THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS    Although it hastened the end, Rasputin’s death was not enough by itself to bring about the fall of the Romanoffs. As no revolution materialized, the revolutionaries became increasingly demoralized. Lenin, exiled in Switzerland, thought the best thing he could do would be to emigrate to America. He doubted that his generation would live to witness the decisive battles of the revolution.²¹⁰ Trotsky was about to leave for America himself; Stalin was in Siberian exile.

Thus, none of the future Bolshevik leaders were present when the Revolution at last broke out in Petrograd in February 1917,²¹¹ so swiftly and spontaneously that Russian filmmakers forgot to photograph anything on the vital first three days. They did not sort themselves out until March 1, when they filmed the aftereffects of revolution—the burned-out prisons, the ashes of official records, policemen in civilian disguise caught by the crowds. The material was compiled by the Military-Cinematographic Department of the Skobelev Committee into The Great Days of the Russian Revolution from February 28 to March 4 1917.²¹²

Now that autocracy had gone, the people wanted peace—peace with victory. But army discipline had been shattered, and soldiers were deserting the front lines in droves. Alexander Kerensky, leader of the Menshevik government, staged a disastrous major offensive against the Germans in June. The people, desperately short of food, rioted in favor of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The provisional government crushed an uprising in June, which it blamed on the Bolsheviks, and films were made to denigrate them—Lenin & Co.—and link them to the Germans—A Stab in the Back.

It was essential for the government to persuade America that despite the desertions and the disasters, Russia had no intention of withdrawing from the war. John (Ivan) Dored, a Russian who had lived in Los Angeles and worked as a cameraman, traveled to the United States to organize the editing and presentation of Russian battlefield footage. Russia to the Front was ready in a couple of months, and in September 1917 was presented at the Rialto, New York. Scenes of action against the Turks were followed by astonishing shots of the funeral procession of the victims of the Revolution, when virtually the entire population of Petrograd turned out to pay their last respects. One prominent family was not present; a subtitle explained that the tsar and tsarina were now “in an ordinary railway coach on their way to Siberia.”

How the immigrant audiences must have loved that! Reviewers praised the high photographic standard of the pictures, which had the quality “of conveying more clearly, more impressively than anything else possibly could the immense significance of the Russian Revolution in world civilization.” In the September 17, 1919, Moving Picture World one reviewer wrote: “One could scarcely view these scenes, in which surging masses of individuals of all classes joined hearts as one in celebrating what was not only the greatest event in the history of their country, but one of the greatest events in the history of the whole world, without being aroused to a high degree of enthusiasm and admiration for the heroes of the hour.”

But in Russia, enthusiasm for the war had evaporated, and the failures of the provisional government rallied the masses to Bolshevism, whose slogan—“peace, land and bread”—proved irresistible. On October 26, 1917 (old calendar), as the Red Guards besieged the Winter Palace, a congress at Smolny consigned Kerensky’s provisional government “to the rubbish heap of history.”^b

When news of the February revolution reached America, a young Russian immigrant called Herman Axelbank, office boy at the Goldwyn Company in New York, remarked, “I wish I could take moving pictures over there; we don’t have any of our own of 1775.”

A few years later, Axelbank met a cameraman traveling to Eastern Europe. He commissioned him to film Lenin and Trotsky, pawning his possessions and borrowing from friends to pay the advance. The cameraman returned, in 1922, with film of the Kronstadt Mutiny and the Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries. And so began the Axelbank Film Collection of Imperial and Soviet Russia.

Axelbank was never a Communist, nor was he particularly interested in politics. In 1921, however, he helped the Friends of Soviet Russia produce Russia Through the Shadows to raise funds for Soviet famine relief. The following year, he assembled With the Movie Camera Through the Bolshevik Revolution in three reels from material in his collection. In 1924, he made The Truth about Russia. And in 1928, he began work on his epic, Tsar to Lenin, for which he had the assistance of Max Eastman, who went to Turkey, to Prinkipo Island, to film Trotsky in exile, then edited the film and spoke some of the narration. The picture was not premiered until 1937, when American Communists who supported Stalin picketed the theatre to protest the portrayal of Trotsky.

Although the Soviet government bought footage from him, Axelbank attributed various fires and thefts to the work of Soviet agents. Nonetheless, the collection survived until Axelbank died in 1979, when it was split up, part going to the Hoover Institution and part to a German collector.

BETWEEN TWO FLAGS    A Russian-born Jew named Jacob Rubin, an unusual combination of prominent banker and convinced Socialist, traveled to Russia in 1919 as a supporter of communism. He landed at Odessa and was thrown into jail by the Whites. Under sentence of death, he endured unspeakable privations until the American Red Cross obtained his release. He could easily have escaped in the evacuation of Odessa, but, realizing he was witness to history and anxious to join the Red cause, he remained. Though shot at and shelled, he survived to welcome the Reds, with whom he got on so well that for a time he controlled the government of Odessa. With his knowledge of American business practices, he transformed the inefficient Russian methods. He was able to prevent a Red Terror, to abolish capital punishment, and to give the Jews of Odessa religious freedom.

The frantic population evacuates Odessa before its occupation by Soviet troops in Between Two Flags, 1920.

Even though elsewhere the Soviets were executing thousands of people daily, they were sensitive about the worldwide publicity given to the Red Terror. Jacob Rubin, still an idealist, regarded these stories as wild exaggerations, like tales of German terror in the war. At a meeting to discuss the problem, a commissar put the question directly to the Americanitz.

“The thing to do,” Rubin replied, “is to fight the White guards with their own weapon. That is, show the world the White Terror—the atrocities committed by the Denikin regime during its occupation of the Ukraine. The way to do this is by producing a moving picture, showing the pogroms upon the Jews, the raids upon stores and market-places, the cruelty, the injustice, the extortion, the graft, the many executions.”²¹³

The suggestion was applauded and adopted unanimously. A committee of five, with Rubin as chairman, was appointed to write the scenario. It became the story of his own experiences, his prison life, his death sentence, his release, and the series of White atrocities he had witnessed or learned about. The film was to be called Between Two Flags, and it was to be directed by Alexander Arkatov,²¹⁴ who had made Jewish films before the Revolution. Rubin was to play himself.

The scenario was so enthusiastically received that 500,000 rubles were appropriated for its production. Rubin was appointed natchalnik (chief) of foreign propaganda, given a smart khaki uniform and a regiment of soldiers, and authorized to requisition transport and other supplies for the picture.

Completed in five weeks, the film was first shown to an audience of 500 in the former palace of a sugar king. “There was such a demonstration of enthusiasm as I never witnessed in the United States outside of a political convention.”²¹⁵

The liberal regime in Odessa displeased Moscow, and Rubin was deposed and left the city. His fate might have been sealed had it not been for the film, which mitigated the anger of the commissars, who regarded it as “valuable propaganda.” It was fortunate that Rubin did not stay in Odessa, for when the Whites recaptured the city they staged a public bonfire of agitki (propaganda films), arrested a director, and shot one of the actors.²¹⁵

Disillusioned, Rubin remained in Moscow for some time, but he longed to return to America. When he finally received his visa, a last-minute impulse caused him to try to smuggle out his film—a foolhardy action that caused him agonies of fear on the long train journey to Estonia. Had not a blizzard felled the telephone lines, he would have been escorted back to Moscow under arrest, for his theft had not passed unnoticed. He was so frightened that he handed the film to the secretary of the Estonian Legation, and his book makes no further mention of it. Presumably, though, as the secretary’s diplomatic baggage was exempt from search, the film came through safely. Although there is no sign of it, alas, either side of the old Iron Curtain.

A still from Between Two Flags, 1920. From Jacob Rubin’s book I Live to Tell.
The death of a Communist. Reenactment of a scene which occurred at the Odessa Prison, January 18, 1920. As he leaped to his destruction this Communist-patriot cried, “Welcome, Liberty!” (From the motion picture made under Communist auspices, directed by Mr. Rubin.)

Jacob H. Rubin, author of Between Two Flags.

The American picture business had taken little notice of the February revolution, and it studiously ignored the new one. Yet there was an audience passionately concerned with events in Russia. The Fall of the Romanoffs and Rasputin, The Black Monk had played to packed houses. An “unprecedented box-office rush” led to special midnight performances at New York’s Rialto of news films of the February revolution, and a “special” featuring the Man of the Hour, Kerensky in the Russian Revolution of 1917, was released with the slogan “Action Pathos Thrills.” Even though its subject was on the run, audiences crowded the theatre. Yet when the October Revolution occurred, no feature film was made about it.²¹⁷

Author Gilbert Seldes had his own theory about this: “The October revolution, as opposed to the Kerensky one, was the first revolution in any country since 1776 which was not based on our revolutionary principles. Given slight differences, the French revolution, the 1848 movement, the upsetting of kingdoms on the Continent, even the February revolution meant democracy. They were following us. And bang, in October 1917 occurred a revolution which had the audacity, the goddam crust, to say that the American revolution was not the last one … as far as anyone was aware at all of what was happening, the awareness brought home to them this fantastic fact; that for the first time in nearly 150 years—we were not the New World. The Russians had started a new system; what right did they have? We invented revolution, and they turned it against us. The reflection of this in our movies was preposterous beyond words.”²¹⁸

This reflection, like the sun blazing on glass, blinded people to the truth. The truth, or such fragments of it as we now believe, was frightening enough. The movies poured in generous portions of melodrama to make the incredible merely unacceptable.

LAND OF MYSTERY    Considering the fear aroused by the very name of Bolshevism, it was an act of considerable courage—or bravado—to take a film company into the burning cauldron of Russia—or at least Lithuania. But this is what American director Harold Shaw did in 1920 for a British film called Land of Mystery.

To make such an expedition required the support of men in high places. One such man was associated with this project from the beginning, for he wrote the story. Publicity referred to him as “Basil Thompson [sic] of the Secret Service.” Such a claim can usually be discounted. An officer in the secret service would hardly remain secret by advertising his job in the newspapers. But Basil Thomson was an exception. He was not only a genuine secret service man, he actually commanded an entire section of British Intelligence.

The son of the Archbishop of York, Thomson was called to the bar after a distinguished career in the Colonial Service. He then became governor of a prison and, in 1913, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. In 1919, the Special Branch was expanded into a civil intelligence department and Thomson became its director.²¹⁹

“The new Directorate was funded with Secret Service money,” wrote Nick Hiley, “and was permitted to operate both in the United Kingdom and abroad to counter the threat of Bolshevism.”²²⁰

Thomson, described by a colleague as having “the ‘Red’ bee buzzing long and loud in his bonnet,” appeared convinced that Britain was “seething with revolution and might well blow up any day.”²²¹ The Daily Herald called his organization the “Blood and Shudders Branch.”²²² He had been associated with an official film project during the war, and he evidently regarded Land of Mystery as a thoroughly worthwhile method of combating the Bolsheviks.

Another curious character behind the venture was Boris Saïd, an associate of the theatrical impresario Gilbert Miller. He was revealed in a court case to be an agent of Imperial Russia,²²³ but it seems likely that he was also working for—or with—Thomson’s Directorate of Intelligence.

The scenario for Land of Mystery was adapted from Thomson’s story by Bannister Merwin, a former Edison man. Director Harold Shaw²²⁴ also came from Edison, as did his future wife, the leading actress Edna Flugrath. Although she and her parents were born in America, Flugrath was as fluent in German as in English, which proved an advantage at the first location—Berlin, where from the window of her hotel she saw “machine guns being rushed through the street firing showers of shot indiscriminately into the people.”²²⁵

Only with the utmost difficulty were she and the company able to get out of Germany. They moved to the town of Kovno^c in Lithuania, newly independent of Russia and struggling to stay free of the Bolsheviks. Edna Flugrath was appalled by the filthy living conditions and the famine: “So desperately destitute were these poor people that their empty stomachs overrided their moral conceptions and they would shoot a person for bread. I used to lay awake at night and count the shots, and on one occasion I counted fourteen—fourteen victims to the uncontrolled hunger of the poor starving people.”²²⁶

Stanley Rodwell, the young British cameraman of Land of Mystery, 1920, with his American Bell and Howell camera. (Ken Rodwell)

So dramatic was this location trip that another player, John East, kept a record of it, describing it as one of the most eventful experiences in a crowded half century of acting. East’s grandson wrote it up at length in his book, ’Neath the Mask.²²⁷

Kovno, the scene of heavy fighting during the war, was in ruins. It was bitterly cold. The company had grown accustomed to the sight of corpses in Berlin; here, however, bodies by the roadside were the victims not of machine guns but of starvation. The vegetable fields were patrolled by armed guards day and night, and a constant stream of refugees filed through the town.

The filming began with a scene of the Bolshevik flag being torn down to be replaced by a Lithuanian one. “The actor assigned to this task narrowly missed death when troops opened fire on him.”²²⁸

On their return journey to Berlin, members of the company were relieved of “surplus eatables” under the pretext of requisition. The police did not discover the silver candlesticks and the icon which East had himself requisitioned from a ruined church and sewn into the lining of his overcoat.

Was it worth the misery?

The Kine Weekly felt that Harold Shaw and his company deserved congratulations for their enterprise in taking such a hazardous trip, but backgrounds did not make a photoplay. The magazine objected to the creation of a bad precedent—the use of a character well known in world affairs, under a slightly disguised name. “At least one writer in the lay press, deceived by a similarity of names, had stated that this is a true story of a living man, mentioning the man’s name.”²²⁹

Even the most outrageous of American propaganda films had not descended to lying about the private domestic life of a living individual, the weekly said, and it would be very bad for the reputation of this country were it to start here.

The film company made no bones about it. It announced at a press lunch that the film was about Lenin. The character was called Lenoff, and he was portrayed by Norman Tharp as the son of prosperous peasants—kulaks, no less. (Lenin was actually the son of a college teacher.) Lenoff loves a peasant girl, Masikova (Edna Flugrath). They become engaged, but Masikova encounters Prince Ivan (Fred Morgan), a member of the royal family, who sends her to the Imperial Ballet. She becomes his morganatic wife. This arouses in Lenoff a hatred of the regime and of society in general; he throws himself into the Bolshevik cause. Three years after the outbreak of war, he returns from exile to head the revolution. Upon the downfall of the tsar, Masikova and the prince escape. Lenoff tries a friend by telephone for aiding their escape and condemns him to death. He quarrels with his mother, and she is shot inadvertently as a substitute for this friend, who manages to buy himself off. When he hears what has happened, Lenoff goes mad. The final scene shows Masikova and the prince arriving in England.

The only surviving photograph taken at the Land of Mystery location, Kovno, Lithuania. (Ken Rodwell)

The film had many similarities to the 1916 The Cossack Whip. The realism of its backgrounds startled English audiences, accustomed to a cruder standard of art direction in their native films. The Bioscope praised the enthusiasm with which Shaw had treated his subject: “One of the most dramatic episodes is where a mad fanatic, jumping on to the High Altar, declares that ‘there is no God or I should die this minute,’ to be taken at his word by a young soldier who, shocked at the blasphemy, shoots him down on the spot.”²³⁰

The re-creation of the Imperial Theatre, showing the vast audience rising at the entrance of the tsar, was regarded as “a masterpiece of staging.”²³¹ A similarly glittering event was held at London’s Winter Garden Theatre, Drury Lane, where impresarios George Grossmith and Edward Lurillard gave the film a magnificent premiere, graced by an array of dignitaries quite remarkable for a mere film. Thanks to Sir Basil, the Home Secretary came, together with the French ambassador, the Dutch consul general, and the cream of London society. They were not disappointed. Loud applause was reported for the real “Russian” scenes. Many called Land of Mystery a masterpiece to compare with Griffith’s finest in its portrayal of the dark despotism of tsarism and the “even greater tyranny under Lenin.”²³²

But there was a sour note. “It has been claimed that this film has an historic value,” said The Kine Weekly. “There is not an historic scene in it. The years 1914 to 1917 are simply dropped out. It has been said that it shows ‘the birth of Bolshevism.’ The question of Bolshevism is not touched; neither a capitalist nor an industrial worker appears, the characters being exclusively Romanoffs, ballet girls and peasants. But the fact that it is propaganda is indisputable, because the hero is a Romanoff and the villains are peasants.”²³³

THE JEWS

A Jewish producer once explained the attraction of the picture business for members of his faith: because the commandment forbidding the making of graven images precluded them from practicing the sculptural or graphic arts, many found an outlet in music; but the theatre, and now films, provided an opportunity to manipulate an art that was not representational within the meaning of Mosaic law.²³⁴

The motion picture also attracted Jews because it was a new business, with no tradition of prejudice. Like vaudeville, it was a branch of the legitimate theatre, the management of which was predominantly Jewish, David Belasco and Marcus Loew being the most notable examples. Exhibiting pictures required a relatively small investment, and the potential audience was vast. The Lower East Side, in 1908, had forty-two of New York City’s 123 movie theatres, for tenement dwellers were fervent picture fans.²³⁵

While the heads of the industry in the twenties were mostly Jewish, by no means all came from the ghetto. (Jesse L. Lasky was born in San Francisco.) And it should not be thought that Jews were exclusively interested in finance. They could be found in every stratum of the industry: writers (Alfred A. Cohn, Julien Josephson), cameramen (Hal Mohr, David Abel), directors (Ernst Lubitsch, Harry Millarde, John Stahl, Sidney and Chester Franklin—even the de Milles were partly Jewish), and players (Theda Bara, Ricardo Cortez, Carmel Myers, Alma Rubens). The Talmadge girls got the balance right for the early days of pictures—they were half Jewish and half Irish!

A surprising number of Jews on the financial side came from the garment industry; with its emphasis on fashion and public taste, it provided useful training.

It cannot be denied that in the beginning Jews encountered a certain amount of prejudice in Hollywood, where the residents, mostly Presbyterians, objected to the movie invasion and particularly to the Jews. And I found this description of a new executive in a letter of the time: “A little fat, sawed off, undersized, hook-nosed Jew simp by the name of Selznick (you don’t pronounce it, you sneeze it).”²³⁶

But outspoken anti-Semitism faded away in a business dominated by Jews, and despite the quips of Marshall Neilan, whose hatred of money men was notorious—“an empty taxicab drew up and Louis B. Mayer got out”—at least one Jewish filmmaker could assure me that he experienced no racial prejudice whatever in the industry.²³⁷

Dore Davidson as Isadore Solomon, Virginia Brown Faire as Essie Solomon, and William V. Mong as Clem Beemis in Welcome Stranger, 1924, directed by James Young for Belasco Productions. A Jew arrives in a New England town and the mayor and leading citizens try to get rid of him. A hotel handyman (William V. Mong) persuades the Jew to invest in an electric light plant for the town and when he brings this boon to the populace, they honor him. (National Film Archive)

The Jews were treated more liberally in America than in any European country,²³⁸ but the more immigrants arrived, the more anti-Semitic the United States became. Those who came from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century had been assimilated, and many had reached the middle class. When the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe arrived, those already established were dismayed. They themselves had experienced virtually no anti-Semitism, but they feared that the impoverished newcomers would threaten their hard-won status. They were charitable, but they kept themselves apart.

The ghetto dwellers were surrounded by hostility, for they often had the Irish on one side and the Italians on another. To reach other parts of the city, a Jew had to cross these Catholic enclaves, receiving a beating from time to time in the name of Christianity. These rivalries were immortalized in The Cohens and the Kellys films. “There are three races here,” said a title. “Irish, Jewish and innocent bystanders.”²³⁹ And even within the Jewish quarter, there was prejudice according to national origin.²⁴⁰

It was when the Jews began to leave the ghetto that anti-Semitism flourished. Clubs and resorts advertised “No Hebrews,” and as Jews moved into prosperous neighborhoods, Gentiles moved out. Denigration of the Jews became part of popular culture in newspapers, songs, vaudeville, and moving pictures. Much of it was the humor of stereotypes, applied indiscriminately to every race and nationality—but some of it was vicious.

Since the beginning of the cinema, Jews had been ridiculed, but the Rosenthal case made their criminal element front-page news, and the movies saw a proliferation of Jewish villains with names like Moe “The Fence” Greenstein or “Moneybags” Solomon.

“Whenever a producer wishes to depict a betrayer of public trust,” ran the report of the Anti-Defamation League, “a hard-boiled usurious money-lender, a crooked gambler, a grafter, a depraved fire bug, a white slaver or other villains of one kind or another, the actor was directed to represent himself as a Jew.”²⁴¹

In 1908, Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham had claimed that half of New York City’s criminals were Jews,²⁴² thus it would have been as reprehensible to sweep their sins under the carpet as to portray all Italians and Irish as pure in deed. And some of the films dealt with Jewish criminals without racial rancor.

A Female Fagin was made by Kalem in 1913. The most offensive thing about it was its title, without which few people would realize that the old woman is Jewish. Her name is Rosie Rosalsky, a clue only to the most knowing. Given every opportunity to carry on like a burlesque Jew, she is nonetheless restrained, a Fagin in deed only. She lives in a tenement and runs a school for thieves. Her pupils are two charming Jewish girls who work in a department store. It doesn’t take long to realize that in this East Side story almost everyone is Jewish.

At the dry goods counter, one of Rosie’s girls steals money from a customer’s purse and shoots it through the pneumatic tubes to her accomplice at the cashier’s booth. The customer raises a fuss, but nothing can be found. The owner’s daughter, Grace, decides to investigate. She leaves a pendant as bait; that night she spots one of the girls wearing it at the nickelodeon. She reports the incident, and the girl is called into the manager’s office. She might have got away with the theft, but Grace takes her position for a while, and, thanks to the pneumatic system, becomes the receiver of stolen property from the dry goods counter. The girls, confronted with their crime, break down and plead for mercy. A bargain is struck. They reveal the whereabouts of their teacher, and a group of men from the store, with a policeman, swoop down on Rosie, who is very roughly treated. The picture ends with the girls, looking happier, boarding with Grace and her new husband in their comfortable home. And her husband proves to be the department store manager.

Frame enlargement from A Female Fagin, 1913. The men from the store are led to the school for thieves. (National Film Archive)

Investigations after the Rosenthal case revealed such a network of Jewish crime that uptown Jews feared a pogrom if they did not act. Their organization, the Kehilla, created a Bureau of Public Morals to deal with the criminals themselves—and they were astonishingly successful.²⁴³

In 1914, a meeting of the Committee for the Protection of the Good Name of Immigrant People was called to discuss what it called “a notorious evil”—the imputation of the Jews, in certain films, of the crime of arson. Statistics proved the charge without foundation—“the Jews commit no more crimes of such a nature than any other nationality.” Several film companies, Edison, Kalem, Lubin, and Universal, sent emissaries, but their advice was only to get in touch with the National Board of Censorship.²⁴⁴

Nevertheless, direct references to Jewish criminals began to disappear from the screen, partly because more Jews were taking control of the picture business, partly because Jewish crime was itself fading out as the Italians took over the big cities.

But 1913 had seen perhaps the worst example of American anti-Semitism.

 

THE LEO FRANK CASE    Leo Frank, a Jew from Brooklyn, was arrested for the murder of a girl at a pencil factory he managed in Atlanta, Georgia. His trial was transformed into an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign—former senator Tom Watson of Georgia, a Populist leader, wrote, “Our little girl—ours by the eternal God!—has been pursued to a hideous death and bloody grave by this filthy perverted Jew of New York.”²⁴⁵ Detective William J. Burns, hired by the Frank defense, only just escaped an angry mob for “selling out to the Jews.”²⁴⁶ The trial itself was a tragic farce—the true culprit was the principal prosecution witness—and Frank was sentenced to hang.

William Randolph Hearst expressed concern about the injustice of the Frank case; Senator Watson called him a tool of the Jews and cited the film Hearst had produced as an example. Hal Reid also produced a film, Leo M. Frank (Showing Life in Jail) and Governor Slaton. Frank’s mother and the governor’s wife appeared in it. When it was shown in New York, Reid delivered a glowing tribute to Frank and his mother. He was also impressed with Slaton, who had received more than a thousand messages warning him that if he commuted Frank’s death sentence his own would follow. “But with the confidence of his wife, who kissed him when he announced his determination, the Governor did the thing he thought should be done.”²⁴⁷ Reid showed this film together with his anticapital punishment story, Thou Shalt Not Kill (1915).

“Incidentally,” said Variety, “Mr. Reid talks more interestingly of the Frank case off stage than he does upon it, telling inside stuff such as he found out when in Georgia. Mr. Reid mentioned some unpublishable phases of the Frank murder matter that appear to bear out his assertion of Frank’s persecution.”²⁴⁸

Director George K. Rolands, of Russian-Jewish origin, made a five-reel reenactment called The Frank Case, which prophesied that Frank would be acquitted. The National Board of Censorship and the New York City license commissioner both banned the film because the case was being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and any film on the subject would be in contempt of court. Although exhibitors protested that it was no more in contempt of court to review the case on film than in print, the picture was banned in Louisville, Kentucky—the first direct interference on the local level since the Jeffries-Johnson fight pictures were barred.²⁴⁹

Despite new evidence, the Georgia courts refused Frank a retrial, and he lost his appeal in the Supreme Court. Although two justices strongly dissented, the majority refused to intervene on the grounds that it was not a matter within federal jurisdiction.²⁵⁰

Having commuted Frank’s sentence, Governor Slaton ordered him secretly transferred from Atlanta to a prison farm. A furious mob was only prevented from hanging the governor and blowing up his home by the arrival of troops; in any case, Slaton had to leave Georgia and abandon his political career.

At the prison farm, a convict slashed Frank’s throat. While Frank was recovering, Tom Watson urged direct action: “Once there were men in Georgia, men who caught the fire from the heavens to burn a law which outraged Georgia’s sense of honor and justice.”²⁵¹ To Watson’s triumph and delight, on the night of August 16, 1915, twenty-five men took Leo Frank from his sickbed and hanged him. “Lynch law is a good sign,” Watson had written. “It shows that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”

Before the corpse was cut down, Pathé News managed to get shots of it which were included in its weekly newsreel. Atlanta police did not object to the film itself, but they strongly objected to the way manager Logan of the Georgian Theatre advertised it. He drove through the city in a large truck, with a set of chimes playing and a sign splashed along the sides: “Leo M. Frank lynched. Actual scenes of the lynching at the Georgian today.” The theatre had an exceptionally large Jewish patronage, and Logan alienated them all.²⁵²

Gaumont News, released through Mutual, also showed shots of the lynching ground, the crowds assembled there, and the judge who asked the onlookers to let the body be taken home in peace. Another scene showed Mrs. Lucille Frank, the widow, picking flowers, probably shot days earlier but nonetheless a useful bridge to the funeral.²⁵³

In Philadelphia, picture and vaudeville theatres were visited by the police and “requested” to refrain from showing any film depicting the Frank hanging or the trial. Managers cooperated to the extent of removing the item from the newsreels.²⁵⁴

“During the hysteria surrounding the lynching,” wrote Steve Oney, “the Ku Klux Klan … held its first cross burning atop Atlanta’s Stone Mountain, thus reinvigorating itself for a new life.”²⁵⁵ As for Tom Watson, his anti-Semitism brought him new glory in 1920, when he was reelected to the Senate seat he had held thirty years before. Once he had been a radical. Now, attracting disparate elements from both extremes, he became a bewildering combination of arch-patriot and opponent of Red-baiting, militarism, and the trusts. When he died, two years later, the Ku Klux Klan sent a cross of roses eight feet high.

The State of Georgia did not grant Leo Frank a posthumous pardon until 1986.

 

HENRY FORD    The automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was also a radical in many ways; he too was opposed to militarism and the trusts. His contempt for Wall Street was well known. A populist, he was convinced that the world war had been fought for the benefit of big business, and since big business was controlled by “International Jewish Finance,” in his eyes the war was all the fault of the Jews.

Had this been his privately held opinion, it would have been no concern of history. But Ford took over a small weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and boosted its circulation by making his customers his subscribers. And he used his newspaper to propagate his ideas—it was the Independent that offered the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the world.

Ford’s anti-Semitism brought joy to the Corn Belt and did wonders for Klan recruitment. Referring to the Leo Frank case, Ford’s paper said it was “not without reason that the Ku Klux Klan had been revived in Georgia.”²⁵⁶

The Independent, which called itself “the chronicler of neglected truth,” had already attacked Hollywood by printing the “confessions” of a “producer” who declared he would rather see his daughter dead than on a studio lot.²⁵⁷ This was in keeping with the theme of The Protocols, which urged Jews to stoke the fires of immorality to prepare for the immolation of the Aryan world and the eventual seizure of power by the Jews. Ford called upon the American people to rise up and protest at the “Jewish control” of the people’s entertainment.²⁵⁸

Moving Picture World splashed its reply across two pages: “If the screen were Jew invented, Jew owned and Jew controlled, it would stand today as the greatest monument to Jewish achievement in all the history of that race because no other thing in modern or ancient life has developed with such amazing speed, with such astonishing progress toward perfection and with such tremendous service to all mankind.”

There were Jews, “and some mighty good ones,” in the picture business, and it was a cause for pride that no bigotry had barred them. But the business had attracted men of all races and religions. “Down to this very day and hour there never has been a control of any group of religionists or racialists and there is no movement evident toward such an end.”²⁵⁹

Of course, by 1921 the industry was largely controlled by Jews, but they could hardly be accused of forcing Jewish propaganda on American audiences. They did not misuse their power in the way Henry Ford was currently misusing his.

One casualty of this was the Ford Educational Weekly. Between 1914 and 1921, Ford released a film a week—factual one-reelers which were often of great educational value—offered free until 1919, when a nominal charge was levied. The fee, together with Ford’s anti-Semitic campaign in the Independent, finished the series, although there is no evidence whatsoever that the films themselves were anti-Jewish. Circulation dwindled from 7,000 to a mere 1,300 by August 1920, and in December 1921, the series was canceled.²⁶⁰ Exhibitors told Ford that if he wanted a release, he would have to build his own theatres.²⁶¹

Henry Ford was not dissuaded from his campaign until 1927, by which time immense damage had been done: anti-Semitic articles from the Independent had been published in book form and translated into many languages. Among the industrialist’s many admirers was Adolf Hitler, who is said to have hung a large picture of Ford in his Munich headquarters and incorporated passages from the articles almost verbatim in Mein Kampf. And in one of those paradoxes of which history is full, Hitler’s future propaganda minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, would express the unbounded admiration for Hollywood which Henry Ford could not. Although he knew, if only from Ford, that Jewish talent and finance lay behind virtually every production, he held regular screenings in the 1930s and 1940s to show his men the standard for which they must aim. His diaries record how impressed he was with Gone With the Wind, the brainchild of Lewis Selznick’s brilliant son David. He ran Ben-Hur (1925, reissued 1931) several times: “Old Jewish hokum. But well made.”²⁶² One of Dr. Goebbels’s most cherished beliefs was that the Jews had made no contribution to world culture. To prove this, he was willing to burn their books but not, it turned out, their films.

In 1937, whether he liked it or not, Henry Ford received a decoration from a grateful Hitler.²⁶³ By this time, he had apologized to the Jews, so the award was an embarrassment. But apology or not, the Jews did not forgive him. In at least one recorded case, Jews refused to allow pictures of Ford to appear in a newsreel.²⁶⁴

Against such a background, is it any wonder that the Hollywood producers avoided the subject of their own people? Many believed that any treatment might spread anti-Semitism. In any case, they craved acceptance as Americans. Of the films that were made, most dealt with poverty, and this brought the inevitable reaction from the Jewish establishment: “Why do you not show the successful ones, with their beautiful homes?”

And yet the subject could not be completely ignored because for some reason several of the biggest hits of the American stage and screen were stories about Jews. Abie’s Irish Rose ran for 2,532 performances on Broadway.²⁶⁵ Ben-Hur was a phenomenon on the stage years before it was filmed. And The Jazz Singer, with Russian-Jewish Al Jolson, introduced the era of talking pictures.

Of course, anti-Semites argued that most Hollywood films were Jewish propaganda anyway, with their emphasis on sentiment, mother-love, and the underdog. But that would suggest that the Irish, whose stories are full of such elements, are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

The Jew on the silent screen was not “invisible” as claimed by one historian,²⁶⁶ although to say he appeared in “a vast number of films,” as suggested by another,²⁶⁷ is somewhat overstating the case. But enough films with Jewish themes were made to throw fascinating light on the attitudes and concerns of the time. When the characters were portrayed with sympathy and admiration, the films helped to counter anti-Semitism. But the emphasis on assimilation, however gratifying to the federal authorities, dismayed Orthodox Jews, for whom assimilation was a tragedy. “Jews in hiding,” they called these new Americans.

As historical records, these films are priceless. They caught the streets of the ghettos when they were full of life, jammed with pushcarts and teeming with people. They recorded ritual and ceremony, and preserved the look of dress and costume. They re-created the pogrom and the process of immigration. They filmed the lives of ordinary people in what must seem to people today extraordinary circumstances. Had all these films been allowed to survive, what a history of the Jewish people would have been displayed!

 

SIDNEY GOLDIN    If any man could be said to have depicted the sufferings of the Jewish people on celluloid, it was a Russian Jew called Sidney Goldin. Born in Odessa in 1880, he moved to America as a child and made his debut in the Yiddish theatre in Baltimore at fifteen. The picture business knew him as a rotund comedian and comedy director, although he made at least two highly profitable dramas, The Adventures of Lt. Petrosino (1912) and New York Society Life in the Underworld (1912). H. Lyman Broening, his cameraman on comedies at the Champion studios, retained a warm but bizarre memory of him: “He was nice, a great big oversize guy.… He’d sit down and start directing a scene and right in the middle he’d fall over and snore—sound asleep. He used to call me ‘Mr. Leeman,’ sounded better to him, I guess. He said, ‘Now, Mr. Leeman, when I go to sleep you come and wake me up—don’t hesitate. Come and shake me. I can’t afford to fall asleep in the middle of these scenes.’ So I got to be a bosom friend because I would always wake him up.”²⁶⁸

After a period with scenario writer Lincoln J. Carter in Chicago, and with Essanay, he joined Universal in 1913 to direct for the Victor Feature Film Company and Imp²⁶⁹ at Fort Lee. His first film for Imp was a three-reeler, The Sorrows of Israel (1913), which dramatized the plight of Russian Jews who could join society by converting to the Russian Orthodox faith, but only by sacrificing family ties. It involved pogroms and rescues by nihilists and ended with the statutory last scene of the couple sailing past the Statue of Liberty.²⁷⁰ It was ideal fare for the tenement districts and was popular enough to encourage Mark Dintenfass, supervisor of the Champion studios and head of Universal’s foreign department, to put more Russian-Jewish films into production. Goldin’s Nihilist Vengeance (1913), a two-reeler, was the story of the Jewish daughter of a banker and her love for a prince.

Irene Wallace, who had a small part in this film, played the lead in Goldin’s The Heart of a Jewess—Rebecca, a garment worker who pays for her Russian lover to come to America and go to medical school. Once he succeeds, he drops her for a wealthy girl,²⁷¹ and on their way to the wedding the couple’s automobile knocks down poor Rebecca. The picture was praised for its atmosphere and for its scenario. “It is a pleasure,” said Moving Picture World, “to see Jewish people play Hebrew roles of comedy and sympathy, especially after so many sickening caricatures have affronted vaudeville audiences for years.”²⁷²

Actually, Irene Wallace was not of Jewish but of Northern Irish extraction.²⁷³ She played the lead in Bleeding Hearts or Jewish Freedom under King Casimir of Poland (1913), a highly colored three-reel melodrama in which wandering Jews, banished from other lands, arrive in Poland in the fourteenth century and plead for sanctuary from King Casimir, who allows them to stay. (The film did not show how Casimir created ghettos to isolate the Jews.) A reviewer complained of the “continuous violence” and declared that reproductions of history’s darker pages were gloomy and “should remain in the dust of the past.”²⁷⁴

A far more valuable film, if only it had survived, would have been How the Jews Care for Their Poor (1913), Goldin’s last for Imp. It was intended as a one-reeler, dealing with the work of the Jewish philanthropic societies but was expanded to two reels for the annual banquet of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities on December 21, 1913.²⁷⁵ Although it had scenes of great documentary importance, showing the work of hospitals, it was not a documentary but a simple story of Jewish immigrants from Russia. A mother dies, and her children are cared for by her brother. When he falls ill, they are taken into the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. The brother, recovered, is so impressed that he leaves the children at the asylum. When the small boy grows up and graduates, he delivers a lecture at the Brooklyn Federation, thanking them for all the help they had given his family over the years.²⁷⁶

Nineteen thirteen was a notable year for Goldin. He not only managed to make films for Victor, Imp, and Champion, under the Universal banner, but somehow managed to make a film for Leon J. Rubinstein of the Ruby Feature Film Company, even before his Universal contract had expired. This was called The Black Hundred or The Black 107.

The Black Hundred was a virulently anti-Semitic group in Russia, whose slogan was “Beat the Yids and the intelligents; Save Russia.”²⁷⁷ The tsar gave them his approval, and by 1909 they had succeeded in butchering 50,000 Jews.²⁷⁸

Goldin’s The Black Hundred was based on a famous contemporary Russian case in which a Jew named Mendel Beilis had been falsely accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. The film featured the celebrated Jewish actor Jacob Adler as Beilis and Jan Smoelski in a leading role. According to the publicity, Smoelski had been a revolutionary agent in St. Petersburg for two years, penetrating the councils of the Black Hundred, but he was discovered and had to seek the aid of the nihilists in order to flee the country.²⁷⁹

Sadly, The Black Hundred was not considered a good picture and was not taken seriously even by the commercial reviewers. But Variety’s critic conveyed the hunger of the ghetto audiences for such films:

“I caught the Ruby home-made Beilis in the thick of the movie-mad section of Rivington Street Sunday. Go to Rivington Street, just east of the Bowery, any Sunday after luncheon when there’s a racial film on the circuit if you want to know what a human gorge is. Surprisingly, the fee at the Waco theatre there for the Beilis show was only a nickel.… But at that, The Russian Black 107 [sic] isn’t worth more. It’s mushroom stuff. About the only sympathetic note its three reels contain is in the personality of the player selected to impersonate the much-advertised Beilis.

“A small body, a gaunt care-lined face, and an expression of unchanging and genuine apprehension, make one follow him through the theatric situations in which he is placed.… The manager of the Waco must have realized the playlet’s artificial texture, for the operator whipped the reels along at a sixty-mile clip, the persons zig-zagging on and off the screen like dance puppets. Although poor Mendel has a hard time of it on the screen, nary a bit of applause comes from the packed audience when the mimic jury acquits him.²⁸⁰ In some sections, the film may create a religious outbreak, for Mendel’s chief oppressor is shown to be a Russian priest who makes the sign of the cross while plotting the Beilis ruin.”²⁸¹

When The Black Hundred reached England, the London County Council received a note from the Imperial Russian Consulate requesting that the show, at the Oxford Music Hall, be stopped. The council complied, for precisely one day, and then rescinded the ban. The Russian consul general was startled when he learned of this. “They will never dare to show that film,” he said. “They must not.… The pictures are a grave slander on the Russian police and the Russian people.”²⁸²

Sidney Goldin subsequently made a five-reel feature called Escape from Siberia (1914), which again emphasized the regime’s brutality. A Russian count is stripped of his military rank by his own father when he announces his engagement to a Jewish girl. The nihilists are the heroes, and the final sequence shows the lovers’ safe arrival in the Land of Liberty.²⁸³ Goldin also made an ambitious version of made leading man. The American Film Company at Santa Barbara gave him his first chance to direct. His films were characterized by a strong feeling for people; there was a refreshing realism about his work which marks it as exceptional, even today.

East and West, 1923, directed by Sidney Goldin, with Molly Picon, Sidney Goldin (third from left), and Jacob Kalich (right). (National Center for Jewish Film)

Karl Gutzkow’s 1847 play Uriel Acosta, which came out in July 1914, with the Yiddish actor Ben Adler and Rosetta Conn. Moving Picture World was disappointed that Goldin had tried to improve on the play and felt that the dramatic moments in the life of this great Jewish philosopher had been spoiled.²⁸⁴ And Variety commented, “In Jewish settlements, colonies, or neighborhoods, this picture will excite interest … otherwise it won’t create a ripple.”²⁸⁵

All of this must have been thoroughly discouraging to Goldin. He briefly turned back to comedy for a parody on Traffic in Souls called Traffickers on Soles (1914) in which the cops were Irish and Jewish, each squad led by an officer of the opposite persuasion. In 1915 he joined forces with the best-known Yiddish actor in America, Boris Thomashefsky, who had opened America’s first Yiddish theatre in New York, in 1902. Thomashefsky had become an impresario, and he felt there were enough Jews in the country to support photoplay versions of Yiddish stage successes. The Boris Thomashefsky Film Company produced The Jewish Crown, The Period of the Jew, and Hear Ye, Israel! Thomashefsky played the lead and Goldin directed all of them, but while the trade press reported that they had been made, there is no record of their release or of the Thomashefsky Film Company’s survival.

What happened to Goldin during the war is unclear. Afterward he went to Europe and ran the Eclair studios in Paris for a while. Then he moved to Vienna, where, in 1923, he directed Molly Picon and her husband, Jacob Kalich, in East and West (Mizrakh un Marev). According to Molly Picon, the film was popular with all audiences—in America it was called Mazel Tov—and in Vienna did better than Chaplin’s The Kid.²⁸⁶ Goldin also made Yizkor with Maurice Schwartz in 1924. He returned to America in 1925, reverting to acting for a living. In 1929 he wrote and directed his last silent, East Side Sadie, which contained sound sequences and introduced his daughter, Bertina Goldin, to the screen. She played a part similar to Irene Wallace in The Heart of a Jewess, a sweatshop girl who pays to put her boyfriend through college.²⁸⁷

Goldin then joined forces with independent producer Joseph Seiden to make Yiddish talkies. He ćame out of retirement to make The Cantor’s Son, based on actor and singer Moishe Oysher’s life story. Goldin had a heart attack halfway through production and died on September 19, 1937.²⁸⁸

 

HUMORESQUE    The first Jewish classic was financed and produced by William Randolph Hearst, for his Cosmopolitan Productions, and it very nearly failed to appear.

It was directed by twenty-seven-year-old Frank Borzage, a non-Jewish Italian from Salt Lake City who had come to Los Angeles as a Shakespearean actor in a traveling stock company, fallen in love with the climate, and become an extra at Universal. He applied for a job as a character actor at Inceville and was promptly

Hearst wanted Borzage to direct a sophisticated story by Robert W. Chambers. Borzage recalls that he replied that he didn’t like that type of thing: “Have you got any human interest stories?” He was offered a book by Fannie Hurst: “There are a lot of short stories in it. You might combine three or four to make a feature film out of them. Take it home and read it.”

“So I took it home,” said Borzage. “The first story was Humoresque; it was a short one. I knew that was it. So I called Frances Marion, who was my writer. I said, ‘Frances, I’ve got the story.’ I wanted her to read out loud for me—I had a reason for this. So she read it out loud, and she couldn’t quite finish it. The chords in her throat welled up and I said, ‘That’s the test. That’s what I want. That’s our story, don’t you think?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. So that’s how Humoresque was started.”²⁸⁹

The combination of Frances Marion and Frank Borzage was a powerful one, for Miss Marion shared Borzage’s ability to convey emotion. In an industry devoted to melodrama, it was a rare gift. Miss Marion was much in demand, having written for Maurice Tourneur, Albert Capellani, and Mary Pickford and the screenplays for The Yellow Passport (1916) and Darkest Russia (1917). She and Fannie Hurst were friends, and it was Hurst who took her to the Yiddish Theatre to watch Vera Gordon.²⁹⁰

A veteran of the Yiddish Theatre, Vera Gordon came from Russia. Humoresque was her first picture. “We were sixteen weeks making the picture,” she said, “but every minute was a delight and it did not seem like acting a part. You see, I know the East Side—the daily life of the people, their love of home and kindred. Like them, I have known the hand of oppression, the longing to rear my family in freedom. Because of this, I could give myself to the part.”²⁹¹

Frank Borzage selected Gilbert Warrenton, who would later become the principal exponent of the moving camera and the “German” style in Hollywood, as cameraman. Hearst had no studio, and there was none available in New York, so the company took over an old beer hall, the Harlem River Casino, closed because of Prohibition, on One Hundred Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue.

Because sets for another picture occupied the main floor, Borzage and Warrenton had to work in the basement. Fortunately, their sets needed low ceilings anyway, but whenever the crew upstairs boosted the current, all their lights would blow.

For the scene where the mother goes to pray for her children, Joseph Urban built a stylized synagogue on the main floor. Warrenton suggested putting a shaft of light through a little window with the Star of David above the set. To make it more visible, he had two Irish electricians and a couple of prop men breathing smoke from cigars on to the set. Borzage was delighted with the result.

The opening sequence was shot on location on the Lower East Side. Said Warrenton: “To get rid of the crowds, which in that territory were awful, we secreted the camera in vans, and in one case used a pushcart. We also worked out of windows. In the ghetto, the buildings are close together. There are little platforms on the fire escapes … we also got up on these to shoot across at the opposite building, or down the street. Of course, we were not observed.

Mama Kantor (Vera Gordon) at the synagogue in Humoresque, 1920.

“We shot underneath the elevated, where the lighting was bad. Even when the sun is on the right slant, there is no room for the light to get between the ties that hold the rails. We did our exteriors as best we could under these conditions, and when I had to, I would plug in a booster light. We didn’t like to do this because it attracted attention. By doing it pretty fast, we got away with it a couple of times, and that’s how we got our exteriors.”²⁹²

Sadly, these glimpses of life on the Lower East Side are all too short.

Humoresque, released in 1920 and long considered lost, was rediscovered in 1986 by Bob Gitt, of UCLA Film Archives, and Ron Haver, during a search of the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. (Warners had acquired the original in order to remake it.) Although it has much to commend it, like all too many once influential films, its attributes are no longer remarkable. Its style of highly wrought sentimentality became identified with Hollywood for four decades and is common to a hundred other pictures. Though well directed and well photographed, it is basically hokum.

From Motion Picture Directing by Peter Milne (New York: Falk Publishing Co., 1922.)

The ghetto scenes, however, cannot be overlooked, although real exteriors are often intermingled with studio. In one sequence, a small girl takes a dead kitten from a garbage can, trying to warm it back to life; the boys who crowd around her end up by punching each other to pulp. This vivid ghetto atmosphere gives way to a more theatrical portrayal of life on Fifth Avenue. American films were never so picturesque dealing with the rich as with the poor! Nevertheless, the emotion of Humoresque is so near the surface that while you may note a certain disappointment in your reaction, you will also note the lump in your throat.

Fannie Hurst’s short story ended as Leon goes to war.²⁹³ The expanded story by Frances Marion begins before the war. Abraham Kantor (Dore Davidson) works in his brass shop, converting factory-made candlesticks from Brooklyn into aged antiques from Russia. His wife (Vera Gordon) cares for a large family which includes a mentally defective child, whose condition she blames on all she suffered in Russia.

The youngest son, Leon (Bobby Connelly), ruins his new suit, given him for his ninth birthday, by fighting for a girl, Minna Ginsberg (Miriam Battista). His father is angry; his mother forgiving. She sends Abraham out with Leon to buy him a birthday present. Leon sees a violin and becomes obsessed with it. Abraham says at four dollars it is too expensive and drags him away, protesting and tearful.

When Mama hears about this, she is profoundly moved. She had long prayed that one of her children should be a musician.

“Always a moosician,” grumbles Abraham. “Why not pray for a businessman?”

From the depths of the shop, Mama produces an ancient and dusty violin she has kept for just such a moment as this. And to her intense satisfaction, Leon proves he has talent. Soon, he gets the four-dollar violin and Mama goes to the synagogue to give thanks.

From the boy playing, we dissolve to Leon the young man (Gaston Glass) ending his first concert tour with a recital for the king and queen of Italy. It is ten years later. Leon re-encounters the girl from the ghetto, now Gina Berg (Alma Rubens), pursuing a singing career. They become engaged.

The Kantors are no sooner back in New York when America enters the war and Leon joins the army. Before he goes, he stages a concert for his own people—the people of the ghetto. (And the shots of the audience reveal that Borzage filled the concert hall with authentic Lower East Siders.) He plays the Kol Nidre, the prayer of atonement, and then his people call for him to play Humoresque, “that laugh on life with a tear behind it.” The concert is a wild success, and Elsass, the great manager, offers a contract at $2,000 a concert. But Leon says he has signed a contract with Uncle Sam. Mama Kantor is overwhelmed with sadness—surely, such a genius could be excused? But Leon refuses to hide behind his talent. “Look at Mannie,” he says, “born an imbecile because of autocracy!” Before he goes, he plays Humoresque to bring a smile to his mother’s lips.

The war ends. The troops return. A car arrives at the Kantors’ home, and an officer steps out. But it is not Leon—just a buddy to report that the boy is lying wounded in the hospital. A doctor explains to the anxious Gina that it was a shrapnel wound—a terrific effort would be his only hope, but not in his present state of mind, for Leon has given up, convinced he will never use his arm again.

Gina tends him in his convalescence, with constant assurances that she loves him. He answers, “Then you must leave me. My career is ended. I will not have you sacrifice yourself to a cripple.”

Humoresque, 1920. Leon Kantor (Gaston Glass) plays a concert for his own people—portrayed by Jews from the Lower East Side.

She walks away, heartbroken and falls in a faint. Leon rushes forward and lifts her up. He realizes that he can move his fingers, and, as Gina recovers, he reaches for his violin and tries to play the instrument. Mama Kantor hears Humoresque.

“God always hears a mother’s prayers,” she says. Replies Abraham, “I suppose a papa’s prayers have nothing to do with it?”

When the picture was finished, it was shown to William Randolph Hearst, who loathed it. Not that Hearst was anti-Semitic; in later years, despite being called a fascist, he interceded with Hitler on behalf of the Jews. It was simply that he could not understand why anybody would want to show the seamy side of life and call it entertainment. “The remarks from the releasing company [Paramount] bore out this theory that audiences would reject the picture.”²⁹⁴ The head of Paramount, Adolph Zukor, also detested Humoresque, saying to Frances Marion, “If you want to show Jews, show Rothschilds, banks and beautiful things. It hurts us Jews—we don’t all live in poor houses.”²⁹⁵

Hearst and Zukor decided not to release the film. It would require an elaborate advertising campaign, and they felt there was little point in throwing good money after bad. Frances Marion told me that it was only because the Criterion Theatre had run short of a film that they were obliged to put it on. It was booked in for a prerelease run of several weeks, to follow DeMille’s Why Change Your Wife?, that glamorous medley of sex and wealth. A press preview on May 4, 1920, suggested that Hearst and Zukor had been right. Variety said, “It proved to be something exhibitors should not bank on too heavily. Up to the middle it seemed like a wonderful picture, then it began to slip.… The continuity by Frances Marion was inadequate, and unless Miss Marion soon values her reputation more than her profits she will have to look alive to preserve what’s left of the former.”²⁹⁶

But when the picture opened at the Criterion, it was an immediate sensation. “Never before,” said Picture Play, “has such a perfect atmosphere of reality been communicated to the screen. Any fine work of art must have the power of drawing the spectator into its very center. This Humoresque accomplished. The life of the Jewish family is your life while you sit and watch the screen. You are as much a part of it as your teeth are part of you. I predict that it will live for years, and will be held up as a standard for aspiring artists to aim at.”²⁹⁷

A vital ingredient for the film’s success was its emphasis on mother-love. Curiously, the cinema had not paid a great deal of attention to mothers. There had been stories of maternal sacrifice, there had even been stories about abominable mothers. But a film which bombarded the emotions with scenes of maternal heartbreak—with a Jewish mother at that—could hardly have been more perfectly timed. The postwar generation was rebelling against its parents, and the story exploited their suppressed sense of guilt while it (briefly) restored their parents’ confidence.

Fannie Hurst (who was herself Jewish) was as surprised as Cosmopolitan by the success of the film. “The impact of Humoresque was quite extraordinary,” she said. “It’s been done several times since and it still brings in the most wonderful royalties! Yet the original wasn’t elaborate. It was a simply made picture. I had no part in the production. I had nothing to do with the filming of any of my books.

“A cousin of mine, who was a writer herself, accompanied me to the special showing at the Ritz-Carlton for an invited audience.

“ ‘Why, it’s a travesty of the story!’ she said. ‘The liberties they’ve taken!’ I made a sound signifying agreement, but actually I thought they’d done rather well. I enjoyed it.²⁹⁸

“The film was directed by Frank Borzage, a rough and ready man whom the cast found somewhat abrasive. But I liked him—he had a real feeling for his work, and the film put him on the map. That’s what pleases me most, I think, that my stories have put people on the map.”²⁹⁹

New York City set its stamp of approval on Humoresque by giving it one of the longest runs ever recorded for a feature picture. (It played for twelve weeks and broke box office records.) Photoplay awarded the film its first Gold Medal—the 1920 equivalent of an Academy Award. Wrote Frances Marion: “Nobody was more surprised—and hurt a little—than Mr. Hearst, who had just released another Marion Davies million-dollar opus which was playing to half-empty theatres.”³⁰⁰

The stunning success of Humoresque proved that audiences did not want their realism unadulterated, when a little hokum could make even squalor and mental disease acceptable, evoking a tear rather than a grimace. It set the standard for future Hollywood films about the plight of the Jews. Virtually all the silent productions were affected by an overdose of sentimentality, in the hope of repeating Borzage’s success.

 

HUNGRY HEARTS    The long-lost Hungry Hearts was recently discovered in England and deposited with the National Film Archive. A remarkably complete account of the production can be put together from the interoffice memos and telegrams preserved by the legal department of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is thus possible for once to follow a social film from conception to release—and to observe the gulf between what was intended and what was achieved.

Hungry Hearts is a quiet film, with relatively little which could be described as melodramatic or sentimental. It was made so simply it might have passed as a poverty row production were it not for the obvious commitment of those on both sides of the camera.

When it was first proposed by story editor Ralph Block, Sam Goldwyn was enthusiastic, but he wanted an Americanization picture rather than a Jewish propaganda film.³⁰¹ This may have been due to the fact that his associates in New York had just turned down Sophie Irene Loeb’s book Jewish Epic on the grounds that they did not favor Jewish plays.³⁰²

Goldwyn himself was an immigrant from Russian Poland, and when he approved the synopsis, he wrote, “Important you emphasize value old people in Russia attach to candles and other sacred things they part with to raise money for transportation to America. This is sure fire.”³⁰³

The story was based on a group of short stories by Anzia Yezierska, collected under the title Hungry Hearts. Yezierska was also born in Russian Poland, about 1881. When she was nine, her family came to America and lived on the Lower East Side. Her sisters went straight into the sweatshops; Yezierska went to public school and learned English. She started work at about age fourteen or sixteen. At seventeen, determined “to be a person,” she left home and began writing. In December 1915, Forum magazine printed her first published story, “The Free Vacation House.” She won an award for the Best Short Story of 1919 with “The Fat of the Land.” She handed the child she bore (during her second brief marriage) to its father and returned to her independent life.³⁰⁴

An enthusiastic item by a Hearst columnist aroused the interest of Hollywood in Hungry Hearts, her first book: “Here was an East Side Jewess who had struggled and suffered the desperate battle for life amid the swarms of New York. She had lived on next to nothing at times. She had hungered and shivered and endured. Why? Because she wanted to write. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all there is to genius. An undying flame, an unconquerable hope, an unviolable belief that you are God’s stenographer.”³⁰⁵ Actually, she had graduated from Columbia University and worked for a time as a schoolteacher.

Sara (Helen Ferguson) with her admirer, the rent collector—nephew of the landlord (Bryant Washburn) from Hungry Hearts, 1922.

Yezierska’s agent, R. L. Griffen, sold her book to Goldwyn for $10,000, and the company invited her to work on the scenario at a salary of $200 a week. And so, in January 1921, this red-haired girl with a lifelong hatred of the rich set out for Hollywood—a famous writer.

The Goldwyn people were surprised by her disdain for luxuries. She refused any special treatment and would accept only a lower berth on the train.³⁰⁶ They booked her into an expensive hotel. “I could not stay,” she said. “I would have lost myself … I did not feel comfortable being waited upon. It smothered me. I told them I must go away and stay in some simpler place.”³⁰⁷ She also abandoned her chauffeur-driven limousine and took the trolley to work—though once was enough and she returned to the limousine.

Few of the studios regarded writers with the same respect as directors, but in 1919 Goldwyn had formed Eminent Authors, Inc., and had invited some of the most distinguished writers to Hollywood. When Yezierska arrived at the studio she was given an office alongside such celebrities as Rupert Hughes, Alice Duer Miller, and Elinor Glyn. She was astonished at being given stacks of fresh paper; her writing had been done on the backs of envelopes and scraps of wrapping paper. She had been assigned an eager secretary but had no idea how to employ her. Her method of composition was not a nine-to-five affair. The aura of luxury made her impotent as a writer.

Yezierska was interviewed by reporters and her story translated into such headlines as “Sweatshop Cinderella,” “Immigrant Wins Fortune in Movies,” “From Hester Street to Hollywood.”

She received a gift of roses from Paul Bern. “Thank you for giving us a book that’ll blaze a new trail in pictures,” he said. “You’re what I call a natural-born sob sister.”

“Do you mean that as a compliment?”

“I mean you’ve dipped your pen in your heart. You’ve got the stuff that will click with the crowd—the stuff that’ll coin money.”³⁰⁸

She detested Bern on sight; his dark Hester Street face seemed betrayed by his slick, movie star appearance. But it is hard to know how much of Yezierska’s recollection to trust. In her memoirs she had Bern assure her the picture would have a million-dollar budget, which was ludicrous, and around three zeroes more than it did cost.³⁰⁹ And there are many other discrepancies.

Bern, one of a large family, had come to the United States from Germany when he was nine and his parents were over sixty. The family lived in the New York ghetto with packing cases as furniture for a time, but, like Chaplin, whom he resembled in many ways, Paul used his wits to struggle free of poverty. Bern was said to be a nephew of Sigmund Freud,³¹⁰ and certainly his analysis of pictures was unusually perceptive. An intellectual, he was described by his friend Sam Marx as “soft-spoken, with a slight Teutonic accent and gentle Continental manners.”³¹¹ Known as the best-read and most generous man in Hollywood, he had little in common with the character sketched by Anzia Yezierska.

In Yezierska’s account, Paul Bern is quite clearly a director. Certainly he had codirected a couple of pictures, and his experience included acting, writing, and even managing a film laboratory. But at this stage of his career he was both head cutter at Goldwyn and a producer. True, he had his heart set on directing Hungry Hearts, but Goldwyn’s heart was harder. This was to be a superspecial and he wanted “Hamburg” to direct it. “Therefore cannot consider Bern’s feelings in the matter,” said his telegram, bluntly.³¹²

I had never heard of a director called Hamburg. As I read these telegrams to and from the home office in New York, I came upon other unfamiliar names—a Frenchman called Bordeaux, a man called Glasgow—and I realized that to avoid other studios indulging in industrial espionage, directors’ names were in code. “Hamburg” referred to E. Mason Hopper.

Born in Vermont and educated in Maryland, Hopper began acting at the age of fourteen. And that was the least surprising fact of his career. He was also a baseball player with a minor-league team, a cartoonist—he used this talent on the vaudeville stage—a student of chemistry, and he even invented a windproof matchbox.³¹³ He became an interior decorator and a student of architecture and wrote sketches for vaudeville. He joined Essanay in 1911 as a writer and became a director, known as “Lightning” Hopper for his skill at cartooning, and directed Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery, whose comic talents he helped develop. According to his own count, he made around 350 silent pictures and wrote 400 produced scenarios. And yet he remains unknown.

“E. Mason Hopper could have been one of the finest directors,” said his former assistant William Wellman, “but he was completely crazy. He’d rather cook than make pictures; he was a much better chef than he was a director. He was a little screwy, but he had great talent.”³¹⁴

Ethel Kaye, the first choice to play Sara in Hungry Hearts—later dropped in favor of Helen Ferguson. (National Film Archive)

Yezierska had taken more kindly to the scriptwriter, Julien Josephson, a sandy-haired young man of endearingly scruffy appearance who had written some of Charles Ray’s tales of small-town life. She and Josephson worked on a story outline during her four-week stay in California. “We spent days and days in the search for one slim thread of truth,” she said. “Not one false note must be struck. And we did not force it. Not one line. When the sterile days came, we just sat back and waited and then after a while the life of the thing itself carried us forward so that it wrote itself as a story should.”³¹⁵

She was equally impressed with the sets, designed by Cedric Gibbons. “We walked out of the office building to the studio lots and saw an East Side tenement, the rusty fire escapes cluttered with bedding and washlines, a row of pushcarts that seemed to come directly from the Hester Street fish market, a whole city humming.”

The sight of men working on the thatched roofs of the village houses transported her to her childhood. “The past which I had struggled to suggest in my groping words was recreated here in straw and plaster.… I closed my eyes and could almost see Mother spreading the red-checked Sabbath tablecloth. The steaming platter of gefüllte fish, the smell of fresh-baked hallah, Sabbath white bread. Mother blessing the lighted candles, ushering in the Sabbath. ‘This interior is perfect,’ I said to Josephson.”³¹⁶

Once her four weeks were up, Yezierska returned to New York to fulfill her commitment to a series of lectures. She left behind a massive story outline—“enough for a twenty-reel picture,” groaned the front office³¹⁷—and a reputation for being “difficult.”³¹⁸ With her socialist sympathies, she did not hesitate to take financial advantage of the studio. To keep her happy, the studio promised to submit Josephson’s slimmed-down “technical continuity” for whatever comments she might care to make.

A few months later, the studio began casting the picture. Sam Goldwyn, in New York, tested a Russian-Jewish girl called Ethel Kaye³¹⁹ and decided that she should play Sara,³²⁰ although a few days later he had second thoughts and suggested that Alma Rubens, another Jewish actress, might be more suitable.³²¹

“Organization unanimously and definitely opposed to Rubens for Hungry Hearts,” replied Abe Lehr, who ran the studio. Leatrice Joy was also turned down. So was Carmel Myers, the daughter of a rabbi, who had just appeared in Cheated Love: “Good actress, but too American.”³²² So Ethel Kaye got the part.

The role of the mother was even more crucial. Augusta Burmeister, who had played in George Loane Tucker’s wartime comedy-drama Joan of Plattsburg (1918), impressed Goldwyn, but when he brought Yezierska in for her opinion, she thought Burmeister looked more Irish than Jewish.³²³ Jacob Adler’s wife was interviewed. An actress called Cottrelly was considered. Yezierska said she was not the type. Goldwyn suggested having Mary Alden, a celebrated Hollywood character actress who had been in The Birth of a Nation, study Jewish mannerisms.³²⁴ Lehr replied: “Unanimously thought here Mary Alden could not possibly acquire Jewish mannerisms in short time between now and starting of the picture.”³²⁵ Lehr made an appointment to see Madame Thomashefsky, but she failed to turn up. None of this came to anything.³²⁶ With the start of production looming. Goldwyn took Yezierska’s advice and settled upon the Russian stage actress Sonia Marcel, who left at once for California.³²⁷ Lehr informed Goldwyn that Bryant Washburn had been selected for the juvenile lead, a surprising choice, for he was a very American actor, popular in light comedy. But Lehr justified the decision by calling Washburn “the only juvenile leading man we know of who acceptably photographs Jewish.”³²⁸ Perhaps equally important, he had been six years at Essanay and was a friend of Hopper’s.

Goldwyn asked Lehr if he wanted Yezierska to come out again. Lehr answered: “Don’t want Yezierska as aside from her being a hindrance to Hamburg she will make impossible a sane shooting schedule.”³²⁹ Last time, he explained, they either had to get her out of California or face devoting years to the development of her continuity.³³⁰ “I suppose she is just as much of a nuisance in the home office as she was here.”³³¹

From New York, Yezierska had complained bitterly that the scenario was being reedited without her approval. Cleverly, she argued that unless she were consulted at every stage, Goldwyn’s policy, which had given authors complete faith in him, could not be carried out, endangering both artistic integrity and money-making potential.³³² Lehr assured her that nobody was contemplating murdering her brainchild.

And it was true. The creative people associated with the film were devoted to it. They were convinced they had a great picture, and they worked on it with enormous enthusiasm.

Shooting began in late September 1921, and Lehr happily cabled Goldwyn: “Have never screened in any single day a finer or more satisfactory collection of rushes than what we saw today. Opening episode is full of beauty and convincing realism.”³³³

But the euphoria was short-lived. In the eight months between the making of her test and her appearance in the picture, Ethel Kaye, in the eyes of everyone at the studio, had changed. “She has lost something that makes her acceptable,” wired Lehr enigmatically, “and consequently took her out of part this morning after exhaustive consideration. As emergency measure we put Helen Ferguson in part.”³³⁴

Helen Ferguson was another veteran of “Lightning” Hopper’s playground, one of the hopefuls who turned up and sat on the extra’s benches, hoping for a job. She was thrown out again and again by the casting director, E. J. Babille, who told her bluntly that she simply wasn’t the type for pictures. She refused to believe him. When she signed a contract for the lead in Hungry Hearts, it was poetic justice that the assistant director should have been the same E. J. Babille.³³⁵

Ferguson was delighted with the part, which proved the only major role she was ever to play. “I’m not a Jewess,” she said, “and have always hated the little hump on my nose. I now love it because it brought me the part I love so.”³³⁶

In a letter, she assured Yezierska that she would not simply act the part, she would be the part. To this end she went to Temple Street, the Jewish district of Los Angeles, and took a job in a delicatessen. The owner, Abe Budin, was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who lived with his family behind the store. “Warm-heartedly, they asked me to live with them for a while. So I lived with these people and it got so it didn’t smell right any place unless it smelt of gefüllte fish.”³³⁷

Abe Budin was given the role of Sopkin the butcher and played it most proficiently.³³⁸

If one member of the cast is replaced, the others fear for their jobs. This is the time to make changes; soon it will be too late. And the ax duly fell on Sonia Marcel. Lehr wrote to Goldwyn: “We have gone along from day to day with hope that … Sonia Marcel would give us an improved performance but in spite of everything that Hopper can do and talk that I have had with her we feel she will kill our picture if we go on.… She is photographically almost impossible for this part because of hard straight mouth and hawk nose that even in slightest profile gets over hardness which makes her repellent in her sympathetic scenes.… Her personality is negative and instead of giving us simplicity of peasant Jewess she is giving us intensity of an intellectual woman dressed in peasant’s clothes … With Ferguson only moderately acceptable we are apparently doomed with definite failure if we go on.”³³⁹

Lehr suggested recasting with Cottrelly as the mother and Celia Adler as the daughter. To suspend production and make the necessary retakes would cost $10,000. “We must face this unless we are willing to accept mediocre production … we are faced with expense through extra production time it takes Hopper each day to get over Marcel’s scenes even passably.”³⁴⁰

Helen Ferguson as Sara, the immigrant in Hungry Hearts. (National Film Archive)

Production was suspended. Goldwyn wired that to replace Marcel he and Yezierska had chosen Russian-Jewish actress Rosa Rosanova,³⁴¹ a veteran of twenty-two years on the Russian and American (Yiddish) stage. He saw no hope of finding another Sara, so it was decided to retain Ferguson.

When production resumed, Goldwyn complained that Hopper was inclined to be “too realistic” in his direction of the East Side characters—in other words, they were too Jewish—and he asked Lehr to keep a close watch on him.³⁴²

Hopper transferred Yezierska’s story and Josephson’s continuity with care and dedication. And he created one of the best, albeit one of the simplest, Jewish pictures of the entire silent period.

Hungry Hearts opens in that same thatched hut Anzia Yezierska had seen on the back lot, where Abraham Levin is forced by the tsar’s harsh law to hold services in secret. “Abraham, gentle, pious, impractical, who, in 1910, solved all problems according to a book written in 1200.”

A Cossack policeman (German actor Bert Sprotte) bursts into the hut, threatening Abraham with ten years in prison if he catches him again. The Cossack stamps on the Sabbath bread and slashes at Abraham’s wife, Hanneh (Rosanova), with his whip.

“Oi weh!” cries Hanneh. “Is there no end to our troubles?”

A letter from America is read by Abraham to a gathering of villagers: “In America, they ask everybody who shall be President and I, Gedalyah Mindel, have as much to say as Mr. Rockefeller, the greatest millionaire.”

Sara, Abraham’s daughter, longs to go to America, as does Hanneh, but Abraham asks where he is to get the money.

“Let us anyhow sell our fur coats,” urges Sara. “It must be always sunshine in America.”

They sell all their possessions, beg, borrow, and at last reach New York. They are dismayed by the ghetto (we see brief shots of the real Lower East Side) and even more dismayed by the tenement Gedalyah Mindel (Otto Lederer) has found for them.

“Gottiniu,” gasps Hanneh. “Like in a grave so dark.”

“It ain’t so dark,” says Gedalyah, “it’s only a little shady.”

And for this they must pay ten dollars a month.

Abraham tends a pushcart in the crowded street, but keeps his nose in his beloved Talmud. “He who studies,” it tells him, “will not follow a commercial life, neither can the merchant devote his time to study.”

Abraham’s landlord, Benjamin Rosenblatt (George Siegmann), a burly, brutal-looking man, has a good-looking young nephew, David Kaplan (Washburn). David calls on his uncle to tell him that the Supreme Court has made him a lawyer.

“I made you a lawyer,” shouts Rosenblatt, showing him his financial outlay down to the smallest car fare. He orders him to start collecting rents, as a return.

Abraham loses his pushcart to a thief and asks Sopkin the butcher to buy his watch. Sopkin doesn’t want it, but he is a kindly soul and takes it anyway. Abraham uses some of the money to purchase a hat for Hanneh. She is touched, until she learns the source.

Day after day, Sara scrubs steps and cleans rooms for Rosenblatt. For this he gives the family their flat rent-free. To her mother, Sara mourns the lack of a social life. “I’m not jealous, but why should they live and enjoy life and why must I only look on how they are happy?” When Mindel offers her a job in a shirt factory, she accepts. This means the Levins start paying rent—and David Kaplan becomes a frequent visitor.

He stays to supper one day and is clearly attracted to Sara, but Abraham monopolizes the conversation. “I am an ignorant woman,” Hanneh whispers to him. “But if there is anything in the Talmud about getting a daughter married by her father doing all the talking, show it to me!”

Hanneh is deeply impressed by the gleaming white kitchen in the home of wealthy Mrs. Preston (Frankie Raymond), whose washing she delivers. “If only my children could live to have such beautifulness.” And why not? Hanneh spends her hard-earned money on white paint and begins to transform her kitchen.

Helen Ferguson works with Abe Budin in his delicatessen store. Budin played Sopkin in Hungry Hearts. (National Film Archive)

Hungry Hearts: E. A. Warren (Abraham Levin), Helen Ferguson (Sara), and director E. Mason Hopper. (National Film Archive)

Benjamin Rosenblatt (George Siegmann) yells at his nephew (Bryant Washburn): “I made you a lawyer!” and shows how much it cost him, in Hungry Hearts.

She invites her neighbors to admire the new grandeur. “To such a tenant,” says Sopkin, “the landlord ought to give a medal.”

The landlord cannot understand why his rent collector should spend two hours every time he goes to the Levins, and walks over to find out. He smiles as he sees the white paint but the smile vanishes when he sees David holding hands with Sara. He calls the Levins “starving nobodies.”

“They are not nobodies,” replies David, indignantly. “They’re fine people from Russia.”

“Fine people! Low-down greenhorns—schnorrers!”

David tries to reason with his uncle but he is crushed, and Sara sees their future crumble. As a parting shot, Rosenblatt says, “Because you’ve got such a fine painted-up kitchen—your rent will be doubled.”

Hanneh is mortified. She rushes downstairs to plead with Rosenblatt, who responds, “If you don’t pay more another tenant will.” A policeman confirms his rights.

“Is there no justice in America?” she asks.

She returns to her flat, shuts the door, and leans her head against the wall, smoothing the paintwork with her hand and weeping. “No, the landlord ain’t going to get the best from me.” She grabs a meat cleaver and hacks at the wall with ferocious energy. The plaster crumbles. She attacks the cupboards, shelves, and crockery. The janitor rushes in, and she chases him out with her incongruous weapon. Smash—smash—Abraham and Sara rush in and try to hold her, but she breaks free. She has gone berserk, and there is nothing they can do to restrain her. Rosenblatt arrives and is apologetic. Not until two policemen overpower her does the destruction stop. “The Cossack!” she cries, as they drag her out.

Hanneh’s case comes up the next morning. The judge asks if she has an attorney, and David steps forward, to Rosenblatt’s fury. Hanneh tells her story clearly and movingly, and even the judge is touched.

In Hungry Hearts, Abraham (E. A. Warren) and Sara (Helen Ferguson) restrain Hanneh (Rosa Rosanova) without success; she smashes up their kitchen. (National Film Archive)

“How could you raise this poor woman’s rent?” he asks Rosenblatt. “You who were once a poor immigrant yourself?” He dismisses the case, and Rosenblatt’s anger is so violent he is fined for contempt of court.

“Their second summer in a new land.” The Levins now have a smart home in the suburbs. Before this sequence goes much further, the surviving version abruptly ends.

All Yezierska’s stories were in some degree autobiographical. Her father, like Abraham, was a Talmudic scholar, although he was a tyrant—more like Rosenblatt than the quiet old man of the film. Anzia herself had a burning eagerness to become an American, to acquire American clothes, like Sara in the picture.³⁴³ But the film smoothed away the underlying anger and all hints of Yezierska’s socialism. Gone is the wretchedness of the girl in the ghetto, her agitation for higher pay in the shirt factory, the passiveness of the other workers, and her subsequent despair: “At least in Russia she had the hope of America!”³⁴⁴

The original story, “The Lost Beautifulness,” dealt only with the episode of the painted kitchen. Hanneh, the mother, converts it because her soldier son is returning from France. There is much more emphasis on relentlessly rising prices. Mrs. Preston, the wealthy woman, treats her as a friend and talks to her of democracy. The courtroom scene is also very different. In the story, the judge agrees with the landlord. Hanneh is evicted. The soldier returns to find his mother surrounded by a heap of household things on the sidewalk, dumped there in the rain.

The picture was completed at the end of November 1921 and was edited by Robert Kern as a nine-reeler, under Paul Bern’s supervision. It was shipped to New York with the strict understanding that Anzia Yezierska would not be permitted to dominate the final ending.³⁴⁵ Some people at the home office in New York felt the climax was not strong enough emotionally: it was all very well seeing Hanneh tear up the apartment with a cleaver, but unless one saw her trying to collect the money to paint it, the impact was diminished. Extra scenes were shot of Hanneh working her fingers to the bone, scrubbing offices until the early hours, and returning through the deserted ghetto streets. (None of this is in the surviving version.)

E. Mason Hopper directs “East Side crowd” for Hungry Hearts. The man on the left, with boots, is a member of the crew. (National Film Archive)

A studio preview was attended by Elinor Glyn and Montague Glass, author of Potash and Perlmutter (1923). Both were extravagant in their praise, but Glass was particularly struck. He said it was “a perfect human document” and “the finest picture he ever saw.” He could not suggest a single improvement. He also commented about the fine judgment shown in the spoken titles.³⁴⁶

By this time Sam Goldwyn had been replaced as president of the Goldwyn Company by Frank J. Godsol, who set about signing Glass to rewrite the titles. He also requested that all positive offcuts be sent to New York. Bern, Kern, and Hopper were dismayed at this clear indication that Godsol was about to tamper with their film. When Lehr protested on their behalf, Godsol said Glass hadn’t changed his opinion; he just saw a few splendid opportunities for humorous titles. “The ending is not good and can never be made good, but Glass has figured out a way to make it more logical.”³⁴⁷ (Glass would also insert quotations from the Talmud, to make clear the identity of the book the old man consulted.)

Maybe Glass could work with Bern? But Bern was so violently opposed to the reediting that he refused to cooperate. “I appreciate his feelings,” said Godsol, patronizingly, “but we are closer to exhibitors than he is.”³⁴⁸

When Glass finished his work, the studio people were horrified at the increase in the number of titles. So they made up two versions, the home office version with all Glass’s titles intact and a studio version containing many of them but recut by Kern and Bern. It was not the film they started with—Godsol had lopped more than two reels out of it because he felt it was “draggy and boresome”³⁴⁹—but it was a reasonable compromise. Both versions were sent to New York, and the studio people waited in suspense for Godsol’s reaction. To their intense relief, he accepted their version.

When Anzia Yezierska finally saw what had been made of her stories, she was horrified. She realized she could do nothing to prevent the desecration of her idea and felt as if she had been raped. “But I lived through it. And here is my message of faith; for all this desecration, for all the violation of an integral thought, I feel that the idea still lives and goes on. And it is, after all, a great and good thing to have even the fraction of one’s idea live.”³⁵⁰

Before the film was shown to the press, it was shown privately to Lillian D. Wald, the noted settlement worker, and to magazine editors. The American Hebrew wrote an enthusiastic report of this “epic of the immigrant.” Variety acknowledged that there were many touching passages, “but it is entirely devoid of dramatic action and one is constrained to fear that its appeal will be limited … Here’s a big subject—the theme of the Americanization of an alien family delivered raw in New York from the oppression of Russia. But out of this rich material it does seem the incidents that have been picked are petty. Certainly they are inadequate for a feature length picture.”³⁵¹

One can sympathize with this attitude, for Hungry Hearts might have been the kind of intimate epic achieved, decades later, by Elia Kazan with America, America. But now its very quietness seems an asset. The lack of manufactured drama is refreshing. The titles are full of wisecracks. Yet the degree of stereotyped Jewish behavior is minimal compared to what might have been.

The picture is no documentary; suffering and poverty are talked about rather than experienced. It is in no way a political film. The ghetto is a fact of life, and no one is blamed for it. In common with most films of the 1920s which touch upon poverty, the rich are glimpsed as kindly, charitable people. When Hanneh admires the lady’s kitchen, she is rewarded with a gift of a geranium. “It chokes me how good you are,” says Hanneh. “I can’t get it out in words.”

Hungry Hearts may be more of an entertainment than a social film, but its slice-of-life approach gives it unusual value. The picture of downtrodden Jews may border on the sentimental, but the feeling is right. The central theme is money. Knowing that many in the audience suffered from prejudice, Josephson made the father a man with no interest in money at all. In European communities, Jews who had money supported those who did not. The film makes it clear that in America the system is harsher—“Nobody’s a somebody before he can earn money in America,” says Mindel to the new arrivals. And the fact that the grasping landlord is portrayed as a Jew, too, was a unique touch in a film of this sort. (“Perhaps overdrawn,” said The American Hebrew.)³⁵²

The film’s main drawback, from the cinematic point of view, is its dependence on titles. The first half is a perfect example of a silent talkie. It is soberly and competently directed, albeit without flashes of imagination. The art direction was highly praised: “No one who knows the Lower East Side could find fault with a single scene,” said The American Hebrew.³⁵³ Yet there is an empty look to interiors which Gibbons did not overcome, and I suspect this was due more to the poverty of the budget than to that of the story. The happy ending was attacked by almost every critic—“an oozily sentimental finish,” said Frederick James Smith³⁵⁴—and the sight of Abraham in his battered old clothes against the gleaming white of the suburban home is ludicrous. Mercifully, very little of this survives.

The print, which was discovered in 1978 by John Cannon,³⁵⁵ is missing several important scenes—such as those aboard ship. (One review refers to the “touching moment” as the family sights the Statue of Liberty.) And the pace of the picture is fractured by the chunks torn from the heavily run positive. About fifteen minutes appear to be missing. Between that, and the cuts and changes made between completion and release, the impact of the original is much reduced.

Although the film was selected as one of Photoplay’s Eight Best of the Year and received an honorable mention in Robert Sherwood’s Best Moving Pictures of 1922–1923, it was not a major moneymaker for Goldwyn. It led to very little for its star; she hardly worked at all for the following eight months. And it was three years before Hollywood tackled the subject of Jewish immigration again.

 

SALOME OF THE TENEMENTS    Anzia Yezierska made one more contribution to the silent cinema: Salome of the Tenements (1925), which was directed by the Canadian-born Irishman Sidney Olcott for Famous Players–Lasky. Her agent sold it for 50 percent more than she had been paid for Hungry Hearts. But Yezierska had little to do with the making of the film.³⁵⁶ It was scripted by her old friend Sonya Levien, who had once been fiction editor of Metropolitan Magazine and had virtually started Yezierska’s career when she had bought some of her stories. The lead was given to the Jewish actress Jetta Goudal, and there was a strong representation of Jewish players, including José Ruben, Lazar Freed, Irma Lerner (a friend of Yezierska’s), Sonia Nodell, and Elihu Tenenholtz.³⁵⁷ (According to Picture Show, Tenenholtz gave “one of the most masterly portrayals of Jewish life ever seen on the screen.”)³⁵⁸

The story was a more cynical view of ghetto life than Hungry Hearts; it was about the next generation, the children of the immigrants. Sonya Mendel grows up with good looks and a sharp wit and works as a reporter on the Jewish Daily News. She pursues millionaire John Manning (Godfrey Tearle), who has endowed a settlement house on the East Side and wages war against local grafters. Sonya, known as Salome because of the string of scalps at her belt, borrows money from a loan shark so that she can improve her apartment in order to impress Manning. She is determined to marry the philanthropist and succeeds, but does not reckon with the grafters. They use her debt to blackmail Manning, forcing him to relax his campaign against them. Sonya proves her love, showing herself willing to go to prison rather than allow her husband to give up his work for the people in the ghetto.³⁵⁹

Salome of the Tenements, 1925, with Jetta Goudal, center, directed by Sidney Olcott. (George Eastman House)

Sonya was partly based on Rose Pastor Stokes, a Russian-Jewish social worker who became assistant editor of the Jewish Daily News and married a philanthropist, millionaire Graham Stokes. It was also a portrait of Anzia herself, who became romantically involved with the philosopher and educationist John Dewey. She remained particularly fond of the character.³⁶⁰

Reviewers praised the “rare types” who enlivened the atmosphere, but considered it “a mighty wishy-washy tale at best” which would get money only in towns with large ghetto populations.³⁶¹ A fan from Medford, Massachusetts, thought the producers should be locked up. “This is without doubt the worst picture I have ever seen. If I saw one more like it I think I should give up being a fan for evermore. Please refrain from any more ‘anti’ or ‘pro’ propaganda pictures of the kind of Salome of the Tenements.”³⁶²

 

EDWARD SLOMAN    Was Edward Sloman the most socially conscious director of his time? Just look at his achievements: in 1915 he made The Inner Struggle, a tragedy of life in a leper colony. The same year he directed The Convict King, about the convict labor system. In 1916, he released The Law’s Injustice, about legal and political corruption, and Dust, about conditions in factories and the hypocrisy of rich people who spent lavishly at Belgian relief galas, where their generosity was visible, but who allowed their workers to starve. In 1921, he made The Ten-Dollar Raise, dedicated to the underdogs of the world. And this does not take into account his Jewish pictures.

Yet if anyone personified the kind of filmmaker who made social films without being aware of the fact, it was Edward Sloman. He was the last man to be described as a crusading reformer. He had made so many pictures, he said, he had trouble recalling them. He thought he had made only three films with Jewish backgrounds; I can account for at least seven. Behind many of his early social films was the young radical Julian Lamothe, scenarist; one should beware of ascribing to the director the idea and story of films which were so often assigned to him.

Sloman came from a poor background, but apart from his Zionist sympathies he was never involved in politics. His style of filmmaking was what would now be called traditional, except that rather than following tradition, he was one of those pioneers who helped create it. His attitude was encapsulated in a letter he wrote to me in 1967: “Saw an old picture the other night on television, How Green Was My Valley, the story of a coal-mining town in Wales—and it was perfectly beautiful. It was so far ahead of most pictures made today—and especially the so-called art pictures from the Continent—there was no comparison. Here was sheer entertainment (not pictures that are supposed to tell us how to live). It was ‘hocum’ [sic] but nice ‘hocum,’ the ‘hocum’ that the ordinary person who goes to see pictures doesn’t recognize as such; he enjoys every minute of it and loves it!”

How Green Was My Valley, made by John Ford in 1941, was indeed a beautiful production, but it was an idealized and romanticized view of life in a mining village. It no more dealt with the realities of coal-mining than The Sound of Music, another Sloman favorite, dealt with the realities of refugees.

So Edward Sloman is included in this volume as an outstanding contributor to the films of social importance more by accident than design. Yet some of his films have a significance quite apart from their value as entertainment.

Sloman was born in London in 1883. He emigrated to Montreal around 1901. His skills as a photo-engraver were much in demand, and he moved to a more profitable job in Minneapolis. Fascinated by acting, he paid for lessons from Fred Carr, a former leading man for Otis Skinner. Carr was so impressed by his pupil’s ability, he said he wouldn’t charge Sloman for lessons if he would help Carr teach. Sloman became a professional actor and director and appeared in a staging of Clyde Fitch’s The City (1909), a story of drug addiction.

Edward Sloman with inhabitants of the Jewish quarter of Los Angeles who were hired as extras for the shtetl scenes of Surrender, 1927.

He married Hylda Hollis, and together they toured with Eva Tanguay in vaudeville. When Tanguay was blackballed by the booking agencies because she preferred to book her artists herself, the Slomans were blackballed along with her, so they went to California to act in motion pictures. Sloman’s stage experience caused him to be promoted abruptly to director, at Lubin’s West Coast studios. For three years he worked at the Flying A studios in Santa Barbara, until they closed. For Benjamin Hampton he made the highly successful The Westerners (1919) before joining Metro. And in 1922 he made a Jewish story for J. L. Frothingham: The Woman He Loved.

“Direction came very easily to me,” he said. “It was hard work but I knew what I was doing. You see, when I was acting in pictures, I never knew what I was doing. An actor never saw a script. That’s what started me writing, you see. If I hadn’t written some of the things I worked in, I wouldn’t have known what the hell I was doing. I always worked at night on my script for the following day—I always visualized everything.”³⁶³

Sloman never encountered anti-Semitism in Hollywood, but those who imagine Hollywood to have been a tightly knit Jewish enclave might be surprised to know that he had a rough passage in the 1920s and ’30s, despite the success of so many of his films. For instance: J. L. Frothingham was backed by financier E. F. Hutton. When Hutton withdrew, Frothingham turned his assets over to Mike Levee, owner of the studio. The assets included the negative and print of a picture Sloman had written but had not been paid for.

Surrender, 1927. Lea Lyon (Mary Philbin), the Rabbi (Nigel de Brulier), and Constantin (Ivan Mosjoukine), in Edward Sloman’s version of the play Lea Lyon, about a Cossack prince’s threat to burn a Jewish village unless a village girl surrenders to him; Jewish customs were carefully reproduced.

Sloman recalled, “When I presented my bill to foxy Mike Levee, he not only hired my lawyer away from me, but threatened me with a blackball if I ever dared to collect that money for the story. So I collected and he blackballed me—with the result that I didn’t direct for almost two years.”³⁶⁴

Two years seems to be an exaggeration, but certainly Sloman was driven to putting his own money up for his next production, Blind Justice, released as The Last Hour, with Milton Sills. He was talked into selling it to Mastodon Pictures, a States Rights outfit run by the notorious C. C. Burr, who succeeded in cheating him once more.

Sloman’s agent, Edward Small, was a friend of the studio manager at Universal, Julius Bernheim. He persuaded Bernheim to offer Sloman a job. “Bernheim did so, at the lowest salary ever offered to a director, hoping I would turn it down. But I accepted.”

His association with Universal brought Sloman his biggest hit and the most popular of all the Jewish pictures of the silent era: His People.

Among the first three-reel films to be directed by Sloman was Vengeance of the Oppressed (Lubin, 1916), in which he also played the lead. Yet on the list of films he compiled for me, he could not even recall the title and referred to it alternately as “Russian picture” and “Jewish picture.” The script was credited to Wilbert Melville, the manager of the studio, and Julian Louis Lamothe. The only drawback to the picture, according to Moving Picture World, was that the opening was so powerful that the authors could not increase that impact as the story neared its climax. The opening dealt with the cruelties exacted on the Jews by the Cossacks.

“A more striking and realistic picturization has seldom been produced,” said one critic, “even the crucifixion of the mother lacks any tendency towards artificiality.” Sloman’s playing of the part of Aaron was highly praised: “It is most realistic, being unspoiled by any tendency to overact.”³⁶⁵

The story was about a Jewish student, Aaron, whose uncle in America sends money to enable his family to emigrate. A pogrom shatters the plans and only Aaron and his daughter reach the United States. Years later Aaron becomes financially successful and is asked to assist in the negotiation of a loan to Russia. One of the negotiators proves to be Sergius Kosloff, the man who killed Aaron’s mother and wife. Aaron plans his vengeance, “and in his dying moments he had the pleasure of seeing his enemy killed, decoyed by a woman.”³⁶⁶

“In doing the thing as a Jew,” said Sloman, “I was tied up to a gate and lashed with a cat o’ nine tails. We were using the ıst Cavalry for the Cossacks, and I said to the guy who was going to lash me, ‘You’re going to hear an awful lot of yelling. But don’t take any notice. You keep doing it.’ The lash was made of felt instead of leather—didn’t make any difference. I was yelling at him to stop, and he didn’t stop. He tore all the skin off my back. I carried those scars on my back for many, many years.”³⁶⁷

 

HIS PEOPLE    Sloman’s grand contribution to the films about Jews was His People (1925). “This is my favorite film, not because it was the best thing I’d done, but because it was such a sure-fire picture. I knew when I started that it was going to be a great hit.”³⁶⁸

His confidence was based on Isadore Bernstein’s story, “The Jew,” and Rudolph Schildkraut’s performance. The title The Jew was quickly changed to His People, and advance publicity explained that the story had been written around Alexander Carr’s ability to portray a lovable character and fill it overflowing with humor and pathos.³⁶⁹ “Mr. Laemmle offers a surprise in this one!” The surprise was that Alexander Carr was not in it.

Carr was a Jewish stage actor who had worked for Goldwyn in Potash and Perlmutter. He was notoriously temperamental, a fact which would have been well known to Universal. His People had a fairly large cast, but essentially it was a one-part movie; the entire picture hinged around the father, David Cominsky. This part could have been played by either man, but Universal settled for Schildkraut.

The character of Sammy, the devoted son who becomes a boxer with an Irish name, was based on the prize fighter Benny Leonard (who also inspired the 1927 Alfred Santell film The Patent Leather Kid). Some of the scenes bore a similarity to the stories Leonard told of his parents when he first became a boxer.³⁷⁰ Edward Sloman picked George Lewis from the ranks of the extras to play this part.

Bernstein wrote his story in 1921. Born in New York, he had spent fourteen years working on the Christian Herald and had been superintendent of Boys’ Institute and athletic instructor at the Five Points Mission, New York. He entered the picture business in 1909, taking over Western Universal in 1913. Bernstein had written the script for a 1915 Jewish film called Faith of Her Fathers. That same year he resigned, but his problems with Carl Laemmle, the German-Jewish president of Universal Pictures, were never so serious that he could not return, and he became a supervisor and executive as well as a writer. He knew the Lower East Side, and several of the incidents in His People were autobiographical.

His People, 1925, directed by Edward Sloman. Rosa Rosanova as Mamma Cominsky and Rudolph Schildkraut as David Cominsky. (National Film Archives)

Every producer to whom he showed his story turned it down. Even Universal felt it had no hope of success. Finally, Bernstein got Carl Laemmle himself to read it, and Laemmle decreed that it was to be produced.³⁷¹ With the amazing success of Abie’s Irish Rose, it was a foregone conclusion that Hollywood would eventually make a Jewish-Irish story.

Universal’s new studio manager, Raymond Schrock, called Sloman into his office and handed him the three typewritten pages of The Jew. “There was only a germ of an idea in this story,” said Sloman, “but it was a good one. So, with the help of Al Cohn,³⁷² who had written a similar story for Warner Bros., Charlie Whittaker and myself, we took a couple of sequences between us and started to write a script.

“Our combined efforts evidently jelled perfectly, because before the picture was actually finished everybody in the studio seemed to know that we had a great big hit on our hands.”³⁷³

Before Sloman had finished editing the picture, Carl Laemmle ordered it sent to New York. Sloman had to follow, completing the editing on the East Coast. The picture’s name caused problems: Universal pictures always opened with the title “Carl Laemmle Presents” and in the light of all the jokes about Laemmle’s kindness to his relatives it was asking for trouble to open with “Carl Laemmle Presents His People.” So it was changed to Proud Heart, perhaps recalling Hungry Hearts. This, however, was attacked in the press as “meaningless, trite.” Universal appealed for a better title. Meyer Schine, of Schine Theatrical Enterprises, a large New York circuit, came up with Common People, pointing out that it suggested the significance of the picture and was maximum box-office value. Universal agreed and the title was announced while the film was still playing at the Astor, but as no one else liked it, the name reverted to His People.

The picture had been booked into the Astor while The Phantom of the Opera was still doing $10,000-a-week business there, so certain were Universal’s executives of creating a new hit. And a hit it was.

The premiere was attended by many prominent Jews, including Henry Morgenthau, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey; Bernard Baruch; Judge Otto A. Rosalsky; and lawyer Nathan Burkan. Rudolph Schildkraut did not attend, as he was acting in a play, but his son Joseph was there. The picture got a tremendous reception, and when it was known that Sloman was present, he received great applause. The critics were unanimously enthusiastic … almost. One critic said he hoped a film would one day exploit Schildkraut’s magnificent and powerful pantomime, “which, I am sad to say, are but faintly called upon in Proud Heart. The photoplay is sentimental-comedy-melodrama of the Ghetto—a few dabs from Humoresque, a pinch of Abie’s Irish Rose … it could scarcely fail of sound financial success.” But he admitted that in the development “there was a modicum of honest sentiment, feeling, simplicity and sincerity.”³⁷⁴ The other critics admitted the picture was hokum, but said it was nonetheless human, true, and magnificent. Schildkraut was compared to Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh. His People was a sensation in London; Sloman must have been gratified by the Kine Weekly review which said the picture had “a sprinkling of Dickens and Zangwill.”³⁷⁵ It broke records in London and at theatres across the United States. One exhibitor said his conscience was troubled when he thought of the low price he had paid for the picture, and he sent an extra 20 percent to Universal.³⁷⁶

Out-of-town reviewers thought the re-creation of New York flawless. Critics from the ghetto, however, felt the sets were “rather artificial and poorly lighted” and complained that some of the titles were inane. (Nonetheless, they loved the picture.)³⁷⁷

The Jewish reaction was unreservedly enthusiastic:

“A street in the ghetto. A cross-section of swarming, teeming humanity. A page from Life with its stark, staring realism,” wrote Sam B. Jacobson in a Jewish Los Angeles paper. “One can almost smell the smells of this city within a city that is shown so realistically on the screen.

“This is the first time that a film has so vividly portrayed the lives and environment of the Jewry of a metropolis.”³⁷⁸

After a lengthy paragraph praising Schildkraut, Jacobson added: “Can’t you see the little Cominsky family as the old father pronounces ‘kiddush’ with his ‘brosha’ over the wine and the final ‘moitze’ over the bread? Not once does he omit to kiss the ‘mezuzah’ as he leaves or enters his home. And true to his traditions, he blesses his first born when he believes that he is on his dying bed.

“Rosa Rosanova is perfect as the subjective, yet doting mother. The sweet smile of faith as she finishes her ‘benching’ of the Shabbas candles is the same smile that thousands of Jewish mothers have worn down the ages. Her quick sympathy for the misunderstood younger son is the sympathy of an intuitive mother heart.”³⁷⁹

He reserved his highest praise for the director.

“Edward Sloman is responsible for one of the finest pictures ever made. He has done, with His People, more to eradicate with one blow prejudice and racial hatred than any other agency has accomplished.

“It is a picture that only a Jew could have made. Carl Laemmle, a Jew, who produced it, Isadore Bernstein, a Jew, who wrote the original story, and Edward Sloman, a Jew, who directed it; all have earned the thanks of the Jews the world over for their participation in the greatest piece of propaganda that has ever been presented to the public.”³⁸⁰

Because His People was made by Universal pictures, it was aimed, as were virtually all their films, at the audience of small-town America, and the Jews were as sentimentalized and caricatured as the Irish. But because it was obviously written from experience, the film carries an impact. Time has made even the obviousness touching. Fortunately, the leading roles were given to Rudolph Schildkraut and Rosa Rosanova, both of whom look perfect; Schildkraut, particularly, gives a marvelous performance. Arthur Lubin is convincing as the erring son, but George Lewis is too bland and two-dimensional to be effective as Sammy. The Irish family, represented by Kate Price and Blanche Mehaffey, is overdrawn.

The prologue—supposedly 1914, but no concessions are made to period—establishes Sammy as a tough little newspaper boy, defending his studious brother against the aggressive Izzy Rosenblatt. Ten years later, the boys have grown up and Sammy, caring little for religion, is enamored of the Irish girl across the way. His strict father is dismayed by Sammy’s inattention during Shabbas. He manages to break away by telling his father he is going to night school—“What are you studying, box fighting?” “I’m studying to be an expert finisher.” When a mischievous neighbor shows the father a flyer announcing “Battling Rooney” fighting in a nearby tournament, the father recognizes his son. He throws him out of the house. The same day, the family favorite, Morris, packs and leaves—he has taken a flat uptown to help his career. The family is broken up; the mother bursts into tears.

Morris’s uptown commitment is female, the daughter of a former judge named Stein.³⁸¹ To give himself greater leverage when he asks for his sweetheart’s hand, Morris convinces the wealthy judge that he is an orphan and that he has made his way unaided and alone. This also avoids the embarrassment of bringing his ghetto parents face-to-face with his prospective father-in-law.

Needing money to fuel his courtship, Morris turns up at home, saying that his entire career depends on his having a dress suit. The old father has an idea, and on an icy December night, with snow driving fiercely in a gale, he sets out. “But, Papa, you said you wouldn’t go out on a night like this for a thousand dollars,” says Mother.

“Well, if they give me a little less, maybe I take it.”

He staggers through the blizzard to a pawnbroker and there removes his magnificent coat which he has brought all the way from Russia and which he would not part with for anything. The pawnbroker affects derision for it, but they settle for twenty dollars. “Twenty dollars won’t buy me a dress suit,” says Papa.

“Why didn’t you say?” The pawnbroker has dress suits fit for a king.

While Morris is protesting to his mother that he can’t wait much longer, the old man, deprived of his overcoat (ref Gogol!), soaked and buffeted, staggers home. He is bowled over by a passing vehicle, and Sammy, out for a training run, helps him up without guessing his identity. When the old man reaches home, Morris is sickened by the sight of the dress suit. “But where’s the money?” However, he takes the suit to humor his parents. No sooner is he outside than he tosses it into a trash can.

The father catches pneumonia and cries out for Morris, to give him his last blessing. A telegram greets the boy at his uptown flat, but his girlfriend is more demanding—“You needn’t come if there is anything more important than me.” Of course there isn’t; how can he tell her of his father’s illness—he, an orphan?

So the son receiving the blessing is Sammy; the father is too ill to notice the difference. While the family, and the Irish family, too, stand around and weep, the doctor smiles—he is over the crisis and will pull through.

“It was my Morris—he gave me strength,” says the old man.

But instructions from the doctor are grim; unless the old man goes to live in a better climate, he will die. Sammy therefore forces himself into a tournament; the prize money is $1,000. Meanwhile, the mischievous neighbor cannot wait to show the father the column in the Jewish paper about the smart marriage uptown—Morris Cominsky, an orphan, who rose to an important position in Judge Stein’s legal firm entirely on his own! “This cannot be my Morris.” “But it wasn’t your Morris who came when you were ill—he was too busy. It was Sammy. And Sammy is fighting for you now.”

Intercut skillfully with the boxing match, in which Sammy is being beaten to a pulp, the old man sets out for the wedding reception. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cominsky, under the guise of being taken to a movie show by Sammy’s Irish sweetheart, finds herself a spectator at the boxing match. Horrified by the injuries her son is sustaining, she nonetheless hurls herself to the front and yells at him that he must win—for his father.

The father gains admittance to the great house and upon being told that the bridegroom has no father—there must be some mistake—confronts his son, to Morris’s intense embarrassment. It is an absorbing and impressive scene, albeit highly theatrical. The old man, hearing from Morris that he has never set eyes on him before, apologizes. His own eyesight is weak. With dignity he departs.³⁸²

A coincidence of Dickensian proportions: at the subway station Sammy, the Irish girl, and the mother sit down exalting in their win and the thousand-dollar check. Suddenly they see the old father being helped down the steps by the neighbor. When Sammy hears what has affected the old man so badly, he takes a taxi to the same address and forces his way past the butler. “You denied your father. I wait to hear you deny me, your brother.” Sammy frog-marches Morris away from the reception and throws him in front of his father. “I—I’ve been a selfish cur.” But the father is so anxious to forgive his favorite son, the first-born, that he even has a reconciliation with Sammy. He admits he has been stupid. “I looked for success for my children in the only thing I knew—learning. But success in this country can even mean a box fighter.”

Edward Sloman (left) with Rudolph Schildkraut, who had just arrived at Universal City for what the press agent termed “his debut in motion pictures.” He had already made films in Europe.

Rudolph Schildkraut, the father, could hardly have been better. A star of the German theatre, an actor with Max Reinhardt, and a veteran of the cinema, Schildkraut came from Rumania. As a young man, he misguidedly accepted the role of Jesus in a Passion Play one Easter; the crowd quickly realized that he was a Jew and attacked the stage.³⁸³

Schildkraut had been to the United States before: he had made his debut at the Peoples’ Theatre in 1911, left in 1913, and returned in 1920. His family accompanied him, and Joseph, his son, was the first to become a film star, thanks to D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921).

Schildkraut was a revelation to Edward Sloman. “He was such a consummate actor,” he said. “In the silent days, a good director was a good actor at the same time. While the camera was going he could tell the actor what to do. But with the old man, his technique was so perfect, I’d just have to say to him, while the camera was going, ‘Tighter, poppa, tighter,’ and he would ease the action into perfect balance.”³⁸⁴

For the scene in which old Cominsky confronts his son at Judge Stein’s party, thirty extras were seated around a table. Hollywood extras were well known to be the most hard-boiled and least impressionable people in the business. Toward the end of the afternoon, with everyone wilting under the hot lights, Schildkraut made his appearance at the end of the table. The extras watched cynically as Schildkraut worked his theatrical magic. Slowly he worked to the climax, and when he heard his son deny him he scarcely stirred. He apologized brokenly to the guests. His eyes overflowed with tears as he turned and blindly left the room. When Sloman called “Cut” the extras were weeping openly.³⁸⁵

 

WE AMERICANS    Edward Sloman made one more important film for Universal, We Americans (working title Heart of a Nation), based on a 1926 play by William Herbert Gropper and Max Siegel which starred an actor from the Yiddish theatre called Muni Wisenfrend (Weisenfreund), who became better known as Paul Muni. Said Sloman: “He was very anxious to do the picture, but all we saw was a young man in the stage make-up of a middle-aged man, and we were afraid he wouldn’t be convincing on the big screen. So we took George Sidney. Only a few years later, Muni became the biggest star on the Warner lot, celebrated for his make-ups.”³⁸⁶

The script was by Alfred A. Cohn, who doubled as the Los Angeles harbor commissioner with the Immigration Naturalization Service. He expanded the play, which was a drama of three immigrants. A Russian Jew (Levine: George Sidney), a German (Schmidt: Albert Gran), and an Italian (Albertini: Michael Visaroff) come to America ten years before the war. Their children grow up, and the sons enlist. Levine’s daughter leaves home, sets up a smart interior decorating studio, and falls for a wealthy young society man. The immigrants are now alone. Since they cannot read or write, they are persuaded to go to night school, where they learn the principles of Americanism. This has a magical effect and they become Americans.

We Americans, 1928. Mr. Albertini (Michael Visaroff), Mr. Levine (George Sidney), and Mr. Schmidt (Albert Gran). (Museum of Modern Art)

The immigrants learn to become citizens: We Americans, 1928. (Museum of Modern Art)

The picture was a tear-jerker; the moment that not even hard-boiled reviewers could resist was one in which Mrs. Levine, learning the Gettysburg Address, reaches the line “and they had not died in vain” when she is handed a telegram informing her of the death of her son at the front.

It is a tragedy that Universal allowed their silent films to rot or burn. We Americans would today be of immense historical importance, for it included sequences showing the process of immigration. In response to a request from Will Hays for pictures that would speed up the Americanization of immigrants, Universal asked him to help shape the story by enlisting welfare professionals who worked with the newcomers. Under the chairmanship of former governor Carl Milliken, standing in for Hays, the MPPDA organized a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria to which were invited a number of these people, including Commissioner of Immigration Benjamin A. Day and Dr. John Finley of the Council for Adult Education of the Foreign Born.³⁸⁷

“One after another these men and women, every one of whom had countless personal experiences from which to draw, talked; and while they talked, the pencil of the director moved as he made his notes.”³⁸⁸

Sloman decided to begin his picture before the immigrants reached land, so the first scene was photographed aboard the S.S. George Washington at quarantine, then at the Statue of Liberty, and finally at Ellis Island.

Commissioner Day put the facilities of Ellis Island at Sloman’s disposal. Since the scene was supposed to have taken place in 1907 or 1908, Sloman called in Inspector Baker, who had been attached to the facility since its opening. Baker showed Sloman the parts of the area that were original; fortunately, the piers and the main building, with its glass-covered archway, had not been altered. It was ideal for filming because it had been designed to admit as much light and air as possible for the benefit not only of the immigrants but also of the authorities.

Twenty scenes were shot at Ellis Island, and still pictures were made of the building so that sets could be put up at Universal studios and the rest of the scenes shot there.

Inspector Baker took the film people on a tour, showing exactly what happened to the immigrant from the moment he stepped on the dock—all of which would eventually appear in the film.³⁸⁹ He was asked if the costumes had changed in the twenty years.

“Not a chance,” he replied. ’They haven’t changed in two hundred years. I see the same kinds of clothes coming in here from Italy, Scandinavia, Ireland, France, Germany and Spain as I saw coming in from these same countries twenty years ago, and I’ll venture that in the next twenty years they will be the same. Mr. Sloman need have no fear of getting plenty of character in the costumes of the immigrants, but I would suggest that he wait for one of the immigrant ships from Italy before taking some scenes. They are the most colorful of all the immigrants.”³⁹⁰

Commissioner Day explained to Sloman that not nearly as many newcomers arrived at Ellis Island as before the war, thanks to the government’s new practice of having prospective immigrants examined by U.S. officials in the country of origin. “This prevents a great deal of useless travel, of disappointment on arrival here.”³⁹¹

Motion Picture Magazine called We Americans the first film to glorify the pants-pressers. “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. For We Americans is especially constructed for the stimulation of the lachrymose glands. It is a rather skillful mixture of the Jewish-Gentile theme, the war and the waving of the flag. But, Lord, how they’ll love it!”³⁹²

 

THE JAZZ SINGER    Anne Nichols’s play Abie’s Irish Rose had a lot to answer for. Its phenomenal success led to a proliferation of Hollywood comedies—The Cohens and the Kellys, Clancy’s Kosher Wedding, Frisco Sally Levy, Kosher Kitty Kelly, Private Izzy Murphy, Sailor Izzy Murphy, and endless subplots about the conflicts between Catholic and Jew.

The Jazz Singer, as a play, was written as a reaction to Abie’s Irish Rose; it was an attempt to deal seriously with the problem of assimilation. Its author, Samson Raphaelson, had been electrified by Al Jolson in a musical called Robinson Crusoe Jr. in 1916. Jolson’s absolute absorption in his song, the way he flung out his white-gloved hands as he knelt on the runway projecting into the heart of the audience reminded Raphaelson of a cantor embracing the audience with a prayer. Raphaelson wrote a story called “The Day of Atonement,” published in 1922, about a young Jew from the Lower East Side who was trained to be a cantor, like his father, but who forsook the synagogue for show business, changing his name from Jacob Rabinowitz to Jack Robin and falling for a shiksa—a Gentile girl.

This is precisely what had happened to Asa Yoelson, who had changed his name to Al Jolson and who was struck by the similarities between the story and his own life. He tried to interest several film producers in the idea, but no one wanted Jewish stories. Raphaelson and Jolson met around this time and discussed the story, but Jolson wanted it reworked into a musical revue, with all the hokum that would imply. So Raphaelson rewrote it as a play, which opened in September 1925 at the Fulton Theatre, where Abie’s Irish Rose had had its premiere. It starred George Jessel, a vaudeville comic. Reviews were mixed; the New York Post commented that the play was literate and interesting, its bunkum obscured by careful construction and sympathetic treatment.³⁹³ Audiences were average to begin with, but then, after the Jewish holidays, they picked up remarkably. Warner Bros., which had placed Jessel under contract, now began negotiations to purchase the play for its leading director, Ernst Lubitsch.³⁹⁴

Warners was prevented from releasing its film until May 1, 1927, to protect the play’s national tour. Meanwhile, Jessel had made Private Izzy Murphy for the studio in Hollywood before returning to take the play on the road. Lubitsch then left to make a film for MGM. Warners launched the Vitaphone system with Don Juan and followed it with another sound program in which Jolson and Jessel were represented in separate shorts. When Jessel returned to Hollywood he found preparations complete not for the silent film he anticipated, but for a film with sound sequences. This, he thought, was out of line. According to Moving Picture World, he demanded $100,000, on top of the $100,000 he was getting for the role, for Vitaphoning.³⁹⁵ Warners got Jolson, the most successful figure in vaudeville, for $75,000, with a contingency should the picture go over schedule.³⁹⁶

Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, 1927. (Museum of Modern Art)

Cantor Josef Rosenblatt played himself in The Jazz Singer, 1927. (Museum of Modern Art)

The scenario was written by Alfred Cohn, who might have tailored it for Jolson, so strongly did he emphasize the sentiment and melodrama of the original play.³⁹⁷

The cameraman, Hal Mohr, went with director Alan Crosland to New York to shoot the opening of the film on the Lower East Side, tracking shots that are among the best surviving records of the ghetto. The choice of Crosland was made on practical rather than aesthetic grounds. He had directed Don Juan; even though he had made it as a silent film, adding the music afterward. He had directed When a Man Loves, which also used Vitaphone for its orchestral accompaniment, and had more experience with the new process than any other director. His brother was prominent in Western Electric, manufacturers of the Vitaphone equipment. But if only Lubitsch had stayed at Warners to make this film! For Crosland made it so melodramatic the picture looks as though it were made at the dawn of the silent picture rather than at its twilight.

Among the small part players was a Jewish actor from Russian Poland called Joseph Green. Rudolph Schildkraut, his friend and mentor, helped him get a bit part in the synagogue scene. Green remembered, “When we made the scenes in the synagogue, the Warner brothers, they put their father in charge—he was an elderly gentleman—and Josef Rosenblatt, the cantor, who played himself.³⁹⁸ So for that day, they all refused to use English and all spoke Yiddish on the set. Even the director spoke Yiddish.

“The fact is that I never left this studio until the last minute. I followed from morning until night every day what went on. I was enchanted with this new phenomenon, talking pictures. And when this picture was over, I felt that this was what I was going to do in the future. I had already a background of theatre, naturally. But it was too early. Only a few theatres had the equipment for talking pictures. So I went back to New York.”³⁹⁹

Green eventually became the leading producer-director of Yiddish pictures in the 1930s, with such productions as Mamele and Yidl Mitn Fidl (Yiddle with His Fiddle).

The Jazz Singer, according to Green, was acceptable to the public because it was not totally concerned with the Jews, as were his pictures, but, like Abie’s Irish Rose, was about Jews and Gentiles. Warners called it “a Supreme Triumph,” which was true, if only financially. Reviews for the film were as mixed as for the play, but the public jammed the theatres to see and hear Jolson.

Samson Raphaelson was dismayed. “A dreadful picture,” he said. “I’ve seen very few worse.” He objected to the cantor (Warner Oland), his whiskers so beautifully combed he looked as if he had been to a beauty parlor. “And the mother (Eugenie Besserer) was made just too spotlessly clean, as though she were demonstrating stoves or refrigerators … I had a simple, corny, well-felt little melodrama, and they made an ill-felt, silly, maudlin, badly timed thing of it. There was absolutely no talent in the production at all except for the cameraman.

“The big moment was ridiculous—when Jolson’s rehearsing his big show, and he hears his father is dying, and his mother comes to beg him to replace his father on the eve of the Day of Atonement, and it’s dress rehearsal afternoon and as his mother is begging him, he’s suddenly told, ‘Go on for your number,’ and he has to leave his mother behind as he goes on for his number.

“Now that situation was basically from my play, but in my play the song I had him sing was—Lord Almighty, the one thing I wouldn’t have him sing was a song about mother. There’s a limit …”⁴⁰⁰

The Jazz Singer has passed into legend as the first talkie, even though dialogue films had been made years earlier. It was essentially a silent film interrupted by songs, and it contained one lengthy monologue from Jolson. Whereas Don Juan had been given a recorded score to demonstrate how Vitaphone could enrich the silent films, The Jazz Singer altered the direction of sound and ensured that dialogue would triumph.

 

THE YOUNGER GENERATION    Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation (1929) was adapted by Sonya Levien from Fannie Hurst’s play It Is to Laugh. The Jewish star Ricardo Cortez (whose real name was Jacob Krantz, or Kranze) played an unsympathetic role as an East Side boy who grows up to be a wealthy antique dealer, taking his family with him to an uptown palace. They hate the place. The old father (Jean Hersholt) pines for his daughter Birdie (Lina Basquette), who has married a boy jailed on a frame-up and who is barred from the mansion. Even her letters are destroyed. Worried at the lack of news, the old man defies his son and returns to his old neighborhood. And there he discovers that he is a grandfather. With an armful of presents, he returns to the palace, to be ordered up the service stairs by the doorman. The son emerges at that moment, with some distinguished guests, and Papa appeals to him.

Rosa Rosanova and Jean Hersholt in Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation, 1929.

“How many times do you have to be told that servants must not use the front entrance?” the son snaps.

The old man, deeply shocked, staggers out with Mama to a park bench, where he collapses and has to be carried home by the police. With the old man near death, the son allows Birdie to visit him, and the family is briefly united when Papa dies. Birdie takes Mama back to Delancey Street, leaving the son to a lonely celebration of his wealth. His butler draws the Venetian blinds, and shadows like bars fall upon his face.

The story owed much to Humoresque and His People, and it was provided with talking sequences, like The Jazz Singer. Sound is cleverly introduced. The old man has a letter, which he cannot read, from Birdie—he takes it to a friend, whose young son reads it aloud. The musical score gives way to the boy’s voice, which is natural and amusing. The rest of the dialogue is delivered at the slow pace of the period, but Capra manages to keep the talking sequences homogeneous.

The picture was produced by Jack Cohn, and he and his brother Harry must have laughed up their sleeves at the name of the family in their Jewish picture—Goldfish, the original name of their rival Sam Goldwyn.⁴⁰¹ The son changes it to Fish, as in Hamilton Fish, one of the New York 400, although this was considered too risible for the foreign release and the name became Gold.

 

ABIE’S IRISH ROSE    The Jazz Singer may be a landmark of film history, but as a piece of cinema it is second-rate. So it is with Abie’s Irish Rose. The play, by a poverty-stricken girl in her early twenties called Anne Nichols, who was not Jewish, received the usual round of rejections before it was staged. And it then received a roasting bordering on personal insult from the critics. It would not, they said, last a week. Anne Nichols’s revenge was sweet: the play ran for years, breaking theatrical records and earning her a reputed $8 to $10 million.⁴⁰²

The strange thing about this burlesque comedy was that it was based on a true story. Anne Nichols, despite her youth, had written plays for Fiske O’Hara. As she told it: “One evening [O’Hara] told an interesting story of a young friend of his, a Jew who had fallen in love with an Irish girl. The couple had married secretly, and were trying to win the affection of the boy’s father by having the girl pose as a Jewess. One evening the father had unexpectedly entered the girl’s room, where she was lying down, and, to his horror, he saw a crucifix hanging over the bed. He had rushed from the house, furious with the young couple.

“The story amused us all, but it left a deep impression on me. Almost immediately after my guests had gone I went into the library and sat down to write a play based on the story. I wrote continuously, often working all night, and when I read the final manuscript I was convinced I had a good play. A play that had enormous commercial value, because it was a story of true life, its psychology being obvious to all who would see it, and back of it lay the religious prejudices of generations. I told my mother that I had a ‘million dollar play’ and that Abie’s Irish Rose would make me a rich woman.”⁴⁰³

When this play, in which stereotyped Jews conversed in funny accents with equally stereotyped Irishmen, was transferred to the screen, it was not made as a talkie—although this was 1928—but as a silent film.

First-rate people were assigned to it. The scenario was written by Jules Furthman (The City Gone Wild, Barbed Wire, The Docks of New York), with titles by Julian Johnson, former editor of Photoplay, and Herman J. Mankiewicz, who would write Citizen Kane with Orson Welles. It was directed by Victor Fleming, who was capable of very good work and would one day make Gone With the Wind. But stuck with a silly play which was so popular they dare not change it, they merely put it on film. The picture has a superb opening, which is pure cinema and the only real contribution of these distinguished talents. Beautifully shot by Hal Rosson, it shows the arrival of the immigrants and the birth of their son in the ghetto. The children go to school, pledge allegiance to the flag—we see close-ups of the various races, and for once Orientals and blacks are included. From the feet of the children marching into the schoolhouse we mix to the marching feet of soldiers. “So they went to that baptism of fire and thunder—Catholics, Hebrews, and Protestants alike—newsboys and college boys—aristocrats and immigrants—all classes, all creeds, all Americans.” An injured soldier asks for a priest; instead, a bearded and steel-helmeted rabbi approaches him: “Have no fear, my son, we travel many roads—but we all come at last to the father.”⁴⁰⁴

Once the play proper begins, the temperature drops. The two young people, Abie (the Irish Charles Buddy Rogers) and Rosemary Murphy (the Irish Nancy Carroll), meet in France and return home, get married secretly,⁴⁰⁵ and face the wrath of their parents. Abie introduces his bride as Rosie Murpheski. To placate one set of parents they are remarried by a rabbi and to placate the other by a Catholic priest. But they please them both by producing twins and naming one Patrick Joseph and the other Rebecca.

The curious thing was that the film was released as a twelve-reel silent, complete with carefully depicted religious scenes, on which, Paramount proudly announced, a rabbi and a priest had acted as technical advisers. And it was highly praised: “From one of the worst plays ever written has come one of the best films ever made,” said The Film Spectator.⁴⁰⁶ It was then recalled, cut down to seven reels, and given sound—Jean Hersholt singing the Kaddish and Nancy Carroll singing and dancing were highlights.

Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Nancy Carroll in Abie’s Irish Rose, 1929.

“Use of added sound makes Abie a different matter,” said Variety. “Most of the serious religious material has been eliminated and the story treatment has been greatly tightened.… Generally speaking, sound has heightened the effect of the picture. Also the footage has been cut 40 minutes and the story moves much faster. On both counts the picture is greatly improved. Indeed, to the point where it looks like a run prospect at the Rialto instead of an utter flop for $2.”⁴⁰⁷

Variety was wrong. The film was not an outstanding financial success. “I can’t understand why it didn’t do phenomenal business,” wrote Jesse Lasky, “since the picture was every bit as bad as the play.”⁴⁰⁸

Apart from the opening reel, and the fact that a phenomenon of American popular culture has been preserved, one of the few points of interest is the presence in the cast of Ida Kramer and Bernard Gorcey. Both played the same parts as in the stage version—Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Cohen. Gorcey was the father of Leo Gorcey, who appeared in Dead End; Ida Kramer was a veteran of the Yiddish theatre.

The film upset Orthodox Jews so much that the Motion Picture Project—now known as the Jewish Film Advisory Council—was formed to combat films like this and The Cohens and the Kellys.⁴⁰⁹ It was a dismal end to a remarkable epoch of Jewish pictures.

^* The film was a success in Japan, perhaps because of its respect for Buddhism (William Drew).

^† She played in The Letter (1929).

^‡ Frosted Yellow Willow.

^§ The Japanese were easier to employ than the Chinese, said Ince, because they didn’t suffer from the same fear of the camera; Motion Picture News, May 1919, pp. 113–115.

^‖ Haworth (Hayakawa and director William Worthington) eventually took over the former Griffith-Fine Arts studios, where Broken Blossoms had been shot.

^a The film convinced a modern critic, Fraser Macdonald, that it had actually been made in Japan; Toronto Film Society Newsletter (Winter 1987–1988), p. 17. Curiously, Hayakawa was not popular in Japan; his films were thought to show the bad side of the Japanese people. The Cheat was not forgiven. Tsuru was adored, in spite of everything (Cinemagazine 48, December 1, 1928, p. 298).

^b The palace was defended mainly by women—the Woman’s Battalion of Death—few of whom were hurt. Casualty figures varied from zero to six. It was said there were more injured when Eisenstein stormed it again for October (1927).

^c Now Kaunas. Lithuania was part of the Russian empire. Freed in 1917, it was given its sovereignty by Lenin in 1920. It was invaded by Poland that same year and was annexed by the USSR in 1939 under the Hitler-Stalin pact.