One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley noticed another trend in the movies that annoyed her: leading men weren’t getting to commit enough violence:
Where is the strong and handsome chap who used to kill the main villain and a couple of sub-villains before breakfast? We look for him in vain. It’s pretty soft for the handsome hero, these days! For all he has to do is stand around all duded up and marry the gell.
All his conflict is mental. It doesn’t disturb a wave of his marcel. You know he is suffering because the subtitles tell you so, and you see him in a close-up every few minutes staring straight ahead of him, as though he was trying to remember what it was he promised to bring home to the mater from the 5-and-10-cent store. All his courage is moral courage. He can look Nita Naldi straight in the eye-or anywhere-and let her know that he is not for such as she. Yes, he’s 100 per cent pure.
Happily for her, violence hadn’t been eliminated, it had just been shifted and supporting actors like Ernest Torrence and Lon Chaney got to be tough: “For out-and-out bravery and he-man helling, the character man is now the big biff boy. Rugged and mature he is, this cinema crime crusher.” That doesn’t seem so terrible, especially for the actor who got to have meatier parts. She said: “he seldom marries the girl; he doesn’t get rich. What does he get? Well, around $1500 a week.” So even though they didn’t get top billing, she thought they were happy enough.
While this wasn’t the full-blown crisis of masculinity trend that seems to come up every few years in pop culture, Kingsley still preferred the good old days:
Bill Hart was the come-on he-hero of the screen. Bill used to put the sin in cinema in the first three reels, and then yank the raw out of wrong in the last two. When Bill stopped shooting and began working his jaws with emotion, you always knew he was going to reform, and you went to sleep if you wanted to.
Every now and then she wrote a trend piece—the many pages of the Sunday edition didn’t fill themselves, after all. Some trends stuck around, like when she noticed actresses displaying more skin in An Epidemic of Epidermis. However, this one did not and he-man leading men were not really in danger of disappearing forever. Some of 1924’s top grossing films included Thief of Bagdad with Douglas Fairbanks and The Sea Hawk with Milton Sills; both of their characters did plenty of fighting. This kind of article is the bread-and-butter of film writing. A modern well-prepared pundit could look at Kingsley’s work for ideas when the next inevitable change comes, say when Marvel movies featuring the more muscle-bound superheroes start earning less money.
This month Kingsley included a much more rare kind of news item for her: she told how a cameraman solved a technical problem:
The blondes needn’t worry so much about the photographing of their eyes any more. A means has been discovered for turning blue eyes dark on the screen. The discovery is all in honor of Laura LaPlante, who is a great little actress, say Universal people, but whose blue eyes just couldn’t be made to behave. Jack Rose, cameraman for Robert Hill, turned the trick.
Rose attached a ray screen [filter] of delicately tinted yellowish orange hue to the lens of his camera, which produced the desired effect. Miss LaPlante’s blue eyes photographed dark and her blond hair still photographed light.”
This was a problem when photographing all blue-eyed actors, because the orthochromatic film stock they were using at the time distorted colors. Blue barely showed up at all on it. Early cinematographers found ways to work around that with filters, as Rose did, or with a large piece of black cloth that framed the lens. Invented by James Wong Howe, the black reflected off blue eyes and darkened their appearance on film.
While Jackson Rose did come up with many solutions to cinematography problems (as well as compiling the first nine editions of the American Society of Cinematographers Handbook), this wasn’t one of them. ‘Ray screens’ aka filters had been used in still and moving picture photography for many years. Still, it was nice to see his name in the paper and I think he deserves to be remembered more (of course I do, I wrote a short biography of him).
C.H. Claudy, “Orthochromatic Photography,” Better Photos, April 1913, p.75-6.
William Hood, “Ray Screens Used in Multiples,” Camera Craft, April 1917, pp. 143-149.
Richard N. Reynolds, “The Common Sense of the Ray Screen,” Amateur Photographer’s Weekly, September 13, 1912, pp. 193-4.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 