Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture The Silent Era by Sumiko Higashi Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era by Sumiko Higashi. Film Director, Film/TV Producer (12-Aug-1881 — 21-Jan-1959) SUBJECT OF BOOKS. Robert S. Birchard . Cecil B. DeMille's . University Press of Kentucky. 2004 . 416pp. Cecil B. DeMille . The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1959 . 465pp. Anne Edwards . The DeMilles: An American Family . London: Collins. 1988 . 248pp. Gabe Essoe; Raymond Lee . DeMille: The Man and His Pictures . New York: Castle Books. 1970 . 319pp. Scott Eyman . Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille . Simon and Schuster. 2010 . 592pp. Sumiko Higashi . Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era . University of California Press. 1994 . 264pp. Charles Higham . Cecil B. DeMille: A Biography of the Most Successful Film Maker of Them All . New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1973 . 335pp. Phil A. Koury . Yes, Mr. DeMille . New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1959 . 319pp. Simon Louvish . Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf . London: Faber and Faber. 2007 . 507pp. Simon Louvish . Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art . New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. 2007 . 507pp. Michel Mourlet; Michel Marmin . Cecil B. DeMille . Paris: Seghers. 1968 . 192pp. Hortense Myers; Ruth Burnett . Cecil B. DeMille, Young Dramatist . Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1963 . 200pp. Katherine Orrison . Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille's Epic, The Ten Commandments . Lanham, MD: Vestal Press. 1999 . 196pp. Gene Ringgold; DeWitt Bodeen . The Films of Cecil B. DeMille . New York: Citadel Press. 1969 . 377pp. Paolo Cherchi Usai; Lorenzo Codelli . The DeMille Legacy . Rome: Edizione Biblioteca dell'Immagine. 1991 . 589pp. AUTHORITIES. Below are references indicating presence of this name in another database or other reference material. Most of the sources listed are encyclopedic in nature but might be limited to a specific field, such as musicians or film directors. A lack of listings here does not indicate unimportance -- we are nowhere near finished with this portion of the project -- though if many are shown it does indicate a wide recognition of this individual. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS at WOMEN and the SILENT SCREEN VIII. Sumiko Higashi is professor emerita in the Department of History, SUNY Brockport. She is the author of Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers: The American Heroine (1978) and Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era (1994), as well as numerous essays on women in film and television, film as historical representation, and film history as cultural history. She addresses fan magazine culture for crossover readers in her last book, Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay (2014). KATHY PEISS. Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in modern American cultural history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (1986), H ope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (1998), and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (2011). VANESSA TOULMIN. Vanessa Toulmin is Director of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield and Chair in Early Film and Popular Entertainment. Her work has appeared in internationally recognized journals where she has published articles on early film, Edwardian and Victorian entertainments and popular culture, the history of freak shows, carnivals and British fairgrounds, and the culture and society of travelling showpeople. Toulmin is the author of several books, including The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (2004), Electric Edwardians: The Film of Mitchell and Kenyon (2007), and Pleasurelands: All the Fun of the Fair (2003). Her recent publications include four major works on the architecture and history of Blackpool’s attractions: Winter Gardens Blackpool: The Most Magnificent Palace of Amusement in the World (2009), Blackpool Tower: Wonderland of the World (2011), Blackpool Pleasure Beach: More than Just an Amusement Park (2011), and the Blackpool Illuminations: The Greatest Free Show on Earth (2012). She has also acted as historical consultant for seven major television productions since 2000, including the Mitchell & Kenyon series on BBC 2 and has co-produced five major radio programs with BBC Radio 4 on popular entertainment, history of fairs and early cinema. She recently worked with BBC 4 Timeshift producing two programs on the history of fairs and circuses and has also appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? and Reel History of Britain with Melvyn Bragg. with SPE CIAL GUEST of WSS VIII: SHELLEY STAMP. Shelley Stamp is the author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (2015) and Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (2000), as well as articles and book chapters on early cinema, censorship and feminist historiography. She is founding editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal and co-editor of two collections: American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (with Charlie Keil) and a special issue of Film History on “Women and the Silent Screen” (with Amelie Hastie). Her expert commentary has been featured on several DVD releases and she has served as a consultant for organizations including the National Film Preservation Foundation, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and the US cable networks Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, she has been a visiting scholar at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Queen’s University in Canada, and the Hildegard Festival of Women in the Arts. She is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she holds the Pavel Machotka Chair in Creative Studies. Cecil B. De Mille Biography. Cecil Blount DeMille was born on August 12, 1881, in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the second of Henry Churchill de Mille and Beatrice Samuel DeMille 's three children. His father wrote several successful plays with David Belasco (1853–1931), a famous writer of that time. Actors and actresses often came to the DeMille house to rehearse scenes. When DeMille was twelve, his father died; his mother made money by turning their home into a school for girls. Cecil attended Pennsylvania Military College and studied acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, New York. After graduation he worked as an actor for ten years. He married Constance Adams, an actress, in 1902. They had one child and adopted three more. The man who founded Hollywood. When DeMille was almost thirty, he met Jesse L. Lasky, who was trying to break into motion picture production. DeMille was thinking of leaving show business altogether, but Lasky convinced him to try directing a film. After spending a day at Thomas Edison's (1847–1931) studios in New York City, DeMille left for Arizona to shoot The Squaw Man, a drama based on a Broadway play that was set in Wyoming. When things did not work out in Arizona, DeMille got back on the train and headed to Los Angeles, California. When DeMille arrived in California in 1913, he decided to stay, realizing it was perfect for motion picture making. The sunny weather enabled crews to shoot without having to set up lights, saving time and money. DeMille created the popular image of the big-shot movie director by dressing in an open-necked shirt, riding pants, and boots and by carrying a large megaphone (a cone-shaped device to increase the loudness of the voice) and a whistle around his neck. With the success of The Squaw Man, DeMille had found the perfect location to make movies, he had developed the fashion style that would come to be associated with movie-making, and he had proved he could direct successfully. By 1914 Lasky had moved his entire operation to California and set up a huge studio. Produced first epics. In 1917 DeMille made his first epic (a work that is larger than usual in size or scope), , the story of Joan of Arc (1412–1431), a saint of the Catholic Church. It was one of the longest pictures made up until that time and was not successful. Over the next few years several of DeMille's films were flops, including , a film that meant a lot to him. DeMille began to concentrate on pleasing audiences with comedies such as We Can't Have Everything and Don't Change Your Husband, which contained both sexual and moral messages. Critics scoffed at these films, but they made money. DeMille also helped to set up the Hays Office, which cracked down on films containing sexual or immoral (socially wrong) content. DeMille worried that if Hollywood did not police itself, Congress would. In 1923 DeMille decided to make another epic. The first version of The Ten Commandments was the most expensive movie made up to that time. In the end, though, it was a blockbuster, making its huge budget back several times over. DeMille continued making expensive epics, including King of Kings (1927). His first sound movie was Dynamite, which did well; a musical, Madame Satan, did not. The Crusades, another one of his epics, was the largest failure in Hollywood history up to that time. End of his career. After World War II (1939–45; a war fought between the Axis Powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allied Powers—England, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States), DeMille made Samson and Delilah, which was criticized for its poor special effects and scenes of heavy- breathing sexuality. In 1950 DeMille returned to acting, playing himself in Sunset Boulevard. In 1952 DeMille made The Greatest Show on Earth, a film often considered to be the closest thing to the story of his own life that he ever made. It was the first film he made that won an Oscar. Cecil B. DeMille's final film, another version of The Ten Commandments , is his most widely seen work, thanks to Easter-time television programming, but it is not one of his most respected. Still, it was a huge success at the box office. DeMille suffered a heart attack while shooting The Ten Commandments, but he refused to slow down. Soon after, in 1959, he had another heart attack, which led to his death. For More Information. Bogdanovich, Peter. "The Cowboy Hero and the American West as Directed by John Ford." Fifty Who Made the Difference. Edited by Lee Eisenberg. New York: Villard Books, 1984. DeMille, Cecil B. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. Edited by Donald Hayne. New York: Garland, 1985. Edwards, Anne. The DeMilles: An American Family. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990. Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. The Cursed, Buried City That May Never See The Light of Day. It was the biggest set ever built for a Hollywood film in the 1920s, and then it was buried in the sands of the California Coast. The real story begins when a young filmmaker embarks on a decades-long attempt to excavate it. Thirty-three years ago, Peter Brosnan heard a story that seemed too crazy to be true: buried somewhere along California’s rugged Central Coast, beneath acres of sand dunes, lay the remains of a lost city. According to his friend at New York University’s film school, the remains of a massive Egyptian temple, a dozen plaster sphinxes, eight mammoth lions, and four 40-ton statues of Ramses II were all supposedly entombed in the sands 150 some-odd miles north of Los Angeles. “It was an absolutely cockamamie story,” Brosnan says. “I thought he was nuts.” The ruins weren’t authentic Egyptian ones, of course. They were the 60-year-old remains of a massive Hollywood set—the biggest, most expensive one ever built at the time. The faux Egyptian scenery had played the role of the City of the Pharaoh in one of Hollywood’s first true epics, Cecil B DeMille’s 1923 film The Ten Commandments . The set had required more than 1,500 carpenters to build and used over 25,000 pounds of nails. The production nearly ruined DeMille and his studio. When the shoot wrapped, the tempestuous director supposedly strapped dynamite to the structures and razed the whole set, burying it in the sands near Guadalupe, California, to ensure no rival director could benefit from his vision. “If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe,” the director teased, “I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization…extended all the way to the Pacific Coast.” Bullshit, Brosnan thought. But then his buddy pointed him to a line in DeMille’s posthumously published autobiography. “If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe,” the director teased, “I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization…extended all the way to the Pacific Coast.” By 1982, Brosnan had graduated from film school and was earning a living as a freelance journalist, but he couldn't shake his friend's story. The film student in him was enchanted by the idea of uncovering and preserving a forgotten bit of Hollywood’s history. That summer, Brosnan and his friend drove across the country, from New York City to a stretch of coast near Santa Barbara, to see the ruins for themselves. The whole affair, he thought, would make for a hell of a documentary. “We were young, wannabe filmmakers, and I thought this was golden,” Brosnan says today. “We’ll find some archeologists, we’ll find the set, we’ll dig it up. The story writes itself.” The City of the Pharaoh was not so much a movie set as it was a monument to the man who built it. DeMille was already a towering star in the early days of Hollywood, but in 1922 he was recovering from a streak of critical flops. He had gained a reputation for his sense of spectacle in films like Joan the Woman and , and The Ten Commandments was to be his comeback. Delivering DeMille’s blockbuster meant deploying a barrage of special effects, at least by the standards of the day. In 1923, set design was the only way to visually transport viewers to the Sinai in the time of Moses. The “desert” DeMille chose for his Israelites to wander, while certainly more convenient than filming on location in Egypt, presented a logistical nightmare. There were no nearby cities, no paved roads, and no place for his cast of thousands to stay. The 22,000 acres of sand dunes that separated the small farming town of Guadalupe from the Pacific Ocean was harsh and desolate. The sharp-grained sand that gives the wind there its added sting is devoid of nutrients, and, combined with constant salt sprays from the sea, makes life a rarity in the dunes. For DeMille, it was perfect. The sphinx on set in 1923. ( Photo: Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center) “Your skin will be cooked raw,” DeMille told his army of 3,500 actors and extras, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter on the scene. “You will miss the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history. I expect of you your supreme efforts.” The costs were mounting even before DeMille arrived in Guadalupe to begin shooting. Preproduction expenses were already approaching $700,000—an astronomical sum in the early days of Hollywood. More than a million pounds of statuary, concrete, and plaster were used to construct the 120-foot-tall, 800-foot-long temple and surrounding structures, and whole plaster sphinxes were sculpted and loaded onto trucks bound for the dunes. Every day on location meant feeding and housing the thousands of workers and animals. DeMille drove his construction team to work faster. Paramount Studios, the film’s backer, began sending DeMille increasingly desperate letters demanding that he cut costs. One receipt, for $3,000 spent on a “magnificent team of horses” for the pharaoh, pushed the studio over the edge, according to Sumiko Higashi, a professor emeritus at The College at Brockport, SUNY, and author of Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: the Silent Era , a biography of DeMille. “You have lost your mind,” telegraphed Adolph Zukor, founder of . “Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once.” DeMille refused. He took out a personal loan and waived his guaranteed percentage of the movie’s gross to ensure the production continued. “I cannot and will not make pictures with a yardstick,” he wired back to the studio. “What do they want me to do?” he was rumored to have said, according to Higashi. “Stop now and release it as The Five Commandments ?” Despite the warnings, DeMille pushed on. Bugles sounded every morning to 4:30 a.m. to wake the 5,000 workers and actors that populated the 24-square-mile tent city he’d built in the dunes. (It earned the nickname the City of DeMille.) His workers raised the 109-foot-tall Great Gate—an archway covered in intricate busts of rearing stallions—and buttressed it with two 35-foot-tall clay-and-plaster statues of the Pharaoh. They erected a “city wall”—built 750 feet long because DeMille refused to work with painted backgrounds or limit his cinematic choices. Five mammoth sphinxes, weighing over five tons each, lined the entrance to the ersatz Egyptian city. Filming was done at a madcap pace and condensed into a mere three weeks, according to Scott Eyman’s biography, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille . But even with the Exodus in the can, one more problem loomed. According to a prior agreement with the landowners, DeMille’s monumental set had to be dismantled before he left. Production costs had already ballooned to over $1.4 million, more than any other film previously made. DeMille considered reneging on the deal, Brosnan says, but likely worried about another issue: If he left is city standing, rival directors from other studios could easily swoop into Guadalupe and produce an epic on the cheap. DeMille would not have that. Rather than pay workers to take the set down, he settled on a faster method. Dynamite was supposedly strapped to the great temple he had built, and the City of the Pharaoh was brought down. According to legend, he ordered bulldozers to mound sand over the scattered remains and quickly left town. Sixty years later, in 1983, Brosnan arrived at the dunes like the Children of Israel before him—completely lost. He knew the set was buried somewhere, but the dunes stretched nearly 30 miles, across two counties. Looking for clues, he called the Air Force base that occupied much of the coastline. (“Sir,” he says the sergeant on the other end of the line told him, “There is no Egyptian city buried at Vandenberg Air Force Base.”) He haunted local libraries. He hounded municipal politicians. No one could provide hints about the set’s exact location. Then he stumbled upon an old ranch hand at a local tavern who had run cattle through the dunes for decades. On a cold and dark morning, after a savage storm had rearranged the topography of the dunes, Brosnan and the rancher hiked the sea of hundred-foot-high peaks, making their way a mile toward the pounding surf of the Pacific. Eventually they spied what locals called “the dune that never moves"—the sandy tomb that covered DeMille’s set—and saw a chunk of Plaster of Paris statuary poking through. The sphinx before excavation. ( Photo: Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center) The discovery made headlines around the world and Brosnan fielded calls from The New York Times , NBC Nightly News , and People magazine. His documentary idea, which had seemed pie-in-the-sky a few months earlier, looked promising. And his pitch—that the lost city is the oldest existing Hollywood set left; that props from more modern shoots have already been preserved for posterity; that early set design was, in a sense, an American art form—struck a chord in the industry. Brosnan tentatively called his documentary project The Lost City. Charlton Heston, star of DeMille’s 1956 remake of the film, publicly wished the project well, and local archaeologists volunteered their time to help in the excavation. A curator at the Smithsonian expressed interest in acquiring some pieces, once the dig wrapped. Promises for funding came in from Paramount Pictures and Bank of America. Brosnan moved to Hollywood with the intention of pursuing a career in the ‘biz. But first, he had to start digging. “This will be a scientific exploration by highly trained personnel,” said a Cambridge-educated archaeologist who signed on in 1983. “Not a case of simply digging up stuff like potatoes. And if we're serious about documenting movie history, then let's do it properly.” Excavating the City of the Pharaoh. ( Photo: Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center) The excavation and documentary progressed, but Brosnan constantly faced two problems: funding and permitting. When he had the money, the county wouldn’t let him touch the environmentally sensitive area. (The western snowy plover, a federally protected species that nests along california’s coast, keeps the dunes off limits to people for half the year during breeding season.) By the time he got permission to dig, seven years later, funding had dried up. In 1990, several organizations, including the Smithsonian and the DeMille Family Trust, agreed to partially fund the project, and Brosnan and an archeologist used ground-penetrating radar to show that much of the set remained intact. But he couldn’t raise enough money to excavate the actual ruins. He needed $175,000 for an archeological dig to recover 60-year-old fake relics. “We don't see this as a fake Egypt,” Brosnan told a reporter at the time. “We see this as real cinema history.” But by the mid-1990s, Brosnan had been scraping by in the movie business for a decade, writing scripts and directing small projects. Lacking the money, he gave up the dig. That DeMille’s ruins have survived intact to this day, albeit buried in the sands, is a quirk of geography. The dunes, which cover some 35 square miles of the coast here, formed about 15,000 years ago, according to Doug Jenzen, executive director of the non-profit Dunes Center in Guadalupe. Jenzen and his team run a small museum out of a craftsman on the town’s main (and only) drag and head up conservation efforts for the Dunes preserve. It’s a charming little museum that seems out of place among the shuttered movie theater and boarded up buildings of Guadalupe, but the Dunes and DeMille are the only source of tourism dollars in this largely agricultural area, Jenzen says. Thousands of years ago, rivers swept mineral-dense rocks and boulders from the nearby coastal range down to the sea, eventually pummeling the earth into fine grain sand. “One of the reasons the movie set is preserved so well is because of the minerals in the sand,” Jenzen says. “You know how when you order something mail order and it comes with the silica packets? The sand actually acted as a natural desiccant that preserved the plaster for the statues.” For 15 years, the ruins were left undisturbed. Every few years a reporter or a researcher would call and Brosnan would humor him or her with details of his odyssey in the dunes. Each time, he hoped the new round of publicity would inject dollars into the effort, but nothing ever came through. In October 2014, archeologists preserve decaying remains from wind-blown sand at Guadalupe Dunes. ( Photo: AP) In 2010, though, after the Los Angeles Times ran yet another piece on his unfinished dig, a woman—who wishes to remain anonymous— contacted Brosnan and offered to put up the money needed to finish the film. But by then he was married with children and had been away from the project for two decades. “My first response was a moment of panic,” Brosnan says. “There’s no way I could do this.” But Brosnan hired a producer and an editor, and last fall, with the help of a Santa Barbara County grant, a team of archeologists excavated most of a sphinx. Brosnan was on hand to film it. “We had always wanted to end with a shot of the sphinx being found. And we got it,” he says. Using his early footage shot in the 1980s, Brosnan has pulled together a rough cut and has an editor working on a final draft. He says he’s looking for distributors and considering the film festival circuit soon. In the Dune Center, Jenzen and his team display parts of one of the large plaster sphinxes and smaller relics that have been successfully pulled from the sand. “All of the statues were made of plaster,” he says. “They were built to last two months—92 years ago. I don’t think this could have happened anywhere else on earth.” However, Jenzen says the ruins may not survive another 92 years. Powerful storms in the last few years have shifted the sands of the dunes dramatically—more of the set is now exposed to the elements than ever before. The Dunes Center needs $100,000 to unearth another sphinx to add it to the display, Jenzen says, before it’s too late. “It’s disappearing so fast,” he says, “Archeologists originally thought it’d last until 2090—but every time we go out, more is gone.” Cecil B. DeMille in 1915: Hot Sands, Hotter Love, Tenements and Wild Geese. Last time, we learned that Cecil B. DeMille started 1915 with a shaky mix of established stage stars, popular plays and his own original material. We ended with The Captive , an original story created by DeMille and his collaborator . The tale was likely designed to get one more use out of the Montenegrin costumes left over from but it proved to be a popular film in its own right. For his next release, DeMille returned to the safety of his brother’s writing. The Wild Goose Chase. U.S. Premier Date: May 27. William deMille’s play is a story of arranged marriages, young love and the theater. Two elderly French friends wish their American grandchildren to marry but both boy and girl object to this and separately join the same theatrical troupe. Of course, the wayward pair falls in love, both unaware of the other’s true identity. Broadway comedienne Ina Claire plays the girl and plays the boy. Ina spent much of her career on the stage (her most famous movie role is probably Swana from Ninotchka ), making just one more motion picture in 1915. For those of you keeping track, Ina was the third Mrs. John Gilbert and he was the second Mr. Ina Claire. Forman moved from acting to directing features in the 1920’s (he directed in Shadows ) but his career was cut short when he committed suicide in 1926. (Rumors that Forman killed himself because he was not okayed for sound are quite unfounded. In the first place, he was a director. In the second place, he killed himself a full year before the talkie revolution.) All in all, this sounds like a very cute little light comedy. It has a similar plot to the 1926 Charley Chase comedy Crazy Like a Fox , which I enjoyed immensely. However, the film does not seem to have been an enormous success as it was dropped from the Paramount advertising lineup almost immediately. What did we learn about 1915? Generational conflict and Old World vs. New World manners were considered ripe topics for comedy. Broadway stars were still trying to make their mark on the silent screen, though precious few succeeded. Survival Status: Missing and presumed lost. Check with your wealthy French grandfathers. The Arab. U.S. Premier Date: June 14. You just knew we would have to have one of these sooner or later, didn’t you? Hot Love on the Desert Sands was popular even before The Sheik made it a phenomenon. In this case, Jamil is an Arab prince whose horse has been sold by his father as punishment for his naughty ways. Determined to get it back, Jamil tracks the horse to its new owner, an American missionary named Mary. Horse thieving and the expected romance ensue. However, since this is 1915, Mary and Jamil cannot stay together and part at the end. (Most Sheik films handled the matter of interracial marriage by making their denizens of the Middle East Europeans in disguise. In fact, if Hollywood is to be believed, Northern Africa and the Middle East were populated, not by Syrians, Persians, Moroccans or Egyptians, but by French, Spanish and English nobility who just got mislaid on their way to the safari.) The scenery was praised but the scenario was described as ending with a whimper rather than a bang. Edgar Selwyn, who wrote the play upon which the film was based, was praised for his performance as the hot-headed Jamil. (Samuel Goldfish partnered with Selwyn and his brother to form a company dubbed “Goldwyn.” Goldwyn later became the “G” in MGM and Mr. Goldfish took the surname as his own.) Gertrude Robinson (a Biograph veteran) is Mary the little missionary. The Arab was remade in 1924 with Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry in the leads and directed by Rex Ingram. Thought lost for decades, this version was rediscovered in Russia and is now held by the Library of Congress. The last remake was the sleazy 1933 bodice-ripper, The Barbarian . It starred Ramon Novarro (again!) and a very annoyed-looking Myrna Loy. Miss Loy was obliged to bathe wearing strategic rose petals and a smile. Mr. Novarro was obliged to smolder and act the beautiful brute. It’s quite dreadful. What did we learn about 1915? The sheik film genre was around considerably earlier than most people realize. The issue of interracial marriage was often brought up in films but usually sidestepped with narrative tricks. Survival Status: Missing and presumed lost. All prints were likely destroyed to avoid competition with the Rex Ingram version, which was common practice when films were remade in the silent era. Check with your friendly local Russian archive! . U.S. Premier Date: June 28. Another film, another vehicle to introduce a stage star to motion pictures. This time it was Victor Moore, noted for playing good-natured roughnecks. Moore had one film under his belt, Snobs , and Chimmie Fadden was ideally suited to his talents. What makes him significant is that he managed to stay in the movies, getting steady work in character parts until a few years before his death. (His last part was a small role in The Seven Year Itch ) Chimmie Fadden started as a series of newspaper sketches. These were turned into a book, which was then turned into a play. (You can read E.W. Towsend’s Chimmie stories freely online as they are in the public domain.) They concerned the adventures of Chimmie, an Irish-American tough with a heart of gold. In the film, Chimmie rescues a rich do-gooder from a Bowery masher and is engaged as a footman in her house. However, Chimmie’s brother has conspired with another servant to relieve the rich lady of her silver. Chimmie must save his brother– and himself when he is accused of the robbery! DeMille and Moore made sure that Chimmie was funny but not slapstick. You may not realize it from the inept comic relief in his later films but DeMille was actually quite adept at directing humorous scenes. He demonstrated this forte again and again in his marital comedies of the ‘teens and twenties. Chimmie Fadden received excellent reviews, with Moore in particular receiving praise for his funny and touching performance. In her book Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era , film historian Sumiko Higashi writes that the Chimmie Fadden film “functions as sentimental melodrama in that romance mitigates social tensions.” This theme would be introduced again in DeMille’s 1926 Russian Revolution romance, The Volga Boatman . (In that film, DeMille seems to suggest that the whole revolution could have been halted if both sides had just been more open to inter-class dating.) In addition to Moore, DeMille regular is on hand to play the brother. Hatton’s movie career spanned an astonishing 58 years starting in 1909. His final role was a bit part in the 1967 film In Cold Blood . What did we learn about 1915? DeMille could direct comedy when he wanted to. It was possible for stage stars to make a successful jump to the screen if they had the right character. The lovable tough was just as popular then as it is today. Survival Status: Missing and presumed lost. Look in the attic of your tenement flat. Kindling. U.S. Premier Date: July 12. Social films were stylish in the ‘teens and DeMille never met a trend he couldn’t latch onto. Social topics included drug addiction, labor laws, the plight of immigrants, prostitution, interracial marriage, single mothers, abortion, birth control… It seems that nothing was taboo. For his stab at the genre, DeMille again concerned himself with poverty and tenement dwellers. Unlike Chimmie Fadden , however, this film is quite serious. It is the tale of an impoverished husband and wife. They have agreed not to have children because they are too poor to give a child a decent life. The wife finds herself pregnant but keeps it from her husband. Desperate to raise money to move out of the slums, she becomes involved with a ring of thieves. This was the first time that DeMille worked with as his leading man. Meighan would go on to star in two of DeMille’s biggest successes, Male and Female and Why Change Your Wife? However, DeMille found Meighan to be difficult and preferred the talents of Elliott Dexter. Contemporary critics praised Charlotte Walker’s acting but most modern reviews have described her performance as simpering and hammy. Meighan, on the other hand, is praised for his restraint. What did we learn about 1915? Even glitzy DeMille was not adverse to dipping his toe into the social film genre and, by all accounts, he acquits himself quite credibly. Survival Status: A print exists in the George Eastman House. The title has not been released on home video. DeMille made five more films in 1915. Three of them are considered classics, one is still in the vaults and the fifth is missing and presumed lost. Next time, we will look at Carmen , and Cinderella + Burglars. Like what you’re reading? Please consider sponsoring me on Patreon. All patrons will get early previews of upcoming features, exclusive polls and other goodies. Disclosure: Some links included in this post may be affiliate links to products sold by Amazon and as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.