Rex Ingram: Part II
Rex Ingram with off-screen girlfriend Rosita Garcia in Baroud
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 (who would commit suicide a couple of years later) 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 free-thinking former director was hardly one to follow any sort of religious dogma. (He did, however, adopt an Arab boy, who later became a juvenile delinquent.)
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.
Henri Matisse, Rex Ingram
On July 21, 1950, shortly after being admitted to a hospital for a series of tests, Rex Ingram unexpectedly suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell into a coma. In a few hours, the 57-year-old Ingram was dead. Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry (their extramarital liaisons notwithstanding, they had remained married), Mare Nostrum star Antonio Moreno, and Gilbert Roland were a few 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 obscurity, Ingram’s work has become available once again. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Conquering Power, The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, and Mare Nostrum have all been shown on Turner Classic Movies. If Ingram’s directorial style may feel 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.
Also, unlike, say, Cecil B. DeMille, who saw sex as adolescent titillation, or D. W. Griffith, for whom on-screen sexuality was either nonexistent or portrayed as a fate worse than death, Ingram (like fellow European import Erich von Stroheim) dared to treat the forbidding three-letter word for what it is, at times delving deep into the darker recesses of sexuality, most notably in his brooding The Magician (1926).
And finally, here’s hoping that TCM will unearth The Garden of Allah (above, with Terry and Ivan Petrovich), which is supposed to be 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 film’s truncated print than no print at all.
Those interested in learning a little more about Rex Ingram, should check out Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema. That said, I should add that the chief assets of Liam O’Leary’s 1980 biography are the great photographs, for O’Leary carefully skirts any subject that might upset Ingram’s memory (or that of Alice Terry, who was still living at the time and to whom the book was dedicated).
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Tags: Alice Terry, Baroud, Classic Movies, Ivan Petrovich, Liam O'Leary, Pierre Batcheff, Rex Ingram, Rosita Garcia, Silent Films, The Garden of Allah
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