D.W. Griffith was “The Man Who Invented Hollywood” and Mary Pickford was “America’s Sweetheart,” but Douglas Fairbanks was the prototypical “American Action Hero,” a clean-cut, virtuous and energetic swashbuckler who took great pride and pleasure in doing all of his own stunts. But Fairbanks, one of the powerful founding members of United Artists (along with Griffith, Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin), whose action-packed costume dramas broke box office records in the early 1920s, almost failed to make it in the movies at all.

After Griffith jumped ship at Biograph in 1914, he went to work with Harry Aitken at Mutual Film, and when Aitken left a short time later to found the Triangle Film Corporation, Griffith followed him. Aitken had the idea, borrowed from Adolph Zukor and his Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount), of recruiting Broadway stars by offering them exorbitant salaries to bring their stage experience and built-in box office draw to bolster his pictures. The backbone of this plan was that these pictures would be overseen by the expertise of Triangle’s three director/producers: Griffith, Thomas Ince (famous for his westerns), and Mack Sennett (a great director of early comedies).

One of the stage personalities signed by Aitken was Douglas Fairbanks, and he was quickly assigned to work with Griffith. Griffith, however, felt that Fairbanks wasn’t a very good actor. When Fairbanks was given his first leading role, as Gerald in The Lamb, Griffith was displeased with the result. The movie would never have been released if it had not been required at the last minute to fill out an already-booked Triangle theater program. The Lamb was an instant hit with audiences, and Fairbanks went on to be the only star, Broadway or otherwise, whose pictures were making the studio any money. Meanwhile, Aitken continued to lose money on the salaries of his less-popular stars, and this combined with the financial failure of Intolerance finally sank the fledgling enterprise.

Fairbanks, in life as in his films, landed on both feet and was offered a sweet deal by Adolph Zukor which included control of his own company to produce films for Zukor to distribute (Zukor had also given Mary Pickford a similar arrangement). In addition to starring in these features, Fairbanks also helped to write several of them, along with Anita Loos and director John Emerson, who he brought with him out of the rubble of Triangle.

Despite the fact that Fairbanks plays essentially the same character in all of these films, it was a role that never failed to charm his public. He would eventually put his celebrity status to good use in 1917 when, unable to join the military, he toured the country along with Pickford (who he would later marry) and Chaplin, encouraging Americans to buy Liberty Bonds to help finance the war effort.

Wild and Woolly, which was also released in 1917, is typical of Fairbanks’ output during this part of his career: a smart, satiric story wrapped around an action-driven comedy. Fairbanks plays Jeff Hillington, the Wild-West-obsessed son of a wealthy New York railroad magnate who is dispatched by his father to Bitter Creek, Arizona, to evaluate whether the town deserves the railroad spur it is requesting. Catching wind of Jeff’s love of the Old West and anxious to please him, the townspeople wind the clock back a few decades and recreate the town’s frontier days, planning to stage a train heist and an Indian uprising for their guest’s benefit. As an extra precaution, they substitute Jeff’s ammunition with fake bullets and only carry blanks themselves.

Unfortunately, the evil government Indian agent smells opportunity, and uses the situation to incite the local Indians into a real uprising, hoping to make off with the loot from the train in the confusion. Meanwhile, his slimy Mexican sidekick, Pedro, absconds with the beautiful Nell. With the town under siege, it is now up to Jeff to get to his weapons cache and fulfill his wildest fantasies while putting down the Indians, salvaging the payload, and rescuing the girl.

Throughout it all, Fairbanks electrifies the film with a presence that is arguably as powerful as any that has ever graced the screen. He is constantly in motion: waving his six-shooter ecstatically, pumping friendly arms with his firm, manly handshake, and vaulting nearby furniture with graceful ease (walking around would simply not be able to convey the youthful exuberance he exudes). His most impressive feat, when the Indians have him pinned down in the hotel bar underneath his room, is to leap up and grab a beam overhead, using it to swing up and kick a hole through his own floor so that he can climb in and retrieve the live bullets. He’s a real live wire, this one.

Clearly, even by 1917, the western was already well-established enough to be spoofed, and this film gently chides the genre conventions before good-naturedly surrendering to them. It is also odd to think that, when Wild and Woolly was made, Arizona had only been a state for five years, and was in reality not so far removed from its lawless frontier days as a US territory. Woven throughout the story, though, there is definitely a sense of value attached to the “manly” virtues of courage, strength, and heroism embodied by the myths of the Old West.

This much is clear, even from the beginning of the film, where Jeff is largely a naive figure of fun. His bedroom is a veritable shrine, with gun racks lining the walls under dynamic paintings of cowboy life. Jeff himself squats in the corner, reading a western novel in front of a teepee and eating his meals from a pot of beans cooking over a fire. He torments the butler with lasso tricks and feats of sharpshooting, and mocks the sissy easterners who woo his sister with roses (when he meets the right girl, he plans to carry her off in his manly arms). Forced to work in his father’s dreary offices during the week, Jeff lives for Sundays, when he dons his cowboy outfit and rides his trusty horse through Central Park (much to the amusement of the promenading city slickers). Later he will pay a visit to the local movie-house to catch the latest western feature.

When he arrives in Arizona and steps off the train and into the fictional Wild West that has been prepared for his benefit, the townspeople have difficulty maintaining their composure in his presence. Inevitably, as soon as he has stepped out of the room, their solemnity gives way to peals of laughter at Jeff’s enthusiasm for the whole thing. Part of what makes this whole portion of the film so hysterical is that it foreshadows a time when the national infatuation with the mythology of the frontier turned precisely this sort of thing into profitable, tourist-attracting theme-park fodder.

After the town is saved, Jeff has gained a new self-awareness and apologizes for the trouble he has caused for everyone. Then, having stood still for too long, he runs out, leaps on his horse, and gallops out to board the moving train as it departs, waving farewell to his new friends on the platform as the train disappears out of sight. But this can’t be the end, as a title card soon acknowledges; a western romance cannot end without a wedding. One final scene establishes that Jeff and Nell are now married, and living in a large and elegant house. Jeff is not unhappy by these trappings of civilization, however, for right outside the door waits his trusty horse and a whole gang of cowboys ready to accompany him as he rides off into the sunset.

Wild and Woolly appears all the more sophisticated for its time in the way that it seems to acknowledge that the portrait of the Old West that exists in the popular imagination is largely a constructed thing. Ultimately, of course, the joke is on the jokers when they must rely on Jeff and his familiarity with the fictional tropes of the western to save them from the genre bogeymen that they have unleashed. Thus the film gleefully recognizes the artificiality of the western while powerfully affirming western (and therefore American) morality and values. The frontier may never have existed quite as we imagine, but Jeff reminds us that foreign invaders must still be repulsed, evildoers apprehended, and women rescued. Want to buy a Liberty Bond?

Posted in Reviews, Scholarship

Since its inception, cinema has been the art form with the closest ties to ongoing technological innovation, the limitations of which are constantly being pressed by the extraordinary creativity and imagination of the minds behind the movies. The most obvious early example of this marriage between artistic vision and technical ingenuity can be found in French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès directed hundreds of films during his 18-year career, which began in 1896, but he is best known today for his 1902 adaptation of a Jules Verne novel, Le voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), as a fanciful special-effects extravaganza. Five years later, he adapted another Verne work, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and, just as unable to film under the sea as he had been unable to shoot on the moon, he employed the same abstract and surreal aesthetic.

Although the effects in Méliès films consist largely of camera tricks and an elaborate collection of painted backdrops and imaginative props, the visual magic of the movies grew in sophistication as the movies themselves did. Some of this simply consisted of better trickery and superior integration of fake elements with real ones, but probably the most significant improvements involved the camera: where it could go and what it could do. One such advance was the Williamson tube, a watertight device rigged with mirrors which, for the first time, allowed scenes to be filmed underwater.

In 1914, John Ernest Williamson, developer of the tube, and his brother George, mounted an expedition to the Bahamas, where sunlight reached to a depth of 150 feet, and shot a short picture which they cleverly called Thirty Leagues Under the Sea. The experiment was a smashing success, and the obvious next step was to take the invention to Hollywood and sell them on a full-scale production of the most famous undersea adventure in literature. This they did, and in 1916, the Williamson brothers were back in the Bahamas with director Stuart Paton and a full cast and crew to bring Jules Verne’s book to life in a way never before possible.

I use the word “book” loosely, as the adaptation is actually of two Verne novels: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, its sequel. This movie version arranges the two stories to happen concurrently, adds a female character to each, and gives Captain Nemo a back-story. The plot of 20,000 Leagues is fairly well known, and not changed a great deal here (merely shortened considerably). The plot of Mysterious Island is read and adapted far less.

In the 1860s, a famous scientist is asked to join an expedition in search of a monstrous sea creature. When the creature attacks his ship, he is thrown overboard along with the expedition’s harpooner (and, in the movie, his daughter). Floating helpless in the water, they are picked up by the “creature,” which turns out to be a super-advanced submarine captained by a mysterious and driven man. Captain Nemo keeps them on board as his prisoners, but allows them to take part in his amazing adventures as he traverses the world’s oceans. Oddly enough, the scientist’s daughter (although I expected a romantic attachment between her and the harpooner), has no effect or presence in the story whatsoever. She is simply there, and is given neither dialogue nor anything to do.

Meanwhile, a group of Union soldiers escape their Confederate captors by hijacking a hot-air balloon. However, rather than carrying them back across enemy lines, the balloon flies out to sea and deposits them near an uncharted island. Eventually the men discover that the island’s lone inhabitant is a dark-skinned girl who seems to have been there for quite some time. Unbeknown to them, the island is one of Captain Nemo’s land bases, but he takes pity on them and secretly sends them supplies and aid.

Eventually, we learn via flashback that Nemo was once an Indian prince who was betrayed by a British guest. His guest, who desired Nemo’s wife, falsely accused him of fomenting a rebellion. When Nemo is arrested, a rebellion actually begins, and he escapes in the chaos. Returning home, he finds his wife dead and his daughter gone. By the next morning, the authorities have laid waste to Nemo’s kingdom, and he dedicates his life to seeking revenge against the cause of his downfall.

Of course, the girl on the mysterious island is Nemo’s daughter, who has fallen in love with one of the Yankees. In a bizarre turn, the man Nemo is looking for, haunted by the ghost of Nemo’s wife, returns to the island in search of the daughter. After a tense chase and a brief battle, he is killed. Nemo and his daughter are reunited (he tells his story on his deathbed, although by now we have pieced it together well enough), and everyone else ends happily.

The story has its shortcomings (and they are obvious), but it is passable and even highly entertaining in its way. It presumably exists to showcase the underwater photography, which is beautiful and incredible to watch, even now. One can only imagine its effect on audiences 90+ years ago. Furthermore, the underwater scenes do not wear out their welcome, as they might be expected to considering their novelty at the time. There are plenty of them, but they do not overwhelm the rest of the film or become dull from overuse. Just as much attention is paid to the film’s other aspects, in fact.

A full-sized “Nautilus” (which seems to be unable to dive, as an obvious model is used to film it underwater) was constructed, for instance, and many of the island scenes look as though they were filmed on location. Nemo’s extended flashback is staged with an opulence that approaches (but does not rival) Griffith’s Babylon set from Intolerance. The film is so lavish that it is no surprise to learn that its final budget made the expenditures impossible to recover when the film was released, resulting in a moratorium on adaptations of Verne novels for the next decade.

One final note: In a movie that obviously spared no expense in its staging and construction, one scene cannot escape mention. While the submarine is anchored near the island, the prisoners/guests see one of the castaways swim down to the ocean floor and get attacked by an octopus (whose enormous arm seems to operate like a boa constrictor). They alert Nemo and he quickly (ha!) dons his clunky diving suit and drops down to attack the octopus with an axe. Incredible as the whole thing is, the best part is the creature itself, which basically seems to be a black, octopus-shaped balloon with a cartoon face drawn in chalk. Unbelievably, at least according to John Williamson, the audience actually believed the octopus was the real deal.

Williamson cites a contemporary review as saying: “The struggle between the monstrous cephalopod and the pearl diver, ending in the latter’s rescue by the captain, is one of the rarities of the camera. There can be no question of fake or deception. It is all there, and our vision tells us it is all true.” The silly contraption was actually constructed out of canvas, and the tentacles inflated with rubber tubing controlled with bursts of compressed air, all operated by a diver inside the head. Williamson proudly claimed: “To one who did not know its inner secrets, viewing it in action was indeed a hair-raising experience. John Barrymore himself told me that in all his career on the stage and screen he had never been so thrilled, so absolutely frozen – rooted to the spot – as when he watched my octopus scenes.”

I have long believed accounts of early film audiences running from the screen in terror when an actor pointed a gun at the camera, or a train approached the lens head-on, to be foolish exaggeration. Accounts like this, however, certainly lend an air of credibility to the reported credulity of the first moviegoers. In any case, outrageously fake octopus or no, there is nothing primitive or artificial about Williamson’s ocean scenes. No doubt everyone can bring to mind a film, perhaps even a favorite, which involves underwater photography. We have John Williamson to thank for cinema first “getting its feet wet;” just one of a thousand technological innovations made by a thousand forward-thinking men and women whose work continues to enrich the films we enjoy today in ways that we don’t even realize.

Posted in Reviews, Scholarship