Movies: The Directors and the Pictures

MOVIES: THE DIRECTORS AND THE PICTURES

The First Great Directors

Despite the rise of the star system, the 1910s were without question a decade of great movie directors. Directors made the stars, and the most influential were given their own studios and free rein over the creative aspects of their pictures; most also became producers. The greatest of all was D. W. Griffith, who made more than four hundred short films for Biograph between 1908 and 1913 before turning his attention to the feature films that would make him famous. In The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), both twelve reels long, Griffith pioneered the techniques of close-ups, cross-cutting, and flashbacks; raised the standards for sets and action in films; and made stars of Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh. Another great director who got his start during the 1910s was Cecil B. DeMille, whose films for Jesse Lasky—including Joan, the Woman (1917) and Male and Female (1919)—made stars of Geraldine Farrar, Wallace Reid, and Gloria Swanson. Unlike Griffith, DeMille became more famous in later decades, with extravaganzas such as The Ten Commandments (1923; and a sound version in 1956), King of Kings (1927), Cleopatra (1934), Union Pacific (1939), and Reap the Wild Wind (1942).

New Film Genres

Though he started as a director of IMP movies starring Mary Pickford, after he moved to California in 1912 Thomas Ince specialized in Westerns. Among his Westerns—which starred William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Howard Hickman, Frank Keenan, and Lew Cody as cowboy-frontier heroes and villains—are War on the Plains (1912), Custers Last Raid (1912), The Bargain (1914), Hell's Hinges (1916), and The Gun Fighter (1917). Another new type of movie was the serial, in which the same stars repeated roles from one film to the next, with varying plots, Most such films involve danger but end happily. The first serial was The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913), a thirteen-part series starring Kathlyn Williams (billed as The Girl without Fear). The most successful release in this genre was The Perils of Pauline, a twenty-part series starring Pearl White as Pauline Marvin, the innocent heroine who survives various dangers, from buzz saws to oncoming railroad trains. The Perils of Pauline episodes, released biweekly throughout 1914, were so popular that their plots were printed in newspapers. Pearl White starred in three more serials, The Exploits of Elaine (1914), The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), and The Romance of Elaine (1915).

The Mack Sennett Comedies

The comedy movie was never exclusive to any particular company or set of creators. Yet Mack Sennett was without question the father of film comedy, pioneering physical humor in a silent medium and launching the careers of master comic actors. Trained as a director by D. W. Griffith, for whom he had worked as an actor at Biograph, Sennett began directing his Keystone Comedies in his California studios in 1912, making an average of eight films a month that year. Over the next five years he made more than five hundred comedies. The formula was essentially the same for all these pictures (some of which were about inept policemen, known as the "Keystone Kops"): actors dressed in ridiculous costumes performed slapstick routines, usually ending in a hilarious chase scene. Charlie Chaplin got his start in Keystone Comedies in December 1913, after Sennett hired him off the vaudeville circuit (where he was performing comic pantomime in a touring British company), and soon became the director, as well as the star, of his Keystone pictures. Most of the Keystone films starred Mabel Normand, though Normand and Chaplin played supporting roles in the six-reel Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), which starred Broadway stage actress Marie Dressler and was one of Sennett's most commercially successful films. Others who worked in Keystone Comedies were Wallace Beery, Gloria Swanson, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and scenario writer Frank Capra (who would later make such all-American movies as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939 and It's a Wonderful Life in 1946).

Movies about the War

Movies with fictional plots about the ongoing war in Europe were also popular during the 1910s. From the outbreak of war in 1914 until about 1916, American movies, like American popular songs, championed pacifism or neutrality, reflecting the feelings of most Americans at the time. Examples of such pictures include Neutrality (1914), War Is Hell (1914), The Horrors of War (1914), and War Brides (1916). By 1916, however, film plots were more likely centered on fictional war atrocities committed by the "Huns," such as the defilement of defenseless American women by Germans invading the United States. Pictures such as The War Bride's Secret (1916), The Fall of a Nation (1916), and Patria (1917) fueled Americans' prowar feelings. The Little American (1917), a DeMille film starring Mary Pickford, is a fictionalized depiction of the May 1915 sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania by a German submarine. Hearts of the World (1918), a Griffith picture starring Lillian Gish, is about a French village occupied by German soldiers. Many movies, such as Huns Within Our Gates (1918) and The Kaiser, Beast of Berlin (1918), are overtly anti-German. Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms (1918) is a rare comedic film about military life. The war remained a movie subject even after its end, though pictures such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) reveal some of the ambivalence and disillusionment Americans were feeling about the war by the early 1920s.

THE PHONOGRAPH COMES OF AGE

Recording technology began in 1877 with Thomas Edison's "talking machine," and during the first decade of the twentieth century Americans could buy recordings of opera and classical music. In the 1910s the sound-recording business took off, owing in large part to the dance craze sweeping the country. Between 1912 and 1916 the number of commercial recording companies grew from just three—Victor, Columbia, and Edison—to forty-six, and Victor's assets doubled. By 1919 some two hundred companies were manufacturing nearly two million record players a year, and despite their high price (anywhere from $375 to $2,000), public demand exceeded the supply. In addition to the hundreds of dance-music releases, popular records included John Philip Sousa's "Liberty Loan March," recorded by Sousa's band; Georg e M. Cohan's wartime anthem, "Over There," recorded by vaudevillian Nora Bayes and by opera star Enrico Caruso; many versions of Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band"; and—after 1917—jazz. Though a majority of Americans did not own record players until the 1920s (when prices fell below $100), the machines were rapidly transforming how songs were popularized and how people heard music. Like the new movie industry, the booming recording industry took its toll on other entertainment fields, including sheet-music publishing and vaudeville.

Source:

Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Pbonogrspb: 1877-1977, second revised edition (New York: Macmillan, 1977).

Sources:

Ivan Butler, The War on Film (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974);

Michael T. Isenberg, War on Film: The American Cinema and World War I, 1914-1941 (Rutherford, Madison & Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981);

Ann Lloyd, ed., The Illustrated History of the Cinema (New York: Macmillan, 1986);

Gene Ringgold and DeWitt Bodeen, The Films of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Citadel Press, 1969);

Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide, The Films ofD. W. Griffith, with a foreword by Lillian Gish (New York: Crown, 1975).