Produced by the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company for Paramount release. Director: Cecil B. DeMille. Original story and scenario by Cecil B. DeMille and Jeanie Macpherson. Art director Wilfred Buckland. Photography: Alvin Wyckoff
Picture started: February 15, 1915. Picture finished: March 4, 1915. Length:4,596 feet (five reels). Cost: $12,153.54. Released: April 22, 1915. Gross:$56,074.88
Cast: Blanche Sweet (Sonya Martinovitch), House Peters (Mahmud Hassan), Page Peters (Marko), Jeanie Macpherson (Milka), Theodore Roberts (Burgomaster), Billy Elmer (Turkish officer), and Marjorie Daw
Although Jeanie Macpherson appeared in several DeMille films beginning with The Rose of the Rancho, The Captive marked her first screen play collaboration with the director. She quickly became his favorite screenwriter. Macpherson began her film career in 1909 acting in D.W. Griffith’s Biograph stock company. By 1913 she was a triple hyphenate at Universal: actress-writer-director. According to an official studio biography, Macpherson encountered Cecil DeMille several times before actually meeting him.
She played for a few months in the musical production, Havana. Then she secured a part in the William deMille production Strong heart, with Edgar Selwyn in the lead. Cecil B. DeMille was in the crowd at the dress rehearsal, but she did not meet him for many years. She crossed the path of DeMille on another occasion, when she went to the DeMille Play Agency in New York and asked for Mrs. [Beatrice] DeMille [Cecil’s mother and head of the agency]. Mrs. DeMille was not in but she was told that Cecil DeMille was. She said, “ No, I won’t see Mr. DeMille.”
Several years later, when Miss Macpherson was with Universal she saw Mr. DeMille at lunch, and asked [fellow actress-writer-director] Lois Weber, “Who is that brooding man with the black eyes?” Again she crossed DeMille’s path without meeting him.1
Another time she was directing a one-reel picture for Universal. She happened at that time to choose the same desert location as Mr. DeMille. When she was all set for her long shot she found Mr. DeMille’s company in the foreground…. Still they did not meet, the companies exchanging greetings from a distance and choosing new locations.2
Macpherson came to the Lasky studio after being fired from Universal for going over schedule on one of her short productions. She is said to have laid siege to DeMille’s office until she was given an opportunity, but she was initially hired as an actress only and not as a writer-director. Macpherson managed to impress DeMille with her story sense, however, and proved to be an ideal collaborator. She shared DeMille’s enthusiasm for melodrama and brought a distinct, if somewhat eccentric, sensibility to her writing.
The Captive seems to have been designed to take advantage of the costumes already used for The Unafraid. Again the setting is an eastern European country, and again the heroine falls in love with her enemy, though in this story the dramatic tension is greatly increased. Mahmud Hassan (House Peters) is a Turkish noble man who is captured and given to Sonya (Blanche Sweet) to work the family farm in the absence of her brother, Marko (Page Peters), who has been killed in the Great War. Sonya first dominates the captive Turk, then falls in love with him. He later rescues her in defiance of his own country men. The lovers’ lives are shattered before they can start a new. In finding each other Sonya Martinovitch and Mahmud Hassan lose everything they have lived and worked for: friends, property, and position. This ambiguous and disturbing approach to typical romantic novel claptrap was a quality that distinguished Macpherson’s work. As everyone in the audience expected, love conquered all in The Captive—but at what price? An element of this theme appears in Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, but Ramerrez and the girl make a lesser sacrifice when vigilantes only force them to leave the state.
A freak accident killed an extra during production of The Captive. Actors portraying soldiers stormed a door, smashing it with their rifle butts. One of the guns was loaded with live ammunition and went off, dropping thirty-year-old Charles Chandler dead in his tracks. In his autobiography, DeMille asserts that he told the extras to reload their rifles with blanks before the scene was taken. Blanche Sweet contended that DeMille’s demand for realism led the director to encourage the use of live ammunition.3
Not among the films that DeMille kept in his personal collection, The Captive was long thought to be lost. In 1970 Paramount donated studio prints of its pre-1948 sound film library to the UCLA Film and Television Archive. While removing these films from the Paramount vaults, Bob Epstein and Richard Simonton Jr. discovered a treasure trove of silent films, including The Captive, and it was arranged for the American Film Institute to take possession of the films and preserve them.