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by Ellen Dawson

  At the film’s end, the library scene with which the film opened reappears. This time Beban closes the book as stage curtains signal the end of the picture. The scene may be interpreted as a generic desire to pair cinema with higher entertainment traditions such as theater and literature. Yet Beban also intended to dissociate himself from the negative, highly stereotyped characterizations that one- or two-reelers had broadly created about Italians (and immigrants in general) and that duplicated the racial typecasting of the vaudeville scene. By expanding the story to six reels, Beban explicitly signaled his engagement with the traditions of realist and senti-

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  mental literature and legitimate theater which, best embodied by the countless theatrical representations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that Linda Williams has recently examined, staged complex forms of identification that conveyed “racial sympathy” and a “melodramatic crossracial recognition of virtue” (Williams, Playing 46–47). By echoing such respectable ideology of universal humanism, The Italian could aestheticize racialized characters and settings through sentimental touches of moral unanimity (Keil 37–38).

  Such a universal humanism, however, had limits. Beppo’s various misfortunes, particularly the loss of his child, are explicitly rendered as the result of the environment in which he lives, not as the result of his own personal failures. Yet the injustice and ill treatments he has to endure are not narratively transformed into punishment for his abusers. The film denies him not only the right to express his rebellion and avenge himself, but also his right to justice. After all, he remains an immigrant, not an American citizen, and one whose command of the English language remains always deficient—as the many intertitles written in broken English clearly display.

  What the film exacts from its audience is not com-passion for a peer, but a purely sentimental pity, kept at a distance by a stoic and ultimately mortify-ing narrative conclusion. In its melodramatic combination of realism, pathos, and commiseration, The Italian carefully preserves a racialized legal and ideological distinction between Italian and American individuals.

  Beban’s reputation as a virtuoso actor, established on stage with his long-running interpretation of Pietro in The Sign of the Rose, significantly increased with the creative filming of his signature stage play. The film opened as The Sign of the Rose at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles on 12

  April 1915 (where The Birth of a Nation had just completed a nine-week run) and was released in New York a month later, on 31 May 1915, under the title The Alien. At both premieres, Beban capitalized on his crossover stardom in theater and film. The Sign of the Rose/The Alien was presented as a

  “Combination of Silent and Spoken Drama,” because its denouement was a thirty-minute stage act, played by the same film actors, with impressive musical accompaniment that “ranged from popular songs of this and other days to the selections from well-known operas” (Blaisdell, “The Sign of the Rose,” Motion Picture World, 1 May 1915, 740). At nine reels, the film was a racial melodrama of shocking adversity and cruelty, displaying the perverse outcome of racial prejudices, sentimentalizing along the way the miserable Italian protagonist. A financial dispute between two American brothers ends with one of them kidnapping the other’s daughter and accidentally running over and killing Rosina, the only daughter of a humble and lively Italian widower, Pietro (Beban). Distressed over her death, Pietro is arrested

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  as the kidnapper simply because he happens to be in the flower shop where the ransom was supposed to be paid to a man identified by “the sign of the rose.” Despite his vivacious protests, nobody believes his innocence. As in The Italian, tragedy is the result of environmental and circumstantial factors, not of personal crimes or failures.

  The Sign of the Rose’s ideological address openly sympathizes with the Italian character’s emotional outbursts, following his family tragedy and his unjust accusation. Yet, once more, the film narratively and visually racializes the protagonist: through the realism of costumes and setting, the

  “authenticity” of Beban’s unrestrained acting performance, and, quite prominently, the lack of a narrative closure that would grant him some form of justice. Once racialized, in fact, Pietro’s legal standing falls to sub-standard levels: nobody is indicted for the death of his daughter. The audience’s emotional response is reduced to inconsequential compassion. Pietro appears as an imperfect, deficient, and “pathetic figure”: no full identification is possible with him. Not only does the story deny him justice, but the film’s social system also requests from him a sense of childish and fatalistic submissiveness to the authority that failed to protect him. As the alternate title indicates, Pietro is and remains an “alien.” By (allegedly) mimicking Italian stage performers and real life individuals, Beban emphasized racial mannerisms through a skillful, widely appreciated, and almost obsessive attention to props, settings, costumes, and facial expressions. But the entire film achieved a carefully thought out realistic effect, further enhanced by mass scenes featuring extras brought in from New York City and trained to look like “an excited, surging, crowding crowd” ( Moving Picture World, 24

  April 1915, 561).

  Between 1915 and 1928, the year of his sudden death due to a riding accident, Beban impersonated Italian characters in more than a dozen films that he regularly scripted and, in a few instances, directed. While contributing substantially to the scenario of his films, Beban initially worked within the studio rules set by Thomas Ince and the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Company, whose films were distributed by Paramount. In 1918, however, he decided to exercise full control over his productions. Hearts of Men (Hiram Abrams Production, 1919), in which he played the role of a humble Italian florist (Nicolò Rosetti) who relocates from New York to Arizona and strikes oil, was his first film as both producer and director (“Beban Makes Debut as Cinema Producer,” Los Angeles Express, 8 March 1919, n.p.).

  His cinematic roles did not change. Although the majority of these productions are now lost, available reviews and plot synopses reveal a striking consistency of his characterizations of Italian immigrants—with the exception

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  of The Bond Between (Pallas Pictures, 1917), where he interpreted the role of Pierre “Papa” Duval, a Frenchman living in New York.3 Beban played an Italian grocer who is loyal both to Italy and his Italian American sweetheart in Pasquale (Oliver Morosco Photoplay, 1916), an Italian iceman in His Sweetheart (Oliver Morosco Photoplay, 1917) and The Greatest Love of All (George Beban Productions, 1924), and characters named Guido Bartelli in The Marcellini Millions (Oliver Morosco Photoplay, 1917), Luigi Riccardo in One More American (Famous Players-Lasky Corp., 1918), Nicolò Rosetti in Hearts of Men (Hiram Abrams Production, 1919), Lupino Delchini in One Man in a Million (Sol Lesser, 1921), Pietro Balletti in the remake of The Sign of the Rose (George Beban Productions, 1922), and Ricardo Bitelli in The Loves of Ricardo (George Beban Productions, 1926). In the acting manual he wrote in 1921

  for the Palmer Photoplay Corporation, Beban himself explained quite elo-quently why he kept playing Italian characters: “I like to play the Italian because his costume, his mannerisms, his gestures, and his unlikeness to the everyday people of the street make him stand out as a romantic and picturesque person” ( Photoplay Characterization, 9). Although Beban’s work is still relatively unknown and underappreciated, it is possible to argue that, while looking for the greatest emotional consensus, his feature-length stories of high dramatic and sentimental enticement played a crucial role in marginalizing earlier, unsympathetic representations of Italians as criminals and violent individuals. This was quite clear at the time. A New York Dramatic Mirror review of Beban’s His Sweetheart (1917), for instance, praised his constant ambition to produce more authentic versions of temperamental Italian heroes instead of “the individual with a long black moustache and a bandana handkerchief, armed with a stiletto” (3 February 1
917, 27). Pathos replaced unlawfulness, at least until, more than a decade later, Prohibition and the Depression would identify Italians as “the shame of a nation,” to quote the aftertitle of Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932).

  In the American cinema of the mid-1910s, and specifically at the time of D. W. Griffith’s intense psychological characterizations, Beban’s stardom was both rare and significant. Years before Richard Barthelmess’s performance in Broken Blossoms (1919), Beban fostered an unprecedented intimacy and solidarity with racialized, non-American, characters. Still, Beban’s films did not fully question contemporary Anglo American prejudices about Italian racial traits. Instead, they capitalized on Italians’ conventional racial attributions, including childlike emotional excess, aggressive tendencies, limited intellectual faculty, and intense family bonds. Furthermore, Beban’s interest in displaying the melodramatic turmoil of Italian immigrants was often kept within the safe narrative and ideological distance of an American point of

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  Luigi Riccardo (Beban) argues animatedly with an Ellis Island physician who has declared the Italian immigrant’s wife and daughter unfit to enter the country, from One More American (1918). Courtesy of Kevin Brownlow.

  view and within the respectable exhibitory boundaries of America’s legitimate theaters. By relying on Italians’ white racial status, Beban’s racial urban melodramas stifled both nativist antagonism and newcomers’ griev-ances by pasting “unanimous” and sentimental ideals of universal brother-hood and solidarity onto stories of indigence, exploitation, and injustice.

  Despite the consistency of Beban’s popular characterizations, his films about earnest and sentimental immigrants were not overall exceptional productions in American film culture. Responding to the industry’s realization of the crucial role of female moviegoing, several films in the second half of the decade cast female protagonists in tenement stories of abuse, dislocation, and final redemption. In 1916 alone, Thomas H. Ince and Reginald Barker, respectively producer and director of The Italian, collaborated on two productions centered on young Italian women, Three of Many and The Criminal, both produced by NYMP Co./Kay-Bee Pictures. Special attention should be reserved here for another production company, the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Co. Its founder, Oliver Morosco (born Oliver Mitchell in Utah in 1876), a successful Los Angeles–based producer and theater owner, entered the film business at full speed in the mid-1910s and specialized in productions of

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  tenement dramas. In addition to producing Pasquale (1916) and His Sweetheart (1917), both written by and starring Beban, between 1916 and 1917

  Morosco Photoplay released The Making of Maddalena (1916), Redeeming Love (1916), An International Marriage (1916), The Happiness of Three Women (1917), and Out of Wreck (1917), all centered on battered female immigrants. While more research needs to be done on the Morosco Photoplay Co., it is safe to recognize that, despite its exotic name, the company operated in the mainstream of the U.S. media, particularly theater and motion pictures (Morosco and Dugger 250–58). Consider the story of Francis Marion. Before becoming one of Hollywood’s chief screenwriters, she started her career in 1912 as a poster artist for Oliver Morosco’s theater (Beauchamp 26). Possibly receptive to Beban’s contributions, she wrote Poor Little Peppina (1916), about an American girl who grows up in Italy among bandits, and The Love Light (1921), a love story set in Italy during World War I, both starring America’s sweetheart, Mary Pickford.

  Another trajectory links the maverick Beban to both the popularization of immigrant narratives and the emergence of star-like racialized characterizations. The interest for dramas of oceanic migration and tenement life that M. J. Moriarty Movie

  Souvenir Card,

  George Beban, ca. 1916.

  From the author’s

  collection.

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  Beban contributed to opening up and nourishing coincided with the increasing presence of female screenwriters in the film industry—including Sonya Levien, Anita Loos, Jeanie Macpherson, and June Mathis as well as Frances Marion. Regularly set between picturesque Italy and New York City, the films these screenwriters wrote in the 1910s, from A Woman’s Honor (Fox, 1916), The Woman and the Beast (Graphic Pictures, 1917), and The City of Tears (Bluebird Photoplays, 1918) to The Ordeal of Rosetta (Select Pictures, 1918) and Who Will Marry Me? (1919), cast female protagonists in passionate, highly physical, and controversial love stories. While many of these stories highlighted the trip to New York as a journey toward a better life, and represented social ties within the ghetto as less oppressive than those experienced in the homeland, these films often departed from the drama of immigration. They also repeatedly addressed issues germane to mainstream American culture by venturing, without pedantry, into questions of social freedom, sexual expression, and gender and interracial relations.

  Closely linked to the phenomenon of female screenwriters was Valentino’s rise to Hollywood stardom. Mathis discovered and profiled the figure of Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922), while Marion wrote the script of The Son of the Sheik (1926). If Beban, as a much-celebrated character actor, was successful in creating emotional solidarity for his racialized, yet utterly desexualized, immigrant characters, Valentino and the star machine around him succeeded in attaching his star persona and his celebrated performances to the romantic and sensual stereotype of the Latin lover. Hollywood could do so by discouraging any straightforward association between the Italian-born star and Italian immigrants or any conventional narratives of migration. Fictional biographies described him as an Italian nobleman on the basis of the simple fact that his mother was French. In “real life” and onscreen, Valentino thus did not exude the picturesque Italianness linked to the Lower East Side, but instead the older, yet equally aestheticized one of Don Juan and Casanova (Bertellini, “Duce/Divo” ). Positioned between racial alterity and aesthetic familiarity, he became an exotic object of sexual desire transcending fears of miscegenation. He did so by exploiting a sensual intimacy that Beban had never enjoyed, but which derived from a “closer relationship” between the

  “public and the picture star” that Beban himself justly claimed to have helped to establish (Beban, “100% Italian—In Plays,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 4

  December 1920, 1067). Valentino ultimately benefited from the space of an intimate, resilient yet malleable racial difference that in the 1910s Beban had crystallized not as deviant or criminal but as picturesque and sentimental, and that the glamorous star of The Sheik would recast as exotically sensuous.

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  N OT E S

  I wish to thank Richard Beban for generously sharing biographical information about his great-granduncle, Kevin Brownlow for two of the illustrations, and Jennifer Bean for her invaluable suggestions. This is for Gaylyn Studlar, with admiration and gratitude.

  1. Among the films inspired by Petrosino, consider The Detectives of the Italian Bureau (Kalem, 1909); The Adventure of Lieutenant Petrosino (Feature Photoplay Co., 1912), a print of which is currently held at the Nederlands Filmmuseum; and The Last of the Mafia (Neutral Film, 1915). I discuss these films in Italy in Early American Cinema, chap. 5.

  2. Film Preservation Associates/Flicker Alley Inc. recently released a stunning new version of the film on DVD in a box set entitled The Perils of the New Land: The Immigrant Experience (1910–1915). This edition, for which I provide the audio commentary, includes a number of scenes that were not included in the version that circulated for many years on videotape.

  3. The Library of Congress owns a reference print of Pasquale (1916) and incomplete versions of His Sweetheart (1917) and The Bond Between (1917); the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a copy of The Marcellini Millions (1917); and the Gosfilmofond of Moscow possesses a print of The Greatest Love of All (1925).

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  Pearl White and

  Grace Cunard

  The Serial Queen’s

  Volatile Present

  MARK GARRETT COOPER

  After her 1914 appearance in The Perils of Pauline, Pearl White’s tremendous celebrity established her as the definitive serial queen.

  There were numerous other examples of the type, but none so widely associated with the title or with the risk-taking antics demanded by serial adventures. Week after week, the serial heroine narrowly escaped one fiendish plot only to end up facing another. Through repetition, this structure defined peril as persistent but punctual, omnipresent but extraordi-Pearl White. Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.

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  nary, inevitable yet unexpected. The dangerous moment ended only to be renewed. As White’s fans surely felt, to be enthralled by a serial queen means inhabiting a volatile present. Created by and for fictional characters, this paradoxical present came, mutatis mutandis, to define the serial stars’

  private lives. Through the many renditions of work and home life manufactured by the burgeoning star system, fans discovered women decidedly modern in their independence, fashion sense, athleticism, proficiency with machines, and worldwide fame. These altogether “modern” women, however, also experienced the tug of tradition. Especially onscreen, tradition asserted itself in scenarios that opposed a married, domestic woman to a working, public one. Despite spectacular feats of daring, the serial heroine often requires a hero’s rescue, and marriage inevitably brings her adventures to a close. Precisely because she seems up-to-the-minute in some respects and tied to the past in others, one might well ask when the serial queen’s moment began and if, in fact, it has ended.