Rex Ingram Remembered
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 birth — as Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock — took place in Dublin exactly 113 years ago. (Some sources claim Ingram was born in 1892, but in Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema author Liam O’Leary clearly states that 1893 is the right date.)
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 was Novarro’s lover in the mid-1920s, columnist Herbert Howe, quite likely the wittiest writer to ever cover the Hollywood scene. The other was the handsome, talented, temperamental, independent-minded Rex Ingram, the man who discovered Ramon Novarro (then known as Ramon Samaniegos) and who helped to propel the career of the era’s top Latin Lover, Rudolph Valentino, whom Ingram directed 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 several of the most prestigious productions of the era.
Among those were The Conquering Power (1921), an effective adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet featuring Valentino; the Ruritanian adventure-romance The Prisoner of Zenda (1922), with Lewis Stone (later of Andy Hardy fame) as the Englishman abroad with a royal double; the French Revolution epic Scaramouche (1923), starring Novarro; The Arab (1924), also with Novarro, and Ingram’s answer to Valentino’s The Sheik; the exquisite spy mystery Mare Nostrum (1926), with Antonio Moreno; and the romantic melodrama The Garden of Allah (1927), with Ivan Petrovich as a monk in disguise.
Barbara La Marr, Ramon Novarro in Trifling Women
Ingram’s wife, the lovely and remarkably modern-looking (and modern-acting) Alice Terry (right), 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, 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, while Novarro remained in Los Angeles as one of the top contract players at the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn (later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). MGM was to finance and distribute Ingram’s French-made productions, which allowed the director nearly total freedom in the making of 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 filmmaker Michael Powell, who initially worked as Ingram’s assistant, referred to him as "the greatest stylist of his time," while David Lean once remarked that he was indebted to Ingram’s cinematic vision. 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, 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. 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.
Rex Ingram directing Scaramouche
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 over for the job of directing the monumental Ben-Hur, which was to be shot in Italy under Mathis’ supervision. A couple of years later, when both Mathis and her chosen director, Charles Brabin, were fired from the out-of-control project, 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.
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Tags: Alice Terry, Barbara La Marr, Classic Movies, Herbert Howe, John F. Seitz, June Mathis, Ramon Novarro, Rex Ingram, Rudolph Valentino, Silent Films, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Trifling Women
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