JOHN GILBERT IS triple-cursed: forgotten, misunderstood, and underappreciated. Once one of the most popular stars of the 1920s, he carries the burden of the “matinee idol” label, as well as the dubious distinction of being the official poster boy for the “ruined by sound” movie star. This combination has relegated him to a name without a persona, even though—ironically—some of his movies are among the most revived of the silent era. In his own time, to be a matinee idol was a respectable goal, and Gilbert embraced the term. It meant that he was not only a handsome guy, but the guy all women wanted to be their very own. It didn’t imply “ham actor,” as it does now, or merely “pretty boy,” although there was a touch of scorn attached, since men were always supposed to be manly. (The November 1918 Motion Picture defined the term as “an actor with eyelashes,” and Frank Capra’s 1928 comedy Matinee Idol casually threw out a comment on what it meant to be one: “You’re getting over 500 letters a day—all from women.”) Over the years, the term has increasingly become pejorative. Today it suggests a male clotheshorse standing around holding a cocktail and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, looking bored and coming alive just long enough to deliver a witty putdown with casual ease. A sexless second lead. Or the type usually played by Adolphe Menjou, the Parisian man of the world.
This modern misunderstanding has very little to do with John Gilbert. He was a serious actor, part of a tradition: a long line of respected stage actors admired by female theatregoers (a line that still exists today in its modern version, sexy hunks who draw at the box office). He was the male equivalent of the female sex symbol, and was valued because he inspired romantic dreams in the opposite sex. (This doesn’t mean his own sex couldn’t dream about him too—those were just different times.) Gilbert gave the matinee idol heat. The movie camera brought his audience in close, so they could look into his eyes—and feel the sex on his mind. He faced the lens without fear, and he knew how to smolder. He projected the image of a handsome, passionate, somewhat brooding man, but at the same time he seemed real, tangible. He was not exotic and remote, a dream man you were never going to meet in your ordinary life, like Valentino. Meeting John Gilbert might be a stretch, but it seemed possible. Koszarski calls Gilbert “the first successful link between the romantic traditions of Valentino and Wallace Reid.” In other words, Gilbert had the outrageous good looks and sensuality of the former, combined with the boyish charm of the latter. He bridged the gap between fantasy and reality.
Gilbert has been written about disparagingly in the modern era by critics who find him too weak as an actor or too excessive in his emoting. There’s no doubt that he acts in the silent film tradition, but one has to consider him in the context of his times, and to compare him with other leading men of the era. Only then is it clear why he was so popular: he cuts a far better figure than most of them, and he has personality, real personality. And his voice was adequate for sound. No matter how many historians try to explain that Gilbert made eleven reasonably successful sound movies, or that it wasn’t his voice that killed him as much as it was the changing times, which rendered his brand of heated romance outdated, no one wants to believe it. It’s a better story the other way. So Gilbert winds up as the matinee idol with the lousy voice, little more than a footnote in the transition to sound, proof that it turned the world of movie stardom upside down. It’s a neat and easy way to dismiss a top box office draw of the 1920s.
John Gilbert deserves much more. He was a matinee idol, but one whose career transcended the term both then and now.
GILBERT HAD NO DISTINGUISHED professional family background. He was born in 1897 in a cheap rooming house in Logan, Utah, where his mother, an unknown actress, had dropped out of a low-level touring company to give birth to a child it was clear she didn’t want. Gilbert underwent a fairly long apprenticeship, working in films for over a decade, sometimes writing and even directing movies as well as acting in them. He first appeared as an extra, possibly in William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges in 1916 (sources differ), and he slowly worked his way up, appearing in films at Triangle, Paramount, Metro, and Fox.
Handsome and likable, Gilbert inevitably began to be noticed. Several film historians believe that The Great Redeemer (released in October of 1920, starring House Peters and Marjorie Daw) is the film that determined that he would, in fact, become an actor rather than a behind-the-scenes contributor, but reviews of the day don’t mention him as an actor in The Great Redeemer and do refer to his having adapted (with Jules Furthman) the story on which it is based. On the other hand, two 1919 releases feature him: The Busher, with Charles Ray and Colleen Moore, and The Heart o’ the Hills, a Mary Pickford vehicle. In the first, he has a small role as a well-dressed banker’s son who believes that he is “the social overlord of his native town.” He has obviously been cast for his good looks and for his ability to wear clothes well and look wealthy; he has very little to do. But in The Heart o’ the Hills, he is featured in a showy part, and anyone who was in a 1919 Mary Pickford film received attention. Pickford’s popularity and the quality of her movies ensured Gilbert a chance at an acting career if he did a creditable job, and he did more than that. He is excellent in the second romantic lead of “Gray Pendleton, a blue grass aristocrat.” (It’s as if almost from the beginning everyone understood that Gilbert must play someone with clothes and manners.) The first glimpse of him in The Heart o’ the Hills is a disappointment: he doesn’t look at all like himself—he’s very young, and he has no mustache—and I started to wonder if it was really he. Suddenly, however, his character is given something to do. He smiles, laughs, and reacts to Pickford, who is playing a barefooted little mountain girl. In other words, he comes alive, looking relaxed and natural. He is John Gilbert, after all.
Gilbert has two wonderful scenes in the movie. In the first, he’s a young boy, filled with joyful energy as he claps enthusiastically along the sidelines at a wild mountain hoedown (or, as it is described, “a jollification”). Caught up in the foot-stomping abandon of the dancing, he takes to the floor solo and throws himself into the dance with arms, elbows, and torso all gyrating, his feet thumping the boards a mile a minute. He blows everyone around him—except, of course, for Pickford, who couldn’t be upstaged by anyone—off the screen. In his second big scene, he’s grown into an elegantly turned-out young man in love with Pickford. He kneels by her chair to propose, and despite a bad camera angle which makes his nose too big and bestows a mysterious bump on his forehead, he takes his time with the lovemaking, kissing her hand gently and with a modest passion appropriate to Pickford, who is, after all, not Garbo. When she gently turns him down and walks out of the frame, Gilbert stands there alone holding the moment for an extraordinarily long time. He is slim, handsome, and charismatic. As the young girl who loves him enters to take his hand, and he goes on looking after Pickford, it is a perfectly presented tableau in which Gilbert already seems to have all the experience he will ever need to become a star. Watching John Gilbert in The Heart o’ the Hills explains everything, and it is fascinating to see him before he became a matinee idol, when he was so young and energetic.
Whatever the film was that made everyone take notice (and I would vote for The Heart o’ the Hills), it was a 1923 John Ford* movie, Cameo Kirby, that brought him to real prominence and gave him the chance at stardom. Besides being uncommonly handsome, he is given a showy role as a riverboat gambler whose trademark is his cameo jewelry. Commanding the screen with a cameo at his throat, several cameo rings on his fingers, and a wide bracelet of matched cameos on his wrist, Gilbert makes a dramatic picture. Dressed in a white ruffled shirt, pale tight-fitting trousers, high boots, black hat and jacket, he is beautiful to look at. Furthermore, he’s mastered the final detail of his dramatic outfit—a full black cape that he twirls with great skill and panache. Although there isn’t much for him to do but pose, he poses well and manages to project considerable presence. The story is standard melodramatic stuff, but well directed by Ford, and Gilbert makes it work. He is calm, cool, and collected in front of the camera, seemingly born for roles in which he can wear costumes, suffer, strut, and seduce.
Gilbert on the brink of stardom, in John Ford’s Cameo Kirby (photo credit 10.1)
Although Ford’s Cameo Kirby focused attention on him, it was King Vidor who elevated Gilbert into real stardom, and it was Gilbert’s 1924 move to the brand-new MGM studios that boosted his career to top-level fame. Two of the movies he made at MGM in 1924—one directed by Vidor (His Hour) and one by Victor Seastrom (He Who Gets Slapped)—solidified his reputation.
His Hour gives Gilbert the kind of role in which he was to be fervently embraced by audiences. He cuts a great figure as a Russian prince who stands around on elaborate sets, awaiting an opportunity to make love to his leading lady, Aileen Pringle, who plays a straitlaced British girl. Gilbert has dark hair, a full mustache (said to have been grown to balance his somewhat-too-large nose), a good smile with even teeth, and beautiful dark eyes that literally sparkle.† He’s very, very pretty! And like Valentino, who was his major rival with women, Gilbert moves with grace and plays with style, exhibiting self-confidence as an actor and presenting his silly character without apology or embarrassment. His Hour was one of the many ridiculous plots dreamed up by Elinor Glyn, the high priestess of twenties romance, whose strong suit was in writing stories in which pale and correctly raised young women met up with pseudo-savage men of wealth and/or royalty. (These men were usually European, the idea being that nice American boys would never behave that way.) His Hour is a typical Glyn piece of nonsense, but it doesn’t seem particularly committed to its decadence. Gilbert, on the other hand, does seem committed, and very willing. When he first encounters Pringle, she pretends to be asleep, and he boldly kisses her neck and slowly runs his tongue along her hand. This was hot stuff! After Gilbert sweeps her up and off to his snowbound country lair, she asserts herself by pointing one of his guns at her head and crying out, “Touch me again and I’ll shoot!”
Gilbert with Norma Shearer, in He Who Gets Slapped (photo credit 10.2)
He Who Gets Slapped is entirely different material. Gilbert plays a relatively small role in what was designed as a starring vehicle for Lon Chaney, already at the peak of his popularity. Presenting the lovely young Norma Shearer in one of her best silent films, the movie has Gilbert in the romantic lead, playing Bezano, a circus daredevil rider who falls in love with Shearer. His footage consists of a few scattered moments, with one extended sequence in which he and Shearer go on a picnic together. Shot in glorious sunlight, which gives everything a romantic glow, both young stars look innocent and radiant. While ants devour their food, Gilbert weaves a garland of flowers for Shearer’s hair. They romp about, falling in the grass, kissing and laughing. Gilbert’s job has been reduced to the essence of what will become the central element of his persona: the man in love. He performs the role with great skill, and those who think he was good at appearing to be in love in Flesh and the Devil only because he was in love (with Garbo) should see him here with Shearer. Being featured in a prestigious Chaney movie elevated Gilbert’s status, but the key to his career was that he had appeared in two movies back-to-back that presented him as the ultimate lover. Female fans responded accordingly, he was labeled a matinee idol, and his career took off.
Gilbert finished out 1924 with two other movies, The Snob and Wife of the Centaur, and the following year appeared in two of Hollywood’s most celebrated films: The Merry Widow, directed by Erich von Stroheim, and The Big Parade, by King Vidor. Many movie stars go through an entire career without participating in even one film of such quality, and Gilbert, a relative newcomer as a leading man, had two in that one year. It was the making of his reputation, and from that time on, he was a star of the first rank, with an avid following.
In the first of these two films, The Merry Widow, Gilbert was not the primary focus. The film was designed to belong to Mae Murray in the title role, and if not to her, then certainly to its colorful director, the legendary von Stroheim. Murray, an actress famous for her “bee-stung” lips, brought her own hairdresser and makeup man. She looks gorgeous, the quintessential little 1920s leading lady draped in beads. She has no apparent acting talent, but she’s very good at standing there, hand on hip, showing off her extremely expensive wardrobe. In this sense, Murray knew her job, and she is well supported by Gilbert as the romantic lead, and also by Roy D’Arcy, the consummate villain for silent costume films, and Tully Marshall in one of his best crackpot roles, this time as a foot fetishist. They are all superb, and outclassed in raw talent though she may be, Murray is appealing as the widow. Everything about the movie was given first-class treatment, including the ticket charges: $5 for matinees, and evening performances at the sensationally steep prices of $5.50 and $5.
Gilbert is subtle and honest in his role as the handsome Danilo, and his low-key work in this film doesn’t seem dated today. This is partly because the film as a whole is a masterpiece. The wonderful directorial touches von Stroheim provides include a royal funeral, suggested through a corps of drummers slowly descending a long flight of stairs, dissolving in and out and repeating their movements; the brilliant silhouetting of gems adorning Mae Murray to the exclusion of her face and figure when she is gazed upon by the mercenary prince; the beautiful way freezing rain on a window is used to indicate the passage of time; and a marvelous sequence that establishes subjectively how each of her three different male admirers actually sees Murray: Gilbert, the romantic, sees only her face; D’Arcy, the sensualist seducer, sees her body; and Tully Marshall, the fetishist extraordinaire, sees her tiny feet in their little shoes.
Gilbert and Mae Murray alone in a crowd, and facing the villain, Roy D’Arcy, in The Merry Widow (photo credit 10.3)
Gilbert’s performance is in significant contrast to D’Arcy’s. D’Arcy has been skillfully directed to give his character an insane comic touch. He’s totally in control of the role, and plays it to the hilt with deliberate exaggeration. Nevertheless, the performance—meant to be satiric—doesn’t go over well with modern audiences who don’t appreciate the tradition. By contrast, Gilbert seems far more modern, and thus more appealing. He is outstandingly handsome, relaxed, wearing a 1990s haircut, and very trim in his smart white uniforms. And again, he is the intense lover, the man who, when he sees the woman he wants for the first time, stops everything to appreciate her and to make love to her with fire and passion. He shows up well in a movie that has a great deal else to take attention away from him.
As good as it was, The Merry Widow presented Gilbert as part of an ensemble under the guidance of a unique director. His next movie singled him out and put him front and center. Every great movie star career needs a definitive role in a blockbuster that catches on with the public, and for Gilbert that blockbuster was The Big Parade. Directed by King Vidor from a story by Laurence Stallings, The Big Parade was a war movie made with “the cooperation of the Second Division, United States Army and Air Services Units, Kelly Field.” It is unquestionably a great film, one that stands today as an undisputed classic and that plays with almost the same power it generated on the day it opened, only half a dozen years after the war it depicts had ended.
King Vidor had wanted to make a film about World War I for a long time, but he wanted it to be a realistic and honest film. When Gilbert was suggested to him for the leading role, he balked. He had already directed Gilbert in two romantic pictures, and what he had in mind for the lead was anything but a “matinee idol.” He didn’t dislike Gilbert but felt that a Romeo deluxe was not appropriate for the movie he wanted to make. Gilbert, for his part, was also not enthusiastic—he would have to have dirty fingernails and go without benefit of makeup, so that he could look like a real soldier in the trenches. The two men were reluctantly persuaded, and the result was one of those happy accidents of the kind that kept Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan out of Casablanca. As soon as filming got under way, everyone knew the outcome was going to be good. The movie looked so impressive in rough cut that it was expanded, with new money invested. The final film cost about $5,000, a lot for the time, but it earned an enormous $5 million at the box office. It was the most popular film of 1925, playing a record ninety-six consecutive weeks at the Astor Theatre in New York City.
Just as Lon Chaney had Tod Browning for ten movies and Gloria Swanson had Cecil B. DeMille for six, John Gilbert was lucky to work with King Vidor in five silent films. There were two to launch him (His Hour and Wife of the Centaur), one to make him a star (The Big Parade), and two to prove the status was permanent (La Bohème and Bardelys the Magnificent). (In a sixth Vidor silent, Show People, he appeared as himself in a cameo.) John Gilbert was in the right place at the right time to become the leading man in King Vidor’s The Big Parade, one of the greatest war films ever made, and the film that adds a dimension to his career that takes him beyond the terms “matinee idol” or “sex symbol.”
It’s true, however, that he was a sex symbol of his time. And like female sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth—both of whom had considerable acting talent that often went unused—Gilbert was often denied the respect he deserved as an actor. His range is somewhat narrow, but he is superb at what he does, and The Big Parade showcases him at his best. It’s an epic story of the infantryman’s life in World War I, mixing comedy and tragedy in its account of an ordinary young American who goes over, falls in love, fights a war, loses a leg, and returns home a changed man. In his early scenes, Gilbert is youthful, filled with energy and life. At the end of the war, back in America, when he’s being driven home from the station by his father, he looks gaunt, haunted, years older. This is not just makeup at work; it is Gilbert’s ability to internalize an emotional state and reflect it in his face. He has gone from a lively young boy to a broken man, nervously smoking a cigarette, distracted, looking away from his father, not even listening to him as they drive.
As the young hero from well-to-do circumstances who joins the army for a lark, Gilbert is first-rate. He’s standing on the sidewalk, idly watching a parade, listening to a stirring military march, when his pals ride by in an open-air automobile and cry out to him, “Come on! The whole gang’s going over!” He laughs and, taking another glance at the uniformed band smartly stepping down the street, goes to join them, and in just that casual way his life is changed forever.
It is a significant comment on Gilbert’s underrated acting ability that the film that made him a great star doesn’t present him only as a lover. The scenes in which he woos and wins his costar Renée Adorée (as the French girl, Melisande) are utterly charming, but they are hardly the entire film. Gilbert is called upon to act a character who will experience young love but will also become a disillusioned soldier in battle. The love scenes, which come relatively early in the story, are sweet and funny, and the success with which Gilbert and Adorée enact them makes what follows—the horror of war—even more effective. They’re playful with each other. He teaches her how to chew gum, and she, not understanding, swallows it. He kisses her and wins her heart with his shy yet purposeful manner. The fact that they are not supposed to understand each other fully because of their different languages lends an innocent quality to their wooing, making them seem inarticulate and thus inexperienced.
One of the most famous moments in movie history—and justly so—is the farewell scene in which Gilbert’s unit is called up to battle and Adorée tries to find him to say good-bye. The couple have parted sadly because Gilbert is engaged to marry a girl back home, but when he is called up, they both realize their true feelings and in the chaos of departure try to find each other. Adorée searches hopelessly in the crowded streets of her village while men and machinery swirl past her in a blur. She’s pushed along, pulled at by others, as she frantically calls his name and looks around everywhere, her head swiveling in a frenzy of fear that she won’t find him. Meanwhile, he is up ahead, looking back, calling out her name. The tension builds through cutting until he finally spots her, jumps down off the truck he’s climbed into, and runs back to her. They embrace, and he cries out, “I’m coming back—remember, I’m coming back!” Adorée won’t let go of him, clinging to his leg as he climbs back up into the troop transport, hanging on to the truck as it begins to drive away, looking up at him, her face a mixture of love, fear, and pain. Finally, she can’t keep up any longer and falls down in the dusty road, clutching the dog tags he’s thrown to her and one of his old worn boots. (It’s the boot that makes it perfect.) The scene ends with Adorée sunk to her knees in the dirty street, no one left but her. Audiences ate it up.
Despite these powerful moments of romance, Gilbert’s finest acting is the scene in which, having gone out to rescue his buddy, only to find him dead, he pursues the German soldier who killed his friend. As they both crawl into the enemy trench, Gilbert draws a knife to kill, looking full into the face of the wounded and helpless enemy who is, in fact, also a young boy. As Gilbert hesitates and the two lock eyes, the boy makes the sign for a cigarette and Gilbert gives him one, lighting it for him. Half laughing at himself, still filled with rage at the death of his friend and obviously stunned by the madness of war, Gilbert plays the scene to perfection. (The German dies anyway.) After The Big Parade, Gilbert was given a four-year, million-dollar contract by MGM, proving his box office power.
In his next release, La Bohème (1926), the Gilbert “great-lover” acting style is on full display, and he is given star treatment. He is Rodolphe, the romantic hero, playing opposite the exquisite Lillian Gish as Mimi. Gilbert’s presence is in the tradition of the 1920s matinee idol, but at the highest level of what that implies. He takes a wide-footed stance, hands on hips. He throws back his head, laughing gaily, his white teeth flashing. Playful and full of vitality, he is dressed in full-sleeved white blouses, big hats with feathers, and tall boots. In short, he sets a pose designed to capture female hearts. If this sounds dated and silly, it needs to be evaluated on its own terms, not today’s. The issue is—can John Gilbert pull it off? He can. To watch him tackle the role of Rodolphe is to watch someone who understands and accepts fully the concept of romantic idol, and who plays it not only with pizzazz and dignity but with true and tangible conviction. For instance, in a playful picnic reminiscent of the one between him and Shearer in He Who Gets Slapped, Gilbert and Gish romp about on a happy outing in the country, Gish in gossamer white sleeves and little flowered cap and Gilbert in white blouse and artist’s jabot. The two of them skip, dance, and play hide-and-seek in their pastoral paradise, and only their talent and complete acceptance of the action keeps it from being ridiculous. The sequence is beautifully, ethereally photographed in natural light to suggest innocence, happiness, and great purity. It is a romantic dream, shamelessly presented to viewers to touch their hearts as well as their libidos.
Renée Adorée clings to Gilbert in The Big Parade, while outside the Astor Theatre in New York, mobs line up to see them (1925). (photo credit 10.4)
Gilbert and the exquisite Lillian Gish, and the essential romantic Gilbert image, from La Bohème (photo credit 10.5)
In La Bohème can be seen what will become John Gilbert’s complete acting range in silent films. It is not so much a function of what he could do but what he was asked to do, which in turn indicates what audiences wanted him to do. First, he is young and athletic and devil-may-care, hanging out with his male friends and living a boisterous life. Then, he meets The Woman and goes into his second phase, in which his greatest natural ability is on display. He becomes a man suddenly inflamed by true love, changing from capering boy into passionate man. He becomes John Gilbert, great lover … and he is amazing. He takes his time with the feelings, looking longingly at the woman, his eyes smoldering, lashes slightly fluttering. In La Bohème, where the object is the somewhat sexless Gish, it takes everything he’s got. He draws her into his arms at a snail’s pace, so everyone in the audience can fully savor what is coming. Then he starts murmuring words that the audience naturally cannot hear but which they can surely imagine. Then he starts to kiss her all over her arms and hands, then just her face, and then full on her lips. This kind of slow, detailed lovemaking, seen in medium close-up and lingered over, belongs totally to its time. Even now, however, it can be appreciated for its sensuousness. Thinking about what it might have meant to audiences of its own day, it’s easy to grasp Gilbert’s impact. Women in the audience—and men—had never witnessed such behavior outside a movie theatre and had very likely never experienced anything quite like it either. It took people’s breath away. After his “I’m in love” scenes, Gilbert usually was asked to go into the third phase of his three-step formula, which, alas, might be called “acting.” He becomes angry, experiences grief, or goes berserk. In some of these scenes, he is over the top and somewhat hammy, though as his career progresses, he becomes better and better at handling them. What one sees in Gilbert’s persona, which is fully in place with La Bohème, is the kind of man who is feminine in the sense that he totally embraces the concept of passion and emotion, yet who is totally masculine in his appreciation of a woman’s allure and physical self.
By the middle of 1926, Gilbert was a top star whose only rival with women was the great Valentino. When Valentino died suddenly and tragically in August, Gilbert was left with the playing field all to himself, the undisputed king of the matinee idols. He became a major subject for the fan magazines, gossiped about, adored, and photographed everywhere he went. He received mountains of fan mail, most of it from women. Everyone knew John Gilbert. If he had never made another film, and never had anything sensational happen in his personal life, he would still be one of the primary names of 1920s film.
After La Bohème, Gilbert released one other highly successful movie, Bardelys the Magnificent, in 1926. Directed by King Vidor and based on a Rafael Sabatini novel, Bardelys is a celebrated “lost” film. A small clip of it exists in Vidor’s Hollywood satire, Show People, with Gilbert looking handsome in his swashbuckling role. One review says, “John Gilbert shows that he has IT … he scores a 100% average in this work.” And then Gilbert, the star, was paired with a young woman who was on her way up, and who would, of course, become one of the greatest stars in Hollywood’s history, the one and only Greta Garbo. Pairing Gilbert and Garbo on-screen would have been exciting enough for fans, but there was an added dimension: off-screen, they fell in love, and Garbo would become the greatest love of Gilbert’s private life. (Or so say some. Others believe it was Dietrich, or Ina Claire, or his beloved wife and the mother of his daughter, Leatrice Joy. Perhaps it was that Garbo became his greatest obsession.)
Clarence Brown, director of the movie in which they were first paired, Flesh and the Devil (reviewed in January 1927), described their love affair by saying, “They were in that blissful state of love which is so like a rosy cloud that they imagined themselves hidden behind it, as well as lost in it.” The two stars were like teenagers. She called him “Yacky” and he called her “Flicka,” the Swedish word for girl. Their romance was so hot that MGM rushed to pair them again immediately in a movie to be called Love (what else?). (Nobody ever said the film business didn’t know how to market its product.) By that time, Garbo was finished with Gilbert, but first there was Flesh and the Devil.
Gilbert with Eleanor Boardman in the lost King Vidor film, Bardelys the Magnificent (photo credit 10.6)
This film was the high point of Gilbert’s romantic career. Its credits blazed “JOHN GILBERT in FLESH AND THE DEVIL with Greta Garbo” across the screen, which illustrates his star power: it was his movie, not hers. He exudes self-confidence in his performance, and he is physically at his peak—flat-stomached, handsome, and radiantly healthy. Everything in Flesh and the Devil is about love and passion, a love and passion that simply crowds everything else out of a man’s life.
Garbo and Gilbert play long, detailed scenes of love. Gilbert’s character, the young Leo, stops dead in his tracks when he first spots Garbo at a train station. He stands transfixed, jaw dropping, a perfect portrait of a romantic young man succumbing to love at first sight. He follows her to her car, picking up the bouquet she drops, boldly plucking one of the roses from it. When they meet again that evening at a ball, he is wearing his superbly tailored military uniform, and carrying the rose. Spotting Garbo through the crowd of dancers, he goes directly to her. There is nothing else in his world except her. He gathers her up into a majestic waltz, and as she enters his arms to become his partner, she almost lets her lips touch his. Off they go, round and round, again and again, and—like Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift dancing in A Place in the Sun—they make it clear to us how there is no one in the room but them. We feel their attraction. It becomes palpable, and real—which, of course, it was, as Garbo and Gilbert gave in to their true passion off-screen. Out they sweep into the moonlit night and into one of the most seductive love scenes ever shot on film. Moving forward through magnificent lighting by William Daniels, Garbo and Gilbert are two sensational-looking people who are shown to us in intense, half-lit close-ups. Deep in the garden, they speak. “Who are you?” Gilbert asks. “Does it matter?” she replies. “You are … very beautiful,” he says, and she replies, “You are … very young.”
If one had to choose a single scene to perfectly illustrate the no-holds-barred erotic romanticism of silent films, this would be the one. She places a cigarette between her lips, which are wet and open. Then she puts it in his mouth instead. He starts to light it and the light from the match illuminates their beautiful faces. She slowly blows it out, then remarks that blowing out a match is an “invitation to kiss.” They come together in a lip-lock, up close and tactile. In today’s world, where people disrobe and do everything right in front of us, it may be hard to imagine the impact of a scene like this on an audience. It was a time when couples still did not kiss in public, and to sit in the dark and be so close to such passionate intimacy must have been almost overwhelming.
A title card tells us, “The tragic, unquestioning … amusing love of youth. No one had ever loved before … Leo was sure of it.” Following this, the audience was later treated to yet another hot love scene, the notorious one in Garbo’s boudoir that most of the famous stills from the movie illustrate. Garbo is lying on her back against a brace of pillows, wearing a brocaded, sleeveless silk blouse. Gilbert sits on the floor, his head against her, the tunic of his uniform loosened, partially unbuttoned. He smokes, and the smoke curls upward about them, enveloping them in a kind of postcoital fog. Garbo plays with his hair. Suddenly, he takes her hand and places it over his mouth, not just kissing it but running her little finger back and forth, rubbing it sensuously over his lips, taking his time, focused on giving her pleasure. This kind of male character on film is the absolute embodiment of the female fan’s fantasy of its time: a man who has a woman’s appreciation of love and romance and its importance in the scheme of things—a man to shut out everything in his life except his love for one of her sex. Taking this kind of action is what a matinee idol was all about, and nobody did it better than John Gilbert.
The scene is interrupted soon enough. The lovers go on kissing, exchanging rings and sentiments, when suddenly a character we have been kept in the dark about enters the room. “This is Count Rhaden … my husband,” says Garbo. Because silent films took so much time with the love scenes, played them out so slowly, in so much physical detail, the shock of the husband’s arrival is all the greater, even though we have seen this unidentified character drive up outside and enter the building. Gilbert beautifully plays his surprise and shame, as he offers the husband satisfaction. The resulting duel ends in the husband’s death and Gilbert’s five-year banishment to Africa. Meanwhile, we are given a glimpse into what kind of woman Garbo really is—in case we were overlooking her carelessness in failing to mention that she was married. She is seen trying on black hats with veils, admiring herself in her widow’s weeds. (She looks magnificent. An earlier title has explained to viewers that “when the devil can’t reach us through the spirit, he creates a woman beautiful enough to reach us through the flesh.” This is one of the better descriptions of Garbo’s otherworldly beauty.)
Gilbert and Garbo make film history in Flesh and the Devil … (photo credit 10.7)
After the plot plays itself out, with Garbo marrying Gilbert’s best friend during his exile, there is yet one more great love scene. Wearing a magnificent fur coat, Garbo has come to visit Gilbert while her new husband is in Munich. Gilbert, a decent man who had been tricked by true love, is distressed. They go outside to talk things over. A soft snow is falling. In his anguish, he walks rapidly ahead of her. “I can’t go on,” she tells him. “You shall go on,” he tells her, and moves forward, while she scurries along behind. She’s stumbling in her thin, elegant, high-heeled silk shoes. He stalks grimly on. Her chiffon scarf blows out of her fur pocket in the snowy wind. Gilbert, wrapped up in his own 1920s fur coat, finally comes to a halt. She sees a fire in a conveniently situated cottage, and in she goes, with him reluctantly following. Soon she’s on the floor in the firelight, and they’re off again, two beautiful faces cheek to cheek in the soft glow, with the snow flaking down outside.
Garbo, playing a vain and shallow woman, finally gets her comeuppance. While dashing across a frozen lake to stop the duel in which she expects her husband to kill Gilbert, she breaks through the ice and drowns, still in her magnificent coat, the greatest fur coat ever seen on screen. (The first time I saw this film, in about 1955, as Garbo fell through the ice a woman in the audience called out, “Quick! Save that fur!”) Nothing is left of the selfish Garbo except her exquisite chiffon scarf, floating on top of the cold water, amidst the broken ice. Gilbert and his friend (Lars Hanson) reconcile. “Leo,” says Hanson, “everything is suddenly clear to me.” (This presumably ties up all the action and answers every question.)
… until the unexpected arrival of her husband (Marc MacDermott) (photo credit 10.8)
Garbo became a star as a result of this film, and it’s easy to see why. When she’s preparing to run away with Gilbert and her husband unexpectedly presents her with a gorgeous diamond bracelet, she demonstrates the very best silent film acting technique. Having eased her husband out of her bedroom, she studies the bracelet, fingering it, trying it on, her face subtly revealing that she is only now realizing just what she will be giving up if she succumbs to her passion for Gilbert. When he arrives, she suggests that they abandon their flight and have an affair under her husband’s nose instead. Somehow, Garbo makes this, if not acceptable to the viewer, at least understandable.
Flesh and the Devil was a huge hit, and Gilbert went on to make The Show, Twelve Miles Out, and Man, Woman and Sin in 1927, all three movies pairing him with significant costars in top productions. The Show, directed by Tod Browning, reunited him with his Big Parade love interest, Renée Adorée, in a role for which he received good notices, but which, Variety thought, “will hurt his general popularity with the women, for while he is a great lover there is nothing romantic in the character.” They were wrong, because the carnival barker he plays is a real Don Juan and the audience loved it. Twelve Miles Out put Gilbert “at his best,” said critics, and paired him with the up-and-coming Joan Crawford, who earned rave reviews, with Variety, saying, “Two more pictures like this … and she’s set.” The movie was a lively story of modern pirates, giving Gilbert a chance at some comedy, some action, and also some typical love scenes. Viewed today, it is a startling movie, because of the intense close-ups of both Crawford (angular, strong) and Gilbert (soft, romantic) in one sequence aboard Gilbert’s boat. They played well together, even though their face-offs are a bit like two different decades staring one another down.
Man, Woman and Sin paired him with the great stage star Jeanne Eagels. Eagels, a drug addict, was frankly reviewed as “looking haggard” and “contradicting the description in the subtitles.” Perhaps because of her age and her diminishing looks, the movie cleverly reverses Gilbert’s role. Openly representing itself as not much more than a woman’s picture, the movie has Gilbert portraying a shy and virginal young man who is seduced by Eagels. Once smitten, however, he turns into the passionate Gilbert persona and the focus of attention shifts to him and away from her.
Gilbert’s biggest movie of 1927, which opened almost simultaneously with Man, Woman and Sin in December of that year, was Love. Variety got right to the point in its review of December 7: “Love plus Gilbert, plus Garbo, is a clarion call to shoppers. Shoppers mean women, and women mean matinees. Big ones. Try and keep the femmes away from this one … The girls are going to pay off this production cost, and some more besides. And how often do the exhibs get a real ‘matinee’ picture?” The review also points out that crowds were standing two deep behind the last row in the 596-seat theatre the movie opened in, with SRO notices posted outside for several days in advance.
Here was perfect box office strategy. At the high point of the public’s awareness of their love affair—and just as it was beginning to fizzle out on Garbo’s part—MGM paired Garbo and Gilbert in this silent version of Anna Karenina. Directed by Edmund Goulding and written for the screen by Frances Marion, Love is the sort of literary adaptation that has given Hollywood a bad name in English classes. Although in the versions of the movie released in Europe, Anna does indeed throw herself under the train, the American version presented an upbeat ending in which Karenin is dead, Anna’s little boy is happy as a clam at military school, Vronsky is back in the fold with his regiment, and Anna herself, decked out in an excellent outfit, arrives to be swept up in her lover’s arms forever and ever. Love, nevertheless, may be said to understand its job in adaptation: Wipe out all subplots. Eliminate all politics. Cut down on the moralizing. Reduce the pain level, and give Garbo and Gilbert lots of lingering close-ups, faces backlit, and dressed in great clothes. This is what the audience wanted to see—a story about LOVE with two stars in LOVE on-screen and in LOVE off-screen. To hell with Tolstoy.
Love fully illustrates why Gilbert was a big star. To find a partner for the exquisite Garbo, someone equally beautiful and romantic, was not easy, and it was especially difficult in the silent era, when the audience could stare at her astonishing face in quiet privacy. What Gilbert had was the male equivalent of Garbo’s beauty and grace, and her ability to embody the concept of romance, romance, romance. And he had another important plus: he seemed, somehow, to believe in all of it. He never showed the slightest sense of discomfort in his stiff military uniforms, nor was there ever a touch of irony or self-mockery. He never tips a wink at the audience, the way Valentino and John Barrymore do—he just gives himself totally to the romantic excess, and given the fact that the audience knew he was really in love with Garbo, the movie worked beyond all logical expectations.
In Love, everyone seems to know what to do. The action begins in a beautiful, whirling Russian snowstorm, with sleighs dashing through the cold, the occupants swathed in furs and robes. To ward off the stinging snowflakes, Garbo’s face is wrapped in a chiffon veil so that when she and Gilbert, stranded, meet and are forced to take shelter at an inn together, he cannot see her. The buildup comes: they enter, register, have their things taken to their rooms. As they move toward the huge fireplace to get warm, he chatters away, starting to light a candle. Then he turns, and she has removed her veil. Great balls of fire—she’s Garbo! And she never looked more stunningly beautiful. Garbo’s face is a showstopper in any scene, but here she is simply ravishing. Yet Gilbert can match her. As he stares at her, his eyes widening, softening, the match he is holding burns his finger. He shakes it off with a shudder that indicates what else is passing through his body—a totally emotional response to her face. His own face, also seen in radiantly beautiful close-up, softly, subtly registers the emotions of a man who is falling hopelessly, helplessly in thrall to a magnificent woman he is seeing for the first time. It is a conspiracy of actress, actor, writer, director, producer, cameraman, designers to present to the audience a moment of the most intense emotional meaning.
This scene will not be the only time Garbo and Gilbert and crew rise to the occasion (slight as the occasion may be) in Love. There are many close-ups of the two stars at the peak of their physical attractiveness and at the peak of their physical awareness of each other. Gilbert looks Garbo up and down in one scene, smiling at her, his eyes first devilish, then smoldering, then dumb with love. He later takes her in his arms to whirl her around the dance floor. Their two profiles are in full display, with Gilbert in the stiff collar of his impeccable white dress uniform, Garbo’s enhanced by a dress with a high, stiff standaway lace collar. Love is an exploitation film—using Tolstoy as a footstool on which to rest the beauty and sexuality and love of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. Without Gilbert, however, it couldn’t possibly work, which is not to diminish the work of anyone else, and certainly not the remarkable Greta Garbo. The point is that Garbo is Garbo—she’s in a class by herself. And her perfect partner in silent film was John Gilbert, whose contributions have consistently been underrated.
Gilbert as passionate lover in The Show, with Renée Adorée, and (photo credit 10.9)
Garbo and Gilbert were declared the perfect movie love team, but by the time MGM put them together yet again, in late 1928, their romance was at last completely over.‡ Released in early 1929, the movie was A Woman of Affairs, based on Michael Arlen’s best-selling novel The Green Hat. It boasts the usual quality production from MGM, with gowns by Adrian, sets by Cedric Gibbons, and photography by William Daniels. Gilbert and Garbo stand opposite each other in cavernous rooms done in art deco, and they wear fantastic hats, sleek coats, and superb formal dress. Gilbert looks particularly good in a 1920s tuxedo … but the two of them have precious little to do. The film is more Garbo’s than Gilbert’s, and his role gives him only odd moments in which to shine. One of these, however, demanded considerable subtlety. Having abandoned Garbo to please his father, he is preparing, seven years later, to marry the wholesome Dorothy Sebastian. When Garbo turns up to claim the help of her old friend, a doctor played by Lewis Stone, Gilbert, Sebastian, and the nosy-Parker father are at Stone’s house. After Stone rushes off to Garbo’s aid, the father seizes the moment to speak cruelly of her morals. Up until then Gilbert has been an all-cool dinner guest, impeccably dressed, charming and controlled, attentive to his intended bride. And he has appeared more or less indifferent to the news that Garbo has been in the house. But when his father speaks ill of her, his eyes take on a smoldering anger, very low-key. His mouth twists in a small smile of rage and resentment, and he speaks up for her in an offhand, yet revealing way. His performance here is in no sense of the term old-fashioned, and it is specific, clear, and precise in what it conveys to a viewer. Most of the time, however, Gilbert is either embracing Garbo or walking around in very good white flannels. Perhaps he is a bit bored, but that isn’t inappropriate to many of his character’s scenes.
as action hero in Twelve Miles Out, with Joan Crawford and Ernest Torrence (photo credit 10.10)
Gilbert as the passionate lover: with Greta Garbo in A Woman of Affairs, and Joan Crawford in Four Walls (photo credit 10.11)
Gilbert as the passionate lover: again with Garbo, in Love, and with Renée Adorée in The Cossacks (photo credit 10.12)
By the time Woman of Affairs was finished, the public had become aware that the romance between John Gilbert and Greta Garbo was finished, too. (Many feel it was an even briefer affair than this, and sources differ on almost all the circumstances involving their liaison.) Rumors say that Gilbert got Garbo further than any other man—to the doorway of a justice of the peace—only to have her turn around and bolt at the last minute. Clearly he wanted to marry her and had no qualms about marrying so famous an actress. (In fact, all of Gilbert’s wives were prominent actresses: Leatrice Joy, Ina Claire, and Virginia Bruce.) Garbo seems to have gotten under his skin. After their breakup, he soldiered on bravely amidst the luxury of Hollywood, becoming famous for his extravagant lifestyle, his generous hosting, and his madcap party-going. Sadly, he also gained notoriety for his heavy drinking, becoming an alcoholic, the fate of another matinee idol, John Barrymore.
In early May of 1929, reviewers addressed the quality of John Gilbert’s final silent film, Desert Nights. “No Dialogue,” screamed a headline beneath the film’s title, and the opening words of the review state clearly, “Without benefit of dialogue, Desert Nights leans heavily upon its star and cast.” Technology had already rendered a death blow to Gilbert’s career, and the movie was not accepted on its own terms. It is actually quite an entertaining story, involving a clever band of diamond thieves who take mine-manager Gilbert hostage to secure their escape. Obsessed with the new dimension of sound, the review went on to explain that the exhibition theatre had “made a synchronized score … and this may be helpful on the sound angle.” Sound had taken over motion pictures.
Gilbert’s first appearance before his adoring public as an actor who could talk was in Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which silent stars more or less debuted anew, each singing, dancing, speaking, declaiming, or playing some role that seemed suited to his or her persona. Trial balloons were being sent up. Gilbert appeared, romantically dressed and coiffed, opposite Norma Shearer in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Considering that he had no formal stage training of any kind, he handles the lines well, and he speaks clearly in a somewhat “light” voice, but certainly not a “high and squeaky” one. Reviewers commented that this sequence, done in early two-strip Technicolor and directed by Lionel Barrymore, was “excellent” and “is played seriously”—which, if people had been laughing at Gilbert, would not have been said. Neither the New York Times nor Variety suggested that Gilbert’s voice was inappropriate for the new medium.
The successful delivery of sound dialogue needs a certain nonchalance, an ease with words. Since the medium takes viewers in close to the actor, there is no need for declaiming or hitting a point so the back row won’t miss it. The medium calls for naturalism, behavior that people in the audience somehow take for the essence of the actor. Gilbert does not lack an ease with words, but his strength lay elsewhere. He was best at conveying emotion directly through physical behavior and action—through his face and eyes, through taking Garbo’s hand and rubbing her finger over his lips. Sound was a different world, and accordingly it called for changes in movie acting. Silent film actors and actresses needed visual eloquence to be great, but on the other hand, they could get away with a very narrow range if they had superb looks. Much of what the general audience required from its silent stars was outstanding beauty and sex appeal, at least until they grew sated with merely looking at pretty faces.
Gilbert’s sound debut seemed to go well enough, if not brilliantly, and after all, he was hugely popular. Then he made his first full-length talking appearance, in His Glorious Night in 1929, followed by Redemption (1930), Way for a Sailor (1930), Gentleman’s Fate (1931), Cheri Bibi, also known as The Phantom of Paris (1931), West of Broadway (1931), Downstairs (1932), Fast Workers (1933), Queen Christina (1933), and his last film, The Captain Hates the Sea (1934). This means that he made, not counting Hollywood Revue, ten movies in about five years. His career was hardly dead. The problem may have been that, just as sound unleashed the tough-talking gangster movie and the wisecracking musical, Gilbert’s first two features were dated in content. His Glorious Night was given a royal pan: “A few more talker productions like this and John Gilbert will be able to change places with Harry Langdon. His prowess at lovemaking, which has held the stenos breathless, takes on a comedy aspect … that gets the gum chewers tittering at first, then laughing outright at the very false ring of the couple of dozen ‘I love you’ phrases.” Gilbert’s voice is seen as “passable” but his dialogue is called rotten. “The love lines, about pulsating blood, hearts and dandelions, read far better than they sound from under the dainty Gilbertian moustache.” (The movie is a story about a princess and a captain who is an imposter.)
In Redemption, his next film, Gilbert plays a man who arranges to have his wife and friends believe he is dead. Based on Tolstoy’s drama The Living Corpse (a prophetic title in Gilbert’s life), it too received poor reviews. The New York Times said that Gilbert’s “cheerfulness is not natural and his habit of smiling and laughing strikes one as though he did so to conceal his own nervousness.” The final blow was sneering that when Gilbert’s character finally commits suicide, “few persons who see this picture” will regret it.
It is clear that he was being given the kind of material he handled so well in the silent years, but that the times—and new technology—had made it seem old-fashioned. The public, as if ashamed of themselves for having liked such stuff, quickly abandoned it and embraced the new. They had outgrown Gilbert. He was their teenage crush, the man they had loved in the innocent days in which movies had no voice, and by the time he started playing more suitable sound roles, the damage had been done. His next picture, Way for a Sailor, found him supported by Wallace Beery, Jim Tully, Polly Moran, Leila Hyams, and Doris Lloyd, all strong sound players with lively personae. Reviews say Gilbert “gives a better performance than he did in his previous audible production,” and the story line—a kind of mixture of low comedy and light romance—places him on a freighter with a lot of rowdy shipmates. There’s a big shipwreck, scenes of men working on the freighter, and lively action. By then, alas, it was too late.
One of Gilbert’s typical sound films was Downstairs, based on a story he wrote himself. In it, he plays a cad, a conniving chauffeur who preys on women. (Gilbert still has billing over the title, so how far had he really fallen?) His costars are Paul Lukas and the beautiful Virginia Bruce, who would become his last wife. Gilbert still looks debonair and well dressed. His voice is not a heavy masculine voice, but it sounds just fine, and not inappropriate for the character he is playing. What is lacking is the fire and intensity he exhibited in silent films, his sense of totally believing in what he was doing. Yet he has an easy, nonchalant manner, and seems modern enough. (He was actually more dated in his performance in Queen Christina, something of a return to the type of role he had played in silent film.) He looks a bit tired, and occasionally has dark circles under his eyes, and sometimes he is a little wooden, or even a little dull. What is missing is the dash and flash of his silent lovers, the old swagger, the old self-confidence. Gilbert is fine, but he’s just another leading man.
What really happened to Gilbert’s career is still unclear. Various reasons for his precipitous drop from the very top in 1927 to a frustrated death in 1936 have been put forth over the years. There is the “victim of sound” theory, by which his voice at best “does not suit his image” or “did not record well with the initial crude equipment.” There is his bad luck at having his first release be the Graustarkian and old-fashioned His Glorious Night, when the more believable movie he had actually shot first, Redemption, might have fared better at the box office. There is also his unpleasant relationship with the powerful head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, who is alleged to have sabotaged him, preventing him from obtaining suitable sound roles and assigning him to several unworthy, low-budget projects. Finally, there is Gilbert’s own personality. He was often rumored to be temperamental and difficult to work with (although his friends adored him), and he was said to be insecure, uneducated, and addicted to alcohol.
Each of these arguments can be refuted: his voice is not bad; he did have some good roles in sound, and Garbo insisted on his starring opposite her in Queen Christina in 1933; Redemption isn’t really much better than His Glorious Night; and other stars lived down awkward sound debuts and personal problems. As to Mayer’s contentious relationship with him, he was not the only star to have that problem, and in An Evening’s Entertainment, Richard Koszarski points out that Mayer had a 10 percent share in the profits from Gilbert’s films, and Irving Thalberg had 5 percent. Koszarski’s good sense and solid historical research lead him to conclude:
Gilbert with Garbo in one of his few sound successes, Queen Christina (photo credit 10.13)
Conspiracy buffs attribute too much wisdom and foresight to Mayer. The fact is, most silent stars were very badly presented in their early talkies, even those producing their own films. Pickford, Gish, Swanson, Talmadge, Lloyd, Keaton and Gilbert were only some of those whose talking picture debuts were far below their usual standard … John Gilbert was a victim of the inability of Hollywood’s best minds to predict a method of pushing silent stars to the edge of talkies.
No doubt it is the sum of all these possible explanations that did Gilbert in: his voice, his alcoholism, the changing times, Mayer, and disappointed audience expectations—all these combined are why his great career collapsed so suddenly. And yet studying Gilbert’s silent films and his sound work leads me to think that, despite everything, the original idea may be the correct one. It was sound that killed Gilbert. Not because he had a bad voice or a high voice and not because his sound roles were silly, since some of them (Captain Hates the Sea, Downstairs) are quite entertaining and modern, and he’s good in them. It was sound that killed him because sound diminished John Gilbert. Two other big matinee idols of the day were not diminished by it—Ronald Colman and John Barrymore. Their extensive stage training and experience, their beautiful voices, and their filmed images could carry forward. Barrymore more or less ceased being a matinee idol when sound came in, but he became a great character actor and a romantic leading man. Colman developed a fine gift for comedy, as well as going on with his romantic leads. Barrymore’s looks were adaptable to villains, rogues, and comedy characters as well as to leading men, and Colman’s excellent timing and line delivery gave him the ability to play in a wide range, from Raffles to François Villon. Gilbert could be a cad, but he wasn’t suitable for villainy, and he had only a minor comedy gift. His true forte was as the fulsome romantic idol. Sound added nothing to his ability to convey a man in love, to present a sensuous, impassioned romantic. On the contrary, sound subtracted heavily from it.
Whatever it was that happened, Gilbert’s career slowly died. He languished at home, drinking heavily. On March 20, 1934, he took out an ad on the back page of the Hollywood Reporter that said, “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer will neither offer me work nor release me from my contract. Signed, Jack Gilbert.” After Garbo had helped him get the romantic lead opposite her in Queen Christina, he saw the billing: “Greta Garbo in Queen Christina with John Gilbert” where once it had been “John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo.” “Oh, what the hell,” said Gilbert. “They liked me once. A man is an ass to squawk about life. Especially me.”
Various accounts have been given of Gilbert’s final years of misery. His daughter, Leatrice Joy Gilbert Fountain, wrote of his bleeding ulcers and chronic insomnia, and others of his severe alcoholism. In a November 1992 article entitled “Remembering Marlene,” Fountain quoted director William Dieterle’s conversation with her, forty years after the fact, recounting how he had told Dietrich of Gilbert’s plight. “I told Marlene … ‘There Gilbert sits in his palazzo on top of the mountain. He still looks wonderful, he’s only thirty-five years old, all the talent still there, the wit, the intellect. But it’s like a spell has been cast, those last bad years at MGM destroyed something in the center of him. We all used to drink. My God, how we drank, but Jack couldn’t stop. He drank till he threw up blood, till he was totally unconscious. You’d look at this handsome guy with all the parts still together, it was unbelievable what happened to him.’ ” According to Fountain, Dietrich immediately tried to rehabilitate Gilbert, and they had a short, satisfying affair during which time he began to thrive again. She tried to help his career, and it says a great deal for Gilbert that powerful stars like Dietrich and Garbo went out of their way to help him.
Gilbert reputedly studied with sound coaches and vocal experts, but somehow nothing worked for him after the silent era. He had always had a mercurial temperament, which was part of what gave him his spark on-screen, and losing his first-rank status so rapidly unnerved him. Observers remarked how he changed from the happy-go-lucky guy who drove onto the MGM lot with his car top down, waving to fans and fellow employees, into an angry loner who wore his hat pulled down low over his eyes as he avoided contact with anyone. (Ironically, Gilbert and John Barrymore were neighbors, and in these last sad years of Gilbert’s life, the two idols were said to be drinking buddies.) Then, on January 6, 1936, John Gilbert died at home, very suddenly, from a heart attack. Some say he died of a broken heart, a man who never understood what had happened to him. He was certainly not destitute, but the things he needed most—attention and fame—had abandoned him. He had been replaced by different kinds of leading men: Clark Gable, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, Dick Powell, Wallace Beery, Joe E. Brown, and Will Rogers, all on the list of top-ten box office draws of 1935. Adela Rogers St. Johns said of him, “He grew up with motion pictures and loved them and belonged to them. He wasn’t any New York stage actor who came into Hollywood for money. He didn’t look down on Hollywood. He looked up to it. He believed in movies as a great new art that belonged to the people and was closer to them, and gave them more real happiness than the other arts.”
On that basis, Gilbert may yet have the last laugh. The Big Parade, The Merry Widow, and Flesh and the Devil are among the most revived and best known of all silent films (together with the great comedies, some of Chaney’s work, and the major Griffith efforts). He had the good fortune to work with excellent directors, writers, and designers at MGM, and he costarred with the most beautiful and successful women of the day. His films were directed by King Vidor, Clarence Brown, John Ford, Tod Browning, Edmund Goulding, Victor Seastrom, Erich von Stroheim, Monta Bell, Maurice Tourneur, Jack Conway, and in the sound era, Rouben Mamoulian and Lewis Milestone. His costars included Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Lillian Gish, Jeanne Eagels, Renée Adorée, and, of course, Garbo. The revivals of his movies can put the lie to much that has been said about him, because in them he remains splendid: vibrant and romantic, handsome and untouched by time.
JOHN GILBERT wasn’t the only matinee idol of the silent era, of course. There were plenty of good-looking men for the matinee crowd to enjoy—such as John Barrymore, Conrad Nagel, Richard Dix, and others. Two of the handsomest were Milton Sills and Thomas Meighan. Sills was the “strong, silent type” and he was a very popular star in his day. Six feet tall and stalwart-looking, he played opposite Clara Kimball Young in Eyes of Youth and Colleen Moore in Flaming Youth. He was definitely a major star until his untimely death at the age of forty-eight in 1930. Meighan had curly hair, masculine good looks of the Irish type, and an easy-going, natural style on film. He appeared in movies from 1914 to 1935, and his filmography—a large one—includes such well-known titles as Miracle Man, Male and Female, Why Change Your Wife?, and Manslaughter. He wanted to quit films when talkies came in, but his stage background made him a natural for sound. As he grew older, he shifted to character roles and simply kept going, becoming a wealthy man. He was stricken with pneumonia in 1935, and lingered on until his death in July of 1936 at the age of fifty-seven.
Three other male stars who were labeled matinee idols by the fan magazines of the day were Francis X. Bushman (one of the first of the type), Wallace Reid (the most tragic), and Ronald Colman (the one who managed to carry over into a major sound career).
Bushman was the greatest matinee idol of the early years, coming to films with experience both as a stage actor and as a sculptor’s model. He was a big, good-looking man, a perfect sex object, so movies cast him almost exclusively in romantic roles. Looking good in tights and capes, he appeared in costume dramas and in Ruritanian romantic adventures. Bushman was one of the first fan magazine heroes, and his marriage to his leading lady, Beverly Bayne, was kept secret, as early press agents feared that if the women in his adoring public found out he was married, he would lose his appeal for them. Bushman, like Barrymore after him, was famous for his sharply delineated “classic” profile, but he would go unrecognized today except for his role as the villainous Messala in Ben-Hur (1926). (It’s odd that he’s best remembered as Messala, since he seldom played villains.)
Wallace Reid, called “the screen’s most perfect lover” by Motion Picture in 1919, played a type of lead that was indigenous to the late teens and early twenties. Richard Koszarski defines him as “the final heir to the ‘Arrow Collar’ tradition of motion-picture stardom,” by which was meant
strong-jawed, all-American figures [that] exuded stability, friendliness, optimism, and reliability. He was at home in overalls or evening clothes and did very nicely in a uniform when the occasion arose. Their imitators were legion and, to modern eyes, indistinguishable. Few silent-film historians spend much time on these men or their films, but occasional lip service is paid to the last and greatest of them, Wallace Reid.
Reid, an unpretentious and likable actor, came from a show business family, and brought an ease to the business of performing that stood out among less comfortable, flashier actors. Although he came to epitomize the “all-American,” he was also a matinee idol. The fan magazines described him glowingly as beloved by his mother—an expert swimmer, boxer, and dancer—an artist who was adept in oils—a daredevil who could drive a fast motorcar (and repair it). In an early Photoplay, Laurence Quirk said that the camera “caught a lovable quality in the man and reflected it on the screen.” Reid married Dorothy Davenport, a young woman who also came from a prominent acting family, and the Reids were a glamorous couple about town. Reid became so popular during the period from 1915 to 1922 that he appeared in an amazing number of features—six in 1916, ten in 1917; he has been identified as having appeared in over one hundred films prior to his role of Jeff the blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation.
Most historians feel that Reid might not be remembered, however, if he had not become the protagonist of one of Hollywood’s earliest and most dramatic tragedies. In 1919, he was injured when a special train carrying a company to a location shooting was wrecked. In order to enable him to keep working until the movie was finished, a studio doctor prescribed morphine, and continued the dosage long past the safety point. Reid became an addict, and then started drinking to hide the addiction. He kept on working, making nine features in 1922, but finally collapsed during production, and the truth leaked out. Run-down and ill, Reid contracted the flu, went into a coma, and died on January 18, 1923, at the age of thirty and at the top of his fame. Later, his widow made his story known in order to educate others, and she kept his name and reputation alive for later generations. Reid, in fact, left behind a large and respectable filmography, including Carmen, Joan the Woman, Affairs of Anatol, and The Birth of a Nation, but when he is remembered at all today, it is largely for the scandal surrounding his secret addiction.
The very handsome Ronald Colman was a strong leading man during the last years of the silent era. Like all true matinee idols of those days, he was an exceedingly handsome man who wore clothes well and whose stance was graceful, poised, and soigné. He is solid in silent films, but his career was made by sound, when his distinctive voice, coupled with his highly nuanced and subtle delivery of lines, made him a top-level star and ultimate Oscar winner.
OF ALL THE MALE STARS labeled “matinee idols” or treated as sex symbols for women, the one who escaped both the limitations and history’s scorn is John Barrymore, partly because he came from such a distinguished acting family. Although ultimately he got stuck with his own label—bad-boy brother of noble Ethel and sober Lionel—John Barrymore’s name still has cachet. He is thought of as a glamorous figure, colorful and witty (though alcoholic). Barrymore’s legend has endured. He is a “great actor” and Gilbert is only a “great movie star.” These are two different things, not incompatible, and despite what some people think, not unequal either. In their day, Barrymore was not as big a movie star as Gilbert, but he was even then considered to be the name at Warner Brothers, his studio during the 1920s. He became Warners’ most prestigious property, and they billed him as “The World’s Greatest Actor.” The Barrymore trio were the Royal Family of Broadway, and everyone in the movie business was suitably impressed. (These highfalutin credentials were sometimes said to have kept audiences outside the big cities away from Barrymore’s movies, however, and this is one of the reasons why he never gained the box office status that Gilbert achieved.) Barrymore’s acting ability was never questioned in Hollywood, and he was always treated with the respect that his theatrical lineage and his theatrical triumphs brought to the relatively new medium.
Barrymore and Gilbert are two different types of matinee idols. Gilbert was the man whose basic business is love; Barrymore was the man whose basic business was giving a good performance. If love came into it, he played it honestly and passionately, giving the ladies their lover—but if he could be Mr. Hyde as well as Dr. Jekyll, he put his maximum energy into Mr. Hyde. Gilbert is the movie version of the matinee idol par excellence, one of the earliest stars to give the term power. Barrymore is closer to the original theatrical concept—a performer who is handsome, but who is first and foremost an actor and secondarily a romantic object. Today we think of him primarily as a stage actor, born into the profession; we’ve more or less forgotten that he was also a matinee idol, known as “The Great Profile.” Although Barrymore entered movies in a period in which a man who was handsome—and thus a sex symbol—could still be taken seriously as an actor, his extraordinary good looks meant inevitably that he would become a matinee idol. (In his autobiography, Adolph Zukor called Barrymore “the handsomest man in the world, but a perfectionist, and a temperamental one at that.”)
Barrymore lived with the label, and certainly enjoyed wowing the ladies in his private life, but on-screen he seemed to take perverse joy in wrecking his own looks, in twisting himself into old men, crazy men, mercenary men, ugly men. He’s the Lon Chaney of the tuxedo set. Dramatically handsome, and making the most of his “Great Profile” identity, he played romance willingly, and he could enter a drawing room and occupy the space as well as anyone ever did. But he never relied on his looks alone to create a role, and he always seems to have more fun with the parts that gnarl and twist him.
Barrymore appears in very few silent films—only twenty-two—and in a remarkable number of them, he creates a dual personality, an opposite self, or a masquerade of some sort so he can be both an idol and an actor. When he was given a standard romantic role with no room to maneuver, he sometimes mocked himself, although without ever losing the larger meaning of his role. It is clear from his silent career that in some way he wanted to deny the audience his handsome profile—or at least make them wait for it. Yet despite this tendency to fight his own looks, and despite his reputation as a serious performer, the fan magazines always categorized him as a matinee idol. (The August 1923 Motion Picture admitted that he was “greater than a matinee idol” because “he is one of our greatest living artists,” but six months later the magazine reverted to form with a full-page glamorous portrait of him in full profile and a caption that read “John Barrymore, the matinee idol.”)
Looking at Barrymore as the gentleman thief, Raffles, in 1917, makes an interesting comparison with Gilbert. He is a handsome figure with a dramatic and sensational profile which is amply on display. He is adept at holding the moment: he remains still, concentrated, conveying an animal intensity underneath the most polished manner. His forte is intensity under control, and his appeal as a matinee idol no doubt partly stemmed from this, because women in the audience could sense the passion inside society’s very best, most tailored clothes. (Inside that tuxedo beat the heart of a tiger!) This calmness is a large part of Barrymore’s skill, and he had learned it from years of theatre work, of walking on and taking command, of knowing what to do, how to wait, how to control an audience. While everyone else in the movie hovers about, fluttering and fussing, Barrymore stands still, holding all attention to himself. When he does burst out—which he does—the result is stunning. Unfortunately, it can seem like too much, as, working in the tradition of the stage of an earlier time, he sometimes appears to overact wildly, with broad stage gestures and exaggerated facial expressions designed to be seen in the back row. But he always commands attention and seems to be utterly relaxed about it, casual even, almost cruelly uninterested in his audience. He looks fabulous in his tuxedo, and he can stand calmly smoking a cigarette with all the self-confidence in the world. “I can smoke better than most people can act,” he seems to be implying.
Unlike Gilbert, Barrymore does not have the typical kind of charisma we associate with movie stardom—the understated, low-key, naturalistic behavior that binds us to star personalities and makes us feel that they are talking directly to us. He remains, instead, the consummate master of stage acting, which he shrewdly adapts to the movie format (and, of course, ultimately exploits at the end of his career when he begins to play “ham actors”). Barrymore doesn’t have star radiance, he has stage presence; he stands out by some inborn grace and elegance, some inherent sense of his own royalty, the royalty of the theatre. In a flamboyant era, he could be extremely dramatic, but he could also take the tiniest gesture—the raising of one of his highly mobile eyebrows—and make it huge.
One of Barrymore’s greatest hits was his 1920 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which received rave reviews. The New York Times gushingly refers to the “excellence of the photoplay,” to Barrymore’s “flawless performance,” and to its being “something special and extraordinary.” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, depending on your feelings about a certain style of performing, is either one of John Barrymore’s best films or one of his worst. Taking it on its own terms and placing it within the proper context, the former is a more appropriate assessment than the latter. As the celebrated scientist who searches for a way to separate the good and the evil in a man, Barrymore has the opportunity to present his two selves to the public. One is the young and handsome Barrymore, the one with The Great Profile, the matinee idol who plays the romantic lead. The other is the Barrymore who enjoys hiding behind false noses, domed heads, warts, and a misshapen body. It’s a perfect vehicle for his talents, and illustrates how, although he played his love scenes well and there is a romantic aspect to the story, he himself emphasized the evil character.
As Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opens, a title warns us, “What we want to be, we are.” The handsome and charitable young Dr. Jekyll is at work in his lab, where a fellow doctor is giving him the usual horror film warnings: “Damn it, I don’t like it. You’re tampering with the supernatural … Stick to the positive sciences, Jekyll!” Convinced by a worldly friend that “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it,” Jekyll begins his experiments and soon enough wakens “his baser emotions.” His goal—“to yield to every evil impulse—yet leave the soul untouched”—leads him to opium dens, prostitutes, and the company of Gina, an “Italian dancing girl who faced her world alone” (Nita Naldi).
To turn into Mr. Hyde, Barrymore undergoes a famous on-screen transformation, done without makeup alterations until the moment when a cut provides the viewer with a medium close-up in which he has added warts, new hair, and a false nose. What the audience sees when Jekyll turns into Hyde is a perfect tour de force of silent era/twenties stage acting. Having prepared a vial of his formula, Barrymore backs away from it, stares at it, and then strides purposefully toward it as it rests on his laboratory table. He hesitates dramatically, then lifts it, tilts his head back, and drains it. An immediate physical jolt hits his entire body. The handsome young man in the dressing gown begins to fall backward, head down, his hand at his throat. He then twists forward, his hands flailing, his hair flying loose. He clutches his head, writhing, his body going into spasms. His hair falls forward. He covers his face with his hands, as the twitching continues. Brushing back the hair, he slowly begins to rise. The young, pure-faced man with the noble mien has been replaced by an older person with a demonic stare—an entirely different creature. His eyes now look crazy. His mouth is fixed into an evil grin, and his hands are like claws. Then a cut takes the viewer close, and hideous makeup has been added to completely alter his appearance. To watch Barrymore enact this transformation without sound effects, color filters, superimpositions, or camera tricks is an awesome experience. Small and perfectly formed, with great physical control, he uses his entire body as a single unit of expression.
Barrymore’s great strength as a silent film actor lay in this uncanny ability to change himself physically right before the audience’s eyes. He was the master of transformation, but unlike Chaney’s, his mastery is psychological more than physical. Barrymore is a man who must have thought of acting as more than a job in which you pretend to be someone else. For him, it was a job in which you became somebody else. Before method, he was method, although he surely would have denied it.
John Barrymore as villain (photo credit 10.14)
Romantic idol in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Barrymore’s last silent film, Eternal Love (1929), was directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch. It is not distinguished material, and only the combined talents of star and director keep it from being extremely dull. Even in its own time, reviewers complained about the “sentimentality” of its ending, in which a pair of doomed lovers pray to God for rescue from an angry mob and receive God’s answer—an avalanche—by kissing, embracing, and walking joyously to their death. Both Barrymore and Lubitsch are pros who know what they are doing. Lubitsch’s direction is tasteful and inherently cinematic, and Barrymore could play a role in which he conveyed passionate love—and an outsider’s high spirits—in his sleep by this point. Watching Eternal Love, however, it’s easy to conclude that it’s time for Barrymore to move beyond the “matinee idol” label. He’s too professional to turn in a lackluster performance, but one senses his awareness that this type of material is soon to be outdated. He seems to enjoy some drunk scenes, no doubt playing from an accurate grasp of the condition. In other moments, although handsome and quite virile, he flails about, swinging his arms wildly, and overworking his eyebrows. Clearly he’s become bored with his “matinee idol” status.
Sound arrived in the nick of time to revive Barrymore’s interest in his movie career. Both he and Gilbert started their sound careers in showcase films by reciting Shakespeare, and both made debut sound features that were period costume dramas. But whereas Gilbert was not accepted, Barrymore was embraced. He thrived in sound. His beautiful voice was one of his greatest assets, and his ability to deliver dialogue was a talent he had been born with. He played a wide range of roles in the early years of sound, enjoying success as the demonic hypnotist in Svengali (1931); the wonderful crook in Arsène Lupin (1932), in which his brother, Lionel, played his nemesis; the baron forced to become a thief (opposite Garbo) in Grand Hotel (1932); the wealthy criminal lawyer in State’s Attorney (1932); and the troubled father of Katharine Hepburn in her debut film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932). Barrymore was never the victim of sound—only of his own excesses. He knew how to channel his flamboyance into a vocal advantage, simply turning his characters into theatrical types who were verbally overbearing but appealing. He shrewdly incorporated the label “matinee idol” into his bag of tricks. It became one of the characters he played, and thus he was the label’s master, not its victim. Every role he played was one in which the character spoke well-written lines with style and distinction. An audience immediately knew to listen when Barrymore spoke on-screen, because he brought to sound the power of his family’s acting tradition—and the foundation of years of experience on stage. In this he was very different from John Gilbert, who had learned his acting mainly in the movies themselves. When sound came in, Gilbert had to relearn and to adjust his silent film persona, but the public didn’t give him the time in which to do it. Barrymore didn’t need the time. He knew what to do. If he had been forced to speak aloud such dialogue as “Snivel, you lying wretch!” or “My soul has been asleep—you have awakened it!,” he could have handled it. He never met a line he couldn’t conquer, and no amount of silly dialogue could have ruined his career. However, although he survived the transition-to-sound era, and had a triumphant career well into the 1930s, John Barrymore did not go out in a blaze of glory, with honorary Oscars and the world at his feet. In his final years, he sank deeply into alcoholism and scandal. Frequently drunk and unable to remember his lines, he became a joke, a satirical version of his earlier self. Some of his stage appearances were said to have been travesties, but, except for the very final works, he remained more or less on top of his films. He stumbled on, famous for his rowdy friends and sharp-tongued remarks, and died on May 29, 1942, at the age of sixty. He himself had suggested that his best epitaph would be his favorite line from Shakespeare: “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” He also played a magnificent deathbed scene, and he played it to a writer, his friend Gene Fowler, who in his notoriously inaccurate biography, Good Night, Sweet Prince—a huge best-seller—recorded how Barrymore, near the end, suddenly rallied, opened his eyes, raised an eyebrow, and instructed Fowler to lean down for a final question. It was a solemn moment of farewell between two close friends. Fowler bent low for the golden moment. “Tell me,” Barrymore asked him, “is it true that you are the illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?” He played a grand exit—good dialogue, perfect timing, twist of surprise, center of attention. And he chose to go out in a comedy role.
Barrymore with up-and-coming star Colleen Moore, in The Lotus Eaters, and with the beautiful young Mary Astor, in Don Juan (photo credit 10.15)
JOHN GILBERT WAS, of course, a type, but leading male actors of the silent era all tended to be types. In addition to romantic lovers or matinee idols, there were other categories of female favorites: cowboys, foreign sophisticates, country innocents, and—most popular of all—Latin Lovers. Many women seemed to be especially partial to the boyish heroes of those years, such as Robert Harron, Richard Barthelmess, and Charles Farrell. Harron was developed by Griffith as the perfect young man of innocence and decency. He rose to fame as “The Boy” in Intolerance, although he had begun playing leads as early as 1911 and in later films like Judith of Bethulia (1914). He was handsome and healthy, but his was not a muscled, tall physique. He was well cast as an ordinary young male, a homespun hero with typical, not remarkable qualities. His role really was that of “boy”—the innocent hero for an innocent time in innocent stories. Harron died tragically from a mysterious gunshot wound when he was only about twenty-four years old.
Barthelmess was a solid leading man who played with total conviction in any kind of role he was given. He was darkly handsome but not exotic, so his casting could stretch beyond the role of “lover” or “mysterious hero” into the kinds of stories that were American in setting and innocent in presentation. Barthelmess has been labeled “the hero of the last days of American innocence.” At the same time, he could also play “the other,” as in his excellent role as an ostracized Asian in Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. Barthelmess had the good fortune to be developed by Griffith as a leading man for a series of films that have ensured his reputation today—including The Idol Dancer, Way Down East (both 1920), and Broken Blossoms (1919)—and also had non-Griffith hits like Tol’able David (1921) and The Patent Leather Kid (1927). He had an excellent voice, which helped him make the transition to sound, appearing in tough little Depression movies like Heroes for Sale, The Last Flight, Massacre, and A Modern Hero. Although he left his days as a female favorite behind, his very respectable career lasted for two decades. He was nominated for the very first Oscar for Best Actor for his work in The Noose and Patent Leather Kid, but lost to Emil Jannings, who won for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. His reputation was made, however, in the earlier era, when he played simple heroes of decency and good values.
Farrell, over six feet tall and handsome almost to the point of being pretty, found fame playing opposite Janet Gaynor in a series of superb movies directed by Frank Borzage—Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, Lucky Star. He did not rise to stardom until the very end of the silent era, in approximately 1926, and he did not make an easy transition to sound. His voice initially seemed too thin for his size and robust appearance, but he took lessons to lower it and held on for a time. In the 1950s he became a television star, playing opposite Gale Storm in My Little Margie, and living to a ripe old age.
Most of these idols were family men, or men who were not womanizers, but John Gilbert lived up to his reputation as a “great lover” off the movie screen as well as on. He was the celebrated lover of both Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, among others. Garbo nearly married him, and Dietrich is said to have sentimentally bid top dollar to purchase his satin bed sheets after he died. These are serious credentials!
JOHN GILBERT WAS GIVEN a perfect epitaph when Ben Hecht said, “In the time of Hollywood’s most glittering days, he glittered the most,” and went on to characterize him as “prince, butterfly, Japanese lantern, and the spirit of romance,” adding, “There were no enemies in his life … He was as unsnobbish as a happy child … He needed no greatness around him to make him feel distinguished … He drank with carpenters, danced with waitresses and made love to whores and movie queens alike … He swaggered and posed, but it was never to impress anyone.”
It is sad to think of such a beautiful and talented man, dead too young, living his last days riddled by alcohol and undoubtedly feeling both despair and disappointment. No one ever feels sympathy for the men who fuel female fantasies, but surely they suffer as much from the burden and limitation as female stars do. The life and career of John Gilbert suggest that it’s no picnic being a “matinee idol,” trying to live up to the label of “great lover.”
Three great profiles of the matinee idol era: John Barrymore (photo credit 10.17)
Francis X. Bushman and Ramon Novarro, in Ben-Hur
* Cameo Kirby is today known to film scholars as the movie on which Ford officially changed his directorial credit from the informal “Jack Ford” to the more serious “John Ford.”
† Gilbert’s mustache undoubtedly played a large role in his success, because without it his face loses its symmetry. Suddenly, his nose is too big, his mouth too small, and his cheeks too flat; his head looks too big for his body, and nothing works. But put his mustache on him, dress him up in a slouch hat and a good suit—or a tuxedo, or a Russian cossack uniform with plenty of fur trim—and he becomes a handsome, exotic figure. Cinematographers also learned how to bounce light off the bridge of his nose, reducing its size.
‡ Gilbert’s other 1928 releases were The Cossacks, with Renée Adorée, Four Walls, with Joan Crawford, and Masks of the Devil, with Alma Rubens. About The Cossacks, Variety pointed out that “the flaps who want to see John Gilbert mauling some dame in hot love scenes may not fancy this” because he played a Russian villager thought to be a physical coward until trouble comes and he surprises everyone, even kicking around his own father. A plus was supposed to be “real Russian” horsemen who did the riding stunts. In Four Walls, he was a gangster, with Crawford playing what one reviewer called “a round-heeled frail.” Masks of the Devil was a more fully romantic role, in which he was a libertine whose innocent face masked an ugly soul, a variation on the Picture of Dorian Gray theme.