Alternative Film Guide

Since it’s still Jan. 15 in large chunks of the Pacific Ocean, I have enough time to briefly mention film director Rex Ingram (top right), whose birthday took place in Dublin exactly 113 years ago.

While writing Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro, I often became more intrigued with two of the story’s top supporting players than with the biographical subject himself. One of those two was Novarro’s lover in the mid-1920s, columnist Herbert Howe, quite likely the wittiest writer to ever cover the Hollywood scene. The other supporting highlight in Novarro’s life was the independent-minded, temperamental, and quite talented Rex Ingram, the man who discovered Ramon Novarro (then still known as Ramon Samaniegos), and who helped propel the career of the era’s top Latin Lover, Rudolph Valentino, by guiding the actor in the 1921 epic love story The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Besides The Four Horsemen, which cemented Ingram’s reputation as one of the foremost Hollywood directors of the 1920s, the iconoclastic Irishman - whose background in art and sculpture was clearly discernible in his films - was also responsible for The Conquering Power (1921), based on Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, and starring Valentino; the Ruritanian adventure-romance The Prisoner of Zenda (1922); the French Revolution epic Scaramouche (1923); the Novarro vehicle The Arab (1924), which was Ingram’s answer to Valentino’s The Sheik; the exquisite spy mystery Mare Nostrum (1926); and the romantic melodrama The Garden of Allah (1927). Ingram’s wife, the lovely Alice Terry (pictured), starred in all of the aforementioned films, and in fact only missed out on one Ingram silent production after 1920, the (now lost) 1922 Gothic melodrama Trifling Women (inspired by Marie Corelli’s Vendetta), which starred Novarro, Lewis Stone (he of the Andy Hardy family), and the sultry femme fatale Barbara La Marr. Apart from Terry, Novarro was Ingram’s most frequent star, appearing in five of the director’s films. Their professional partnership ended after The Arab, when Ingram moved his production setup to the South of France. (An agreement with the newly formed MGM guaranteed financing and distribution for his films.)

Though largely forgotten today, Ingram’s work was so influential that it inspired Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu to pursue a film career. British director Michael Powell, who initially worked as Ingram’s assistant, referred to him as "the greatest stylist of his time." David Lean once remarked that he was indebted to Ingram’s cinematic vision. And in the 1950s, when MGM head Dore Schary was asked to name the top creative people in the early days of film, his choices were D. W. Griffith, Rex Ingram, Cecil B. DeMille, and Erich von Stroheim - in that order. Even Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. may owe its Gothic feel and some of its plot elements to Ingram’s Trifling Women (pictured below). In addition to sharing the same cinematographer, John F. Seitz, both films feature a tragic, dark-haired femme fatale, and an ape who plays a crucial part in the storyline.

In Beyond Paradise, I wrote that “Ingram’s unquestionable talent was matched only by his arrogance, fiery temperament, and lack of respect for authority.” Indeed, those qualities were his undoing. During the making of The Conquering Power he fought with both Valentino and the powerful writer-producer June Mathis. A couple of years later, Ingram was heartbroken when he was passed up for the job of directing the monumental Ben-Hur - which was being produced under Mathis’ supervision - by Charles Brabin, who was later fired (and so was Mathis) and replaced - not by Ingram, but by the more malleable Fred Niblo. (Ironically, Ingram’s discovery Ramon Novarro landed the title role after star George Walsh was also fired.)

Louis B. Mayer, the man in charge of the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, resented Ingram’s wilfulness and his penchant for lengthy shooting schedules. Ingram, for his part, so despised Mayer that he insisted his films be released as “Metro-Goldwyn” productions. In the late 1920s, even though the director’s films were still making money for the studio, Mayer severed ties with Ingram. Without MGM’s financial and distribution support, Ingram managed to direct only two more films, The Three Passions (1928), released in the U.S. via United Artists, and his only talkie, the somewhat amateurish adventure tale Baroud (1931), starring Novarro look-alike Pierre Batcheff and Ingram himself as a dashing legionnaire in North Africa. Baroud got few bookings.

With his film career over, Ingram spent much of his time reading and studying Islam. (He had become fascinated with Arab culture while filming The Arab in Tunisia in the mid-1920s.) According to several reports, he became a Muslim in the early 1930s, though the former director was hardly one to follow any sort of religious dogma.

When not trying to resurrect his defunct Hollywood career, Ingram spent the next two decades traveling extensively throughout the world. Despite having suffered two heart attacks during a 1948 trip to North Africa, he kept on traveling until his deteriorating health, worsened by a bout of malaria in Mexico, finally forced him to settle down in the Los Angeles suburb of Studio City.

On July 21, 1950, shortly after being admitted to the Park View Hospital for a series of tests and X-rays, the fifty-seven-year-old former director unexpectedly suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell into a coma. In a few hours, Ingram was dead. Novarro, Alice Terry (they had remained married in spite of their extramarital liaisons), Mare Nostrum star Antonio Moreno, and Gilbert Roland were some of those present at the July 26 funeral service at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. By that time, the name Rex Ingram meant little - or nothing - to the filmgoing public.

After decades of neglect, Ingram’s work is once again available. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Conquering Power, Scaramouche, and Mare Nostrum have all been broadcast on Turner Classic Movies. Whenever they’re on again, make sure to check them out. If Ingram’s style may seem a bit too static by today’s rollercoaster-paced standards, it’s no exaggeration to say that overall those films remain as impressive - and certainly as visually stunning - as when they were first released more than 80 years ago.

(And here’s hoping that TCM will unearth from their vaults The Garden of Allah, reportedly a beautifully photographed film. The Arab would also be quite a gift to TCM’s viewers, though the film apparently exists only in truncated form in the Prague and Moscow film archives. Yet, it’s better to watch a truncated print than no print at all.)

Note: Irish film writer Liam O’Leary wrote a 1980 biography, Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema, that is worth having mostly because of the great photographs. O’Leary’s text is a little too fawning, as he carefully skirts anything that might upset Ingram’s memory.

Ramon Novarro’s Lloyd Wright Home For Sale
The Red Lily with Ramon Novarro on TCM
Janet Gaynor Centennial

Obit: Shelley Winters

Hollywood Foreign Press Association 2005 Golden Globe Award nominations

 

Add Alternative Film Guide to:        blinkbits BlinkList Bloglines blogmarks co.mments connotea del.icio.us De.lirio.us digg Fark FeedLounge feedmelinks Furl GoogleReader Kinja LinkaGoGo Ma.gnolia MyAOL MyMSN MyYahoo NetVibes NewsAlloy NewsBurst NewsGator NewsVine Netvouz Pluck RawSugar Reddit Rojo scuttle Shadows SimplyHeadlines Simpy Smarking Spurl TailRank Technorati Wists YahooMyWeb

 

Trackback URI | Comments RSS