rejects Luigi’s child. One More American, 1918, directed by William de Mille. (Museum of Modern Art)
Half crazed, Beban buys a rose for his child’s grave—convincing the police that he is one of the kidnappers.
“The demonstration is a surprisingly strong argument for the photoplay,” said Photoplay. “Beban’s facial emotion, magnified to intense proportions in the close-ups of the picture, is infinitely more convincing than the patently false illumination, confined settings and more or less distant figures of the theatrical stage. The duration of the play is so brief, however, its emotion so strong, that its vitality balances what is lost by the departure of Ince’s splendid camera work.”52
Motion Picture Magazine voted it one of the classics of the screen, along with The Birth of a Nation and Cabiria: “The acme of simplicity, appeal and beauty. Strong heart-interest story, fine characterization, plot a bit of real life. Well cast, ably directed and beautifully photographed and produced.”53
George Beban did more for the Italian on the screen, let alone the stage, than anyone else, including Rudolph Valentino (who hardly ever played Italians). Perhaps Beban’s greatest contributions were two fine immigration films, first The Italian (1915) for Thomas Ince, then One More American (1918) for Lasky.
A superb title, One More American was by all accounts a superb film. It was adapted from a playlet, The Land of the Free, by William de Mille, who also directed it. The scenario was written by Olga Printzlau, and the technical staff included Charles Rosher, already revealing himself as one of the finest craftsmen of the era, and Wilfred Buckland, revolutionizing the art of film design.
Beban played Luigi Riccardo, who operates a marionette theatre in the Mulberry Bend district of New York. For a long time he has worked to bring his wife and daughter from Italy. Now they are coming, and Luigi excitedly awaits their arrival. He reckons without Regan (H. B. Carpenter), a ward boss who wants his vote. Luigi regards him as a grafter and will not cooperate. But Regan, who has many followers in the neighborhood, decides to bring Luigi into line. He uses his influence to prevent Luigi getting his final naturalization papers. And then, through a physician (Hector Dion) whom he has appointed at Ellis Island, he has Luigi’s daughter refused entry.54
This sequence impressed Wid Gunning so much that he described it in detail: “The doctor is examining Luigi’s family. He begins with the wife (Camille Ankewich), finding her an admirable specimen of womanhood. He knows that he has promised Regan to find something wrong to hold them up; but for the moment his conscience overpowers him and he checks the woman’s tag to signify her admittance to the country. A load off his mind with this act, he turns to the child (May Giraci) with the intention of passing her, too, when he sees Regan standing in the doorway. It is enough. He tricks the child into an appearance of imbecility and marks her tag with a cross.”55
Wild with rage and grief, Luigi sets out to kill the ward boss. It so happens that Luigi has one friend who understands Regan’s tricks—Sam Potts (Jack Holt), a reporter who has long been trying to get something on the man. He goes after the physician, secures a confession, and obliges him to pass Luigi’s wife and child.56
Wid thought it a real box-office winner: “Heart interest just oozes out of it.”57 Motion Picture Magazine thought it “exquisitely rendered” and considered that Beban displayed a masterly hand in his treatment of grief and paternal love: “Beban never rose to higher ranks of pure emotionalism than when he literally throws himself against the wire screen that separates him from his dear ones and tries to tear the heart-breaking barrier down.
“One More American is a photoplay that sinks deeply into the heart.”58
THE ITALIAN Originally titled The Dago, filmed in 1914, and released early the following year, The Italian is one of the rediscovered masterpieces of the early years and the best of all the surviving immigrant pictures by far. Written by C. Gardner Sullivan, who helped himself to de Mille’s playlet The Land of the Free and to a 1913 Imp picture called The Wop,59 it was directed by Reginald Barker.
George Beban is shown in a prologue and epilogue in a library. The camera tracks forward as he pulls a book from the shelves and settles down to read it. The book is called The Italian by Thomas Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan. Beban is thus shown to be a man of education, just in case we think his peasant performance too convincing.
The first reel or so, set in Italy, is picturesque but theatrical. Posed scenes in the vineyards (filmed at a California mission) and some comedy with gondolas in Venice (filmed at Venice, California)60 are the only relief in a long-winded introduction. Once Beppo departs for America, the film changes gear. It becomes serious, concerned, and emotionally involving. We no longer have to endure the make-up of stage Italians; now we are among real people. (The Italians reinvented this style of filmmaking after World War II, when it was called neo-realism.)
Beppo is shown on board the steamship as the Statue of Liberty heaves into view. The Ellis Island experience is left out, a grave omission in a film about an immigrant.61 And suddenly Beppo is shuffling on to a street full of life and dirt and movement.
As soon as he gets his bearings, Beppo becomes a bootblack. One day, he is propositioned by the local ward boss, Big Bill Corrigan (Charles K. French): “Here’s a little present for you. Have your wop friends vote for this guy.” And he hands him a campaign flyer for Alderman Casey.
In Italy, Annette receives an invitation to join Beppo.62 Her steamship arrives at the docks, but Beppo goes to the wrong pier. That night, he and Annette are married; the ceremony is performed by his “friend,” Alderman Casey. “A year later; the dawn of a new life.” Fade in on Annette and newly born baby. Beppo leaves a customer in midpolish, runs past a derelict scrabbling in a garbage can (the film is full of such details), and cannons into a passer-by who falls over a barrow, infuriating the old Jew who is pushing it. The hail of images comes to a halt as Beppo sees his baby. He slowly moves forward and kisses it. Outside, a crowd gathers and Beppo leads them all to the saloon to celebrate. Beppo whispers the good news to the barkeep and explains how the baby was sleeping, just like him, with his hand under his chin. The barkeep signals for the help to wake up all the drunks.
George Beban in the title role of The Italian, 1915, directed by Reginald Barker from a C. Gardner Sullivan scenario. Neighbors help Beppo celebrate the birth of his baby. (Anthony Slide)
Months later, midsummer scorches the slums. A superb series of documentary shots shows crowds of children running after the water wagon and getting sprayed at the fireplug. Although the streets63 do not look like New York, washing has been slung across them in a rough approximation of Mulberry Bend.
“Little Tony, one of the thousands of heat victims, grows alarmingly worse.”
The doctor asks to see the milk—Annette produces a pail covered in flies. The doctor sniffs and shakes his head: “The heat and impure food are wearing him out. You must get him pasteurized milk.”
The heat wave reaches its peak; the baby is still ill, and the supply of pasteurized milk has run out. Beppo gets a message that the baby must have more. Foolishly, he asks two men to watch his stand. They pursue him and beat him up in an alley and rob him. Beppo lies stunned in a dusty archway, his face partially lit by a shaft of sunlight. When he recovers and finds his money gone, he sits slumped on a garbage can, musing over his misfortune. The two men emerge from a saloon. He accosts them, pleads with them: “I must get-a-de milk or my babee is die” (there are few dialogue titles, but they tend to be in this style). A fight breaks out, and Beppo is arrested. He suddenly sights Corrigan.
“Knowing Corrigan to be the boss of the slums whose word is law, Beppo appeals to him for mercy.” Beppo throws the cop to the sidewalk and leaps after Corrigan’s car, even though it drags him along the road. Corrigan kicks him in the face, and Beppo is nearly killed as he falls before a streetcar.64 Fighting all the way, Beppo is dragged to jail. Corrigan returns to his cool suburban home, to be welcomed by wife and daughter.
Beppo asks a warder to write a note and send it to his wife. Once out of sight, the warder tears the note up.
“A week later.” We see an undertaker carrying a small coffin, followed by a weeping Annette. Beppo is finally released, and as he climbs his stairs he passes a neighbor who realizes he doesn’t yet know the awful news and regards him with horror. He pushes open the door, and Annette cries out to him. They embrace. “Beppo, our poor little Antonio—he’s—.” Slowly, Beppo turns and walks toward the blanket-covered cradle. He pulls the blanket back, and, when he sees the emptiness, staggers slightly, then falls across the cradle. Annette tries to comfort him.
A month later, Beppo learns that Corrigan’s child is near death. He steals into his house, determined to avenge himself by killing Corrigan’s child. But as he advances on the bed, the child moves in its sleep and places its hand under its chin—“the gesture that was little Tony’s.” Beppo gasps, and all his resolve flows out of him.
“At the eternal bedside of his baby, where hate, revenge and bitterness melt to nothing in the crucible of sorrow,” Beppo kneels at the graveside. We return to a brief scene of Beban finishing the book, and the curtain descends.
The Italian is a genuinely moving film, a description which, for all their energy and proficiency, can be applied to only a handful of the early features. Directors had not yet grasped the ability to sustain a scene. Perhaps because Beban’s acting demanded it, The Italian shows the value of contrasting moods; after a hectic chase, Barker allows Beban to play a tragic sequence in slow motion. Although most of the other scenes are short, and the narrative is advanced in gulps, mostly with time-lapse titles—“A Year Later”—the mood is sustained from the moment Beppo climbs aboard the immigrant ship for America.
Thomas H. Ince was what would now be called a superpatriot, and so, to judge by the rest of his work, was C. Gardner Sullivan. If the unrelenting viciousness of the Americans encountered by Beppo comes as a surprise, one should remember that this sympathetic portrait of the Italian immigrant may well have been animated by anti-immigrant sentiment. Apart from a woman neighbor and a kindly old Jew, there is not a sympathetic character in all the New York sequences. Nothing is shown, apart from the ward boss’s home, which could possibly entice anyone to leave their own country. Nor is there much sentimentality. The little gesture that was Tony’s may seem corny by today’s standards, but the fact that a gesture was selected as the climax of the picture is indicative of the subtlety and lack of melodrama in the rest of the American scenes.
Beban himself is stylized but convincing; once the opening cuteness is out of the way, his elaborate gesticulation seems appropriate to an Italian crippled by lack of English. (Ince claimed that Beban found his costume by buying it direct from an Italian immigrant at the Battery—the complete outfit, headgear and footwear, for ten dollars.)65 The small parts are played well, as if they had been caught by a hidden camera. It is only when one sees the film several times that one begins to notice the discrepancies: the streets do not belong to New York, the lack of an Ellis Island scene, the suburban home so plainly in California. But although the background is not truly documentary, the atmosphere is—and the atmosphere is what provides conviction for an audience.
Those who interviewed George Beban described him as a powerhouse of a man. Ray Frohman of the Los Angeles Herald called him “an active volcano,” compared to whom even Douglas Fairbanks was a snail. “He does not merely beat you about the head and body with those Latin hands of his to bring home his conversational points, EVERY PORTION OF HIS FAMOUS PHYSIOGNOMY IS WORKING WHEN HE TALKS …”66
Despite his Italian roles, and his many years of doing French parts, Beban was Northern Irish by birth. “I was dragged into pictures by the back of my neck,” he said, “struggling against my will.”67
Thomas Ince read the scenario for The Dago and realized that if Beppo could be played by someone of the caliber of George Beban, it would make one of the greatest pictures on the screen. Beban was then starring in The Sign of the Rose on Broadway, and Ince set out for New York, determined to sign him up. He had hardly been in the city two hours when he spotted Beban in the street. He introduced himself, but Beban resented his offer. It was a crime for an actor to go into pictures; taking the dramatic art and throwing it into the street depreciated the profession. Ince employed the most colorful rhetoric to win him over.
Beban recalled, “He pictured for me every imaginable luxury I would have if I would make just one five-reeler for him as my vacation at his expense, and then go on with my dramatic career as if nothing had happened—ocean view from my dressing room, sets built for me in the mountains, luncheon served by a stream, glorious sunsets on the Pacific.… (All of these were rather difficult to avoid at Inceville, but he threw in a fine horse and groom.)
“Then, after the matinee, with me in the shadows and himself under the light, reversing Belasco’s tactics, Ince told me, without dialect, the story of that picture he wanted me for. He was all worked up to convince, crying like a baby … never in his career did he play a part like he played that! From beginning to end I was spellbound.… All I was able to say was three words: ‘I’ll do it!’ ”68
Beban insisted that the title be changed to The Italian and that it be a special and not a cheap program picture. Ince offered him $7,000 plus a percentage and all expenses paid. “He guaranteed that I’d make more money than I did all season in New York and the previous season—and by golly, I did!”69
The Italian was highly praised. Vachel Lindsay selected it for his book The Art of the Moving Picture, and, while he disliked the sequence in Corrigan’s house, he called it “a strong piece of work.”70 It survived as a paper print in the Library of Congress and was used to guide Francis Ford Coppola in re-creating turn-of-the-century New York for The Godfather, Part II (1974).71 And yet it was never shown in Italy.72 The film made little impression in America at a time when immigrant dramas were not uncommon; the prejudice against Italians may also have had something to do with this. Although Beban played a French farmer the following year, he made several more films about Italian immigrants, often directing them himself. None of them survive. It is a miracle this one does, and it is reassuring to know that the Library of Congress has acquired an original print and will reprint it to enhance the quality.
For The Italian—at least for the most part—stands head and shoulders above any surviving attempt from this period to portray the lot of the underprivileged in a hostile world.
Drama is exploration; melodrama is exploitation. Since the majority of feature films were melodramas, requiring far-fetched situations and exotic villainy, it is hardly surprising that Orientals figured so prominently, for the Chinese were regarded in America not only as a mystery, but as a threat—far more of a threat than even the Italians. They kept to themselves, spoke their own languages, wore their own clothes, and, despite a vast weight of discrimination, they seemed to prosper.
Chinese history had impinged upon America in terms of horror—“Opium wars,” “Boxer rising,” “Chinese torture,” and “Tong wars” were familiar subjects to newspaper readers, whose image of Oriental culture was a confusion of severed heads, temple bells, and screaming mobs. Yet were the Chinese not calm, stoic, philosophical? It was all very confusing. No wonder the great nations were constantly dispatching not merely missionaries to save the souls of these heathens but gunboats to protect their own interests.
The Chinese first came to the Americas as servants aboard Spanish galleons. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 attracted Chinese, who were among the first to stake their claims, only to be set upon by other miners. Many were given “women’s work” in the mining camps—cooking and cleaning. Yet they were the major contributors to the building of the Central Pacific Railroad. (Some of the old Chinese workers were brought out of retirement to play in John Ford’s 1924 reconstruction of those days, The Iron Horse.) When the project was completed, the laborers settled in railroad towns throughout the Southwest, although some tried to find work in the industrial towns of the East. Riots led to many Chinese being killed, and although they added up to a mere 1 percent of the entire immigrant population, labor unions agitated to stop more Oriental labor from reaching the United States.
In 1882, the Chinese became the first immigrant group to be barred, with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which excluded laborers for ten years, although officials, teachers, and merchants were still permitted. The act was renewed in 1892, and again in 1902, and in 1904 the Deficiency Act banned Chinese laborers permanently.73
The Exclusion Acts did little to reduce anti-Chinese prejudice. “The Yellow Peril” was a sweeping term covering all Orientals; it would have been better applied to the Hearst press, whose favorite topic it was. The motion picture industry as a rule followed the popular line. The Chinese tended to be portrayed as friendly but idiotic laundrymen, the subtitles leplesenting their lemarks thus, or sinister opium fiends, masterminding operations of unspeakable evil. The very word “wily” seemed to have been coined for these characters.
China was usually portrayed as a land of screaming mobs, temple bells, and torture. From The Vermilion Pencil, 1922, with Bessie Love. The mandarin is played by Thomas Jefferson.
Yet films occasionally portrayed the Chinese with sympathy and understanding. The War of the Tongs, made by Universal in 1917, sounds like the usual melodramatic hokum, but titles can be misleading. This was the work of a Chinese writer (and possibly director), with a cast led by members of the Imperial Chinese players. The five-reel picture set out to expose the Chinese lottery system and the methods of the tongs.
These organizations—the name comes from the Cantonese pronunciation of t’ang, meaning “brotherhood”—were organizations exclusive to the Chinese in America. They sheltered behind respectable façades, as did regular gangsters, but they were synonymous with white slave trafficking, drug peddling, murders by “hatchetmen,” and blackmail. The War of the Tongs revealed that the victims of the tongs were mainly the Chinese themselves. But it was not just a gangster film. It also served to spotlight the positive aspects of the community. “The Chinese are noted for their honesty in business transactions and this phase of their lives is carefully brought out in the development of the story, as some of the action takes place in a large Chinese mercantile house.”74
Wid Gunning could not have cared less about Chinese honesty: “In the course of this wild career I am following—looking at about fifteen features a week—it becomes necessary for me to see some weird productions. Of all the poor, impossible offerings I’ve ever seen, however, presented seriously as entertainment, I believe this is the worst.”75
The tong wars became as much a part of American life as the old gang wars. And movies melodramatized them. In 1921, the Chinese in Los Angeles approached Tod Browning (a director best known for his Lon Chaney productions) to make a propaganda film to bring the factions together and prevent further bloodshed. Browning’s Outside the Law (1921) had a Chinese sympathetically presented (albeit played by E. A. Warren), who endeavors to reform a couple of crooks. But although Browning continued to make exotic and bizarre pictures, sometimes with Chinese backgrounds (Drifting [1923] featured Anna May Wong), he never made the film for the Chinese of Los Angeles. More’s the pity.76
Chinese stories, which so often dealt with the forbidden, held a strong fascination for American audiences. In San Francisco around 1912, T. Kimmwood Peters made a series called The Adventures of Boe Kung, a Chinese Sherlock Holmes,77 anticipating Charlie Chan by a couple of decades. In the same city, a company called Rice and Berkeley produced a four-reeler called The Chinese Lily (1914), with an entirely Chinese cast, under the direction of Arthur W. Rice. “An entirely new phase of Chinese life is presented without the usual odiferous opium and obnoxious white slave scenes,” said Moving Picture World.78
A number of films were made with Chinese casts for the Chinese theatres in San Francisco, but according to Geoffrey Bell these were termed “ ‘inscrutable’ … that is, only distributed to Chinese movie houses, not in regular distribution.”79
The Exclusion Acts encouraged the smuggling of Chinese immigrants, and this was the theme of The Yellow Traffic (1914), a four-reeler produced and directed by Herbert Blaché (husband of Alice Guy). The advertisements referred to “the cargo of ‘pig-tails’ ” and omitted the names of the Chinese. They listed the white players, who, they said, were “supplemented by a large number of Chinese actors.”80
City of Dim Faces (1918) was a story of San Francisco’s Chinatown written by Frances Marion and directed by George Melford. The Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa played Jang Lung, the son of a rich Chinese importer and a white woman who falls in love with a girl whose cousin breaks up the affair “by disgusting her with Jang’s race.”81 Jang’s love turns to hatred, and he behaves in true movie-melodrama style, finally repenting and losing her—to a white man—before losing his life at the fade-out. Among the Chinese in the cast were James Wang, and, among the other Japanese, Togo Yama. (The future director James Cruze also appeared.)
The Japanese actor Jack Abbe starred as a Chinese in Mystic Faces (1918) with another Japanese, Martha Taka. The film was directed by E. Mason Hopper for Triangle; reviewers found it “refreshing.”82 The aim was to show that the Chinese was a greatly misrepresented person, and for once a Chinese character was allowed to play the hero, rescuing the heroine from the clutches of pro-Germans. Variety thought it full of quaint comedy, and “a thrill a minute.”83
The spate of Oriental films at this period was largely due to the success of a play called East Is West (later filmed by Sidney Franklin).84 The biggest Chinese production was The Red Lantern (1919) with Alla Nazimova, which brought Metro to the fore. A story of the Boxer Rebellion, it was directed by Albert Capellani from the novel by Edith Wherry. Scripted by Capellani and June Mathis, it told of an illegitimate Chinese girl, adopted by an American missionary, who falls for a young American. He has an affair with her (white) half sister. Said Motion Picture Magazine, “The Chinese girl, bitterly resenting the unfairness of a people who educate yet never accept socially one of the yellow race, joins in a Boxer uprising, portraying the part of the Goddess of the Red Lantern.”85
Among those Orientals taking prominent roles were Yukio Ao Yamo, a Japanese, and Anna May Wong, soon to be a star.
These pictures may have convinced Western audiences, but the Chinese had a very different view of them. “In the Old Country,” wrote Su Ah Hui, from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, “I have seven sisters who are also fans and when they see these strange dramas, with fine and authentic Chinese background but white people playing Chinese, they laugh heartily, thinking them comedies.” They were equally amused by actresses, playing Chinese women, who take little mincing steps when they walk, and men of high degree who always stand with their hands folded over their stomachs. “As for that invariable hint of the subtle and treacherous which your producers incorporate into Chinese drama that is but a half-truth. You will find more throat-cutting and knifing-in-the-back among other races I could name. But try giving us real Chinese players and they will demonstrate correctly our character and behavior.”86
He might have mentioned another drawback. However sympathetic the approach, there were only two possible endings to love stories: the Chinese either turns out to be white—or dies.
Although he failed to use a Chinese in the lead, D. W. Griffith made what one historian has called “the single compassionate dramatization on the silent American screen of love between white and Oriental races.”87 In Broken Blossoms (1919), the outcome was unusual, to say the least. All the principals die.
BROKEN BLOSSOMS “A sordid and horrible story, if ever there was one,” wrote Frances Taylor Patterson of Thomas Burke’s short story “The Chink and the Child.” “Mr. Griffith made the story over into a surpassingly beautiful play. But the play was somewhat of a commercial failure for all its marvelous technique. It had no message—unless the rather revolting example of the triumph of the religion of Confucius over that of Christ.”88
The Burke story appeared in a book called Limehouse Nights published in 1916 by Grant Richards of London. It is the tale, admirable in its atmosphere if somewhat purple in its prose, of a poetic Chinese who falls for a girl of twelve in the slums of Limehouse. The girl, Lucy, would now be called a battered child. She is frequently beaten by her father, a boxer called Battling Burrows. She seeks refuge in an opium den, enticed there by a prostitute who hopes to make money out of her. She is rescued by the Chinese, who takes her to his home, and she responds to his kindness and gentleness. But her disappearance has been noted and her protector spotted. Burrows sets out in pursuit. The child is retrieved; her rescuer’s home is utterly destroyed. When he discovers what has happened, he suffers terribly. He prepares a love-gift, for it is the custom that the dying shall present love-gifts to their enemies, and sets out for Burrows’s home. Here he finds the girl beaten to death, but no sign of Burrows. He carries Lucy back, crouches beside her, and kills himself with a knife. Burrows appears to get away with his behavior until the last paragraph. In a twist worthy of O. Henry, Burrows returns home drunk, flops on his bed, and is bitten by the love-gift, an eighteen-inch snake.
Had the film been made by anyone other than Griffith—say, Thomas Ince—a powerful and brutal picture might have resulted, along the lines of The Cheat (1915). Marshall Neilan made just such a film, Bits of Life (1921), several years later. But Griffith transformed the story. The Cheat portrayed a vicious Oriental; why not make a film in which the white man is the brute and the Oriental the apotheosis of gentleness?
He made the Chinese, Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), into a student priest, who leaves his country to bring the message of Buddha to the warring nations. He did not censor the lairs of the prostitutes, but he dropped the episode in which Lucy (Lillian Gish) is brought into the opium den. Instead, he has her stumble blindly into the streets after a beating and collapse against Cheng Huan’s half-open door.
Griffith knew that his audience would expect The Cheat treatment as soon as it laid eyes on the Oriental, so he gave them an alarming moment where Cheng Huan advances on Lucy with obvious intent. And then he defuses the tension with a title: “His love remains a pure and holy thing. Even his worst foe says this.”
And Griffith alters the ending. Cheng is a pacifist, so one might have expected a pacifist finale, with Cheng killing himself by Lucy’s dead body, leaving Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp) to face the consequences of his actions. But this is an American film. Cheng arms himself not with a poisonous snake, which implies that he is a slimy and treacherous individual, but with a gleaming revolver, which he fires point-blank at Battling Burrows. One can almost hear the applause.
Whether the changes improved the story or not, Griffith produced a film hailed instantly as a classic, as the most beautiful production ever made. It was not the financial success it should have been, but it made money and was far from the commercial failure some historians have alleged.
The fact that Broken Blossoms was shot as World War I came to an end had a bearing on the treatment. Had Griffith made the film at any other time, his Chinese might have been far less sympathetic. When he adapted two more tales from Limehouse Nights for Dream Street in 1921, the Chinese characterization followed Thomas Burke more closely: an evil Chinese “vice-lord” is handed over to the police and warned: “After this, you leave white girls alone.”
But in 1918, with the war almost won, the Hun-hatred and drum beating was giving way to a sense of idealism. America, which had saved the world for democracy, now showed the way with the League of Nations. Griffith abandoned his pacifism when he made Hearts of the World (1918). Now he returned to it, foreshadowing the popular mood which would sweep the world after the war to end all wars.
He could not decide on an actor to play Cheng Huan. First he asked George Fawcett, who usually played flint-hearted fathers and was then working in Griffith’s production for Artcraft, A Romance of Happy Valley. But eventually Griffith borrowed Richard Barthelmess from Dorothy Gish Productions, where he was making comedies. Barthelmess said, “With all modesty, I can state that after having watched Fawcett rehearse … I merely went into rehearsals myself and copied every mannerism that Fawcett had given the part.”89
Richard Barthelmess on location in Los Angeles’ Chinatown for D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, 1919. (National Film Archive)
To give him a feeling for the role, Griffith took Barthelmess to Los Angeles’s Chinatown, where they visited the restaurants, shops, and temples. “I absorbed a lot of Chinese atmosphere and ever since that day I have been a firm believer in getting to know what to put into a characterization.”90 Instead of wearing make-up, Barthelmess achieved the narrow eyes by wearing a tight rubber band underneath his Chinese skullcap. (The Chinese-American cameraman James Wong Howe used to call whites in Chinese roles “adhesive tape actors.”)
Rehearsals took place at night while Griffith shot A Romance of Happy Valley during the day. They concentrated on the character of Cheng Huan because Lillian Gish, who was to play Lucy, was having problems. Griffith had seen “The Chink and the Child” as ideal for her, but when she read the story, she disagreed: “Dick Barthelmess wasn’t more than five feet six or seven, and I’m five feet six without shoes on, and how could I bend my knees and get down to a twelve-year-old child? I said to Mr. Griffith, ‘I’ll help any little girl, I’ll be with her night and day if you just won’t make me play it.’ He said, ‘Don’t be silly, you know a child can’t play those emotional scenes.’ ”91
Lillian Gish as Lucy in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms.
Griffith did raise the age of the girl to fifteen, but he almost lost Gish. She was struck by the Spanish flu, and rehearsals had to continue without her. Her recovery speeded by many messages of affection, she returned to work too soon. The epidemic was still raging. “They were dying so fast in California that they couldn’t build caskets, and they were burying the victims in one grave.”92 Griffith, who had a neurotic fear of germs at the best of times, insisted that Gish wear a face mask whenever possible.
The Chinese technical adviser was Moon Kwan. Griffith had a curious policy about whom he would credit and whom he would not: whereas Kwan gets a credit, James Wang, who played the High Priest in the temple, did not, nor did another assistant and interpreter, Leong But-jung (James B. Leong).
Griffith had a curious attitude to casting, too: most of the background characters are Chinese, but a role such as Evil Eye, which required acting talent, was entrusted to Edward Piel, who was all too obviously Caucasian. In the opium den scene,93 a lascar seaman is clearly a white man with a coat of dark make-up.
In a further lapse of authenticity, Griffith confuses Chinese and Japanese customs and has Cheng Huan commit hara-kiri.*
The Chink and the Child had undergone a title change to White Blossom and the Chink. Griffith had to attend to the launch of The Greatest Thing in Life, as well as the formation of United Artists, and he neglected his new film. Jimmy Smith complained that he couldn’t get the Boss to look at it.
Lillian Gish asked Griffith why.
“I can’t look at the damn thing; it depresses me so,” he said. “Why did I ever do a story like that? It will drive the audience out of the theater, providing you can persuade them to come in and look. I was a fool to do such a story.”94
This was a natural reaction to a period of intense hard work. When he forced himself to attend to the details of editing, titling, and scoring, his love for his new child was restored.
One man, however, did not share his affection for the film, and that was Adolph Zukor. One of the shrewdest and most ruthless men in the business, he had financed Griffith since Hearts of the World, and planned to distribute the new film through his prestigious Artcraft releasing arm. When he saw the film, he saw box-office poison—a tragedy in which the girl wears rags and the handsome leading man is disfigured with Oriental make-up. He had made a lot of money from The Cheat, with an Oriental villain, but this was going beyond the pale. Zukor was probably angry with Griffith because of his negotiations to form United Artists, of which, secret or not, Zukor would undoubtedly have been aware.
According to Lillian Gish, Zukor said, “You bring me a picture like this and want money for it? You may as well put your hand in my pocket and steal it. Everybody in it dies. It isn’t commercial.”95
Griffith’s response is not known, but apparently he returned a few days later and gave back Zukor’s money. Tino Balio says that the picture had cost $88,000,and Zukor made no secret of the fact that he wanted to get rid of it. But guessing United Artists’ plight—they urgently needed new releases—Zukor struck a hard bargain and insisted on $250,000—a fairly reasonable figure when compared against the average takings of a major film. UA had no alternative but to advance the money to Griffith in return for distribution rights. The film grossed $600,000 in the United States alone and made an eventual profit of $700,000.96
When Griffith “tried it on the dog” at Pomona, California, the commercial men’s prediction followed Zukor’s: “No big stuff, only three people in the cast and everyone killed off—can’t be done.”
That preview was so successful that Griffith began to think perhaps he had another hit on his hands. The title was still White Blossom and the Chink, which clearly had to go. The new tide came from Burke’s story: “Thereafter the spirit of poetry broke her blossoms all about his odorous chamber.”97
In May 1919 Griffith went to New York, where he had engaged a legitimate theatre, the George M. Cohan, and arranged a repertory season of his films, opening with Broken Blossoms. He had the theatre decorated in Chinese style and offered a prologue to put the audience in the mood for tragedy: The Dance of Life and Death.
This prologue was filmed, and it was when Griffith was running the footage at the theatre with the stage lights accidentally left on that he saw the remarkable, vibrant, almost magical effect produced by diffused blue and gold lights projected obliquely on the screen. He immediately decided to use lights to enhance the presentation, and he went so far as to patent the idea for a period of seventeen years.98
Karl Brown, who saw the effect at Clune’s later that year, described it in his book, Adventures with D. W. Griffith: “The houselights dimmed, but not entirely so. Instead of darkness, the entire auditorium was suffused with a strange, unearthly blue that seemed to come from everywhere—from the chandelier, from spots ranged along the balconies, from the footlights. There was something eerily supernatural about it.… The big curtain whispered upward, revealing the screen which was not at all white but bathed in that strange, all-suffusing blue coming from spots arranged around the inside of the proscenium arch.”99
The lights, the music, and the decoration of the theatre were all designed to encourage the audience to lose themselves in what was not simply a tragedy but a fantasy. From the start of production, every effort, including the attempt to find “Chinese lighting,” had been bent to remove the film from reality. No Chinese was so gentle, no Cockney waif so beautiful, no boxer so violent …
“For it was a fantasy,” wrote Brown, “a dream, a vision of archetypical beings out of the long inherited memory of the human race. No such people as we saw on the screen were ever alive in the workaday world of today or any other day. They were, as Griffith had explained to me in that dark projection room, misty, misty.… They were the creatures of a poetic imagination that had at very long last found its outlet in its own way in its own terms. It was a parable in poetry, timeless and eternally true because it touched the deepest recesses of all who were there.”100
Because the emotions it aroused were genuine, people mistook Broken Blossoms for realism. When it opened in Paris, it was whistled at and booed. Battling Burrows, was “too realistic,” and the Chinese poet was played by an American. In England, there were protests that Griffith’s idea of Limehouse, of Cockneys, and of London police stations was all wrong.101 But Broken Blossoms—one can almost scent the incense—was the escapist film par excellence, and with a stroke of good fortune that had eluded Griffith with Intolerance, it arrived at the perfect moment. The war had ended, and audiences wanted to escape not only from the present but from the immediate past. A film which takes place in limbo, which is idealistic and high-minded, where admirable behavior is offset by the sight of characters carrying on in a despicable manner, its eroticism hidden from sight but not from the subconscious, framed in an exquisite shimmer of light, color, and scent—this greatly appealed to the big-city audiences, despite an admission price of three dollars. The reviews were all outstanding.
Broken Blossoms. A Limehouse opium den. (National Film Archive)
Griffith chose San Francisco for the West Coast premiere, not only because of its large Chinese population but because it had given an excellent reception to David Belasco’s production of The First Born (by Francis Powers), a Chinese story which Griffith considered the most artistic one-act play ever written in America.102
And then he brought it home, to Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. It was a grand farewell gesture, for while Griffith had not officially announced it, Hollywood knew that he and his company were moving east. As Karl Brown wrote: “The reaction of that crowded house was the ultimate in applause—a stunned silence of the deeply moved. This lasted a moment, and then came a spontaneous roar of sound, people on their feet shattering the air, hands smiting hands, voices crying ‘Bravo, Bravo’ and the walls loud with echoed uproar.”103
The film became an instant classic. But, as Brown pointed out, when the picture went into the cold bleak world, to be shown in a regular picture house with no color projection (release prints were tinted, however), no special orchestras to help it out, “It was a sad, sad story. They walked out on it. The farmers who had cranked up the old flivver and driven into town to see a rattling good thriller like Griffith is famous for, couldn’t quite dope out what it was about, so they went across the street to see some other picture that, like as not, the reviewers had tramped all over.”104
A wave of features and serials followed Broken Blossoms with stories set in the Orient or Chinatown—Crooked Streets (Paul Powell), The Yellow Typhoon (Edward José) with Anita Stewart, the serial The Invisible Hand (William J. Bowman) with Antonio Moreno. Chinese extras were paid 50 percent more than their white counterparts ($7.50 per day as opposed to five dollars). And it was not advisable for casting directors to try to make do with Japanese extras; there was intense rivalry between the Chinese and Japanese and while the latter might have worked for five dollars, they would not put on Chinese costume.105
This did not apply to Sessue Hayakawa, who frequently played Chinese roles. In 1921 he filmed the tragic play The First Born, which had so impressed Griffith, working with an almost entirely Chinese cast. The play, however, was not written by an Oriental. And few of these films did anything to dispel the popular misconceptions about the Chinese. “I do not like pictures about Chinese,” said a child, “because they are frightening.”106
To combat the bad image of the Chinese purveyed by the motion picture, James B. Leong Productions (also known as the Wah Ming Motion Picture Company) was set up in Los Angeles, financed by Chinese businessmen. Its aim was to make Chinese stories with Chinese casts. Sadly, it was a short-lived experiment, for it appears to have made but one film. George Yohalem wrote a scenario for The Lotus Flower from an original story by James Leong.
Leong was born in Shanghai in 1889 and came to America in 1913. He went to college in Muncie, Indiana, and entered films about 1918, serving as interpreter and assistant director on Broken Blossoms.107
His story was an adaptation of an old legend of a girl who gave her life that the sacred bell might be sweet-toned and so saved her father’s reputation as an artisan.108 The cast, headed by Lady Tsen Mei,† included James Wang (who had played the Buddhist priest in Broken Blossoms), Goro Kino, and Chow Young. Among the Westerners were Tully Marshall, made up as a Chinese, and Noah Beery as a Tartar chief.
The Pagan God, 1919, directed by Park Frame (center), with H. B. Warner (right). Interpreter is Leong But-Jung (James B. Leong): the cameraman is William C. Foster. (Robert S. Birchard Collection)
A mixture of Oriental and Occidental players in Purple Dawn, 1923. James B. Leong (left). Edward Peil (standing) as tong leader, and Bessie Love (far right).
In Picture Play, the director was named as Leong But-jung (James B. Leong’s Chinese name). The magazine described a preview for the Chinese consul, at which But-jung answered all the questions of the American distributors. Yet when the film was released (under the new title of Lotus Blossum), the direction was credited to Frank Grandon.
But-jung announced another film, based on an old Korean legend, but nothing came of it.
As James B. Leong, or Jimmy Leong, But-jung turned to acting and played Oriental roles in numerous pictures, among them The Purple Dawn with Bessie Love.
James Wang, who came to the United States in the 1880s, appeared in some of the earliest American films, made in Chicago and New York. Although he left the Baptist ministry to act in films, he was not offended to be offered villainous roles. As one of the technical advisers on The Red Lantern, he interpreted French director Albert Capellani’s orders to the 500 Chinese extras storming the palace. James Wang was the major source for Chinese actors and extras and thus a valuable member of the picture business.109
Equally important was Tom Gubbins, an Englishman born in China, where his father was in the diplomatic service. Gubbins spent his first eight years in China; when he moved to Los Angeles as an adult, he found himself more at home in Chinatown than in Hollywood. He endeared himself to the locals by helping to organize a strike among those who worked in pictures when they protested against the lurid screen portrayals of the Chinese.
When producers approached Gubbins, he insisted upon knowing the story, and he refused to ask the Chinese to appear in scenes which were derogatory.110 He had several successes in his casting: he gave Anna May Wong, born Wong Liu Tsong‡ of Chinese parents in 1907 in Los Angeles, her first work as an extra at the age of twelve. She had a role in The Red Lantern and was featured in the Technicolor “Madame Butterfly,” The Toll of the Sea (1922), directed by Chester M. Franklin, becoming as a direct result the only Chinese-American to approach stardom after Douglas Fairbanks saw her and featured her in his The Thief of Bagdad (1924). She had become obsessed with the movies after seeing companies at work in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and she frequently played truant to watch them, becoming known to technicians and players as the Curious Chinese Child. Her parents opposed her career, and her father refused to watch her films. But she succeeded in America and became the darling of high society in England, from whence she returned with a pronounced English accent and the startling statement that there was no racial prejudice in Europe. She had even worked in France and Germany. Wong felt that Sessue Hayakawa’s career had been damaged because he was never allowed to kiss the object of his love if she happened to be white. The same applied to her; she was never permitted to kiss a white man.
Anna May Wong’s departure for Europe in 1928 was spurred by dismay at the parts she was offered in Hollywood. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece,” she said in a 1933 interview, “and so cruel a villain.… We are not like that.
Anna May Wong (center) with a group of Chinese-American actresses in Drifting, 1923, a Tod Browning picture about opium smuggling in China.
“How should we be, with a civilization that’s so many times older than that of the West? We have our own virtues. We have our rigid code of behavior, of honor. Why do they never show these on the screen? Why should we always scheme, rob, kill? I get so weary of it all—the scenarist’s concept of Chinese characters.”111
Yet the nightclub dancer she played in Piccadilly (1929) in England, for German director E. A. Dupont, was hardly a fresh departure, although she stole the picture from its star, Gilda Gray. She knew little of China and when she visited that country found herself rejected by the Chinese theatre for being too American.112
“My Chinese are trying hard—very hard—to win the respect of Americans,” said Gubbins. “They do not like to appear in roles which in any way seem degrading. Honor and honesty are characteristics of their race. For example, when we were working in the William Fox production Shame, directed by Emmett Flynn, the script called for scenes in an opium den. The action revolved about some low-caste Chinese characters and led to one of those dives where, in fiction, white girls become slaves of a fearful drug and are ruined.
“Do you think the Chinese would appear in those scenes? Not on your life! They chattered among themselves, shook their heads, backed off. It looked like mutiny. Then I was called, and I had to take great pains to explain that though the scene showed an opium den, the action would teach a great moral lesson, and it was their duty to help teach this lesson. I had to tell the whole story to them, and it was only then that they would agree to go ahead. At that, they didn’t like it and very plainly told me that they wanted no more of that kind.
Chinese-American James Wong Howe, already one of the world’s greatest cameramen, filming Sorrell and Son, 1927, on the roof of the Savoy Hotel, London. H. B. Warner (left) and director Herbert Brenon. (National Film Archive)
“And they also let it be known that they would take part in no scenes which showed Chinese kidnapping white girls. You remember, back in the old days of serials, the spectacle of the heroine being snatched by villainous Orientals and dragged into a den of vice. It was quite common. The truth of the matter is that fewer white girls have been attacked by Chinese than by any other race of people.”113
The situation got so bad that when a company arrived to film sequences for Pied Piper Malone (1924) in New York’s Chinatown, they were met with a near riot. Young Chinese tore the Mandarin clothes from the extras (also Chinese), and the company was bombarded with milk bottles, bricks, and old vegetables. The film people took cover until the police arrived. The main complaint was against the movies showing the denizens of Chinatown smoking opium.114
But melodrama, however exaggerated, contains a modicum of truth. Opium dens did exist, and it is fascinating to see the way they are portrayed in early films. One of the most startling comments in pre-Hays American cinema was in DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus (1918), when the dishonest clerk is watching the New Year celebrations in Chinatown. He wanders into a Chinese bar, where he is offered not only opium but women, too. A blind is slowly raised revealing a bed, occupied by a girl. DeMille intercuts the clerk’s wife marrying a politician, thinking her husband dead, while the clerk (symbolically) makes love to the Oriental girl.
A 1917 picture with Edna Goodrich called Queen X, an exposé of the opium traffic, featured the Chinese actor George Gee. In 1918, Gee was murdered at his Brooklyn home.
“For many years, Gee has been an informant of the Government,” said Moving Picture World, “and aided the revenue agents in trailing scores of traffickers in drugs, with the result that a price of $500 is said to have been placed on his head by tongs interested in the opium traffic.
“In the film Gee was portrayed as the managing director of the Government campaign against illicit dealers in drugs and the Government officials believe that agents of the tongs recognized him in the film and spotted him as the informant who was responsible for the numerous raids which resulted in the arrest and conviction of illicit drug dealers.”115
Sam Goldwyn purchased a fantasy by Gouverneur Morris called What Ho the Cook, and in 1921 he handed it to director Rowland V. Lee. “I loved the story,” Lee said, “and saw many possibilities of making it into a charming, unique piece of entertainment.”116
The story concerned a Chinaman who makes a trip to America; when he returns he tells the story of his adventures to his eight-year-old son. The attraction of the piece was its view of America through the imaginings of the boy. The hero, What Ho, is in love with a girl named Ting-a-Ling Wing, daughter of a laundryman. Business is bad, and the laundryman decides to go to the United States, “where men wear starched collars every day.” What Ho follows. After adventures with Mexican bandits, What Ho reaches the U.S. border, where a customs officer stands at a turntable. He sniffs the bottles that cross the line, seizing those containing liquor. The officer roars at What Ho, demanding a passport or a ten-dollar bill. What Ho has neither, but conceals himself in a grandfather clock. He arrives with a bang; the removal men drop the clock. Had they placed it carefully, it would have meant overtime. When he finds Ting-a-ling, she is much changed. She indulges in “flirting.” This, she explains, is a custom by which a lady acts as if she doesn’t like the man when in fact she does. Go-Hang, the Chinese owner of the local American Plan laundry, is angry at the competition offered by What Ho. “Don’t I pay the aldermen for a monopoly?” he cries. “Send me the gangster and tell the cops to look the other way.” What Ho manages to defeat the gangster, but not the policemen who support the gangster. Asked to obey the men in uniform, he even returns to give himself up to the customs officer, who offers a bargain bribe, $9.98. When What Ho hears he can leave the country without disobeying the men in uniform, he races back to Arcadia in time to break up the wedding of Go-Hang and Ting-a-ling and marry the girl himself.117
Jack Abbe in What Ho, the Cook, with gangster (Harry Gribbon).
Rowland V. Lee and Cedric Gibbons indulged themselves with elaborate and amusing sets including Go-Hang’s laundry, which featured a monstrous machine called The Button Remover. Their approach was to make the film resemble the illustrations in a children’s book.
Jack Abbe was given the lead opposite an Oriental girl called Winter Blossom, and the title was changed to Whims of the Gods. Chaplin watched the rushes for several nights and was full of admiration.
It would be tempting to see the hand of Will Hays crushing the life out of this diverting little picture, with its cynical view of America, and certainly its non-appearance coincides with his acceptance of his new post. But according to Rowland V. Lee, the culprit was Goldwyn himself: “When the picture was cut, Goldwyn said it stank and had it put on the shelf. Long after I had left the studio an effort was made to salvage the film. A wise-cracking title writer was engaged. Result: disaster. The film was never released and I still think it was one of the best things I ever did.”118
The official reason? The American public did not care for fantasy. Douglas Fairbanks made The Thief of Bagdad a few years later, and the American public embraced it wholeheartedly.
SHADOWS One of the strongest influences of Broken Blossoms was not its tolerance but its violence. Bits of Life was made by Marshall Neilan in 1921. (A title in Broken Blossoms read: “Broken bits of his life in his new home.”) It was a feature made up of four short stories and an artistic experiment in itself. Sadly, the film has been lost, but it made a stir in the business at the time because it seemed such a brave effort and proved such a financial flop.
Lon Chaney in Shadows, 1922, directed by Tom Forman. (National Film Archive)
All the stories but the last ended grimly. The third, “Hop,” by Hugh Wiley, featured Lon Chaney (in one of his remarkable make-ups, as a Chinese vice-lord) and Anna May Wong. As a boy in China, Chin Gow was taught that girl infants were undesirable. When he rises to overlord of the San Francisco opium dens and his wife produces a girl, he beats the wife and vows to kill the child.119 A friend gives the wife a crucifix; as she hammers it into the wall, the nail penetrates the skull of Chin Gow, lying on a bunk on the other side, and kills him.120
Photoplay selected it as one of the eight best pictures of the year, but the censors took such exception to it that some states did not see it at all. In any case, the public stayed away. An exhibitor commented, “I tell you that Chink stuff of that kind won’t do if we expect to stay in the game.”121
The picture did nothing to improve the lot of the Chinese in America. Lon Chaney, however, had the distinction of starring in Shadows, produced in 1922 by B. P. Schulberg’s studio. This was in many respects a routine low-budget melodrama, but what made it unique was that it dealt openly with racial prejudice and small-town hypocrisy, and its hero was an unattractive, opium-smoking Chinese laundryman. “Portraying the Oriental,” said Lon Chaney, “is to my mind an art.”122
The picture opened with the title “To every people, in every age, there comes a measure of God to man—through man.
“Even today, wisdom may dwell among us in humble guise, unknown, despised, until, its mission fulfilled, it slips back into the mystery from whence it came.”
“Pray—or get out!” says the pillar of the church, Nate Snow (John Sainpolis) to the shipwrecked Chinese (Lon Chaney). A scene from Shadows, 1922. (Museum of Modern Art)
In the little New England seaport of Urkey, a violent storm wrecks several boats and Dan Gibbs (Walter Long), the much-disliked “Admiral” of the fishing fleet, is lost. When a man is washed up on the shore, the townspeople are dismayed to find that he (Lon Chaney) is Chinese. They pray for the souls of the lost, but he fails to join them. “Pray—or get out!” says a pillar of the church, Nate Snow (John Sainpolis). “We are all believers in Urkey. We want no heathens.”
But Yen Sin elects to stay. He sets up a laundry and keeps to himself. A young pastor, John Maiden (Harrison Ford), comes to Urkey, “heartsore,” as the title puts it, “because he had not been called to the ‘Field’ of the Far East.” While the townspeople welcome him, their children beat up Yen Sin and Maiden has to rescue the man. He and Sympathy Gibbs (Marguerite de la Motte), Dan Gibbs’s widow, fall in love, marry, and have a child.
Maiden receives a letter, purporting to come from Dan Gibbs, demanding $500. His quiet life becomes a nightmare. He takes Nate Snow into his confidence, and Nate lends him the blackmail money. But Maiden is haunted by the possibility that Gibbs is alive, making him a bigamist. When this fear causes him to collapse in the pulpit, he resigns from the church.
“It seemed that all the purpose of Maiden’s life was now directed to the one channel left open to him”—he attempts to convert Yen Sin. Maiden is shunned by the villagers; only Nate Snow stands by him. When the old Chinese falls ill and asks for the minister, Snow arrives and asks him to repent and believe.
Yen Sin says he will confess if Snow confesses too. Obligingly, Snow catalogues some minor offenses. But Yen Sin turns the tables on him and reveals him as the blackmailer. Maiden, who has arrived together with some of the townspeople, is shocked. But his reaction is unexpected. “I have suffered,” he says, “but you, Nate, you must have suffered a thousand times more to do the thing you did.”
Yen Sin is so moved by this that he touches Maiden’s sleeve: “If you forgive, then Yen Sin believe!”
In the final scene, another storm springs up. Yen Sin, alone again on his old scow, cuts the mooring line, and the wind carries the boat into the darkness.
“The storm brought him,” says Maiden, “and the storm is taking him away—but the peace he found us is awaiting him in the harbor.”
This touching story was directed with such sincerity that the melodramatic style only added to the poignancy. Adapted from the story “Ching, Ching, Chinaman” by Wilbur Daniel Steele, the script was written by Eve Unsell and Hope Loring. Tom Forman directed and Al Lichtman produced. The camerawork was by Harry Perry.
“Filming Shadows was a joy,” wrote Harry Perry. “The exteriors were found not far from Monterey in west central California. Tom Forman took our troupe to a perfect substitute for a Massachusetts town. There, in spite of the worst weather conditions imaginable, I was able to photograph some of the most remarkable scenic effects I have ever recorded on film.”123
The critical reaction was mixed. Picture Play considered it “a curiously dull transcription of an excellent story of New England people. Lon Chaney lifts it from mediocrity.”124
Photoplay said, “An idea of delicacy and charm has been translated with great care to the screen. Tom Forman’s direction is as inspired as possible in view of the fact that there are censors.”125
Photoplay also revealed that those who objected to the title change should not blame the producers. Schulberg and Lichtman wanted to use Ching, Ching, Chinaman and wrote to exhibitors, asking for their opinion. Two thirds thought it a dreadful title.126 Schulberg knew the risk he was taking by making the picture in the first place; there was no point in arousing further antipathy from exhibitors. He changed the title to Shadows, which meant very little and had to be justified by a title in the confrontation scene, when Maiden says, “Then all my fears have been just—shadows?” Schulberg regarded this as his one concession to the box office.127
Thanks to Lon Chaney’s drawing power—he had become a star with The Miracle Man in 1919, the year of Broken Blossoms—exhibitors reported excellent business in many parts of the country. One 4,000-seat theatre in Cleveland reported S.R.O. all day one Monday, when the opposition included a Wallace Reid picture and When Knighthood Was in Flower with Marion Davies. And several Midwest theatres, whose patrons might have been offended by the story, reported excellent runs, with the public well pleased.
Louis F. Gottschalk wrote the score for the film, as he had for Broken Blossoms. And Robert E. Sherwood selected it for his book The Best Motion Pictures of 1922–1923. Of the grave problems faced by such brave independent productions, he wrote: “Shadows provides definite proof of the regrettable fact that the best pictures aren’t always to be seen in the best theatres.
Shadows in production. Left to right, Lon Chaney; Eve Unsell, scenarist; B. P. Schulberg, producer; Tom Forman, director; Harry Perry, cameraman. (Museum of Modern Art)
“It is an open secret that the great majority of first-run theatres in all parts of the country are controlled by four great producer-distributing corporations—Famous Players, First National, Fox and Metro with an additional number that are devoted largely to Universal, Goldwyn and Pathé. These huge companies, which are always at one another’s throats, fight fiercely for control in each city. The poor little independent companies stand helplessly by—knowing that regardless of who wins the big tussle, they are pretty sure to lose. They find it almost impossible to get their pictures into important first-run theatres; and must content themselves with those meagre scraps that they are able to pick off this second string.
“Shadows ran into this difficulty. Mr. Schulberg and his associate, Al Lichtman, tried to place Shadows in one of the first-run theatres in New York (there are five of them)—but it was met with nothing but rebuffs.
“The National Board of Review, however, discovered Shadows and lifted it from the obscurity in which it had been submerged; it proved to be financially successful.”128
Sherwood considered Shadows not only an unusually good story, but a forceful lesson in religious tolerance: “As such, it probably proved offensive to many ardent churchmen who believe that intolerance is a weapon entrusted to them, and them alone, by God.… Mr. Chaney’s performance of the benevolent laundryman, Yen Sin, was the finest impersonation of an Oriental character by an Occidental player that I have ever seen.”129
Shadows came out in 1922, but failed to make the kind of impact for which Schulberg hoped. Lon Chaney went on to make Mr. Wu, directed by William Nigh, at MGM in 1929, a return to the violent melodrama of Bits of Life: despite his love for his daughter, a Chinese kills her when she plans to marry an Englishman instead of a Mandarin.
Hollywood found the sinister Oriental far more profitable than the gentle and humane one. One of the most racist films ever made in America appeared from Warner Bros. in 1927, from the pen of Darryl F. Zanuck: Old San Francisco, directed by Alan Crosland. A white man hides a hideous secret: he has Chinese blood … a girl who has been captured by the Chinese is about to be handed over to the white slavers when she is saved by the San Francisco earthquake. It is serial stuff, impeccably produced, but utterly absurd, suffused by the kind of religion best practiced by the Ku Klux Klan:
In the awful light of an outraged, wrathful Christian God, the heathen soul of the Mongol stood revealed.
Picture the Japanese immigrant arriving in America between the years 1890 and 1924 with just a blanket on his back and faced with an alien landscape and equally alien faces. He was subjected to brutal inspection by officials, not one word of whose language he could understand. Occasionally Nisei (first-generation Japanese-Americans) might be on hand to assist the Issei (Japanese-born). If not, he was on his own.
Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese were not excluded by the United States. At first barred from leaving Japan by their own government, when they were finally permitted to emigrate, Japanese people were welcomed in America. But large numbers began to arrive at the worst possible moment, when the United States had “solved” the Chinese problem with the Exclusion Act of 1882. The Japanese replaced the Chinese, working hard for low wages and seldom complaining about conditions. This impressed employers but did not endear the newcomers to the unions. Restricted to low-paid laboring jobs, they gravitated toward agriculture; the vast majority of Japanese immigrants became farmers or gardeners.130
Japan’s 1905 victory over Russia appalled the Western world. Films were even made about a possible Japanese invasion of America. When Japan was rumored to be preparing for war in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a “gentleman’s agreement” by which no further passports would be issued to laborers; this was expected to reduce immigration. The Japanese who were already in America were ostracized, and social ostracism was, to them, almost more unbearable than the death penalty.131 Then, in 1924, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act excluded the Japanese altogether, despite a warning by the Japanese ambassador of the grave consequences of abandoning the gentleman’s agreement.132 The act shocked and insulted Japan and strengthened the hands of the nationalists and militarists. Leonard Mosley, in his life of Hirohito, points to the act as an important link in the chain that eventually led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
(Will the Japanese never cope with our technology?) Sessue Hayakawa in Hashimura Togo, 1917, directed by William de Mille. (Museum of Modern Art)
The act was followed by a boycott in Japan against all things American—especially motion pictures.
There was another Japan in American minds; the land of Madame Butterfly, orange blossom, geisha girls, ornamental gardens, bold samurai. To bring audiences a scent of authentic Japan, the Star Film Company, run by the Frenchman Gaston Méliès, went there as part of their world cruise in 1912. The group sailed from San Francisco aboard a Japanese steamer and began filming at once. The subjects they produced were either documentaries—A Japanese Wedding, Japanese Shoemaker at Work—or dramas of shame, slavery, and suicide.133
The Vitagraph Corporation of America followed a year later.134 They also traveled aboard a Japanese steamer and were astonished to find it equipped with a motion picture theatre, enabling them to shoot pictures during the day and show them at night. Director James Young, far from expressing gratitude, muttered darkly about the vessel crossing the Pacific some day as a military transport “laden with yellow warriors to overrun the Louisiana Purchase and points East.”135
When the ship put in at Yokohama, the Americans were soothed and charmed. “For exquisite scenery and immaculate cleanliness Japan is in a class by itself.”136 But wherever they went, they were shadowed by secret service men and allowed to take pictures only on condition that a copy of each scene be handed over for government inspection. Two films, Osaka’s Wrath137 and Jack’s Chrysanthemum,138 were shot in the Yokohama area.
In 1917, The Fuji Yama Film Company of Yokohama brought out director Frank A. Thorne to help make its pictures. He was accompanied by his wife, the actress Lizette Thorne; both had worked for the American Film Company. Thorne told Moving Picture World:
“I am directing an eight-reel feature, which the company is here to make, entitled Nami-Ko. The entire cast is composed of Japanese actors, and while it is very interesting to see these quaint people work before the camera it is nevertheless quite a task to handle them, as everything has to be done through an interpreter, and when night comes I am very weary from the work …
“Their studios are fine and their settings are very elaborate; their actors are very good, and in many ways they can teach us, but they don’t understand construction and cutting for dramatic value, and most of their plays are tragic and much overacted. Naturalness seems foreign to them, and if they can be taught this simple art their products are destined to give the world at large very keen competition.”139
In October 1914, the Japanese-American Film Company began operations in California, capitalized at $200,000 by Japanese businessmen. A stock company of forty players was brought over from Japan to make films with Japanese themes, treating native customs with absolute fidelity. The president of the corporation was K. Numamoto and the secretary J. Takata. The leading lady was Hisa Numa, who had made pictures in Japan. Tomi Morri, a Japanese stage veteran who joined the company, had worked in pictures with Ince; other players included Kohano Akashi and Jack Y. Abbe. Abbe became the only Japanese other than the Hayakawas to attain any kind of prominence as an actor, even though he tended to specialize in Chinese roles.140 The company’s first production, The Oath of the Sword, was made in California. One might have hoped for a fresh approach from Japanese filmmakers—particularly in view of the outstanding Japanese films which would be made before the end of the silent era. But it was the usual hokum—a young Japanese loves a girl from his own nation. He goes away to college. When he returns he finds his sweetheart has married an American, who has left his wife and child in the United States. “The ensuing dramatic scenes are most thrilling, and include a new handling of the Japanese custom of hara-kiri.”141
The Japanese film in the United States received its greatest boost when Thomas H. Ince signed a Japanese stage actress called Tsuru Aoki in 1913—together with her company of twenty Japanese players.§ Tsuru Aoki had come to America as a child in 1903 with her aunt, Sado Yacco, a celebrated dramatic dancer, and her uncle, the owner of the Imperial Theatre of Japan. While they went to Paris, Tsuru was left in San Francisco in the care of another uncle, Hyosai Aoki, an artist who placed her in a convent. He died while she was there, and an American newspaper woman adopted her and brought her to Los Angeles. So American was her up-bringing that while she retained respect for Japanese culture, she had to exercise great patience with all the preliminaries necessary to be correctly dressed and made up for Japanese roles.
Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki in The Courageous Coward, 1919, directed by William Worthington for Haworth Pictures Corp.
In Los Angeles, she organized a Japanese theatre and was succeeding so well she began to direct plays herself. Fred Mace, the comedian, tempted her into pictures. He argued that the film would accomplish more for Japan in a short space of time than the legitimate drama in a very long time.142 Actually, Mace just wanted her for a series of split-reel comedies at Majestic. But at the Boyle Heights studio she formed a friendship with director Dell Henderson and his wife, and they thought her wasted in these roles. Henderson directed her in The Oath of O Tsuru San, written by William Nigh. (In it, she fell in love with and married an American.) Then came the Thomas Ince contract.
Tsuru Aoki was born in Tokyo, but this was too mundane for the Ince publicity department; they declared her to be a native of the island of Sakura, which had recently been devastated by the eruption of the volcano Sakurajima.
“Miss Aoki, having lost practically all her relatives in this eruption, was inconsolable and Mr. Ince thought he was due to lose her, that she would have to go back home. But in consoling her, he induced her to work in conjunction with him on a thrilling and powerful heart interest story, entitled Wrath of the Gods … revolving around Japanese legends and depicting the scenes and actions of her countrymen during the eruption, so that she could show the world the sufferings of her people.”143
Tsuru Aoki’s future husband, Sessue Hayakawa, was described by David Warfield as “the screen’s greatest dramatic actor.”144 Born Kintaro Hayakawa in the township of Nanaura, on the island of Honshu, on June 10, 1890, he came of Samurai stock.145 He entered the navy, but suffered a broken ear drum in a diving prank. He was dismissed from the navy and attempted hara-kiri. His family sent him to the University of Chicago. He began acting for the Japanese community and eventually played in Los Angeles. It was here that he met Tsuru Aoki.
“I was very much interested,” she said, “in his brave attempts to play Ibsen and Shakespeare in Japanese, at the Japanese theatre in Los Angeles, and I promised to help in any way I could. I told him about my cherished plan to return to Japan some day and go on reforming the theatre, as my uncle and aunt had been doing, and I found that our ideals were identical.”146
Tsuru Aoki persuaded Ince to see a performance of Hayakawa’s staging of Melchior Lengyel’s murder-mystery play, The Typhoon. Ince was so impressed he bought the film rights and placed Hayakawa under contract, casting him immediately in Wrath of the Gods, which was produced in early 1914. In May of that year, Tsuru Aoki and Sessue Hayakawa were married.
The Wrath of the Gods, 1914, directed by Reginald Barker, with special effects by Raymond West. (National Film Archive)
The Wrath of the Gods opened with a typhoon (unlike The Typhoon) and closed with the eruption of a volcano. Ince’s most elaborate spectacle, it was nevertheless entirely a Japanese story. Curious that such a film should have been made in California, where anti-Japanese prejudice was endemic! What was the reason? Was Ince nostalgic because his father once specialized in Oriental roles? Was he capitalizing on the worldwide coverage given to the Japanese volcano, which erupted in January 1914? (The full title was The Wrath of the Gods, or the Destruction of Sakura-Jima; since the action took place several centuries earlier, the reference was dropped.) Whatever the reason, Ince caught the public at precisely the right moment. So great was the demand that Marcus Loew opened up the Brooklyn National League baseball ground (Ebbets Field), seating 20,000; 40,000 people tried to get in, and a riot broke out when 15,000 were turned away. Police reserves from three precincts had to be called out, and there were several casualties.147
The sequence in which the town is destroyed by the volcano is staggering, even today. Taken half a mile out to sea, a long shot of the entire shoreline smoking and what looks like thousands of extras rushing in panic along the seafront is unparalleled. (Ince was able to recruit extras from a Japanese fishing village a mile from the studio.) Director Reginald Barker, who made several Japanese subjects that year of 1914, handled most of the picture, while Raymond B. West coped with the special effects.
“I never saw an audience more plainly moved than the thousands that sat in the Strand watching the kaleidoscope of elemental rage,” reported W. Stephen Bush, who felt the appeal was doubly effective because the main roles were played by Japanese “with an earnestness and power which are rarely witnessed in the average screen performer.”148
The Typhoon was also directed by Reginald Barker; it, too, was regarded as an early classic. An all-too-faithful translation of a stage play, with a notable lack of physical action, it is not so impressive. Frank Borzage, who later excelled in the direction of actors, overacts alarmingly; Hayakawa is not much better. The only player who seems in control is Henry Kotani.149
Hayakawa played Tokorama, a Japanese diplomat living in Paris, who is working on a crucial military report. His French mistress grows petulant at his long absences. When he discovers she has another lover, he orders her out and she turns on him: “You yellow whining rat—and your Japan, a yellow blot on the ocean.” For which he kills her. Tokorama is protected by his compatriots, for only he can complete the vital report. An underling takes the blame; after an elaborate trial scene he is taken out and guillotined by the French authorities. Tokorama is found dead, his report completed. The ambassador is forced to burn it as the police smash their way in.
“The one impression of the play is that Japanese patriotism is a peculiar and fearful thing,” wrote Vachel Lindsay. “Sessue Hayakawa should give us Japanese tales more adapted to the films.”150
Hayakawa would have been the first to agree. “Such roles are not true to our Japanese nature,” he told Grace Kingsley in 1916. “They are false and give people a wrong idea of us. I wish to make a characterization which shall reveal us as we really are.”151
Typhoon, 1914. Hironari (Henry Kotani) is led to execution, sacrificing his life for his superior. (George Eastman House)
This was a curious comment, for it had been Hayakawa who had brought the play to Los Angeles. DeWitt Bodeen says that The Typhoon was a veritable dramatic thunderbolt, and it made Sessue Hayakawa an overnight star. This must have taken Ince by complete surprise because he had nothing with which to follow up The Typhoon.152 Although he tried to keep Hayakawa, he failed to match what Jesse Lasky offered.
Hayakawa appeared as the drunken son of a Sioux chief in Pride of Race (1914) (or The Last of the Line), an excellent two-reeler but hardly of the stature of the other films. When his contract lapsed, he went over to the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, and, after making a few films, including The Secret Sin with Blanche Sweet, in which he played the drug overlord of San Francisco’s Chinatown, he won his most famous role, as Hishuru Tori in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915).
The Cheat was one of the most sensational films of the early cinema. Edith Hardy (Fannie Ward), a society woman addicted to gambling, loses charity funds at a card game and borrows money from Tori, a collector and art connoisseur. The service she is expected to provide in return is implied in the bargain. When her husband (Jack Dean) makes money in the stock market and she is able to repay the debt in cash, Tori insists that she carry out their agreement. She refuses; he tears the gown from her shoulder and brands her like an object in his collection.
Tori (Hayakawa) attempts to contact Edith’s husband to reveal her vast debt—a scene from the 1915 version of The Cheat, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. (Anthony Slide)
She shoots and wounds him, but her husband takes the blame. In the trial scene, he is on the point of being convicted when she rises and, baring her shoulder, reveals the incriminating brand. Tori is protected with difficulty against the fury of the mob.
From Hector Turnbull’s scenario, DeMille made a powerful film which still retains much of its original impact. Although the film is unashamedly racist (Stephen Bush referred in his review to “the beastliness in the Oriental nature”),153 Hayakawa’s performance gives it much of its explosive quality. According to DeWitt Bodeen, the branding scene produced screams from the audience and some women fainted. “The effect of Hayakawa on American women was even more electric than Valentino’s,” he wrote. “It involved fiercer tones of masochism as well as a latent female urge to experience sex with a beautiful but savage man of another race.”154
Variety said: “Here certainly is one of the best yellow heavies that the screen has ever had.… Without the third point of the eternal triangle having been one of an alien race the role of Edith Hardy in this picture would have been one of the most unsympathetic that has ever been screened.”155
Japanese associations in California protested the picture vigorously on the grounds that the branding scene would embitter people against Japan,156 and DeMille received an official protest from the Japanese Embassy. As Japan was an ally of Great Britain and France, apologies were made, but not until the 1918 reissue (by which time the United States was in the war) were the titles changed, Hayakawa becoming Hara Arakau, a “Burmese” ivory merchant. (Hayakawa was unrepentant and felt the nationality of his character was immaterial.)
In Great Britain and Australia, the film was banned for fear of offending Japan. Although France should have followed the same diplomatic line, she failed to do so, and the film was an enormous hit—so much so that it became the first (and possibly only) motion picture to be turned into grand opera when Camille Erlanger’s Forfaiture was presented in Paris in 1921.157 (It was not a success.)158
The great French writer Colette reviewed The Cheat with admiration: “To the genius of an Oriental actor is added that of a director probably without equal,” she wrote. “Let our aspiring cine-actors go to see how, when his face is mute, [Hayakawa’s] hand carries on the flow of his thought. Let them take to heart the menace and disdain in a motion of his eyebrow and how, in the instant when he is wounded, he creates the impression that his life is running out with his blood, without shuddering, without convulsively grimacing, with merely the progressive petrifaction of his Buddha’s mask and the ecstatic darkening of his eyes.”159
The French were even more enthusiastic about the film than the Americans, although Louis Delluc said, “No one actually wanted to see anything in it except the Japanese.… Hardly anyone thought of its absolute cinematic newness.”160
Harry Carr claimed that Sessue Hayakawa gained stardom with a single glance. When Fannie Ward realizes she has made a blunder and tries to win Tori back, he meets her advances with a flash of cold scorn. “It sounds like an exaggeration; but it is an actual fact that, with that glance, Hayakawa not only made himself famous, but actually started a new school of acting—the school of repression.”161
Hayakawa explained that he had been brought up to follow the Samurai traditions: “I was always taught that it was disgraceful to show emotion. Consequently, in that scene, as in all other scenes, I purposely tried to show nothing by my face. But in my heart I thought, ‘God how I hate you.’ And of course it got over to the audience with far greater force than any facial expression could.”162
Hayakawa never had another sensation to match The Cheat, but he maintained his status as a star, moving easily from hero to villain and back again. As Karl Brown put it, “Sessue Hayakawa was a particular personality in his own right, something categorically personal having nothing to do with his being Japanese. A Hayakawa with another name would be as forbiddingly fascinating and as unpredictable as this man of mystery.”163
Hector Turnbull atoned for the racism of The Cheat with Alien Souls (1916), in which Hayakawa played another wealthy Japanese, but this time he was a noble character. At least it inspired one reviewer to write, “We are interested to learn here that the Japanese are not the peculiarly monstrous Mongolians of the arts in general, but, after all, just—people, although a bit strange of habit and custom.”164
Hayakawa specialized in romances and mystery stories, like other stars of the time. The nearest he came to a social film was The Honorable Friend (1916), about “picture brides,” Japanese women so called because they were selected from photographs. They arrived in America, married, then went to work, thus defeating the gentleman’s agreement.165 Hayakawa played the young manager of the Cherry Blossom Gardens and Nursery whose employer lends him the money to bring over his picture bride (Tsuru Aoki). Once he sees her he proves to be anything but an honorable friend. The Japanese were played by Japanese, with the exception of the employer, for whom Raymond Hatton concocted one of his spectacular make-ups.
Hayakawa was not always cast as a Japanese; he played Indian princes, Mexican bandits, Hawaiians, African chiefs, and, most significantly for a Japanese, he also played Chinese parts. He had only one major comedy role, in William de Milk’s Hashimura Togo (1917), in which he costarred with Florence Vidor. She considered him “a great actor, very subtle, very concentrated, very honest: ‘All I ever knew about acting I learned from Hayakawa.’ ”166
Sessue Hayakawa prepares to commit hara-kiri in Hashimura Togo, 1917. (Hayakawa had himself attempted hara-kiri when he was dismissed from the Japanese Navy.) (George Eastman House)
The first film Hayakawa made for his own company, Haworth,‖ His Birthright (1918), which was intended as a kind of sequel to Madame Butterfly, caused a flaming row. There had to be an American naval officer in such a story, but Variety was shocked that a rear admiral of the United States Navy should be placed in an “unenviable light” when confronted with an illegitimate son, the result of a long-ago affair with a Japanese girl. The character’s name was Milton. At the New Orleans Navy Yard in 1918 there was a rear admiral named John B. Milton, whose friends saw the film and registered their protests. Naval intelligence officers raided the Palace Theatre and seized the film on the grounds that it reflected discredit on the U.S. Navy. It was sent to Washington for examination, where the harmless plot must have caused some amusement. Hayakawa was unlucky: Milton was on the retired list but had been recalled to active service.
“The scenario would have been in far better taste had it been built around an ordinary American citizen,” said Variety.167
It became apparent around the end of 1919 that even though he was running his own company and helping to choose his own stories, Hayakawa was having difficulty with his subjects. (A Heart in Pawn [1919], had been based on his own play, Shadows.) The trade press commented on this when the overly artistic The Dragon Painter came out. At last he had made a pure Japanese film, but the public was not impressed, even though some critics were.a The following year he moved to Robertson-Cole.
The Hayakawas were among the social elite of Hollywood. Their home, Castle Glengarry, resembled a castellated Highland fortress, although it was actually built of wood. They entertained lavishly, sometimes welcoming as many as 600 guests. The racial problem was suppressed in their case, for their wealth engendered a degree of acceptance, yet it was ever-present nonetheless.
While making The Swamp, with Bessie Love, Hayakawa kept working despite an attack of appendicitis. Robertson-Cole executives warned that it would be financial disaster if he withdrew. He had just finished the film when his appendix burst, and he was rushed to the hospital.
Bessie Love also played with Hayakawa in The Vermilion Pencil (1922): “He wasn’t just a semi-Japanese,” she said, “he was the whole hog. A complete Japanese. And he didn’t pretend to be anything else. If you didn’t understand what he was talking about—and I never could—you were lost. Some people give you the gist, you get the drift, but not with him. He was so sweet.
“I was selling tickets for a function at the Hollywood Bowl and when I said I was starting work with Sessue Hayakawa, the organizing ladies looked askance and said, ‘Don’t sell one to him … we wouldn’t want him sitting next to anyone.’
“Another time I was made up as a Chinese, with my hair pulled back. Somebody called me back to the set. “Oh, Miss Love, I understand you’re invited to Hayakawa’s home for dinner. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ ”168
Legislation to prohibit Orientals from owning property was on the statute books in California, as anti-Japanese feeling increased. Yet press agents tried to give the impression that Hayakawa’s father was American—making him only half Japanese.169
It was one of the mysteries of Hollywood that Hayakawa suddenly dropped out of the American picture business.170 He went to Europe and appeared in French and British films, but Hollywood wondered what had happened. Interviewed in the January, 1929, Motion Picture Magazine, he blamed the standard of the stories he was given. But the interviewer, Winifred Eaton Reeve (Onoto Watanna), asked, “Surely you did not drop out of pictures because of that?”
“Oh, no,” said Hayakawa hastily. “That was just one of many irritations.” And he revealed another reason: “It was something deep. It strike me inside! It was something said to me that no true man should speak, and no true man can hear. Something that should not come out of the mouth. It was, you understand—not decent.
“I was associated with certain men in motion picture enterprise. They owe me $90,000. I never ask for this money. I think there is plenty of time to pay. Perhaps it was that they think too much about this debt. They think it good to goad and humiliate me—to pick a quarrel.”
The quarrel he did not object to. But one of the men—the head of the company—grew very angry. “He called me a name. It is something that should not come out of the mouth. Something that is unpardonable insult to me and an affront to my nationality. No man can help where he is born—what is his blood. Only an ignorant coward throws up to a man that he does not like his race. I come of a proud people—a man of my quality could not endure an insult. Still I did not speak. I stare at this face, but I say nothing. He say then, ‘People in this country have no use for Chinks.’ I am not Chink. I am Japanese gentleman, and the word Chink is not fit to be spoke.”
Hayakawa said nothing to the man, but bowed and left the room. He dismissed his servants and went to Japan in May 1922. (The $90,000 was settled by the company that bought the assets of his production organization.) He stayed in Japan for a month, and then passed through the United States—avoiding Hollywood—to New York, where he appeared in an unsuccessful play. Then he received an offer from France to appear in a Russo-Japanese war drama, Croix de Fer, released as La Bataille (1923)—The Danger Line in America. He was allowed to wear the uniform of a captain in the French navy and received remarkable naval cooperation.171
Whether the insult was the true reason for his departure, we have no means of knowing. It may seem like a minor incident to us, but coming after years of prejudice it may have been the last straw. A more sinister story went the rounds that during the shooting of The Vermilion Pencil, a set was rigged to fall on Hayakawa. And it was this story, rather than the other, which he chose to tell in his (somewhat unreliable) ghostwritten memoirs, Zen Showed Me the Way. He claimed that overall, his films made a substantial profit. Figures do not survive to confirm this, but there is no doubt that Hayakawa’s popularity was waning. His fans were satiated with stories with sad endings in which he was obliged to perish to leave the (white) lovers free. Although he felt that his acceptance in romantic roles by the public was a blow of sorts against racial intolerance, even if he did lose the girl in the last reel. He went on to make some talkies in Europe (and one in America, in 1933).
He was brought back to Hollywood for a Bogart vehicle, Tokyo Joe (1949), although his most famous role of later years was in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). After Tsuru Aoki died in 1961, Hayakawa became a Zen Buddhist priest in Japan. He died in 1973 at the age of eighty-four.
The idea of the Japanese as aggressors was never laid to rest. Overt references appeared in The Pride of Palomar (1922), directed by Frank Borzage, in which the villain was a Japanese potato baron, Okada. His attitude toward the United States was symbolized by a shot of him striking a match across a bust of George Washington.172 (Okada was played by Warner Oland, who, despite his Swedish origin, would specialize in Oriental roles.)
The threat of Japanese expansion caused William Fox to produce an educational feature, Face to Face with Japan, which appeared as part of Fox News. “So far as is humanly possible, it is said, this Fox production answers the query ‘Does war threaten between United States and Japan?’ ” wrote Exhibitors Herald.173
Al Brick, the star cameraman of the New York office of Fox News, traveled 6,000 miles into areas “never before photographed or entered by civilized white men.”174 The documentary revealed the Japanese war machine and illustrated Japanese expansion since 1894. Brick also secured footage of the “camphor hells” on Formosa, where Japan controlled the world’s output of camphor, used not only in mothballs but in explosives.
Yet at the same time, interest in the Japanese faded. In the decade from 1921 to 1930, the American Film Institute Catalogue lists just six fiction films (one of them the French production, La Bataille), which concern themselves with Japan. After December 1941, the American cinema corrected that oversight.
When the first moving pictures were made, Russia was undergoing a period of terrorism and repression that had started in 1881 with the assassination of Tsar Alexander by a nihilist. The 1905 revolution was preceded by another assassination in February, of the Grand Duke Sergius. Reverses in the war against Japan, particularly the disastrous naval defeat at Tsushima, led to mutinies in the Black Sea fleet, the most celebrated of which took place aboard the Potemkin. Twenty years before Eisenstein directed his masterly re-creation of the event, Pathé of France rushed out a reenactment which, however false the painted backcloths, nonetheless still carries impact with its scene of officers being thrown overboard.
“With the Japanese in the East hammering to pieces the armies of the Czar, with revolution fomenting throughout the empire, Russia demands the attention of the whole world,” announced The Biograph Bulletin,175 advertising their elaborate production of The Nihilists (1905). In the film, an aristocratic family in Russian Poland was torn apart by involvement in revolutionary politics. Grantwood, New Jersey, stood in for Warsaw.
In most of the early films about Russia, the nihilists resemble the French Resistance in World War II; in addition to blowing up oppressive officials and their mansions, they were often called in to get political suspects out of prison or across the border. Many of these films, however, were not political at all, but were merely an opportunity to put assaults on women and sadistic floggings on the screen. The leader of the nihilists, armed with gun or bomb, was invariably a girl who had suffered the death of her lover at the hands of the authorities.
Arthur Miller, the cameraman, recalled working on Russia, Land of Oppression (1910), made by Edwin S. Porter. The exteriors were shot on Staten Island and showed a Cossack raid on a Jewish village on the eve of Passover. Unfortunately, Porter could not afford to build the village. “The alarm shown by the peasants inside the cabins … was a trick used to avoid the necessity of building a cabin outside.”176
Doors could be filmed bursting open or being smashed in from inside, and the Cossacks could beat the peasants and depart. “It was a horrifying subject for a picture and the expectation that fast-riding Cossacks would create the same colorful excitement as cowboys and Indians did not materialize. Hence the picture had a disappointing lack of success.”177
The Sowers, 1916, William de Mille’s film about Russian revolutionaries—made before the Revolution. Raymond Hatton as the peddler, on a set designed by Wilfred Buckland.
The trouble was the immigrant audiences often knew a great deal more about Russia than the people who made the films. Sets and scenery were often a cause for merriment.
The Girl Nihilist (1908) was described as “gripping” by Variety,178 but the reviewer warned that the transition from Russian scenery to Ellis Island “may expose the locale of the country where the picture was taken.” And Lost in Siberia (1909), a story of “Nihilist Intrigue, bomb throwing and banishment to Siberia,” was criticized for the fact that “painted snow and calcimined rocks abound on every hand.”179 The street scene shown at the opening of A Russian Heroine (1910) was “the funniest looking village imaginable. If the peasants of Russia are willing to live in a village of that sort they should be oppressed.”180
These early nihilist pictures would have horrified audiences had they been shown ten years later at the height of the Red Scare, for their sympathies lay firmly with the revolutionists, whatever ghastly crimes they may have committed. In The Girl Nihilist lots are drawn for the execution of a governor. The heroine draws the fatal paper. She hurls a bomb beneath the governor at the railroad station and is caught by the guards. Instead of being shot, however, she is merely exiled to Siberia with her family.181 Said Variety: “The brutality in the picture may be overlooked through the universal impression of the Russian. Following the striking down of the woman by the Tax Collector, everyone in the audience would have been delighted if the Russian Empire had been destroyed before their sight.”182
Having committed their acts of revolutionary violence, the nihilists were usually only too keen to flee to the Land of Liberty. None of them seemed anxious to stay behind to continue the revolutionary struggle.
SOLD FOR MARRIAGE The guardians accompanying Marfa (Lillian Gish) in Sold for Marriage (1916) were immigrants of a less romantic kind. Obsessed with their plan to make money on their beautiful niece, Uncle Ivan (A. D. Sears) and Aunt Anna (Pearl Elmore) arrange a marriage. Marfa refuses to go through with it, for she has a secret lover, Jan (Frank Bennett), just back from America. When the local police chief (Walter Long) attempts to maul her, Marfa fights him off so violently she thinks she has killed him. The family has to flee, in an imaginative sequence (shot at Truckee, California), during a raging storm, with a furious wind and falling branches. They take the same boat to America as Jan, to Marfa’s delight.
The film, written by William E. Wing, was evidently inspired by a newspaper report exposing the marriage market among Russian immigrants. In Los Angeles, Ivan meets his brother, Georg, identified as the leader of the Russian colony, who assures him that pretty girls bring high prices. Many scenes are set in what is described as the Russian quarter of Los Angeles. The crooks even have a contact in the police department who prevents the scheme from being cracked, and they are on the point of selling Marfa to an elderly suitor when Jan finds out, bursts in, and rescues her.
Sold for Marriage is a surprisingly gripping and colorful film to bear the name of Christy Cabanne—usually one of the dullest silent directors—but then it was made at Fine Arts, where the Griffith influence, although emanating almost entirely from Intolerance, still had some effect. A great deal of care was lavished on sets, costumes, and atmosphere, but Variety felt that the story justified none of it. Nevertheless, it casts an unusual light on the Russians in the period just before the Revolution. Or, as Moving Picture World put it, it affords “an interesting glimpse of the low status of Russian civilization.”183
Now that the Russian archive has opened to us its amazing collection of pre-revolutionary dramas, we can see that Russian films were, on the whole, technically and artistically superior to the American product. But they dared not tackle political subjects, and concentrated instead on slow, meticulously staged psychological dramas with tragic endings. The political comment was there—sometimes the filmmaker’s distaste with the hypocrisy of upper-class life betrayed his Menshevik leanings—but usually it was hidden.
Few Russian films were seen in America, whose film industry depended on emigrés to provide a veneer of authenticity for its Russian stories. The more enterprising directors realized that they would be seen by large numbers of Russians—those living in the United States. Thus, Russian immigrants with the right kind of experience were very much in demand by the early studios. It might have alarmed many residents of the Lower East Side to know there were Cossacks in the City of New York, but one such, a former officer called Daniel Makarenko, directed and appeared in The Heart of a Cossack for Reliance in 1912. For this costume drama, Makarenko had brought the clothing from Russia. He hoped to make a series of Russian pictures for Reliance, but there is no record of his having done so. He became an actor and technical adviser; fifteen years later he played the role of a Cossack in Edward Sloman’s Surrender!
Sold for Marriage, 1916, directed by Christy Cabanne. The Cossacks pursue the fleeing family.
Nick Dunaew—or Nick the Dime-Bender as he was known184—was the leading man in two of Rex Ingram’s films. He was born in Moscow in 1884; his father was a nobleman, and his mother, Fedosia Bagrova, came from a St. Petersburg literary family. He obtained a degree in literature, studied law, and made his stage debut in 1904. In America he played at Daly’s Theatre and at Jacob Adler’s Theatre, on the Lower East Side. He entered films when Blanche Walsh engaged him to assist with the décor and details of her production of Resurrection (1912).185 He then became an actor at Vitagraph, where he met Ingram.
He also met the actor James Morrison, who told me that for My Official Wife, Dunaew brought to the studio a Russian Jew by the name of Bronstein—who turns out to have been Leon Trotsky. This was confirmed by several other people who worked at the East Coast studios; furthermore, the story appeared in the trade press at the time186 and passed into the annals of film history.187 Photographic evidence to support this claim was published in 1932, when some old Vitagraph footage was being examined for a compilation film. Suddenly, the unmistakable image of Trotsky came on the screen in a scene with Clara Kimball Young. The photograph was syndicated to the newspapers and the leading man, Harry Morey, recalled the “shy, nervous” revolutionary.
The actor does look like Trotsky, but there is a problem: My Official Wife may have been reissued in 1917, the year Trotsky was in New York, but it had been made in 1914. Trotsky arrived in New York on January 13, 1917, and sailed on March 27, 1917;188 did he work as a film extra in that time, perhaps appearing in retakes added to the story to take advantage of the February revolution? Perhaps, but there is little chance that he could have appeared with Clara Kimball Young, for she had left Vitagraph two years earlier. (My Official Wife was her last film for that company.)
Trotsky himself wrote: “Of the legends that have sprung up about me, the greater number have to do with my life in New York … the newspapers had me engaged in any number of occupations, each more fantastic than the one before …
Clara Kimball Young in My Official Wife, 1914, with the actor mistaken for Leon Trotsky. (National Film Archive)
“I must disappoint my American readers. My only profession in New York was that of a revolutionary socialist … I wrote articles, edited a newspaper and addressed labour meetings.”189
But I still nourish a faint hope that Trotsky had forgotten an afternoon spent at Fort Lee or Flatbush and that a Russian story will surface from obscurity, bearing the unmistakable close-up of the founding father of the Red Army.
THE COSSACK WHIP The apotheosis of anti-tsarist films was produced by the Edison Co., written by Paul Sloane, directed by John Collins, and played by Viola Dana and Franklyn Hanna. One remarkable aspect of this film was its technique: Collins used fast cutting, and the occasional tracking shot together with elaborate wipes, which suggested a rewarding partnership with cameraman John Arnold.
Also remarkable was its theme of revenge. The other anti-tsarist films showed the brutality of the regime and the flight of the revolutionaries to the United States. This was one of the few films in which a victim reaches safety, then returns to Russia to mete out vengeance to her tormentors. As the original program said, “The sensation of the spectator is a compelling desire to applaud.”190
Other films compared the Russian insurrection to the American Revolution. This one, while equally sympathetic, depicted the rebels’ clandestine meetings in the same way as did the later anti-Bolshevik films. The composition and lighting were based on paintings; the later films would heighten the sinister lighting and use the same compositions to disturb the audience, with reminders of how easily another revolution could happen here.
The story concerned Darya (Dana), daughter of a muzhik. Cossack police take her relative to prison. The revolutionists decide they must strike; the prison train is ambushed and the guards attacked. Fedor Turov (Frank Farrington), prefect of police, orders a raid on the whole district. The sequence is astonishing: it opens with mounted Cossacks on the skyline breaking into a gallop across the snow, and these shots of charging horses are intercut with flashes of screaming, panic-stricken villagers. Some of the flashes are a mere twelve frames; this is a pioneering example of the rapid cutting which, ironically, the Russians made famous, and is the earliest I have seen.191
Darya conceals herself, but her sister, Katerina, and her sister’s lover are dragged to headquarters. Turov orders the lover taken to the notorious “stone cell,” where he is shackled and flogged. Katerina is forced to submit to Turov to save her lover, but he is killed anyway, and she is then flogged herself and thrown out into the snow. Before she dies, she reaches Darya, who vows revenge. The revolutionist Sergius (Richard Tucker) gets Darya a job with the Imperial Ballet Company as the best method of hiding her.
She goes to London and Paris, returns to Russia a star, and is introduced to Turov. When he makes his usual advances, Darya grows quite flirtatious and even requests the privilege of visiting his famous “stone cell.” She allows herself to be shackled while he playfully demonstrates the technique. “Now you pretend you’re my prisoner,” she says, and when he is securely pinioned she produces the Cossack whip from beneath her dress and attacks Turov with frightening energy. That this scene would appeal to those with sadomasochistic tendencies would not have occurred to the censors of the time; it was not even cut for England.
Viola Dana in John Collins’s The Cossack Whip, 1916. (George Eastman House)
“That whip was so long and heavy I had one hell of a time pulling it out from its hiding place,” said Viola Dana. “The part should have been played by an older girl.”192
Turov’s aide bursts in, and Darya thinks it’s all over for her. But the officer gives her the revolutionary password, and, as she leaves the cell, he declares, “I am going to take a monster from the world,” and shoots Turov. The screen is tactfully blacked out by a wipe, obscuring Turov at the moment of the killing, then clearing to show him slumped against the wall, held up by his shackled arms.
The film ends as do most of these stories: escape and arrival in the Land of the Free, with the Statue of Liberty arousing applause from the audience. Although shot in the winter of 1915–1916, it was delayed in release and did not appear before the end of 1916.193 Thus, for some audiences, it would have been unusually topical, coinciding with the news of the February 1917 revolution.
Wid’s described it as “the old Russian story of the oppressor who whipped men and ruined the women,”194 but admitted it had one or two good twists. Variety thought it one of the most vivid pictures, pictorially, that Edison had ever turned out.195 And everyone praised the work of Viola Dana; she never forgot the personal appearance she made when the film was shown on the Lower East Side. The crowd tore off buttons, grabbing at her clothing, “wanting any remembrance of me, because they identified with the part I’d played.”196
THE FALL OF THE ROMANOFFS The strangest film about the Russian Revolution went into production in 1917, after the revolution of February, to be released before that of October. It was called The Fall of the Romanoffs197 and accompanying the title, like some magic ingredient: “with Iliodor.”
The central character was Rasputin. Everyone knew by this time that he was the drunken lecher who had become the power behind the throne. Although the newspapers portrayed him as a brutal, evil man, he was actually a pacifist and a healer. For all his faults, the royal couple regarded him as a godsend, for Rasputin was able to relieve the hemophilia of the tsarevich. “Whatever Rasputin’s other talents might have been,” wrote Alex de Jonge, “perhaps the greatest talent of all was his ability to calm and comfort troubled souls.”198
The Fall of the Romanoffs, 1917, Alfred Hickman as the tsar, Nance O’Neil as the tsarina. (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research)
Because of her dependence upon Rasputin, it was assumed that the tsarina and he were lovers. During the war, rumors that the German tsarina and Rasputin were trying to make a separate peace led a group of aristocrats to kill him. “To preserve the old regime,” wrote the sister of one of the assassins, “they struck it, in reality, its fatal blow.”199
The Fall of the Romanoffs should have been called The Fall of Rasputin. The royal family were merely supporting players in the duel between “The Holy Devil” and “The Sinful Angel,” Iliodor. But who, or what, was Iliodor? In the many books I had read about Russia and the Revolution, never once in over twenty years had I encountered his name. I began to suspect that he was just another charlatan, a Russian immigrant who had sold a movie company a story they couldn’t refuse. Seventy years after the events, he has not so much as a footnote in most of the definitive works. But, in 1985, I was led to a book by Alex de Jonge, The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin, a work of exceptional scholarship, which gives a full account of the career of Iliodor. He was of far more consequence to Russian history than I suspected, and he thus makes the film of more consequence, too.200
Iliodor, whose real name was Sergei Mikhailovich Trufanov, was initially better known to the Russian people than Rasputin; tens of thousands followed him. Born a peasant, he grew up believing the tsar was a god on earth whose enemies were revolutionists and Jews. At twenty-three, he became a priest and adopted the name Iliodor. His first experience of urban poverty caused inner turmoil; it led him to preserve his idolatry for the tsar as he poured scorn on those who surrounded him. He thus aroused the anger of the authorities and the revolutionaries. His disciples built him a fortresslike monastery at Tsaritsyn,201 from where he preached his doctrine of resistance to authority to defeat revolution. The tsar ordered his eviction, but Iliodor appealed to Rasputin, who received him warmly and persuaded the tsar to rescind the order. When Rasputin returned the visit, he was received by Iliodor’s followers with a display of mass hysteria that greatly impressed him.
Rasputin and Iliodor took a river journey together. Rasputin spent the time talking indiscreetly about himself, and Iliodor memorized everything (and used it in his eventual exposé). “The tsar thinks I’m Christ incarnate,” he revealed, showing Iliodor letters written him by the royal family. Iliodor begged him to give him some; Rasputin told him to take his pick.
Iliodor was shocked by Rasputin’s behavior toward women, but nonetheless became a disciple. Rasputin protected him, even when the local governor laid siege to his fortress.
Iliodor’s gratitude took a strange form. He turned against Rasputin, and, with Bishop Hermogenes, lured him to a sort of ecclesiastical kangaroo court, where they confronted him with his sins and struck him repeatedly with a cross, while a halfwit called Mitia the Blissful tried to castrate him.
Rasputin managed to escape. Hermogenes was imprisoned and so was Iliodor, who chose this moment to release the letters he had acquired from Rasputin. One, from the tsarina, began: “My much loved never to be forgotten teacher, saviour and instructor, I am so wretched without you.”202 The letters caused precisely the damage Iliodor intended. Iliodor renounced the priesthood; the Holy Synod unfrocked him.
Iliodor escaped and set about starting a revolution on October 6, 1913, the tsar’s name day, but his aide betrayed him to the police. Once again he got away; disguised as a woman, he fled to Finland and then to Norway, where he worked on his exposé of Rasputin. He reached America in June 1916 and set about trying to make money from his story. The Russians offered him $25,000 to suppress it. He agreed, intending to double-cross them, but they double-crossed him first, and he only got $1,000. The Russians sent over an assassin, but he was too late; the exposé was serialized in 300 newspapers.
Iliodor, a rabid anti-Semite, must have been staggered to discover what the Jews had achieved in America. He met the flamboyant Lewis J. Selznick, born Zelenik in the Ukraine, who had joined forces with Herbert Brenon and placed Iliodor under contract for a moving picture. (Iliodor had been signing contracts for his exclusive services elsewhere, causing massive legal wrangles and general annoyance.) Selznick is famous for sending a telegram to the former tsar:
NICHOLAS ROMANOFF
PETROGRAD RUSSIA
WHEN I WAS A BOY IN KIEV SOME OF YOUR POLICEMEN WERE NOT KIND TO ME AND MY PEOPLE STOP I CAME TO AMERICA AND PROSPERED STOP NOW HEAR WITH REGRET YOU ARE OUT OF A JOB OVER THERE STOP FEEL NO ILLWILL WHAT YOUR POLICEMEN DID SO IF YOU WILL COME TO NEW YORK CAN GIVE YOU FINE POSITION ACTING IN PICTURES STOP SALARY NO OBJECT STOP REPLY MY EXPENSE REGARDS YOU AND FAMILY
SELZNICK
NEW YORK
The cable may not have actually been sent to Russia, but it was apparently released to the press.203 Selznick must have felt that if he had the real Iliodor, he might as well have the rest of the cast.
Iliodor was flattered by having a picture corporation named after him. (Half the stock was bought by theatrical promoter Al Woods.) He had one of the top directors in the country, Herbert Brenon. Austin Strong and George Edwardes-Hall wrote a scenario from his book.
The film was a farrago of nonsense, yet the very distortions of historical accuracy throw fascinating light on Iliodor’s attempts to alter the facts to enhance his prestige. In the screenplay Rasputin’s disciple Anna Vyrubova, the tsarina’s best friend, becomes a gypsy who loves the priest and supplants his wife. Prince Felix Yusupoff, Rasputin’s assassin, becomes the tsar’s messenger, bringing the healer to the Winter Palace. Rasputin, soon a power behind the throne, enlists Iliodor to help quench the fires of revolution. Iliodor speaks; the revolutionary spirit abates; Iliodor becomes famous. Rasputin brings him to court to act as his teacher. He orders a Jewish pogrom; Iliodor protests. He tempts him with an orgy; Iliodor flees in horror. At the climax, the tsarina installs a wireless telegraph in her dressing room to communicate with the kaiser and Rasputin is dispatched by airplane to conclude a separate peace. Prince Felix, realizing that Rasputin is a monster devouring Russia, decides to kill him.
Iliodor at last gets his hands on Rasputin (Edward Connelly) in The Fall of the Romanoffs, directed by Herbert Brenon. (Museum of Modern Art)
No one yet knew how Rasputin had died—Prince Yusupoff lied about the murder, preferring to keep the details for his memoirs. So it was left to the scenario writers’ imagination: a horseman crashes through a window to land on a banqueting table, riding down the center to cover Rasputin with a gun. Rasputin is then given a pistol to finish himself off.
The sequence paled against the facts. As Trotsky said of the murder, “It was carried out in the manner of a scenario designed for people of bad taste.”204 In December 1916, Rasputin was lured to Yusupoff’s palace and fed with cakes laced with cyanide, which had no effect. Yusupoff tried adding cyanide to the wine, but the man was unkillable. Yusupoff shot him. Rasputin still would not die and tried to strangle Yusupoff. He was eventually thrown into the Neva.
The last part of the drama was all that was known, so the film ended with the body being thrown from a bridge. A woman rushes to the city, crying, “Rasputin is dead and Russia is free,” and, with an odd sense of chronology, the revolution breaks out then and there.205
The ending of the picture was left open—to be dictated by events. Brenon expected to end it with a scene of the tsar at the railway station, receiving news of his overthrow. But the news changed from day to day, and the conclusion was left deliberately vague.
Iliodor as himself in The Fall of the Romanoffs. (Museum of Modern Art)
The Fall of the Romanoffs was accorded the most lavish advertising campaign ever given a picture before release. The premiere, on September 6, 1917, was held at the Hotel Ritz-Carlton in New York. Among the prominent guests was William A. Brady, who had every right to be there—but it so happened that his company, the World Film Corporation, was busily completing a rival version of the Rasputin story, Rasputin, The Black Monk. Brady had the temerity to shout across the lobby, as the distinguished audience made its way to its limousines, that he had “beaten Brenon to it.” Brenon heard him, harsh words were exchanged, and soon the two Irishmen were punching away. The diminutive Adolph Zukor ran foward to separate them.206
William Brady had been right. The Fall of the Romanoffs may have opened first and may have done excellent business at the Broadway Theater, but when the rival version opened there was a near riot in Columbus Circle. A huge crowd became so impatient it smashed down the doors of the Park Theatre. Police reserves had to be called out. Brady’s film owed all this to Selznick’s advertising campaign, which had made Rasputin a household word in New York.
Brenon’s publicity claimed the most enthusiastic press reaction in the history of the silent drama—two years after The Birth of a Nation, that was going a little far. The picture, and its cast, were highly praised, all except Iliodor. Nobody thought Iliodor was any good as Iliodor. Sensibly, Iliodor did not wait for the reviews. He vanished. Wid’s reported he was back in Russia—in which case he was just in time for the next revolution, for by now it was October 1917.
Iliodor did return to Russia, to start religious uprisings against the Bolsheviks. But he was soon converted, and became one of the leaders of the “Living Church,” an artificial creation set up by the Soviet government to undermine the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church. Iliodor referred to himself as “Pope,” a title he dropped in favor of “Patriarch.” The Living Church was dissolved in 1922.207
Before he left America he had played fast and loose with his contract again, offering his services as actor to the Russian Art Film Corporation.208 And he had quarreled with Brenon over ownership of the negative of The Fall of the Romanoffs. Not that one could guess at conflict from the dedication in his book: “To my good friend, the Admirable Herbert Brenon, Motion Picture Artist and Poet.” Was this inscribed by Iliodor before the falling-out, or was it added later by the book’s ghost-writer, Van Wyck Brooks?209
Iliodor turned up again in New York in 1922 to preach at the Russian Baptist Church, and became a daily visitor at the chambers of the district attorney, attempting to get redress against one Al Gilbert and the Sunrise Picture Company for failing to live up to a contract to star him in Five Days in Hell. What happened to him after that is clouded in mystery. I have written repeatedly to historians in the Soviet Union. None have replied. Perhaps Iliodor has been written out of their history books, too.
Rasputin (Edward Connelly) and Anna (Ketty Galanta) in The Fall of the Romanoffs. Anna Vyrubova, the tsarina’s best friend, is transformed into a gypsy in the film. (George Eastman House)