Week of September 30th, 1916

Louis H. Tolhurst

Tolhurst and his machine

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported “there is a new wizard in the motion picture field. His name is Louis H. Tolhurst.” Tolhurst had invented a mechanism that allowed him to film microscopic particles, and Kingsley commented:

Just as if we hadn’t enough actors already, Mr. Tolhurst has succeeded in making screen actors of microbes…With his apparatus this scientist pursues a bacilli, runs him to earth and makes him ‘act’ for the screen with ease and sangfroid. It matters not whether the subject be the blood coursing through arteries, a microbe dashing madly about in a pin-point of water, or a dust germ actually floating through the air—Mr. Tolhurst’s apparatus grabs them all and reveals them to the screen in such a size that the smallest animalcule resembles a mastodon, as it glares at its motion picture audience.

Writer William Wing at Triangle Studio quickly figured out how to use Tolhurst’s invention in a fiction film, The Microscope Mystery, in which a doctor examines a murder weapon under his instrument and determines who the killer was. Nevertheless, Thomas C. Kennedy in Motography felt that the footage of bacilli had “little to do with the story, except they make it last longer.”

Tolhurst put his invention to more successful use a few years later with a series of one-reelers, Secrets of Life. He filmed insects like flies and bees, then Walter Anthony contributed dramatic and funny intertitles; American Cinematographer called the films a “cinematographic triumph.” (Anthony had an impressive list of title writing credits including Foolish Wives, The Sea Hawk and The Cat and Canary.)

Tolhurst, a graduate of Stanford Law School, blamed his interest in microscopy for his failure in half a dozen jobs (he also owned an auto repair shop for several years). He got his start when he was fifteen and his father, a dentist, gave him a microscope for Christmas. After Secrets of Life he continued to invent and patent camera apparatuses, including one to make composite images. He didn’t have commercial success with them, so he quit and he got interested in racing his yacht, the Malabar VII. His 1960 L.A. Times obituary didn’t even mention his film work .

The Straight Way

Kingsley’s least favorite film this week was an “old-time thriller” The Straight Way. However, it was her best review. She wrote:

Valeska Surratt cares not how many troubles she has, so long as she can have the right clothes for the occasion…Miss Surratt, in an exquisite flowered satin, is suspected by her husband; she defies the villain in tasty taffeta; she weeps becomingly over her infant in the most exquisite lingerie; she is train-wreaked in a tailor suit, and her husband takes her back in a splendid crepe de chine evening gown…but there are several inaccuracies which get the laughs. For instance, while Miss Surratt is weeping over her babe, the infant nearly rolls off her lap; a house is struck by lightening but nobody in it feels even a shock except one woman, who is instantly killed.

Valeska Surratt, 1916

Valeska Surratt, 1917

The movie sounds like an absolute hoot. Unfortunately, just like all eleven of Surratt’s films, it is lost. She was primarily a Broadway and vaudeville actress, famous for her outfits.

Frances Ring and Thomas Meighan

Kingsley mentioned that actor Thomas Meighan admitted, “in spite of his numerous friends in Los Angeles, he’s just plain lonesome for his wife’s company.” Frances Ring was visiting her sister. Ring and Meighan were happy together; according to his New York Times obituary “The marriage safely weathered all the vicissitudes of fame and fortune, a fact which prompted one Hollywood writer to remark a few years ago that ‘Thomas Meighan and Rin Tin Tin were the only Hollywood stars who had never seen a divorce court.’”

Finally, in this week’s “the past is a foreign country:” Douglas Fairbanks returned to Los Angeles, and “he was met by a crowd of cowboys, who, as a special mark of their affection, treated their hero to a travesty lynching.” Affectionate lynching? They did do things differently there.

Week of September 23rd, 1916

George Jean Nathan

Mack Sennett

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported that some big New York magazines had noticed Mack Sennett’s work. George Jean Nathan in his theater review column for The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness praised him, and Kingsley was so surprised that she quoted him at length:

This Sennett is probably the most fecund inventor and merchant of the slapstick masque the civilized world has yet seen. A spectator of but a very few of his opera, I am yet fascinated and not inconsiderably bewildered by the resourceful imagination of the fellow. An erstwhile chorus man in the Casino music shows, Sennett has done the work he set out to do with a skill so complete, with a fertility so copious, that he has graduated himself as the foremost bachelor of custard-pie arts, the foremost professor of the bladder. He is, in short, the very best entrepreneur of low comedy the amusement world has seen. He has made probably twice as many millions laugh as have all of Shakespeare’s clowns and all the music show comedians on earth rolled together.

Nathan actually seems to be sincere in his admiration, beneath the thick layer of pretension (or as Kingsley politely put it: “Of course, Mr. Nathan’s viewpoint is from a very very lofty height, which naturally makes his language sound a bit condescending”). An intellectual such as himself couldn’t have possibly witnessed more than “a very few” Keystone films, nevertheless he could recommend them over “the labored unfunniness of the posturing mimic artists of Broadway.” The whole article is available on Google Books.*

Kingsley also mentioned that the Saturday Evening Post published an article Sennett wrote, “Movie Star Stories,” in which he described the differences between theatrical and film acting and told stories about some of the people who had worked for him, included Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand. Marilyn Slater has posted a copy on her site, Looking for Mabel.

So in 1916, general interest magazines were already starting to take movies – and comedies at that – seriously. They were well on their way to respectability.

 

Keystone Studio

Louise Fazenda, 1916

In other Keystone news, the place was turning highbrow, but not because of the media attention.

No longer do Keystoners loiter about the big open-air stage, telling Keystone-y stories, playing pinochle, or otherwise amusing themselves in the common, vulgar way. Nowadays the erstwhile footlight comedians, chorus ladies, prize fighters, acrobats and cowboys gather about the phonograph, and nothing short of a Wagnarian trilogy of a Liszt rhapsody will satisfy the artistic temperament of these new disciples of the elevated brow. Louise Fazenda started the movement and everybody chipped in last week and bought a Victrola.

Technology has been ruining society for an awfully long time.

Two comedies made Kingsley laugh this week. Anita Loos’ work was back again, this time with a “whimsically clever” screenplay for The Social Secretary. Norma Talmadge gave a “clear-cut, sparkling interpretation “ to the role of a beautiful woman masquerading as a prim, dowdy social secretary to avoid workplace sexual harassment. Kingsley said “it is refreshing to see Miss Talmadge in a comedy role, after the long series of gloomy, heart-broken females she has played.” Despite her good notices, Talmadge went back to her dramatic roles and only rarely made comedies. The Social Secretary is not a lost film; it’s even available on DVD.

Harold Lockwood

May Allison

She had fun at Mr. 44 as well, in which a poor factory girl (May Allison) marries a rich man (Harold Lockwood). She wrote “Miss Allison and Mr. Lockwood are always easy to look at, and their fine sense of comedy values places them right among the blue ribboners in brightly humorous plays.” The two were very popular stars at the time, co-starring in over 20 films between 1915 and 1917. Lockwood died of influenza in 1918. Allison kept working until 1927, retiring after she married James Quirk, the editor of Photoplay magazine. Mr. 44 is a lost film.

Tony Gaudio

Mr. 44

Kingsley also admired the work of the person who had the most successful career of everyone involved with the film: “Photographer Gaudio shows himself master of his craft in making the pictures of those wonderful Lake Tahoe locations.” Tony Gaudio already had many years of experience; he had been shooting short films since 1903. In the 1920’s he became the Talmadge sisters’ regular DP, and when their studio was bought by Warner Bros. he went along. He shot some of that studio’s most prestigious films, including Little Caesar (1931), Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Letter (1941).

 

 

 

*Buster Keaton fans might want to see Nathan’s article because he reviews the play Seven Chances was based on, calling it “a poor thing at best.”

One other aside: earlier in the article he opined that Sydney Chaplin was a better comic than his half-brother and his film The Plumber was better than all films, including Birth of a Nation. One problem with his argument is that The Plumber was a Charlie Chaplin film – that was an alternate title for Work (1915). So Nathan wasn’t infallible.

Week of September 16th, 1916

1917 ad

1921 ad

Robert Goldstein’s 1921 passport photo

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley announced the formation of a new company, the Continental Producing Company, that

will begin active operation next Monday on the production of a big twelve-reel feature, The Spirit of ’76, embodying historical events and characters of the American Revolution…it is said that much painstaking research has preceded the production of the picture.

She didn’t mention the man who is the reason the film is remembered today, its writer/producer, Robert Goldstein. His story was so sad that it wouldn’t make a credible melodrama (the Slate article about him was called “The Unluckiest Man in Movie History”).

Mary Mallory wrote a very through article about the film and Goldstein’s subsequent troubles, but the short version is that the historical events in this patriotic film included British war atrocities. Showing allies in the World War doing such things was suddenly considered pro-German, and he was arrested and convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917. He served three years of a ten-year sentence. In 1921, he recut the film and it was shown in New York City for three weeks, but he had little success. He left the United States later that year and tried to find film work in Europe, ending up living in Berlin with his aunts. He returned to New York on August 16, 1935 (earlier writers assumed he died in the Holocaust, but his immigration record was recently digitized). He appears in the 1940 Census as an inmate of Riker’s Island, and that’s the final record currently available for him. It’s a shame Robert Goldstein ever wanted to make movies. To add insult to injury, it’s a lost film.

If you’d like to know more about the legal aspects of the case, look at “The Espionage Act and Robert Goldstein’s The Spirit of ’76 (1917): A Historical and Legal Analysis” by Zach Saltz. There is also a book by Anthony Slide called Robert Goldstein and The Spirit of ’76. 

[Update: I visited the New York City Archive in October 2016 and I found only a dead end. Their records for Rikers Island end in 1936. I also checked the burial records for Potters Field but they’re kept by death date, and they’re missing the microfilm reel with records for 1942-1943. Maybe someday more records will be digitized and we can find out what happened to him.]

The Tarantula (1916)

Antonio Moreno, 1916

Kingsley’s favorite film this week was The Tarantula, a “tense and thrilling drama” about the downfall of a “he-vampire” (it’s about time!) Edith Storey played an innocent young woman seduced, impregnated and abandoned by a married man (Harry Hollingsworth). The baby dies, she becomes a dancer and he goes to one of her shows where she give him a jeweled box. When he passes out from drink, a tarantula emerges from the box, bites and kills him. She marries her faithful suitor (Antonio Moreno). And so we learn that the wages of premarital sex and revenge are to live happily ever after with an extremely handsome man. Hooray! (A few years later Moreno would become a star and rival to Valentino.) The Silent Feature Film Database says there are no archival holdings of The Tarantula, but it seems to be available on some sketchy streaming sites.

Audrey Munson, 1915

A notorious film came to town, but Los Angeles seemed “entirely apathetic” despite censorship battles waged in New York. Purity starred Audrey Munson as an artists’ model who poses nude to earn enough money to publish her ungrateful boyfriend’s poetry. Kingsley warned filmgoers that it was a bore; she thought that “the part calls for clothes – but there is no answer…there is a story, but it is obviously written merely for the purpose of stringing together through seven reels numberless poses of Miss Munson.” While the censors in L.A. were apathetic, the public was less so — the film played to capacity audiences. The next week, theater manager Seth Perkins learned just how relaxed the local censors were: hoping for a little publicity, he put up a “frank” photo of Miss Munson in the lobby. Unfortunately, not one person or official objected. He sighed to Kingsley: “Oh, for the old censor days!”

Kingsley revealed that even then people could be skeptical about Los Angeles standing in for other places: “The Lasky company apparently has implicit faith in California scenery and their art director. At present there are three features under production, with scenes laid in widely different localities on the earth’s surface.” The locations were Japan, the jungles of South Africa, and New York City.

Week of September 9th, 1916

Benjamin F. Reynolds

Ben and Adelaide Reynolds’ passport picture

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley told a story about a newsreel cameraman, B.F. Reynolds, who filmed a mountaintop explosion at a rock quarry:

Hobnobbing with earthquakes, fires and other disasters is just second nature to a pictorial news gatherer…Reynolds placed his camera at a point which the superintendent of the quarry said was dangerously near. “Oh, I guess I’ll take the chance,” answered Reynolds. “I’m used to this sort of thing. We have all kinds of explosions in our pictures, you know, and I’ve even been on intimate terms with a cyclone. I feel pretty safe here. Let her go.” Reynolds remained where he was, and when the explosion occurred the rock fell all around him, but fate lent a kind hand and he escaped injury.

This fearlessness would serve him well in over next decade, when he was Erich von Stroheim’s director of photography. Benjamin Franklin Reynolds was born on July 21, 1890 in Woodville, Michigan, and when Kingsley was writing about him, he was working for the Los Angeles Times-Universal Animated Weekly Newsreel. In 1917 he moved from nonfiction to fiction and went to work for another division at Universal, Bison Motion Pictures. His first movie was The Scrapper (1917), a Western short written, directed, and staring John Ford. He worked with Ford for a year and a half, then he got assigned to work with first-time director Erich von Stroheim on Blind Husbands (1919). He collaborated with von Stroheim on all of his features, including the infamously difficult Greed (1924). They spent 37 summer days filming the final sequence in Death Valley, the hottest place in North America. You can see them hauling their equipment by mule in this short newsreel.

After Greed, he married stenographer Adelaide Bader and they took a long honeymoon in Europe. They came back to Los Angeles in late 1924 and he went back to work. In between von Stroheim films, he was under contract at M.G.M. and Universal, so he shot comedies like The Waning Sex (1926, with Norma Shearer) and dramas like Freedom of the Press (1928, with Lewis Stone), but his career was still tied to the director. When the von Stroheim got fired from Queen Kelly (1929), Reynolds’ career suffered too. He shot some early sound shorts for Warner Bros., then he got a contract at the less-prestigious (at the time) Paramount Studios where he worked on Westerns and comedies, including W.C. Field’s The Old Fashioned Way (1934). His final film was It’s A Great Life (1935), an Eddie Cline-directed comedy about working for the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In July 1935 his story turned tawdry. A 21-year old bit player, Julia Graham, with whom he was having an affair, committed suicide in his house. The County Coroner cleared him of any blame, but the story was picked up in the newspapers and it ended his film career. Adelaide Reynolds didn’t leave him but they did move to a new house. He got a job as a gas station attendant, and she went to work in a studio script department.

The American Society of Cinematographers also didn’t abandon him. He’d been a member since 1917 when they were still called the Static Club, and their magazine continued to mention him in their “A.S.C. on Parade” column. His final appearance was in 1941, when he reminisced about shooting in Death Valley after Greed had a revival screening at the Academy. He died on February 14, 1948, age 57. Adelaide Reynolds remarried and moved to Anaheim, California where she died on November 1, 1991.

Anita Loos, 1917

The Little Liar

Kingsley’s most enjoyable trip to the movies this week was to a double bill of Anita Loos films. The short Laundry Liz was “the very best little gloom-chaser…a delicious travesty on the silent ‘drawma’ and the methods of its producers, and it mercilessly reveals and satirizes the weakness and faults of the business.” The feature was a tragedy, The Little Liar, about a slum girl (Mae Marsh) who uses fiction to help her cope with her grim life. Kingsley thought that Marsh did “some of the best work of her career.” They are both lost films.

It wasn’t difficult to program an Anita Loos double feature in 1916, because she had at least 18 films to her credit that year (including the intertitles for Intolerance). Now best known for the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she wrote over 100 screenplays including San Francisco (1936) and The Women (1939).

Louise Glaum, 1912

Louise Glaum, 1917

Kingsley gave “the blue ribbon for the suppression of mashers” to screen vampire Louise Glaum this week. Glaum, who was second only to Theda Bara for her exotic temptress roles, was working on the boardwalk near Venice Beach, and between scenes

a dandy of the jellyfish type approached, apparently hoping that Miss Glaum would think him a suitable subject for vamping. Miss Glaum does not, however, believe in carrying professionalism into private life. The man began to talk to her, and she thought for a moment of leading him to the police station. But it was a warm day and the police station was some distance away.

Suddenly she hit upon a new plan. She pretended she was deaf and dumb, and began to talk on her fingers. But the man persisted. Soon Miss Glaum observed Charles Ray, Howard Hickman and some of the other men from the studio standing in a group. She lead the masher directly into the crowd, and suddenly exclaimed, as though bored to death:

“Boys will you please rid me of this thing? It’s been following me for ten minutes!”

The thing turned and fled.

This happened while they were shooting The Wolf Woman, which told “the pitiful story of a siren’s fall, a fall that carried her far into the depths of depravity—but not until she had been robbed, by a cruel trick of fate, of her one potent weapon, beauty” according to Motography (August 5, 1916). Kingsley reviewed the film a week later, and said that Glaum was an entirely convincing vamp in her “spider-web gown, the most insidiously naughty gown that’s been seen on the Rialto this season,” unlike the “dames on the screen whom we know couldn’t get a rise out of a half blind and one-legged rag-and-bottle man.” It’s a lost film.

Glaum was a former stage actress who got her start in films as a comedian with Nestor Studios in 1912. She became a vamp when she signed with the Ince Company in 1915. Her film career lasted until the early 20’s and she returned to live theater.

 

Note: There’s a blog post about Julia Graham at The Unsung Joe, however, some of the information in it about Ben Reynolds is inaccurate so I can’t vouch for the rest of it.

Week of September 2nd, 1916

One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley reported some very good news for film workers who are always looking for their next job: Samuel Goldfish, chairman of Famous Players-Lasky, intended to move production to Hollywood. He had been visiting Los Angeles for four weeks, and just before he left for New York he issued a press release:

…we are convinced that Los Angeles is the ideal motion picture producing center. Heretofore most of the Famous Players pictures have been made in New York; in the future the majority of the Famous Players-Lasky pictures will be produced here. …We shall practically have to double our force of employees at the Lasky studio to handle the increase in producing directors. As soon as possible we will erect new office buildings and stages. The increased output will practically triple our expenditures.

Unfortunately for all of those cameramen and production managers, this didn’t happen the way he planned. When Goldfish returned to New York, his boss Jesse Lasky asked him to resign (another executive, Adolf Zucker, had engineered his removal), so he did, effective September 14^th. Goldfish quickly got back into the business; he announced the incorporation of his new company in early December. He joined Edgar Selwyn to form the Goldwyn Company, changed his last name to match the company and went on to the sort of career that 510 page (plus notes) biographies are written about. He did move his production headquarters to Los Angeles in 1918.

The Honorable Friend

Kingsley was impressed by the novelty of The Honorable Friend this week. Unusual because it featured only Japanese characters (the one Caucasian actor was in yellow face), it was “frankly melodramatic, but melodrama beautifully and naturally done. The Japanese atmosphere and tradition are so cunningly intermingled that it seems a very great drama.” It seems that unfamiliarly raised the film’s quality for her, because she wasn’t kidding about the melodrama: the story involves a handsome gardener, an innocent young woman, an unscrupulous rich man, kidnapping, murder, revenge and self-sacrificing false confessions. It’s a lost film, which is a shame because it was one of the few American films in which Sessue Hayakawa got to play an ordinary man and a hero, not a villain or exotic, forbidden lover.

Tsuru Aoki, Sessue Hayakawa and Shoki

Kingsley admired the actors; Hayakawa was “subtle and admirable” and Tsuru Aoki “played the decorous but fiery-hearted little Japanese woman to perfection.” Hayakawa went on to a very long career in America, Europe and Japan that included an Oscar nomination for his part in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). His wife Aoki often co-stared with him until 1924 when she retired from acting to raise their three children.

Adele Frede/Valda Valkyrien/Baroness Dewitz

 

Kingsley was fairly appalled by the hackneyed themes of another release this week, The Unwelcome Mother, but she noted the “rare and distinctive beauty” of its “new and fascinating screen personality,” Valkyrien. It was her first film for Fox, and she was being heavily promoted. Photoplay went completely nuts with their description of her:

Behold a Danish girl, Valkyrien, whose yellow, gold-tipped hair reaches to her knees; her eyes are the deep blue of the Norse sea; her skin is like the young ivory faint-flushed with rose-petal pink…Her age is nineteen; in stature she is a mean between Psyche and Venus; she has the solid, rounded outline of limb and figure of the Ancients, combined with natural grace and nimbleness.

The author (wisely) didn’t sign this piffle. All of this promotion came to nothing; she had been promised top billing for The Unwelcome Mother but she didn’t get it so she sued Fox, which for the most part ended her career. Her Women Film Pioneers Project biography does a good job of debunking the nonsense written about her, but she’d still make an interesting biopic subject.