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Farrar and DeMille on the set of Temptation (1915). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The war itself was the inspiration for her fourth film, Joan the Woman (1917), in which Farrar played Joan of Arc in a patriotic narrative of the rescue of France framed by the experiences of a young British soldier (Wallace Reid), who must die in the trenches to atone for the sins of an ancestor responsible for Joan’s martyrdom. Joan marks the second phase of Farrar’s association with Paramount, the final three screenplays for which were supplied by Jeanie MacPherson, who also performed as a cigarette girl in Carmen.
The remaining two MacPherson scenarios include The Devil Stone (1917) and The Woman God Forgot (1917). Beatrice De Mille (mother of Cecil and William) supplied the story idea for The Devil Stone, which survives in a partial print at the Library of Congress and describes the travails of a Breton woman in thrall to a malignant jewel that appears also to dominate earlier incarnations of the heroine and which causes her to kill her first American husband. The Woman God Forgot is a tale about the fall of the Aztec Empire in which Tecza, daughter of Montezuma, works against her father for love of a Spanish soldier again played by Reid. The latter film, now apparently lost, clearly hoped to capitalize on DeMille’s post- Joan confidence with large casts and historical detail. Stills from the film suggest that it looks forward in some
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degree to DeMille’s racier films of the early 1920s (there was a sequence in which Farrar’s attendants rose clothed from a bath while birds were released upward [Farrar 177]); at the very least, Woman clearly involved Farrar in the most risqué costuming of her film career.
If one were to characterize these films generally, one could say that they manifest three distinct strategies for packaging Farrar, the first two of which persisted into her association with Goldwyn from 1917 to 1919. The three strategies are, first, stories based on her association with a particular opera text ( Carmen and its lesser avatar Maria Rosa, set in a similarly hot-blooded and violent peasant milieu); second, stories based on Farrar’s connection with the social world of opera ( Temptation); and, finally, stories that combine the topical with the historical epic or offer the epic alone. The first two strategies indicate a certain initial caution in the development of Farrar’s screen persona, a judgment borne out by an examination of the planned opening credits for Carmen and Maria Rosa, which display photographs of Farrar’s performances in a series of operas (see screenplays in SC).
Similarly, the sharing of visual details between The Cheat and Temptation suggests that DeMille was feeling his way in the deployment of Farrar in Farrar on set and in costume for The Woman God Forgot (1917). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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narratives not immediately associated with roles for which she was already famous but that nonetheless mobilize the figure of the “woman who pays,”
beloved of both Belasco and Turnbull.
MacPherson’s participation in role construction moved Farrar’s persona in a different direction, partly in response to the ongoing war, but also, perhaps, in response to the competition presented by The Birth of a Nation (1915). Joan the Woman, for example, appears to be an opportunistic com-pound of interest in the topical (the war) and the conviction that Farrar was a substantial enough performer to carry the weight of an epic. The Woman God Forgot drops the topical element but turns the plot of Joan the Woman inside out: in Joan, the heroine refuses a sexual connection to serve her God and country; in Woman, she chooses love over service to her father and her Mexican deities, to the ruin of both. Not enough of The Devil Stone has survived to permit much analysis, except to note that it shares, like Joan and Woman, an interest in exotic locales and eras not contemporary with its making, including a part for Farrar as a barbaric Nordic queen in addition to a role as a modern American wife (who was raised as a simple Breton peasant!). Nonetheless, of these three narrative modes, Carmen represents both Farrar’s best film and most important generic model.
✩★
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✩ The Carmen Prototype
Carmen elicited from Farrar an extraordinarily physical performance, involving dancing, biting, scaling a wall, and a knockdown fight with a fellow cigarette girl. While her other surviving performances do not have this kinetic component to the same degree, Carmen appears to be a significant template, inasmuch as films showcasing tigerish Spanish or part-Spanish women featured not only at the outset of Farrar’s career but also in her engagements with the Goldwyn Company, which began when she did not renew her contract with Lasky after the summer of 1917 owing to difficulties created by her husband Tellegen at Paramount. Farrar’s heroines for Goldwyn include Pancha O’Brien in The Hell Cat (1918), who is part Spanish; The Stronger Vow (1919), set in Spain; and The Woman and the Puppet (1920), which shares the Pierre Louÿs novel with Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman (1935), describing the fortunes of Concha Perez.
Despite Farrar’s mounting frustration with weak scripts at Goldwyn, these efforts to leverage her association with one Spanish heroine into success with several others were clearly attempts to recapture the good box office of Carmen. Indeed, Farrar noted the similarity in one case, claiming in an interview about The Hell Cat that Pancha O’Brien is “more like Carmen than
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any other part I have ever played. She has the same quick temper and imperious nature” (Weitzel 39). The selection of these roles also attempted to play to Farrar’s command of the psychology of the rebellious, unfeminine, and highly sexual heroine of that opera.
Because Carmen is a major structuring element in Farrar’s film career, it is worth pausing to examine in more detail what that role might mean historically. In her account of nineteenth-century female performance in opera, Susan Rutherford suggests that sexual “knowingness,” described as a woman’s consciousness of her power to seduce and her eagerness to use it, was read as particularly licentious (268). Carmen, which premiered in 1875, shocked contemporaries because it appeared to require this attribute if the star, playing a worker in a cigarette factory who seduces a soldier, were to act the part in keeping with the new vogue for realism, which often meant, for example, studying the clothing of actual cigarette girls. Rutherford notes that realism in female performance was often read as sexual rebellion, and it maintained its power to alarm even sophisticated viewers to the end of the nineteenth century, when George Bernard Shaw reported himself shocked by Emma Calvé (one of Farrar’s heroines and models). Her Carmen was “a superstitious, pleasure-loving good-for-nothing, caught by the outside of anything glittering, with no power but the power of seduction, which she exercises without sense or decency” (Rutherford 269). While Farrar might have disputed Shaw’s notion of Carmen as wanton, she endorsed the view of the character as deliberate seductress. Writing at some length on “the psychology of Carmen” for The Bookman, she argued that Carmen’s “beauty, her position, her race compelled her to be what she was.
Admiration she demanded and obtained as freely as the flower demands and absorbs the sunshine that gives it life. The mere indifference of José aroused her—truly womanly—sense of injustice and pique. Homage was her birthright. And she proposed to have it—obtain it as she might” (Farrar, “The Psychology of Carmen” [as recorded by Frederic Dean], The Bookman 42.4, 1915, 413).
Twenty-one years after Calvé’s 1894 performance, this interpretation of Carmen’s character must have been prevalent, inasmuch as Theda Bara, partisan of the vamp-as-feminist school of performance in films such as A Fool There Was (1915), was simultaneously appearing in a version of Carmen as Farrar’s film was distributed. Nevertheless, Farrar facilitated making the seduction trope respectable in its translation from opera stage—where, after initial reactions of horror, it had
been made safe for consumption by cultivated women—to the screen, where it still had the capacity to alarm in 1915. The New York Times, for example, commented of Farrar’s performance
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that “her playing is able. Also it is bold, bald, and in dubious taste,” and the review noted that Bara’s Carmen had “none of the elements which make the Lasky ‘Carmen’ remarkable, and none, it should be added, of the elements which make the latter picture objectionable” (“Geraldine Farrar: Seen But Not Heard,” New York Times, 1 November 1915). It is notable that Bara, who was presented offscreen as an exotic and mysterious heartbreaker vamping in the cause of feminism (Koszarski 274–76), found herself in a film that could afford fewer risks with the presentation of Carmen than did Farrar, whose offscreen persona was that of the middle-class American girl who made good in a difficult art. Even so, as this criticism of Farrar’s performance implies, a too-knowing presentation of the seductress could still cause discomfort. Farrar’s autobiography observes that Zaza disturbed and excited Metropolitan audiences as late as the early 1920s (151), suggesting that, even in opera, scenes of seduction had not been entirely domesticated. As further evidence of the contemporary perception of sensuality in Farrar’s performances, Gertrude Atherton’s 1923 novel Black Oxen includes a description of Farrar’s Butterfly: “Farrar, almost supine in the arms of the seducer, was singing with the voluptuous abandon that makes this scene the most explicit in modern opera” (111). Nonetheless, Farrar’s prestige was such that, as Lasky observed to Farrar when he signed her, “whatever you do, your public will accept it as right” (Lasky 116). For at least one upper-class young woman, Farrar’s pictures were the first she was permitted to see, solely because her family had known Farrar at Lake George (Nash 186n36).
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✩ Farrar’s Performance Style
Farrar understood herself to be as much actress as singer on the opera stage, as demonstrated by her relish for the psychological dimensions of the heroines of the realist plays that were coming to dominate both the legitimate theater and the opera. She was, moreover, an intuitive performer who counseled the aspirant to opera to “sing, not from the outside, in; but from the inside, out” (Rutherford 272). Edward Wagenknecht reports that Farrar had “often spoken slightingly of her voice. At the height of her operatic career, she referred to her ‘mediocre instrument,’ and described herself as ‘an actress who happens to be appearing in grand opera’” (“Geraldine Farrar” 26). Paying lip service only to the idea of what constituted opera performance at the time, William de Mille observed that
“on the operatic stage, ‘Jerry’ was known as a fine actress, which meant that she had more than two facial expressions, that she never tripped over
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her own feet and that her gestures were not semaphorical” (148). In setting the acting competence bar comically low, de Mille organizes a continuum from opera to cinema, or what he calls “the most distant and artificial form of acting known to modern man to the closest and most naturalistic method which had yet been evolved,” that certainly overstates what Farrar learned in California (148).
Where Farrar learned her filmic performance style speaks to several key issues, namely the questions of priority in invention between opera and cinema and Farrar’s autonomy as a performer. The origins of the performance in Carmen in particular would also seem to bear on the question of what a good opera performer could offer film in terms of expertise with the highly sexualized roles derived from brothel plays or, indeed, Carmen. Did this kinetic approach originate on the stage with Farrar, did she learn it in Hollywood directly from William de Mille or Cecil B. DeMille, or did she take the greater freedom of a new location and a new medium to experiment with characterizations that the conventions of the opera stage had not previously permitted? Because only Carmen, Joan the Woman, and The Devil Stone remain as evidence, this question can be answered only indirectly, but it is striking that Farrar’s performance in Carmen is authoritative, interesting, and far less dated than her performances in Joan and The Devil Stone; indeed, if one arranges these performances chronologically, her work becomes successively less compelling with more time spent in Hollywood, although one may make allowances for differences among genres and scenarists.
Despite the evidence of the films, a famous piece of Farrar lore credits her experience on the set of Carmen in the summer of 1915 with causing her to rethink the role when she next performed it on stage. She notoriously “introduced ‘a lively wrestling bout in which she threw her opponent easily and had all but succeeded in plucking out handfuls of her hair when the rude soldiers intervened,’ [and] according to gossip, slapped Caruso’s face and clung to him so violently that he was obliged to pinion her in order to be able to sing, and half threw her to the floor when he had finished,”
causing Caruso to hiss in annoyance, “Do you think this is an opera house, or a cinema?” (“Music or Movies?” The Independent, 28 February 1916, 294). Farrar’s own autobiography would appear to endorse this account:
“Caruso is said to have given me a sharp reprimand about such tiger-like tactics in my scenes with him, with special emphasis on the unfortunate importation of movie technique!” going on to add, “I . . . know he never sang better in his life—nor did I—and we shall let it go at that” (170). In a sensitive and informed consideration of the release of the Kino videotape of Carmen in 1994, Peter G. Davis also argues for Farrar’s film experience as
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having revivified her stage Carmen, offering in evidence the contemporary reviews of her opera performances that would seem to suggest a stark before and after (“Cruella Seville,” New York Magazine, 21 November 1994, 81). Nonetheless, the question is more complex than this story of film teaching opera new tricks would suggest.
Beyond the well-established phenomenon of Carmen as a laboratory for realist experimentation on the part of the soprano (who was often, as Farrar claims to have been, responsible for the design of her costumes and makeup, a role that no longer belongs to the performer either in opera or on film and that clearly goes some distance toward shaping an interpretation of the drama), there is the question of just how much direction Farrar received from DeMille. Her autobiography suggests that his function was primarily to license an interpretation that she already harbored but had not been permitted to realize on stage. For her first essay in front of the camera ( Maria Rosa), she recalls that DeMille
outlined briefly the scenes, their intended length, the climax—and with the minimum expenditure of precious energy in preliminaries, set his camera at all angles to catch the first enthusiasm of a scene, which spontaneous impulse was always my best interpretation. We were not cautioned to beware of undue emotion, disarranged locks, torn clothing, etc. We were allowed free action as we felt it; so we acted our parts as if we were engaged in a theatre performance. . . . At any rate, Mr. DeMille understood my enthusiasm and left me free to express natural impulses wherever my feeling prompted them.
(168–69)
This account implies that Farrar received comparatively little overt instruction about the role per se and perceived film acting to be a release from the many strictures, both vocal and physical, that she had experienced on the stage.
Perhaps unexpectedly, DeMille’s autobiography ratifies Farrar’s recollection of autonomy; he observes that “I tried to help her bring out her own best performance, rather than force upon her arbitrarily my concept of her role”
(143). When one considers that Farrar was by far the most experienced with the text of Carmen of any member of the cast or crew, it seems still less likely that her interpretation was not dominant, a view shared by Carl Van Vechten: It has seemed strange to me that the professional reviewers should have attributed the added notes of realism in Miss Farrar’s second edition of Carmen to her appearances in
the moving-picture drama. The tendencies displayed in her second year in the part were in no wise, to my mind, a result of the cinema. In fact, the New York critics should have remembered that when Miss Farrar made her début at the Metropolitan Opera House in the
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Farrar at her dressing table. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
rôle of Juliette, they had rebuked her for these very qualities. . . . No, Miss Farrar is overzealous with her public. She once told me that at every performance she cut herself open with a knife and gave herself to the audience.
(“Interpreters: Geraldine Farrar,” The Bellman, 24 March 1917, 324) In the same piece Van Vechten speculates that, for better or worse, Farrar was often the inventor of prominent stage business, extending to aspects of makeup and costumes (322, 324), granting her an authority that she certainly
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wanted for herself. Writing in Vanity Fair (“The Art of Acting in the Movies,”
November 1918, 90), Farrar nods at the notion of the director as a type of Svengali, commenting that the director “must so enthuse, and hypnotize his players, that he will bring them to the creative pitch required for effective and telling acting.” Yet she claims even this function for herself in the end, going on to note that “if a motion picture star has this self-starting dynamo, or power of self-hypnosis within her, so that she need not rely on the director for her artistic stimulus, so much the better for her and for all concerned.”