Grace Kingsley's Hollywood

One hundred and ten years ago this month, Grace Kingsley reported on a change in downtown Los Angeles that caused tears among theatergoers and seemed to upset her, too:

The Burbank, Los Angeles’ most historic theater, and during the past sixteen years, under the Oliver Morosco management, the birthplace of some of the biggest successes this country has seen, is to be turned into a motion-picture house.

I was surprised that people were only being sentimental about an alteration to a familiar place, they weren’t yet concerned that movies were driving out live theater. But that might have been because the Burbank stock company wasn’t being disbanded, they were just moving to a different theater called the Morosco that the boss had built in 1913 and named after himself. It was only three blocks away. Oliver Morosco made his announcement on January second, and was enthusiastic about his plans, saying:

I should have made this move four years ago except for the sentiment I felt for the old Burbank Theater, whence came my first successes…The Burbank company deserves a better place to work in, the public deserves a better house, and the office staff requires bigger and better quarters.

Kingsley followed up on the story regularly. On the fourth she said that patrons were saying their farewell to the theater by buying out the house and on the sixth she listed all the good luck charms, from a horseshoe and an antique chair to Zit, the theater’s cat, that the actors were getting ready to move. Her column on the ninth was an obituary for the old theater, and she wrote: “Thousands of theater patrons of the city, wont to attend the Burbank weekly, feel no little sentiment in regard to the old theater where they’ve enjoyed many hours of entertainment.”

Finally on Monday, the tenth, she reported:

There was a real sob party at the Burbank on Saturday night, when the last performance of the Burbank company took place, and the aggregation played Kick In, and really “kicked in,” i.e. gave up, surrendered to the march of progress, and said farewell to the old house….The stained old walls have sheltered many an hour’s pleasure to most of us.

They made speeches after the curtain went down, and the manager, Joseph Morosco, read a telegram from his brother, thanking their patrons and promising them “the very best in the land” at the new Morosco.

However, in another article that day she also wrote that all was well over at the new theater. She told of the “big enthusiastic crowd” that greeted their first performance, and mentioned, “even Zit, the house cat, after he discovered there was a rat preserve on the place, decided it was a pretty decent dwelling after all, and made up his mind to continue his patronage.”

Her editor Henry Christeen Warnack also went to the sold-out opening night and thought that while the Morosco was a much better theater than the Burbank, nothing had really changed:

 When we moved we made a complete job of it, bringing our actors, our atmosphere, and our cat. We also brought our chewing gum and our privilege to talk at the same time as the actors. You will note that I did not say that we brought our manners.

He admired Seven Keys to Baldpate, calling it “one of the most delightful mystery farces ever concocted” as well as the actors, saying they were “better in nearly every respect than the company from New York.” He summed up the evening with “it is safe to say that no theatrical enterprise ever had a more auspicious opening or a better attraction.”

Kingsley continued to follow what became of their old theater, which had been taken over by the Triangle Film Company. On the thirteenth she wrote:

The Burbank Theater, which will be turned over to pictures next Saturday night and thereafter, is being fitted with a gorgeous new dress in the shape of wall decorations. The lobby is to be cream and pink with touches of gold, and the interior design will be in keeping with this scheme of coloring.

An anonymous Times article added more details:

The front of the playhouse has been concreated and the lobby has been brilliantly lighted with hundreds of blazing electric lamps and decorated with an artistic color scheme of pink, cream and rose-gold and with panels of French tapestry.

The renovations were finished remarkably quickly, and the Burbank reopened on the fifteenth with the premier of The Flying Torpedo, a spy thriller set in the near future supervised by D.W. Griffith, and two Mack Sennett comedies.

Henry Christeen Warnack attended this opening too. He said that Griffith and Sennett had spent $12,000 in the renovation and opined “this promises to be one of the best investments of their successful careers.” He reported that it was a big success: “It was packed as a theater seldom is, yet twice as many persons were turned away as could gain admission.” Three policemen, as well as the theater staff, were needed to keep the people without tickets out. Like Kingsley, this audience was sentimental about the old place, and he said,

A house they had loved that was dead had come to life again, and great was their rejoicing.

Warnack really like the movies, too, and called The Flying Torpedo “by far the biggest and best picture that has yet come out of that strange combination called Triangle.” He even thought it was “the biggest made in Los Angeles since The Birth of a Nation and the best since The Avenging Conscious.” Both of the Sennett shorts were “snappy” and “done in the best Keystone style,” and he summed up the program: “as it stands, one needs go a long ways to find anything better that the Burbank show.”

Although the opening night went well, movies at the Burbank didn’t last long.  Like many failures, it ended quietly: there was no newspaper ad for the theater starting March 1^st.* Fans of live theater barely had time to miss the place; on April 14^th Kingsley reported that the theater had returned to Morosco’s management, and he planned to have a new stock company there. He acted quickly and on May first he opened The Lion and the Mouse there. In her review Kingsley and the audience were happy to have the place back; she said,

The old playhouse Monday night emerged from its silence. It came forth to the showering of hundreds of blossoms and to the sound of deafening applause. In fact, The Lion and the Mouse seemed only an excuse for the welcoming of old favorites under the Morosco management, by hundreds of theatergoers happy to be back in the theater where they had passed so many pleasant hours.

Her review of the performance itself was less enthusiastic; she wrote: “the piece was staged in the usual adequate and artistic Morosco manner.”

The Los Angeles Theater blog has a history of the Burbank; it eventually became a burlesque house and was re-named the Burbank Follies. Demolished in 1973, it became a parking lot until 2018 when apartments were built there.

*With spending like that on a place that only lasted a few weeks, it’s no wonder Triangle had financial problems and began to fall apart in 1917.

“Burbank Opening Tonight,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1916.

“Burbank Theater Goes to Film,” Motography, January 22, 1916, p. 158.

“Burbank Theater Opens to Live Again,” Screamer, February 3, 1917, p. 4.

Grace Kingsley, “Flashes,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1919.

Grace Kingsley, “Footlight Flashes,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1916.

Grace Kingsley, “Lights to Glow Again,” Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1916.

Grace Kingsley, “Ovations Greet Them,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1916.

Henry Christeen Warnack, “Gala Event in House-Warming,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1916.

Henry Christeen Warnack, “Old Burbank in Bright New Frock,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1916.

One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley reported on a surprising film project for comedian Raymond Griffith:

Announcement was made yesterday by Hector Turnbull [a production supervisor at Paramount] that a fantastic comedy known as The Ship that Sailed to Mars has been bought as a starring vehicle for Griffith. Indeed, secret preparations for the filming of this picture have been under way during the last sixteen months, he says, and it will be at least three months more before actual work can be commenced.

Paramount wasn’t sparing any expense on the project; Kingsley mentioned:

That magician of picturedom, Roy J. Pomeroy,* who achieved such wonders in The Ten Commandments with the Red Sea sequence, and such beautiful and mystifying effects in Peter Pan, is to wave his wand for The Ship That Sailed to Mars.

The press release she was working from also quoted the vice-president of Paramount, Jesse Lasky, who promised:

This picture will be absolutely different from any picture ever produced. It will not be an experiment, either. For more than a year Roy Pomeroy and his assistants have been working day and night evolving ideas and ways of making them practical. When he first told us some of the things which he planned to achieve, we could hardly believe him. He went ahead and proved his arguments.

The Ship That Sailed to Mars/Get Off the Earth would have been not only a movie unlike anything else Raymond Griffith made, it would have been one of the rare science fiction films made in the 1920’s. This month, Kingsley’s boss Edwin Schallert wrote that he was looking forward to it; he pointed out:

Comparatively few pictures have been made in which there is an imaginative scientific angle. The most promising of the recent ones is The Lost World, which, from all indications, has been a surpassing success. The Mysterious Island, on which preliminaries have started, also has the province of scientific romance. And there are many other stories of this imaginative type that no doubt offer unusual possibilities. The trouble with the filming of many of them, of course, is their costliness.

Unfortunately, Get Off the Earth never was completed. Nevertheless, the studio kept working on it for a while, and announcements about the project were in the trade press throughout 1926. In March Motion Picture News reported that Roy Pomeroy:

has evolved something new for Get Off the Earth, the Martian comedy which Raymond Griffith will do. He has created a man, 30 feet tall, who runs, talks, throws missiles, eats—and is strong enough to push over an ordinary office building. Pomeroy and his 20 associates have been working for a year and a half on preparations for this fantastic screen novelty.

There’s no giant in Timlin’s book. It seems like they just bought the rights to it for the idea of traveling to Mars. In April Harry Behn (he’d recently written The Big Parade) was announced as the scriptwriter. Later that month Exhibitors’ Herald said that Arthur Rosson had replaced Clarence Badger as director.

Get Off the Earth was on Motion Picture News’s list of films in production until December 1926, then it quietly disappeared. The cost might very well have been what sunk the project, plus Pomeroy and his department needed to get to work on special effects for Wings (1927) for which he won an Oscar.

Early 1926 was the pinnacle of silk-hatted comedian Raymond Griffith’s career. His best-remembered film, Hands Up, came out this month, and Kingsley thought it was terrific. She wrote, “The gags are all great…Bright spontaneity marks the whole bunch of fun, and one feels sure that if you got to the bottom of the matter, you would find Ray Griffith pretty well responsible for the production.” 

Griffith got his start in the movies playing uncredited roles at the L-KO Kompany in 1915. He’d lost his voice as a child (probably due to respiratory diphtheria), so silents were ideal for him. He went to work with Mack Sennett, and started writing and directing in addition to acting. He went on to make films at Goldwyn, Universal and finally Paramount where in early 1926 Kingsley reported: “Raymond Griffith is doing so well for himself and for Paramount in all his comedies that Paramount is leaving no stone unturned to find him the best possible stories.” Unfortunately, that didn’t last and in 1927 he left and became a freelance filmmaker. The coming of sound ended his acting career, but he went on to work as a screenwriter and producer. Lea Stans has written a teriffic article about Griffith at her blog Silentology.

Every now and then there’s a revival of interest in The Ship that Sailed to Mars. There have been reprints in 1993 by Stone Wall Publications, and in 2011 by Dover Publishing. Andrew Hallman has an interesting post about it on his Aisle of Misfit Books blog. There’s even a Geocities page that reproduced it which has been preserved by the Internet Archive.

*Roy Pomeroy was a former theatrical scenic artist who experimented with using miniatures and back projection in films of ballet performances; Jesse Lasky hired him in 1921 to head Paramount’s special effects department. You can learn more about him at his family’s genealogy site.

“Famous Players Signs Four Scenario Writers,” Motion Picture News, April 3, 1926, p. 1499.

Frances Halpern, “Fantastic Voyage,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1993.

“Hollywood Happenings,” Film Daily, January 31, 1926, p. 9.

“Pictures and People,” Motion Picture News, March 13, 1926, p. 1169.

Edwin Schallert, “Upheavals Seeing Fulfillment,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1926.

“Story of Lloyd Difficulties at Paramount Denied,” Exhibitors’ Herald, April 17, 1926, p. 20.

One hundred and ten years ago this week, Grace Kingsley wrote her earliest appreciation of Keystone Studios:

We’ve got to hand it to Mack Sennett on that comedy of his which accompanies the Billie Burke Peggy picture at the Majestic. The name of the comedy is Crooked to the End, and it is a really brilliant satire on the current ‘movie’ thriller, with its wreaks and hair-breadth escapes, and a subtle kidding of the people who like them. The thrilling features are all exaggerated, but while you know they’re all a joke and Sennett is laughing at you in his sleeve, you can’t help being thrilled. The comedy is most amusing too.

And the colossal joke of it all is that no matter how many engines are wrecked, no matter how many trolley cars run over cliffs, no matter how many automobiles go smash, that stolen safe remains intact and at the end, Anna Luther, clad in rags and disheveled from her blood-curdling experiences, calmly folds her arms and refuses to reveal the combination. And when the safe is finally opened it contains nothing except this note to hypothetical robbers: ‘If you fellows would work as hard for the railroad as you work to rob it you’d maybe be president some day.’ We’ve got to thank Sennett for that rara avis* (especially in pictures): a new idea. 

Kingsley had only been writing about films for a little over a year, and she was already complaining about not enough originality. However, what’s particularly remarkable about her comment is that she didn’t have see this movie for work, she went in her free time– her editor Henry Christeen Warnack had already reviewed the program a week earlier and said:

In the case of Crooked to the End we expected only slapstick, but with the rough and tumble we unexpectedly fell heir to a tale of rich humor, developed pictorially to boiling point.

Crooked to the End sounds absolutely wild. Louis Reeves Harrison in Moving Picture World summed it up: “so crowded with exciting incidents that one can only marvel at the tremendous amount of ingenuity and hard work compressed into so small a space.” Two robbers (Charles Arling and Hugh Fay) steal a safe from a railroad station and kidnap the station master’s (Fred Mace) daughter (Anna Luther) and the chase is on, with all the excitement that Kingsley mentioned, plus a quicksand interlude and “a lively exchange of bombs” between the autos and streetcar. No wonder she went out of her way to see it.

Crooked was such a success, that Sennett quickly made two more shorts with similar plots and most of the same cast: A Village Vampire and An Oily Scoundrel. At that time, he needed an awful lot of material; according to historian Brett E. Walker, his contract said they had to make two two-reelers per week! No wonder  new ideas quickly seemed old.

Kingsley was to go on the write lots more praise for Sennett over the years, including for Down on the Farm (1920) and Shreik of Araby (1923). She just loved comedy!

*Rara avis just means rare bird—but in 1915 she could use Latin in an action comedy review.

“Coming Keystone Brilliant,” Moving Picture World, January 15, 1916, p. 403.

Louis Reeves Harrison, “Triangle Program,” Moving Picture World, December 4, 1915, p. 1848.

Henry Christeen Warnack, “Some Notable Films Showing,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1915.

One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley interviewed a serious dramatic actress to help publicize her film playing at the Egyptian Theater, The Big Parade. However, instead of collecting cute anecdotes about her work on that, she asked Claire Adams about the alarming stunts she had performed in her earlier movies. She learned that the road to becoming an actress in dramas was no fun at all:

The emotional actress of the screen seems to require as a preliminary that she work in the black-and-blue drama of the serials or hop about in a bathing suit in comedies. Funny, isn’t it? Maybe it’s all right. Doubtless after having the life frightened out of them in doing stunts, or playing in the so-called comedies, they feel that they never care to smile again.

Take Claire Adams, for instance, who is one of our best little tear-teasers of emotional drama on the screen. Miss Adams has narrowly escaped death in thrill drama in more ways than almost any actress you can mention.

Adams told her about her time as Tom Mix’s leading lady, and Kingsley reminded readers that Mix shot real bullets from his gun—bullets that skip all about the heroine. “But I didn’t mind after the first few bullets,” remarked Miss Adams.

Even more dangerous were “the awful horseback stunts and the leaps from crag to crag.” Adams said that it took an hour to revive her when she worked on Just Tony and a horse crushed her against a rock, knocking the breath from her and wrenching her knee. There was no time to rest and recover: the next day she had to leap onto a horse bareback.

Before she worked with Mix, she had made several other Westerns. There she quickly learned to dread fire scenes, like in The Riders of the Dawn. She was bound and gagged, lying on some hay in a barn. The hay caught fire. The director, Jack Conway, thought it wasn’t burning fast enough, so he put kerosene on the flames! Then they got so busy shooting a fight that they forgot about her. She managed to roll away from it, but her eyebrows were singed and her hair burned. Kingsley summed it up: “Oh, yes, there is one emotion in which the graduate of the thrill drama is perfect when she comes to register it, and that emotion is fear!”

No wonder the film industry needed health and safety standards. This is another entry in Kingsley’s occasional public service series to help people feel less bad about being ordinary, like her interview with Bessie Barriscale about the many obstacles to success in Hollywood.

Even though her film career is mostly forgotten now, Claire Adams had quite a life. Playing John Gilbert’s sweetheart that he left at home in the war drama The Big Parade was her most memorable role, but while she had the usual post career fate of silent actresses–she got married and quit working–she really hit the jackpot.

Beryl Vere Nassau Adams was born on September 24, 1896 in Winnipeg, Canada; her dad was an accountant and her mother a housewife. Claire was her nickname. She served as a nurse during the World War and she made her movie debut in Spirit of the Red Cross, a 1918 two-reeler made by the organization for their second War Fund Drive. She decided to keep acting and found work in Hollywood at various studios including Lasky (Invisible Bond, 1919) and Educational (Key to Power, 1920).

In 1920 she signed a contract with director/producer Benjamin Hampton (a former tobacco executive) and starred in several of his films based on Zane Grey stories, including The Mysterious Rider (1921) and his final film Golden Dreams (1922).  He wasn’t as successful as he’d hoped to be and he quit the business. She married him in 1924. She continued to work in Westerns with Tom Mix, then she branched out to dramas, beginning with The Scarlet Car (1923) for Universal. She was a freelance actress for smaller production companies like Chadwick Tiffany, appearing in a Kingsley favorite Souls for Sables (1925) (unfortunately, none of the reviews mentioned her work in that). After The Big Parade, she continued to freelance until 1927 when she joined her husband in retirement. He died in 1932, leaving her a wealthy widow.

She met Australian heir and horse breeder Donald ‘Scobie’ Mackinnon at a party in London in 1937 and they got married three weeks later. They moved to his two houses in Victoria: his town house was in Melbourne and his country house was near Skipton (it was named Mooramong). Her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography says they had a fine old time:

They entertained often at Mooramong, which they transformed from a staid Victorian homestead into a jazz-age folly with Art Deco cocktail bar, swimming pool, games room, and a bathroom reminiscent of a film star’s dressing-room. On their frequent trips to Melbourne to attend the races, the cinema and innumerable cocktail parties, they travelled in their Silver Ghost Rolls Royce. Wearing smart hats and chic outfits, and often adorned with her diamonds, Claire was an exotic figure at Government House functions and at the race-course.

He died in 1974 and she in 1978, and they left most of their estate to the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) for the creation of a wildlife sanctuary and flora and fauna park at Mooramong. It’s temporarily closed for renovations but the website has lots of photos.

“Adams, Claire,” Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual, 1920.

One hundred and ten years ago this month, film news was slowing down for the festive season and Grace Kingsley reported on plans for a big movie industry party:

Preparations will be started today for the New Year’s Eve movie carnival, which the Southern California Motion Picture Exhibitors’ Association plans to stage at the Shrine Auditorium. The exhibitors plan to make it a distinctive masque carnival to usher in little Miss 1916.

They began their work on November 18^th, which seems awfully late for a glitzy Hollywood party. However, this was the third one they’d done, and they knew what they were doing: it was a success.

Not only were film industry people invited; the general public could buy tickets too. I continue to be amazed that they were able to trust people to behave themselves around movie stars—that would never happen now. To entice ticket buyers, they needed publicity, and Kingsley reported on a remarkable stunt a few days before the event:

A throng at first interested and finally much perplexed gathered outside the Times Building yesterday afternoon to watch what seemed to be a troupe of motion picture actors perform.

A young man in the role of the director marshaled a very stout gentleman and a demure little woman about the streets for some time, making them act before a camera that contained no film. When a large crowd had gathered, the “director” moved his forces to the second-floor fire escape of the Times Building. With the spectators straining their necks, a fake battle between the very stout man and demure little woman was staged. As the fight reached a climax actor and actress stooped and picking up a roll of canvas from the floor of the fire escape, flung it over the railing. In huge letters screamed to the crowd below that there was going to be a great time at the movie carnival to be held New Year’s Eve in the Shrine Auditorium.

Kingsley didn’t attend, but another anonymous Times reporter did, and they reported:

The New Year nowhere was met more gaily or light-heatedly than at the Shrine Auditorium Friday night, on the occasion of the Motion Picture Exhibitors’ League ball, when scores of motion picture folk turned out to bid hail to the New Year and farewell to the old…Heroes tangoed like common mortals. Fair heroines ‘hesitated;’ villains wore a good-humored smile, and comedians gilded sadly round and round; the poor little girl came out in silk and satin; and an imitation Charlie Chaplin made merry.

The most famous actors weren’t there—they only got a Chaplin imitator. But plenty of mid-level stars attended, like Myrtle Gonzales, Kathlyn Williams, Dustin Farnum, and Hobart Henley. Motion Picture News estimated that 5,000 people filled the Shrine.

This event had one unique feature: the Grand March doubled as a beauty contest. The studios hadn’t given up on trying to make beauty contest winners into actresses! The winner was Thelma Francis; the Times said:

Thelma Francis is the exceedingly pretty 19-year-old girl chosen by Carl Laemmle from among the participants in the grand march to be offered a position as motion-picture actress at Universal City. Miss Francis has had dramatic school training, but no experience, but stated she had always wanted to go into motion pictures and was delighted at being chosen.

Motion Picture News gave some more details about her:

Thelma Francis is a dainty brunette of unusual type, nineteen years of age, and extremely vivacious. She was induced to be present at the ball through the announcement of the contest, which was carries in the Denver Post, and she went on to Los Angeles with her mother from Denver to be present at the ball.

Her career in Hollywood went about as well as most other contest winners. Mary Thelma Francis was born in Flagstaff, Arizona on March 27,1895. She was the only child of Richard and Elizabeth Francis; her father was a physician and her mother a housewife. She went to boarding school in Denver, Colorado where she also took stage acting lessons from Maude Fealy, a famous theatrical actress.

Despite initial publicity that said Francis would be added to the Universal payroll as a leading lady, by February they announced she’d been put in their general stock company. According to her listing in the 1919 Motion Picture Studio Directory, she appeared in two films for Universal: Tangled Hearts and Maude’s Summer Idyl (this was probably the two-reeler A Kentucky Idyl). Then they quietly let her go.

But her time there wasn’t a complete loss. On March 14,1918 she married assistant director Joseph McDonough, and for their honeymoon he took her along to Catalina Island where he was working on a Universal serial called Pleasure Island (re-named The Brass Bullet). He went on to a long and successful career, even getting an Oscar nomination in 1934 for his work as assistant director to James Whale on films like Frankenstein and Waterloo Bridge. However, he and Francis were no longer married at that point.

She had gone back to Arizona, where she married tire salesman William T. Smith in Kingman on October 26,1925. They had two daughters, Elizabeth Jane (1927) and Billie Frances (1932). She died in San Francisco on April 23, 1971.

G.P. Harleman, “News of Los Angeles and Vicinity,” Moving Picture World, April 13, 1918, p. 252.

“Los Angeles Film Brevities,” Moving Picture World, January 22, 1916, p. 580.

“Picture People Hail the New Year,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1916.

“’U’ Puts Another Beauty Contest Winner in Pictures,” Motion Picture News, January 22, 1916, p. 350, 373.

“Universal Stock Changes,” Moving Picture World, February 5, 1916, p. 806.

 

One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley had news from one of the early movie superstars, whom she’d been interviewing since 1917:

Theda Bara, long-time champ vamp of the world, and who set the fashion for all vampires on the screen, is going to come back into pictures, not only to follow the trend of pictures today by playing comedy, which rumor has it will kid the life out of the old-time vampire, but also to play a role in which she will have a chance for real characterization.

Bara had just signed a contract with Hal Roach, and the two-reeler was to start production in early December. She was happy to be going back to work, telling Kingsley, “I am glad to return to the screen before the class of audience which this contract offers. Any actress loves to reappear before the best possible audiences, the sort which a combination of the Keith circuit and the country’s key-city theaters offers. It is an opportunity highly satisfactory to any actress.”

Kingsley added that it was part of Roach’s “somewhat revolutionary policy” of making comedy shorts to complete with features and signing “artists of note, usually associated with features only.” Two days later she reported that there was a rumor that Lionel Barrymore had signed with Roach (it was true) to join people like Raymond Hitchcock, Eddie Foy, and Gertrude Astor. Roach explained to Motion Picture Director magazine that he thought that short comedies didn’t get the respect they deserved, and that putting famous players in them would not only help their reputation but would also increase their sales.

Unfortunately, although she was still famous Bara wasn’t getting many opportunities to act at this point. Her career was at its best from 1915 to 1919, when she was at Fox Studios making films like A Fool There Was.

She had been retired from the screen since then. Just before signing with Roach, she starred in a melodrama called Unchastened Woman for Chadwick, a small production company, but the reviews weren’t good. George Pardy in Motion Picture News said it was “unworthy of her talents,” and the story of a wife who wins back an unfaithful husband was “a flabby mess.”

So she went in a different direction and went to work for Roach. She was looking forward to her new challenge, saying in an interview in mid-November: “Comedy is a real test of skill….And I hope to create something as distinctive in comedy as I am said to have done in serious parts.”*

Happily the movie she made, called Madame Mystery, was pretty good. Film Daily particularly enjoyed it:

 “Can you picture Theda Bara, the vamp, in a two-barreled scream? Well, here she is. But where the new slant comes in is in the fact that Theda plays her role straight as a woman of mystery, acting as an agent for the Government on a dangerous mission. And out of her perfectly serious and legitimate efforts to accomplish her mission, the funny situations develop most naturally—and screamingly funny.”

Photoplay agreed, saying “See it and howl!…Madame Mystery is one long scream from start to finish with Theda furnishing the charm, and Jimmy Findlayson funnier than he or anyone else ever hoped to be.”

Reviewers for the LA Times had a mixed reaction. In a preview Whitney Williams said, “Theda Bara’s first two-reel comedy is little short of a riot…it is quite apparent that her ability as a comedienne is but a latent quality.” However, when it played there in July 1926 an anonymous reviewer said, “although Miss Bara photographs beautifully this comedy affords her little opportunity as an actress.” They thought that Jimmy Finlayson provided the laughs.

It’s available on YouTube:

Despite the good notices, Madame Mystery was Theda Bara’s last starring role. It wasn’t a bad way to end things. According to her biographer, Eve Golden, it took a while, but eventually Bara grew to appreciate retirement and enjoyed travel with her husband, director Charles Brabin, learned gourmet cookery, and had loads of friends. Transitioning to retirement is hard for everybody, from movie stars to librarians, which is unexpected, because when you were slogging through work every day you thought that fewer responsibilities would be nothing but wonderful. Movie stars: they’re just like us!

*She had earlier tried her hand at comedy in The She Devil (1919), but the studio cut all the funny scenes and released it as a drama.

M.T. Andrews, “Madame Mystery,” Motion Picture News, April 17, 1926, p. 1823.

Eve Golden, Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara, Vestal, NY: Emprise Publishing, 1996.

Arthur Q. Hagerman, “Hal Roach’s Revolution,” Motion Picture Director, December 1925, p. 38

“Madame Mystery,” Photoplay, May 1926, p. 125.

George T. Pardy, “Unchastened Woman,” Motion Picture News, January 2, 1926, p.89.

“Quest Well Worth Seeing,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1926.

“Short Subjects,” Film Daily, April 11, 1926, p.8.

Sumner Smith, “Reviews of Little Pictures With a Big Punch,” Moving Picture World, April 24, 1926, p.606.

“Theda is Through Vamping,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1925.

Whitney Williams, “Under the Lights,” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1926.

One hundred and ten years ago this month, Grace Kingsley reported on one theater owner’s fight with the Los Angeles Board of Censors:

Maybe there will and maybe there will not be a showing of Damaged Goods at Quinn’s Superba next week. Censors say yes, others say no, and so far the noes have it. However, at a special meeting of the board yesterday afternoon [October 22] J.A. Quinn presented a large amount of evidence in favor of showing the picture and the board will meet again this afternoon for a second view of the picture and a further conference, after which the final verdict will be pronounced. At a late hour last night it was said that a majority of the Censor Board were in favor of allowing the picture to be run provided children under 16 were excluded from the theater.

Kingsley was able to assume that her readers knew what the Board was objecting to because Damaged Goods was based on a play that had been causing controversy since 1913. She didn’t need to use a word that rarely appeared in the L.A. Times (the search engine says it was only 11 times between 1910-1919) and was referred to with euphemisms like:

• “a most unhappy subject;”
• “the great social evil;”
• “blood poisoning;”
• “the awful punishment meted out alike to the innocent and the guilty as the result of vice; and”
• “the most terrible disease known to medical science.”

The word they needed was syphilis. According to Kevin Brownlow, sexually transmitted infection was one of the most taboo subjects at the time, and “the result was that venereal disease became an epidemic without the public being aware of the fact.”* The topic was so fraught, that it roused the normally lethargic L.A. censors into a weeks-long fight. 

Actor Richard Bennett wanted to improve matters. In 1911, a Pennsylvanian legislator told him about a 1902 French play, Les Avaries, by Eugene Brieux, that had recently been published in English. He thought that it could educate the public about venereal disease.  After two years of fighting with theater managers afraid of such a controversial subject, Bennett got funding from a medical journal and brought it to Broadway on May 14, 1913. Damaged Goods told the story of George Dupont, a young man engaged to be married, who is diagnosed with syphilis (unlike newspapers, the play called it by its name). The doctor tells him to postpone his wedding until he can be cured, but the treatment with mercury would take three to four years so George ignores him and gets married anyway. The second act opens with the birth of his child, who gets diagnosed with congenital syphilis. All are horrified and after discussion about laws to mandate premarital testing, the doctor makes a speech about the need for more education about STIs.

The play was a hit; people really did want information. When its tour came to Los Angeles the L.A. Times said it held New York “enthralled” and called it “the most discussed play of the age.” It opened at the Mason Opera House on June 22,1914 and played to capacity houses for two weeks. There was a small kerfluffle about it when a social worker filed an unsuccessful suit for an injunction so that children wouldn’t be allowed in, but people worried much less about the content of live theater than movies–Los Angeles didn’t have a censor board for that. The Times supported the play, printing excepts from a sermon given by Rev. Baker Lee who said everyone should see it because “only through knowledge can we combat the physical ills of the world.” The theater made a concession to propriety with two women-only matinees (even the ushers were female) which were so popular that they had to add extra seats to the boxes. 

Nevertheless, the Times‘ theater critic Henry Christeen Warnack loathed the play because he found it too didactic. He said:

However much we may need preaching too, and regardless of the delight the effort may have given Mr. Bennett, I am certain that it contributed nothing whatever to stage wealth or interest…I am not opposed to the advertising of specialists nor a frank discussion of anything from the yellow peril to Sylvia Pankhurst, but to dump all of this necessary evil (I don’t mean the disease, but its dissection) on the stage and call it drama, is unfair to unorganized genius.

Bennett and his troupe ended their tour in Los Angeles and went to Santa Barbara to make a film version of it with the American Film Manufacturing Company in July and August. They also shot on locations in L.A. and San Francisco. The movie followed the same plot, but it added elements to heighten the melodrama: George became a studious law student who got infected when he had sex with a prostitute at his bachelor party. The prostitute had been infected by a wealthy customer, and she was taking revenge on all rich men by spreading the disease. The film ends with George’s suicide, just before his wife’s father has a chance to murder him. They also added a visit to a hospital ward full of people suffering from tertiary syphilis to show how horrible it was.

Damaged Goods was sold on a state’s rights basis, and it took over a year until a theater owner decided to run it in Los Angeles. J.A. Quinn realized he might have trouble with the Censor Board, so he first previewed it for newspaper writers and people in the film industry at his Supurba Theater on October 14, 1915. The Times writer admired it, calling it “strong and convincing.”

Next, as Kingsley reported above, on October 22^nd the Censor Board held a special meeting where Quinn presented support from education and medical experts; he was following a strategy that had been used elsewhere with both the play and film to placate censors. They continued to waffle and on October 25^th Kingsley reported that the Board still hadn’t made a final decision (they were putting it off until the following Tuesday, November 2nd), so Quinn decided to temporarily replace it with The Man from Oregon.

On the October 26^th he held a private screening for the faculty of the Manual Arts High School, the Parent Teachers Association, and “several noted lawyers and doctors” to garner more support for the film. According to the Times, “it was the unanimous decision of the assembly that Damaged Goods should not be suppressed, but rather it should receive the widest possible publicity; that the play was in no way immoral.” They thought the Board should remove the ban right away.

The Board continued to delay, so Quinn continued his campaign. On November 5^th he held a meeting at his theater of other owners and the general public to protest the Board’s refusal to permit the screening. On November 11^th, the Times reported that he collected endorsements from over 100 religious leaders, doctors, and educators which he presented to the Censor Board at their November 11^th meeting. However, before that meeting there was a scandal. The president, A.P. Tugwell, had been removed by the mayor on November 9^thand another board member had resigned when Quinn accused them of accepting bribes from film distributors. He really played hardball!

So there were only five members left to decide Damaged Good’s fate on the 11^th. After an hour of listening to speeches supporting the film, the Times said that the board had such a “heated” and “sensational” fight amongst themselves that the three members opposed to the film resigned. The remaining two members once again postponed their final decision. One of them, Edna Landers Rogers, left on a vacation to Canada on the 14^th and the Mayor decided to dissolve and reorganize the board. J.A. Quinn and Damaged Goods managed to break the Los Angeles Board of Censors.

With nobody to stop him, Quinn went ahead and showed the film. It opened at the Superba on November 15^th. Like the play, the film version also sold huge numbers of tickets, playing to packed houses for over a month. The theater added extra screenings at 9 am and 11 pm. Churches, schools and clubs attended together.

An anonymous Times reviewer called the film “a supremely strong presentation of a world-wide condition, and it unfolds in intensely dramatic manner the tragic consequences of an act of indiscretion on the part of a young man,” but Henry Christeen Warnack still hated it. He minded being preached at about blood poisoning less because the movie ticket only cost a quarter, plus he didn’t object if some children picked up useful information, but he couldn’t stand seeing the people suffering from syphilis, not because he thought their misery shouldn’t be exploited but “to show one example after another of rotting flesh is disgusting in the extreme.”

The Board of Censors in Los Angeles was rarely this newsworthy. That’s not too surprising: studios wanted to sell their product, not push artistic or social boundaries, so they usually made inoffensive movies. The City Council founded the seven-member board in 1911 mostly to regulate the lighting in theaters (too many sweethearts were holding hands in the near darkness!), but they threw in a mandate to “eliminate all obscenity, nudity of figures shown or violence.” It looks like enforcement was half-hearted: in May 1914 the city budget committee threatened to defund the Board, because exhibitors often didn’t bother to submit movies to them until after they’d played for a few weeks. Nevertheless, they kept going and in February 1915 they helped convince the City Council not to ban The Clansman (Birth of a Nation) because it was “of tremendous worth to the nation.” Similarly, in March 1915 they passed the high-minded film Hypocrites which featured Margaret Edwards in the nude as The Naked Truth. 

After Damaged Goods it took the city government quite a while to do anything about film censorship. On November 12^th Mayor Sebastion said he planned to reorganize the Board, perhaps with the addition of a fifty-member Advisory Committee that would serve as a court of appeals. That bad idea was quickly forgotten. On November 24^th, Kingsley reported that studio executives were asking the City Council to abolish the censor board and appoint a single commissioner who would only enforce the decision of the National Board of Censors. The City Council eventually got around to making a decision, but not until March 29, 1916 when they established a Film Commissioner with the power to prohibit films with nudity or gruesome crimes.

However, they didn’t bother to name anybody to the office until December 1917, when they wanted to ban an utterly racist anti-miscegenation film called Free and Equal. The Council appointed Edward J. Purcell, from the City Prosecutor’s office, to the post. Purcell died in the flu epidemic the following December, and they didn’t appoint another censor. In 1921, when the Clara Smith Hamon movie Fate caused an outcry, the City Council “discovered an almost forgotten ordinance enacted in 1917 creating a Commissioner of Films,” according to the Times. However, they couldn’t find anybody willing to take the job fast enough, so the Council decided they could ban it themselves.

*It’s actually impossible to know how big the problem was then. Researchers didn’t collect data on sexually transmitted infections.

However, even though we now know how bad the rate of disease is these days, it’s still getting worse. According to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, rates in the United States are spiking. From 2018 to 2022, the number of reported cases rose 80%. Dr. Khalil Ghanem wrote:

We should be able to eradicate this entirely preventable disease through the basic tenets of infection control: widespread screening, testing, finding the sexual partners of infected individuals, treating those who have the disease, and educating the public.

We have good diagnostics, we know how it’s transmitted, there’s no animal reservoir, and we know how to treat it. 

But there are wider public health challenges. Screening is inadequate: While some women get routinely tested for STIs at their annual exam, men are far less likely to get routine screenings. And because many people with syphilis have no symptoms, they won’t seek out screening. Plus, many at-risk patients don’t have access to health care, and a lot of sexual health clinics have closed over the last decade.

We don’t just need a new Richard Bennett, we also need better health care.

“Bennett Making Picture,” Variety, July 14, 1914, p. 7.

“Bird to Nest Here Again,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1915.

“Censor Board Under Fire,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1915.

Gardner Bradford, “Busy Week on the Rialto,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1914.

“Brieux Play at Mason,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1915.

“Brieux Play in Film Form,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1915.

Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence, New York City: Knopf, 1990, pp.56-61.

“Goodwin at Majestic with Never Say Die,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1914.

Grace Kingsley, “At the Stage Door,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1915.

“Last Film Censor Will Leave City,” Los Angeles Herald, November 13, 1915.

“Little Mary in New Role,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1915.

“May Cut Claws of Censor Law,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1921.

“Mayor Blocks Trouble Films,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1917.

“Movie Owners to Protest L.A. Censors,” Los Angeles Herald, November 4, 1915.

“Officials to Attend Purcell’s Funeral,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1918.

“Only Two on Board Now,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1915.

“Orders Films Censored Here,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1921.

“Picture Shows: Board of Censors,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1911.

“Poe’s Raven To Be Shown,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1915.

“Strong Support for Film Play,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1915.

“They Censure the Censors,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1914.

“To Reorganize Censor Board,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1915.

“Tugwell Out of Censor Board,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1915.

Henry Christeen Warnack, “Brieux Broken on the Wheel,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1915.

Henry Christeen Warnack, “The Chamber of Horrors,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1914.

Henry Christeen Warnack, “Trouble Over The Clansman,” Los Angeles Times, February 9, 1915.

Alma Whitaker, “A Chamber of Horrors,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1913.

“William Hodge at the Majestic,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1914.

“Women Pack Majestic to See Damaged Goods, Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1914.

One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley went to a movie that tried to teach her that “the wages of sin are sables.”* She knew better than that, and she thought it was such a hoot that she recommended to anyone feeling down to “cheer yourself up by a trip to the Criterion,” because:

you cannot fail to get a kick out of some of the obviously unintentional comedy. For instance, the professional traducer of wives must buy his sables in car lots, or else the producer has an interest in advertising sables, because all of the fallen ladies draw that kind of fur. If you don’t care for sables, there’s just no use your sinning in Souls for Sables!

She said that the plot about a wife (Claire Windsor) tempted to leave her neglectful husband (Eugene O’Brien) by that habitual sable-seducer (Anders Randolf) didn’t make you “exert your mind in the least,” nevertheless:

And yet and yet, having proved by the above that I am a perfectly frightful high-brow, and that I can find faults in a picture just as well as any other critic, I’m going to admit that I did enjoy the picture. Maybe it was the comfortable Criterion seats; maybe it was just not having to puzzle or worry over the story; maybe it was the beautiful fashion show included; but I have seen far more pretentious pictures that were much worse, I’m sure.

Films don’t have to be great art to be worth seeing. She made Souls for Sables sound like fun, and wasn’t ashamed to admit she enjoyed it. In contrast, Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times seemed to find it a grave insult to women:

It is a photoplay which begets little sympathy as it treats its female characters in an ignoble fashion. From this film one would judge that most women would forget hearth and home when they find themselves confronted with a soft glossy sable coat.

He discounted the idea that she was motivated by her husband’s neglect and complained that the story had “a degree of stupidity” saying, “Mrs. Garlan, although she was peeved with her husband for working night after night, had such a spacious and well-furnished home that one sable coat more or less should have meant nothing to her.” He did agree with Kingsley about the quantity of furs in the movie, concluding, “this story has no soul, but more than its quota of sable coats.”

Unlike Hall, Kingsley found the story’s stupidity was so absurd that she couldn’t take it seriously. I think she thought that audiences were smarter than he did, and they could have a laugh at it too, especially if they had a comfortable seat.

Souls for Sables has been preserved at the Library of Congress and the George Eastman House. Maybe with appropriate expectations it’s worth a second look.

This month Kingsley also ran into Charlie Chaplin eating at the Montmartre Café (unsurprisingly, “he was the cynosure of all eyes lunching”). After sending back his salad because it was “too architectural,” he told her that he

probably will film The Dandy as his next picture. That is, if he doesn’t change his mind before the end of the present fortnight, when he expects to begin work.

The Dandy is the story of the well-known gentleman bum character which Charlie always plays, with his adventures laid this time on a Parisian boulevard, and all the action taking place within two hours. The picture, he says, is to be a five-reeler.

She was right to be skeptical: Chaplin never did make The Dandy, which is a shame because it sounds experimental, a sort of Cleo From 5 to 7 decades before Agnes Varda’s movie. According to Exhibitors’ Herald, he wrote the story himself. Other trade papers reported that his next project would be either The Dandy or an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection of detective stories, The Suicide Club.

He did go back to work soon, but on neither project. On December 11th, Kingsley reported that The Circus was in production. It wasn’t finished until 1928; according to the official Chaplin site the delay was caused primarily by his messy divorce from Lita Grey.

*I wondered how much a sable coat cost in 1925, but expensive fur shops didn’t  run newspaper ads with prices then. However, I did find a February 28,1924 New York Times  story about Miss E.M. Dunn who, when she arrived in New York, tried to evade paying customs on a sable coat that she declared cost $1000 but the Customs officials said was worth $5,000. (that’s around $90,000 now, according to online inflation calculators). So the wages of sable sin were pretty high. The paper didn’t print a follow up, but I’d guess that somebody quietly paid Miss Dunn’s bills and the problem disappeared.

J.S. Dickerson, “Souls for Sables,” Motion Picture News, September 12, 1925, p. 1275.

Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen,” New York Times, September 15, 1925.

“Woman’s Jewelry Seized on Pier,” New York Times, February 28, 1924.

“Chaplin Dines Reviewers,” Moving Picture World, October 10, 1925, p. 467.

“Chaplin to Make ‘The Suicide Club,” Exhibitors’ Trade Review, November 28, 1925, p.12.

John S. Spargo, “A.M.P.A. Luncheons Reach Pinnacle of Entertainment,” Exhibitors’ Herald, November 7, 1925, p. 38.

“To Be, or Not To Be,” New York Times, November 29, 1925.

 

One hundred and ten years ago this month, Grace Kingsley said she had the story behind the Little Tramp’s walk:

At last the truth is out. I mean about the Charlie Chaplin walk.

It seems Willie Solar, appearing at the Orpheum, and Chaplin are great friends.

“We played together on the same vaudeville bills in London for a long time,” said Solar. “Charlie was getting only a few shillings a week then. He used to get awfully blue. One day we went out for a walk along the English lanes, out in the country. We saw a duck waddling ahead of us, and Charlie came out of his blues and began to laugh. All of a sudden he turned serious and stopped. ‘Say, if that walk is funny to me, why wouldn’t it be funny to everybody?,’ said Charlie. And from that duck’s waddle was evolved the famous Charlie Chaplin walk.”

It’s not utterly impossible that Solar, an American vaudeville comic,*  was telling the truth. He shared music hall bills with the group Chaplin performed in, the Fred Karno company, in 1912 and 1914, both in London and on tour in England. Nevertheless, I haven’t seen this story anywhere else, and the other stories seem much more plausible, that it came from a combination of trying to walk in the oversized shoes he grabbed when he quickly needed a costume for Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), and it was a part of his preexisting drunk act with Karno. It does show how famous Chaplin was already: Kingsley would find any excuse to write about him.

The Tramp’s walk was only one part of the character, but people still pay a lot of attention to it. The official Chaplin site even has an essay called “The Walk That Talks” by Sawani Vinita.

Earlier in the month, Kingsley reported on Chaplin’s current project under the headline “Charlie as a ‘Brow.'” She said:

“The picture Shanghaied which Charlie Chaplin is doing for the Essanay, promises to give the comedian a chance to display his real dramatic ability. The photoplay is said to be more ‘human’ in quality than heretofore.”

It really wasn’t a highbrow film; when it was released just a few weeks later the Motion Picture News review said the movie included some drama with intense action, but “in every scene the Chaplin antics predominate,” and the reviewer said he was “jolted into an uproar of laughter.”  The following month Peter Milne reviewed it for the same magazine and called it a melodrama burlesque that was “good, clean, rough and tumble comedy…refreshingly uproarious.”

Someone in the publicity department must have told Kingsley to expect something serious. Highbrow aspirations were far in Chaplin’s future–he didn’t make A Woman of Paris until 1923. Nevertheless, he was already beginning to experiment with expanding what could be done in a comedy.

Shanghaied is available on the Internet Archive.

* Kingsley ran into Solar because he was playing at the Orpheum Theater this month. In her review she said, “A rubber face has Willie Solar, apparently, and he makes the most of it. He nearly stopped the show yesterday.” Born in Anderson, Indiana on August 8, 1886, he had a long career on stage. He died following a heart attack on December 15, 1956 in New York City, still working as a performer.

“Charlie Chaplin in Shanghaied at Empire,” Stockton Independent, March 19, 1916.

“Latest Chaplin Comedy Combines Thrills and Laughter,” Motion Picture News, September 18, 1915, p. 78.

Peter Milne, “Shanghaied,” Motion Picture News, October 16, 1915, p. 89.

“Obituaries,” Variety, December 19, 1956, p. 79.

Robert Payne, The Great God Pan: A Biography of the Tramp Played by Charlie Chaplin, New York: Hermitage House, 1952, p. 10.

‘Sime.,’ “Shanghaied,” Variety, October 22, 1915, p. 23.

One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley noticed a new trend in comedies, one that wasn’t caused by people turning away from slapstick. She said physical comedy would never die, because “it is elemental. It is ingrained within humans. It had its beginnings so far back that nobody remembers.” She thought the taste for a more adult sort of comedies were coming from people being tired of melodramas. She visited the set of Free Lips (soon to be re-titled His Secretary) and declared that its director, Hobart Henley, was “one of the missionaries of the new sophisticated screen comedy.” He explained the change:

 People are tired of the weeping willows and the sob sisters. They are beginning to enjoy subtle comedy as well as the more riotous sort.

She also spoke to the film’s leading lady, Norma Shearer, who was playing a plain stenographer in love with her boss. You won’t be shocked about the movie’s plot: she gets a makeover and comes out looking like a star, then they live happily ever after. She said:

They make comedies of the most serious things nowadays. It is hard to make a dramatic picture and make it good enough to be taken seriously by fans.

This wasn’t the first time Kingsley mentioned that people had had enough of melodrama. In the past, when people were sick of them, they went to a parody like The Shreik of Araby.

Kingsley reviewed the film when it opened in Los Angeles in December. She noted that there was nothing new in the ugly-duckling-to-swan story, but the filmmakers managed to make a “breezy laugh-pager that is a knockout.” She particularly liked the innuendo in the intertitles, and quoted a set: “You aren’t a very fast worker, are you?” demands the man of his pretty stenographer. “Not with a pencil,” answers the steno demurely.

George T. Pardy in Motion Picture News agreed, writing:

 Crisp, bright comedy shot through with winged arrows of satire directed at the ‘tired business man’ target that hits the mark squarely, offering a farcical plot brimful of absurdities; this picture classes as decidedly good light entertainment.

Unfortunately, His Secretary is a lost film.

I’m less certain that they were being made because audiences were wearying of melodrama, because it wasn’t a brand-new trend; Ernst Lubitsch and Cecil B. De Mille had been making sex comedies since the early 1920’s. There were just more directors giving them a try, for instance, Mal St. Clair’s Are Parents People? (about a couple on the verge of divorce) had premiered in July and his The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (shenanigans ensue when a sophisticate disguises himself as a waiter to meet a duchess) came out the following year. Hobart Henley himself had recently finished shooting Exchange of Wives, which was about an experiment in wife-swapping.

Just as Kingsley said, they weren’t replacing other sorts of comedy. This month Charlie Chaplin signed a million-dollar deal with Pathe to re-release all of his First National films including The Kid, A Dog’s Life, and Shoulder Arms. In addition, his The Gold Rush and Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman were selling loads of tickets in Los Angeles this month. There was room for all kinds of comedy.

Of course, the appeal of dramas with strong emotion is as elemental as slapstick and melodrama fans had no need to fear. Early in the month, the Times ran a note that “the Norma Shearer of Sweden” was on a train through Canada to Hollywood. Greta Garbo would bring as much drama to the movies as anyone could want. Her arrival was such a big deal that somebody has even posted a film of it on YouTube:

 

George T. Pardy, “His Secretary,” Motion Picture News, January 2, 1926, p. 87.