Ingram’s Wrecks

Rex Ingram had some kind of fascination with the grotesque. The main identifying trait I had identified in the work I’d seen was a tendency to cut in bizarro comedy business at the worst possible moment. I liked that about him. There’s even buffoonery going on during the famous erotic tango of FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE. If you’re getting off on Valentino, those cutaways (a drunk finding a goldfish in his glass) will put you right off your stroke. THE MAGICIAN, a melodrama about mad science and black magic, ends with a dwarf stuck in a tree with his trousers in tatters.

Ingram only does one really weird cutaway in SCARAMOUCHE, but it’s right at the climax — the hero rescues his family from the Reign of Terror, and we cut to a huge closeup of an ugly guy flickering his eyelids in a repulsive parody of feminine emotion. An extraordinary thing to insert during your tale’s emotional climax, expressing either humorous contempt for the material or some kind of urge to set the sublime in stark contrast with the ridiculous.

Elsewhere, Ingram entertains himself with his extras, in the manner of Fellini. He not only gathers impressive physical oddities, he enhances them with makeup, so Danton is spectacularly pockmarked and corrupt French justice is embodied by this caricature —

The make-up artist / putty wrangler is uncredited. This guy is mocked by the beautiful Novarro for his hideousness, which is somehow meant to stand in for his corruption, but then Danton, who looks like somebody spat Rice Crispies in his face, is a noble figure, which seems inconsistent.

In a cameo, we get Napoleon, played by the great montage director Slavko Vorkapich (Nappy gets a walk-on in the remake, too, but a more significantly placed one). Slavko has a terrific face. This is his earliest credit, but the IMDb list is surely incomplete, so we can’t know if he was plucked from some other role because his face fit, or if he was bumming around Hollywood doing extra work before his montage career took off (he later made an expressionist movie, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413, A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA, which may support that supposition).

Jacques Tourneur is also listed as an extra in the film, but he’s hard to spot in the cast of thousands. This isn’t him ~

Somewhere in the throng is Buster Keaton’s future sidekick, Snitz Edwards, and Ingram favourite John George, the little guy from THE MAGICIAN and TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS. This movie could be nicknamed INGRAM SATYRICON.

More SCARAMOUCHE soon!

The Batman

The Batman from David Cairns on Vimeo.

This is from the Robert Florey-directed THE PREVIEW MURDER MYSTERY (1936). At a certain point in the story, we get glimpses of different movies being shot on different stages of a studio which is being targeted by a murderer/terrorist, who turns out to be… well, I won’t spoil it. But we get to see Hank Mann and Snub Pollard as clowns doing crosstalk patter instead of the slapstick they were famed for (Mann plays the drunken millionaire in CITY LIGHTS, among many other roles through a long career beginning at Keystone), but much more interestingly we witness the shooting of an expressionist horror movie, featuring a character called The Batman. He wears a dark cape and is accompanied by a grotesque figure with a painted grin.

THE BAT WHISPERS

THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

This is all very interesting as the DC Comics Batman (known as THE Batman in his early appearances) didn’t make his first appearance until 1939. Creators Bill Finger & Bob Kane always credited the movies, though they mentioned THE BAT WHISPERS (1930) and THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (1928). And indeed, the Bat and Gwynplaine look a lot more like the comic book characters than these doofuses, with the quaint twist that the Bat was a villain and Gwynplaine a hero, rather than the other way around.

I’m also slightly amused that The Batman in Florey’s film looks so much like Brandon Lee in THE CROW, a much later descendant of the costumed crime fighter.

Florey, of course, directed for-real horror movie MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE and *nearly* got to do FRANKENSTEIN, but for me the more relevant credits are his early shorts, THE LOVE OF ZERO and THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413, A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA. Both are made in a Caligariesque kind of cardboard expressionism, and the latter is even a behind-the-screen story of moviemaking like THE PREVIEW MURDER MYSTERY.

As for the actors — the screen’s first Batman turns out to have been German character player Henry Brandon, best known for playing Scar in THE SEARCHERS. IMDb refers to his sidekick as “the gnome,” and the actor is my hero, John George, from TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS. A dynamic duo by anybody’s standards!