The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Unfortunately, very few pre-1932 Fox Film movies survive. Although Fox valued his productions highly and took care to store them in fireproof vaults, successive regimes were far less conscientious. In July 1937, a huge fire at a company warehouse in Little Ferry, New Jersey, would incinerate the only remaining prints of a great many William Fox–era movies. Still, enough remains (reviews, production stories, ads, reminiscences, and once in a while, an actual entire film) that it’s possible to discern patterns of theme, style, and intention.

  The impression that emerges most strongly, especially from the company’s first two identity-defining years, is how deeply personal these movies were, how much they reflected Fox’s own experience, outlook, and values. His formal education had ended in the third grade; his movies addressed the world heatedly and emotionally rather than with cool intellect. Yet, he respected education, missed what he hadn’t gotten; so he tried to base all his movies on acclaimed plays, novels, and short stories. Most importantly, the early Fox movies mirrored the world that he had witnessed. Archly melodramatic plots teemed with murder, suicide, illicit sex, madness, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, and ruinous ambition, all often swirled together with dizzying complexity; main characters were fallen women, thieves, drunks, adulterers, and murderers. Although Fox would be criticized for excessive melodrama, he was essentially narrating the facts and themes of his observation and experience.

  Death, the menacing presence that had carried away seven of his infant siblings, frequently leapt out in early Fox movies to pounce on large portions of the cast. Three violent deaths occur in the first hundred feet of The Marble Heart (1916), which was based on Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin. After that comes the murder of a young man, his mother’s paralyzing stroke, and the double suicide of the couple who murdered the son. The total length of the movie was only forty-five minutes. In The Unfaithful Wife (1915), which begins with a cholera epidemic wiping out most of an Italian town, a deceitful wife and her lover nail the still-living leading man into a coffin and shove him into a vault. (The unfortunate husband was played by former Shakespearean actor Robert Mantell, who declared himself “as enthusiastic as a schoolboy” to be in the movies.)

  Some plots simply threw one murderous calamity after another at the characters. After being marooned on a South Pacific island at the beginning of The Island of Desire (1916), a young couple is attacked by two gin-soaked, opium-crazed men who set fire to their house. Then an earthquake traps them in a cave. Just after they escape to the sea, a volcano shatters the island and sends white-hot rocks hurtling toward them. Even when the lovers think they’ve found safety on a boat, they haven’t. Inside are the two men who attacked them at the beginning of the movie, and outside, floating on rafts, are hordes of naked, hungry cannibals. After the ship’s crew throws dynamite at the natives, blasting them to bits, the movie has nothing left to do except end.

  Fox movies didn’t shrink from graphic displays. Particularly gruesome was The Ruling Passion (1916), about the wife of a British officer who is hypnotized into joining the harem of an evil Indian prince. One scene shows a slave getting his eyes gouged out with hot irons. Elsewhere: a full view of a skeleton in a casket in The Green Eyed Monster (1916); a battlefield strewn with dead and dying bodies in A Soldier’s Oath (1916); a schoolteacher whacking her brutal ex-husband with a poker and choking him with a rope in The End of the Trail (1916).

  Emotional pain, too, spilled out onto the screen in torrents. One of the studio’s more innovative efforts was Wormwood (1915), in which the protagonist, after learning on the eve of his wedding that his fiancée has slept with his best friend, becomes an absinthe fiend—not just a garden-variety substance abuser quietly sinking into despair, but a subhuman creature of restless, writhing agony. The character is tormented by vivid hallucinations—represented in a remarkable 118 double exposures—including several of being stalked by a leopard. “I crawl through the city whining for a soul!” Gaston Beauvais anguishes. “A slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man—my eyes so murderous that, should you meet me, you would shriek for sheer alarm.” With its growing catalogue of grisliness, the studio soon acquired the nickname the “Fox chamber of horrors.”

  In the collective view of the early Fox movies, trouble occurred because of one main reason: unrestrained passion. Characters were always wanting too much of something—sex, money, fame, pleasure, power—or wanting it in the wrong way or from the wrong people. Usually, men wanted sex and power, while women wanted money and power. And very often the root cause was that their original family had failed to provide proper moral guidance. Specifically, the father had failed to lead.

  Enter the shadow of Michael Fox. It’s difficult to resist the notion that Fox was working out pent-up anger toward his father, that silent soup-slurping presence at the dinner table who hadn’t much cared whether the bills got paid and who had effectively compelled his ten-year-old son to drop out of school and go to work sixty hours a week in the D. Cohen garment factory. There were so many bad fathers in the early Fox movies: lazy fathers, irresponsible fathers, drunken fathers, physically abusive fathers, thieving fathers, cheating fathers, gambling fathers. Always they caused tremendous misery to the people around them, especially to their children—sons and daughters both, but more often daughters, because to Fox, girls were more fragile and vulnerable than boys.

  Three prominent early Fox movies showed the daughter of a thief nearly ruined by the guilt of association. In The Battle of Life (1916), the young woman endures “years of misery” while trying to reform her father’s character; she is persecuted by the police and thrown into jail. The Victim (1916) tells the story of a poor restaurant cashier (vaudeville star Valeska Suratt) who, falsely accused of aiding her father’s bank robbery plot, must endure a six-year prison sentence. After her release, she marries a young, rich, and kindly doctor, but her no-good father shows up again, to rob her home. While he’s hiding behind a curtain, a corrupt detective arrives to try to blackmail the daughter. The father jumps out, kills the detective, and runs away—leaving the daughter to get arrested for the crime and tossed into jail again. Only after being badly burned in a fire, with death imminent, does the father confess to the killing.

  At least that father has some shred of a conscience. The father in The Silent Lie (1917), directed by Raoul Walsh, is completely ruthless. A gambling hall owner in the Northwest, he is so furious that his wife ran off with another man that he decides to punish their daughter by forcing her to work in his disreputable business. Honest girl that she is, she denounces him for cheating a stranger. The father grabs her, drags her out of town, and leaves her out in a blizzard to die. She survives only because the young stranger has followed and rescues her.

  Even Theda Bara’s characters could shift some responsibility for their behavior onto their cruel upbringing. In The Eternal Sapho (1916), Theda’s slum-dwelling ragamuffin has an alcoholic father who routinely lashes her with a whip and in a rage sells her to a sculptor to use for sex and as a model. In The Vixen (1916), Theda steals her saintly sister’s boyfriends so that she won’t get stuck caring for their incapacitated, alcoholic father. What might she have become without that burden?

  Sometimes the sins of the father literally kill their children. One of the most chilling illustrations of this theme occurs in Her Mother’s Secret (1915), the story of a lawyer who leads a double life by having a son with his wife and a daughter with his mistress. After the lawyer refuses to leave his wife, the mistress tries to drown herself. Then the husband and wife accidentally drown on a boating excursion. The son and daughter grow up and, unaware that they are half siblings, fall in love. After learning the truth from her late father’s law partner, the girl is so horrified that she drowns herself.

  Mothers could also sin. However, because Fox believed that a mother’s love for her children was one of life’s strongest passions—enter the inspiring light of the long-suffering but always gentle Anna Fox—simply the state of being a mot
her could ennoble the basest sinner. A number of early Fox heroines were prostitutes or unmarried mothers who willingly absented themselves in order to keep their child’s life pure. The main character of Sins of Her Parent (1916), for instance, was an alcoholic Alaska dance hall prostitute who silently finances her beautiful daughter’s education and entrance into Southern society. Then, forced by her fiancé’s father to discover her “heritage of shame,” the girl finally meets her mother. Not long after their reconciliation, the mother conveniently gets shot and dies. In Fox movies, mothers routinely sacrificed, with no regrets, to give their beloved children a better future.

  But was this the sum of life, only darkness and pain and heartbreak? Of course not. As Fox had pointed out to director Raoul Walsh during their prerelease discussion of Carmen, “Who wants to see such an ending?” Movie audiences needed hope, Fox believed, and so he offered it in the same place that it shone in his own life: in the transformational power of romantic love. Fox always credited his remarkable marriage to Eva as an essential sustaining force of his progress, and he believed that anyone could gain similar strength by seeking love with a pure heart. An early emblematic movie, which became a big success and survives intact, was The Regeneration (1915), Raoul Walsh’s first movie for Fox. Based on the best-selling book My Mamie Rose, by Owen Kildare, the story tells of a young Bowery gang leader named Owen (Rockliffe Fellowes) who goes straight and learns to read and write after falling in love with a pretty society woman (Anna Q. Nilsson) who works in a settlement house. According to the intertitle cards, she shows him “that within me was a mind and a God-given heart. She made of my life a changed thing and never can it be the same again!” Simultaneously, he helps her discover her own noble qualities that her previous “butterfly existence” had obscured. For the quietly but deeply religious Fox, the miracle abided in divine relationship. One intertitle card reads, in glowing letters against a black background, “God is love.”

  Many of these movies were rough, technically as well as thematically. Reviewers criticized bad lighting, fuzzy photography, scene inconsistencies—a character walking through a door previously established as locked, an American train on a supposedly French landscape—as well as the occasional jarring anachronism. In Should a Mother Tell? (1915), set in twentieth-century America, the police use a racklike torture device to interrogate a prisoner and an executioner later brandishes a fifteenth-century two-handed sword. Subtlety was scarce. As one critic commented, the typical Fox movie from this era made its point with “the delicacy of touch that characterizes a sledge hammer when swung by a husky son of Italy.”

  Audiences forgave. No other major studio was regularly making these kinds of movies. During 1915, its first year of business, Fox Film took in $3.21 million, more than a tenfold increase over the $272,401 posted the previous year by the Box Office Attraction Company. Of that 1915 total revenue, profits totaled $523,000. The following year, gross revenues climbed to $4.24 million, with profits of $365,000. In less than two years the company had catapulted into the front ranks of American movie studios and had, according to the trade paper Wid’s Daily, established itself as “a concern whose films would, without question, bring money to the box office.” It was the fastest arrival the motion picture industry had ever seen.

  The fastest arrival, and also the most disruptive.

  Sensational, forthright, at times brutally explicit, Fox movies kicked up an unholy ruckus among staid social pillars who believed that the depiction of evil was tantamount to an endorsement of evil. Fox must have expected it. After all, less than a decade had passed since New York mayor George McClellan Jr. shut down the city’s movie theaters in December 1908 in response to pressure from conservative clergymen.

  Now, nationwide, Fox movies acquired a singularly notorious reputation. In Boston, chief censor John M. Casey barely paused for punctuation as he fumed, “In my opinion, each succeeding subject turned out by this firm advances one step or degree nearer towards the portraying of indecency or filth, and I am absolutely safe in saying that I have received more complaints on the Fox Films than ALL the others together, and if I followed out my judgment I would cut 50% of their output and without doubt they would be prohibited by the Mayor from exhibition in this city.” In Seattle, the chairman of the Board of Theater Censors, Sidney Strong, protested that his group was “getting a little nauseated with some of the Fox productions.” In Columbus, Georgia, the 600-member Federated Women’s Clubs passed a resolution condemning Fox movies, with one club leader explaining, “They work an evil influence on the people who see them, and especially the children.”

  It wasn’t only the sex. Some Fox movie viewers found the violence, even the suggestion of violence, more disturbing. In a series of letters to the National Board of Censors, a male viewer in Seattle protested that although he could dismiss the sex aspect of Theda Bara’s Carmen as being “of but trifling importance,” the brief bullfight scene still haunted him several weeks later. The movie showed only glimpses of an angry bull charging at a terrified horse, but Charles M. Farrar wrote that “these incidents were so burned into my consciousness that I remembered practically no other scenes in the play . . . I am still suffering from it and I am not particularly sensitive either.”

  Newspapers amplified the outrage. “Revolting,” “degenerate drivel,” reviewers wrote, widely portraying Fox movies as fomenting a trend toward sex and sensationalism that was turning upstanding communities into “American Babylonia.” “William Fox has some of the best actors and actresses, some of the most beautiful players, some of the best directors, certainly some of the best photographers, and about the best publicity department in the photo play world. He also has a record of some of the worst plays ever filmed,” caviled the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “The public, especially the rising generation, needs plays which extol virtue and nobility of character, which take an optimistic view of life, plays which elevate, inspire and teach the joy of living.” Even Fox’s motion picture colleagues protested. The bluntness of Fox’s early movies rattled an industry that, while not shy, was trying hard to shake its low-rent image. “We are anxious to avoid lurid dramas of the objectionable sex variety,” sniffed Adolph Zukor, head of Famous Players–Lasky, the home of Mary Pickford.

  On a practical level, Fox understood the risks of offending conservative community standards. Local censorship boards, often wielding their power arbitrarily and imperiously, could cause mayhem for theater owners. In Portland, Oregon, for instance, censors who objected to the “disgusting vulgarity” of a peasant’s table manners in Theda Bara’s The Serpent (1916) banned the movie just after 8:00 p.m. on a Saturday, too late for the manager to change the program. In Pennsylvania, after the studio made all the changes to Theda’s Kreutzer Sonata (1915) demanded by the state censorship board, officials decided that now the movie didn’t follow the Tolstoy short story closely enough to warrant use of the title and threatened to impose a fine. Around the country, police seized prints of Fox movies, sometimes to the tune of a patrol wagon’s clanging gong. Although Fox Film fought back and usually won, the effort involved legal expense, lost ticket sales, and unwelcome controversy for local exhibitors. Some decided the potential profits weren’t worth the trouble. In February 1916, all three movie theaters in Macon, Georgia, announced that when their contract with Fox Film expired the following month, they would not renew.

  Still, luck was never far from Fox during these years. A fortunate turn of events soon provided a solution. In late December 1915, the National Board of Censors changed its funding source from its parent organization, the People’s Institute, a New York City–based social welfare organization that had established the Board in 1909, to the motion picture industry itself. From now on, the Board of Censors would derive its $30,000 annual budget from film producers who would pay $3.25 per reel for a review. Fox quickly understood the implications. Because compliance with the Board’s recommendations was voluntary, producers would have to feel they were getting their money’s
worth and not being held to overly stringent standards. Therefore, in order to survive, the Board would have to become a handmaiden to the studios.

  Previously Fox hadn’t paid much attention to the National Board of Censors. When it rejected A Fool There Was because of its “sensuous love scenes and carousals of immoral women and degraded men,” he hadn’t bothered to make any changes. Now that the organization was amenable to influence, he began to court it assiduously. He made lofty promises: of course he would tell his directors to stop filming risqué scenes (as if he hadn’t been the one to order those scenes in the first place), and of course he would keep a much closer watch over his branch office managers, who somehow had been distributing uncut movies instead of censored versions that incorporated the Board’s recommendations.

  He even consulted with Board members while making and editing his movies, in order to forestall trouble. He also spent handsomely to build legal bulwarks around his movies. This was one reason he had been willing to pay high prices for hit plays: the courts had held that if a movie were based on a work that had been permissibly performed on the legitimate stage, then the movie version could not be banned as salacious. “Mr. Fox desires to work at all times in perfect harmony and sympathy with the National Board so far as it is feasible to do so,” a Fox Film official assured the Board.

  Humble appearances masked shrewd gamesmanship. Fox soon had Board officials working on his behalf. They wrote letters justifying Fox movies to outraged patrons, brokered meetings between out-of-town municipal censors and Fox Film executives, and sent speakers around the country to promote the message that motion pictures were made for adults rather than children. The latter activity was crucial to undercut claims that movies should be highly censored in order to avoid corrupting innocent young souls. Under the weight of this extra work, however, the Board’s leaders began to grumble. Why should they have to pay all the travel expenses and sometimes an honorarium to the speakers in order to put money in the pocket of film producers? “There is no company in the motion picture business, aside from D. W. Griffith’s Productions, to whom this matter is more vital than to your company,” executive secretary W. D. McGuire Jr. wrote to Fox Film general manager Winnie Sheehan. How about an extra $100 a week to subsidize this “fundamental educational work”? Fox agreed instantly, if not with great enthusiasm. Although the payments were supposed to last for only six months, the arrangement—the shakedown, really—would continue from November 1916 until September 1919.