Rex Ingram: THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, THE MAGICIAN, THE GARDEN OF ALLAH

Rex Ingram directing Scaramouche (top); Henri Matisse, Rex Ingram (middle); Rex Ingram, the actor-director, with off-screen girlfriend Rosita Garcia in Baroud (bottom)

Rex Ingram Part I

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.

A couple of years after his falling out with June Mathis and Rudolph Valentino, Ingram was heartbroken when he was passed over for the job of directing Goldwyn Pictures' monumental Ben-Hur, which was to be shot in Italy under Mathis' supervision.

After two more years had gone by, both Mathis and her chosen director, Charles Brabin, were fired from the out-of-control project. But instead of replacing Brabin with Ingram, the top brass at Metro-Goldwyn opted for the more malleable Fred Niblo. (Ironically, Ingram's own discovery, Ramon Novarro, landed the role of Judah Ben-Hur after leading man George Walsh was also fired.)

Louis B. Mayer, the man in charge at Metro-Goldwyn, resented Ingram's wilfulness and his penchant for lengthy shooting schedules. Ingram, for his part, so despised Mayer that after the new studio became known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the director insisted his films be released only as "Metro-Goldwyn" productions. In the late 1920s, even though Ingram's efforts remained profitable, Mayer severed ties with him.

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 Ingram himself as a dashing legionnaire in North Africa and Novarro look-alike Pierre Batcheff, who would commit suicide two years after the film's release. Baroud got few bookings.

With his film career over, Ingram, who had become fascinated with Arab culture while filming The Arab in Tunisia, spent much of his time studying Islam. According to several reports, he became a Muslim in the early 1930s, though the free-thinking former director was hardly one to abide by any sort of religious dogma. (He and Terry did, however, adopt an Tunisian boy, who later became a juvenile delinquent.)

When not trying to resurrect his defunct Hollywood career, Ingram spent the last two decades of his life 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 a hospital for a series of tests, Ingram unexpectedly suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell into a coma. In a few hours, the 57-year-old former filmmaker 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 — if anything — to the filmgoing public.

The good news is that 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, The Magician, and Mare Nostrum have all been shown on Turner Classic Movies. The Arab is one of the "lost" films that have been returned to the United States by the Moscow film archives, and last week I was fortunate to catch two Ingram rarities at UCLA's Festival of Preservation, The Chalice of Sorrow (1916) and The Flower of Doom (1917).

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.

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. Watching them, one can also see how, directly or indirectly, they have influenced the works of directors as disparate as Erich von Stroheim, James Whale, David Lean, and James Ivory.

I should also note that, unlike, say, Cecil B. DeMille, who saw sex as adolescent titillation, or D.W. Griffith, for whom sex 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, delving deep into its darker recesses in the unsettling The Magician.

Those interested in learning a little more about Rex Ingram, should check out Liam O'Leary's aforementioned Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema. That said, I should add that the chief assets of 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.