Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:27 am
Well, it's a quiet day so I thought I'd repost an essay from a few years ago (now with photos!) and see if anyone takes it and runs with it.
Judging Rex Ingram
Years ago, when one of my standard film books (useful because it's so unsentimental) was David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, Rex Ingram's place in film history was established-- as one of the blank spots on the map. He was the movie equivalent of the elephant's graveyard, riches likely to exist there-- if anyone could find it. None of Ingram's films was in the standard repertory of silents distributed in 16mm by the likes of Killiam or MOMA (I think Films Inc. had only The Magician). Yet we knew his reputation in his own time was extremely high, validated by the likes of Stroheim and Michael Powell (and by his own walking away from the movies to go paint rather than be an MGM errand boy). So we had to assume that he was a talent of the first rank, if only we could see the films to prove it.
Slowly that situation has changed, and by now I've seen at least five Ingram titles (or more, depending on how seriously you want to take the idea that he, more than the young Raoul Walsh, was the real hand behind Regeneration, or that anything significant of his survives in Ben-Hur). In any case, I've seen The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, Mare Nostrum and The Magician, five works from his mature period whose characteristics are consistent enough to make it possible for me to judge Ingram's real place and how he relates to the other talents of his time.
Usually Ingram is talked about in terms of visuals-- which gives the wrong idea about his work, I think. A typical silent director of the time who is noted for visuals, for instance, is Maurice Tourneur-- his work dotted with chiaroscuro shots, painterly images of silhouetted characters, and occasional moments of quite remarkable formal innovation such as the robbery scene in Alias Jimmy Valentine which is shot as if it were a diagram of the robbery, from overhead with the roof removed showing several rooms at once.
Ingram isn't like that at all-- if there's one virtue I would grant him above any others, it's that he is, at this early date, a "visual" director who seems to owe very little to painting, who doesn't just make nice stills but instead makes active, visually interesting scenes. Partly an Ingram film is distinguished by an unusually high quality of set design-- they look sumptuous, lavish not in a money-thrown-around way, like one of DeMille's tales of the absurdly rich, but by just looking harmoniously designed and sturdily built, believably real in a way few movie sets are. Lavishness in and of itself is not one of the cardinal cinema virtues, it's the province of a Jean Negulesco rather than a Jean Renoir, but it must be admitted that there's something very satisfying about the realness, the depth of Ingram's settings, as you watch one of his movies.
But that's not Ingram's main visual distinction as a director-- it's the way he handles movement within the frame. There's a moment in Scaramouche where Ramon Novarro swaggers back into the Assembly, having just one-upped the bad guys. Ingram instinctively senses that if Novarro is filmed entering the room from a stationary setup, he will be a distant, diminished figure. Instead, he tracks with him as he enters the room, so that Novarro dominates the frame and our sense of the room's reaction comes from his swagger. Obvious enough if the year is 1990 and you're making Goodfellas; Scorsese films in particular are full of this kind of projection of the character's psyche onto the camerawork. But it's rare, to the point of near-uniqueness, in 1923, I believe. If there aren't many other moments exactly like that, you can at least say that throughout the movie's crowd and action scenes, there is visual dynamism in the acting and direction that makes them more alive and intense than is typical of comparable spectacles throughout film history.
Balanced against these directorial virtues, however, are the flaws that I think keep Ingram's work out of the class of Stroheim, Murnau, Sjostrom and the other most significant figures of the time. There is, in the end, an essential exterior-ness in Ingram's telling that keeps us too often from fully identifying with his characters. The exception to this might be Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an intense drama with a powerful dramatic climax, which also indisputably launched a great star. Otherwise, however, you do not remember Ingram's films for deeply felt characters, powerfully portrayed. His heroes are the unquestionably debonair but less than fully involving Ramon Novarro and Antonio Moreno; worse yet is the persistent use as heroine/love interest of Ingram's wife, Alice Terry, whose bland, immobile features make you miss the quicksilver play of emotion on Carol Dempster's face.
Part of the reason his films seem to stay outside of their characters' emotions is his reliance on pulpish material which simply doesn't afford the opportunities for greater depth in storytelling or acting. Nothing against Scaramouche or Prisoner of Zenda as ripping yarns (though the sound Zenda rips a good deal swifter than the stately silent, it should be noted), but they aren't exactly McTeague, either, as literature, and Ingram takes them at face value, so that Scaramouche, revolutionary associate of Marat and Danton, thinks nothing of rescuing aristocrats (and the movie thinks nothing about him thinking nothing of it). Sabatini fails to grasp what could be quite a moment of dramatic and historic irony, and so Ingram does too; it's that simple.
The ambitious Mare Nostrum ends up a stock hate-the-Hun piece, and The Magician, for all its Gothic atmosphere (which James Whale plundered wholesale), is the most willfully rational horror movie ever made, going out of its way to assure us that there's nothing supernatural happening, that the mad doctor is simply mad, that there's nothing happening here which could possibly tempt the virginal Ms. Terry, allegedly a Parisian artist, away from her ideal of settling down to the most bourgeois marriage imaginable. Admittedly, it's awfully early in the history of the horror movie, it's not surprising that Ingram doesn't quite get that the genre is primarily about the blurring of the line between the human and the monstrous and that its drama usually comes from the sexual tension between the two, but it's hard to think of a horror movie which goes further in throwing cold water on the idea at every possible opportunity, which has less sense of or interest in the uncanny. Dr. Haddo might as well be sacrificing virgins for a new brioche recipe, the horror content is so peripheral to the basic mechanics of damsel-in-distress. (It doesn't help that the portly and decidedly aging Paul Wegener looks like the love child of Strom Thurmond and Klaus Nomi in the role.) I suppose the one exception to all this might be The Conquering Power, a rare example of an Ingram film based on a genuinely first-rate novel, Eugenie Grandet. Then again, given that it's been retitled The Conquering Power, which suggests a rather sticky message about love has been plastered over Balzac, maybe not.
In the end, what seems Ingram's main limitation is that he takes all this material at face value, time and again, and there is nothing beneath the surface in these stories; they are simply impressively mounted, well-paced versions of less than first-rate material. When you think of how, say, John Ford handles stories of heroism, there's always something else going on beneath the surface-- a sense of time passing and age catching up, or a suspicion that it's all hooey, and yet men do it anyway and God bless them for it. There's no subtext like that in Ingram's work; given especially powerful material in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he made an especially powerful film, but given lesser material on other occasions, he met the material at its own level, for good or ill.
Alice Terry burns with vibrant passion for Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
P.S., in hunting up photos I found this nice interview with our own Rudyfan.
Judging Rex Ingram
Years ago, when one of my standard film books (useful because it's so unsentimental) was David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, Rex Ingram's place in film history was established-- as one of the blank spots on the map. He was the movie equivalent of the elephant's graveyard, riches likely to exist there-- if anyone could find it. None of Ingram's films was in the standard repertory of silents distributed in 16mm by the likes of Killiam or MOMA (I think Films Inc. had only The Magician). Yet we knew his reputation in his own time was extremely high, validated by the likes of Stroheim and Michael Powell (and by his own walking away from the movies to go paint rather than be an MGM errand boy). So we had to assume that he was a talent of the first rank, if only we could see the films to prove it.
Slowly that situation has changed, and by now I've seen at least five Ingram titles (or more, depending on how seriously you want to take the idea that he, more than the young Raoul Walsh, was the real hand behind Regeneration, or that anything significant of his survives in Ben-Hur). In any case, I've seen The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, Mare Nostrum and The Magician, five works from his mature period whose characteristics are consistent enough to make it possible for me to judge Ingram's real place and how he relates to the other talents of his time.
Usually Ingram is talked about in terms of visuals-- which gives the wrong idea about his work, I think. A typical silent director of the time who is noted for visuals, for instance, is Maurice Tourneur-- his work dotted with chiaroscuro shots, painterly images of silhouetted characters, and occasional moments of quite remarkable formal innovation such as the robbery scene in Alias Jimmy Valentine which is shot as if it were a diagram of the robbery, from overhead with the roof removed showing several rooms at once.
Ingram isn't like that at all-- if there's one virtue I would grant him above any others, it's that he is, at this early date, a "visual" director who seems to owe very little to painting, who doesn't just make nice stills but instead makes active, visually interesting scenes. Partly an Ingram film is distinguished by an unusually high quality of set design-- they look sumptuous, lavish not in a money-thrown-around way, like one of DeMille's tales of the absurdly rich, but by just looking harmoniously designed and sturdily built, believably real in a way few movie sets are. Lavishness in and of itself is not one of the cardinal cinema virtues, it's the province of a Jean Negulesco rather than a Jean Renoir, but it must be admitted that there's something very satisfying about the realness, the depth of Ingram's settings, as you watch one of his movies.
But that's not Ingram's main visual distinction as a director-- it's the way he handles movement within the frame. There's a moment in Scaramouche where Ramon Novarro swaggers back into the Assembly, having just one-upped the bad guys. Ingram instinctively senses that if Novarro is filmed entering the room from a stationary setup, he will be a distant, diminished figure. Instead, he tracks with him as he enters the room, so that Novarro dominates the frame and our sense of the room's reaction comes from his swagger. Obvious enough if the year is 1990 and you're making Goodfellas; Scorsese films in particular are full of this kind of projection of the character's psyche onto the camerawork. But it's rare, to the point of near-uniqueness, in 1923, I believe. If there aren't many other moments exactly like that, you can at least say that throughout the movie's crowd and action scenes, there is visual dynamism in the acting and direction that makes them more alive and intense than is typical of comparable spectacles throughout film history.
Balanced against these directorial virtues, however, are the flaws that I think keep Ingram's work out of the class of Stroheim, Murnau, Sjostrom and the other most significant figures of the time. There is, in the end, an essential exterior-ness in Ingram's telling that keeps us too often from fully identifying with his characters. The exception to this might be Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an intense drama with a powerful dramatic climax, which also indisputably launched a great star. Otherwise, however, you do not remember Ingram's films for deeply felt characters, powerfully portrayed. His heroes are the unquestionably debonair but less than fully involving Ramon Novarro and Antonio Moreno; worse yet is the persistent use as heroine/love interest of Ingram's wife, Alice Terry, whose bland, immobile features make you miss the quicksilver play of emotion on Carol Dempster's face.
Part of the reason his films seem to stay outside of their characters' emotions is his reliance on pulpish material which simply doesn't afford the opportunities for greater depth in storytelling or acting. Nothing against Scaramouche or Prisoner of Zenda as ripping yarns (though the sound Zenda rips a good deal swifter than the stately silent, it should be noted), but they aren't exactly McTeague, either, as literature, and Ingram takes them at face value, so that Scaramouche, revolutionary associate of Marat and Danton, thinks nothing of rescuing aristocrats (and the movie thinks nothing about him thinking nothing of it). Sabatini fails to grasp what could be quite a moment of dramatic and historic irony, and so Ingram does too; it's that simple.
The ambitious Mare Nostrum ends up a stock hate-the-Hun piece, and The Magician, for all its Gothic atmosphere (which James Whale plundered wholesale), is the most willfully rational horror movie ever made, going out of its way to assure us that there's nothing supernatural happening, that the mad doctor is simply mad, that there's nothing happening here which could possibly tempt the virginal Ms. Terry, allegedly a Parisian artist, away from her ideal of settling down to the most bourgeois marriage imaginable. Admittedly, it's awfully early in the history of the horror movie, it's not surprising that Ingram doesn't quite get that the genre is primarily about the blurring of the line between the human and the monstrous and that its drama usually comes from the sexual tension between the two, but it's hard to think of a horror movie which goes further in throwing cold water on the idea at every possible opportunity, which has less sense of or interest in the uncanny. Dr. Haddo might as well be sacrificing virgins for a new brioche recipe, the horror content is so peripheral to the basic mechanics of damsel-in-distress. (It doesn't help that the portly and decidedly aging Paul Wegener looks like the love child of Strom Thurmond and Klaus Nomi in the role.) I suppose the one exception to all this might be The Conquering Power, a rare example of an Ingram film based on a genuinely first-rate novel, Eugenie Grandet. Then again, given that it's been retitled The Conquering Power, which suggests a rather sticky message about love has been plastered over Balzac, maybe not.
In the end, what seems Ingram's main limitation is that he takes all this material at face value, time and again, and there is nothing beneath the surface in these stories; they are simply impressively mounted, well-paced versions of less than first-rate material. When you think of how, say, John Ford handles stories of heroism, there's always something else going on beneath the surface-- a sense of time passing and age catching up, or a suspicion that it's all hooey, and yet men do it anyway and God bless them for it. There's no subtext like that in Ingram's work; given especially powerful material in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he made an especially powerful film, but given lesser material on other occasions, he met the material at its own level, for good or ill.
Alice Terry burns with vibrant passion for Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
P.S., in hunting up photos I found this nice interview with our own Rudyfan.
Last edited by Mike Gebert on Wed Apr 16, 2008 12:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
We should respect the other fellow's religion, but only to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is attractive and his children intelligent. —H.L. Mencken
