The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Stuck in the industry’s lower echelon, Fox adopted a siege mentality of moviemaking. It was a lesson in humility. While FPL made Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik (1921), The Ten Commandments (1923), and The Covered Wagon (1923); while First National made Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), and Jackie Coogan’s Oliver Twist (1922); while United Artists made Douglas Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921), and Robin Hood (1922); while Metro made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921); and even Universal had Lon Chaney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Fox Film slogged along with a release schedule full of inexpensive repeats, remakes, and reissues.

  Lurid themes, of course, had always been Fox’s stock in trade, and despite an increasing call for “clean pictures,” he couldn’t afford to abandon them. Flame of Youth (1920) showed an orgy at a Paris artist’s studio; The Mother of His Children (1920) had a married sculptor tormented by desire for a beautiful “Oriental” princess (the decidedly non-Asian-looking Gladys Brockwell). Elsewhere were opium traders (Shame, 1921; The Devil Within, 1921), a mad prince plotting the violent takeover of the world (The Eleventh Hour, 1923) and salacious, irrelevant titles such as Daughters of the Night (1924), which referred to late-shift telephone operators.

  Looking back to better days, Fox remade past hits. In 1922 he released a supposedly new, improved version of his first success, A Fool There Was, with an “intellectual vamp” (Estelle Taylor) who tries to trap rather than destroy the man because she loves him. “A revarnished antique,” sighed the New York Sun, “the siren can’t come back any more than the average prize fighter can.” Dr. Rameau (1915), about an atheist surgeon who regains faith after his prayers save his dying daughter, became My Friend the Devil (1922). Samson (1915) became Shackles of Gold (1922), again with William Farnum starring as a financial giant who ruins himself while seeking revenge against a romantic rival. Perjury (1921) reworked the plot and themes of Les Miserables. Fox even considered remaking his very first movie, the failed Life’s Shop Window, but wisely decided not to. Other former hits he simply rereleased. In 1920, even though they were two to four years old, he sent out “The Big Six”—Les Miserables, A Tale of Two Cities, Cleopatra, Salome, A Daughter of the Gods, and The Honor System—and kept several in circulation as late as 1922.

  With overblown publicity hustle, Fox tried to disguise his cheap merchandise. Still, exhibitors recognized instantly that a great many Fox movies had budgets far lower than the industry’s average starting point of $75,000. “Oh, for crying out loud!” a midwestern exhibitor complained about No Mother to Guide Her (1923), about a woman who escapes from an unhappy marriage. “Played by ‘hams’ on somebody’s front lawn. If this picture cost Fox more than $20,000, I will eat the 7,000 feet of film.” A Goodland, Kansas, theater owner who booked Fox’s crime melodrama It Is the Law (1924) described it as “the usual cheap hokum peddled by this producer, played by one of the ‘all-star casts’ who look like a lot of Hollywood extras that were either out of a job or never had one.”

  Now and then, Fox’s former ambitions glimmered through the junk heap. Monte Cristo (1922), with the misused John Gilbert, at least testified to Fox’s continuing reverence for great literature. So did Dante’s Inferno (1924), which aimed to answer the literally burning question: What would hell look like? The movie began with a modern-day story of a mean, wealthy man who receives a copy of The Inferno, along with a curse from a needy neighbor whom he has refused to help. The old skinflint then deliriously imagines himself descending into hell. There he finds, according to one reviewer, an “orgy of blood stained furies and boiling pitch, of bat-winged fiends and harpies and everlasting flames, and through it all the white, writhing figures of the damned ‘blown like cranes upon a mighty wind.’ ” During its first week at New York’s Central Theatre, the movie unexpectedly rang up a house record of $17,600 in ticket sales. Variety observed, “No one can account for the business except that there is a wonderful flash of nude stuff in the lobby depicting the Inferno scenes.” Beyond the big city, Dante’s Inferno collapsed. “Bought this for two days, and they stayed away fine,” reported one small-town exhibitor. Another said, “Several persons were seen sleeping throughout the entire picture.”

  At the studio, Fox imposed martial law. Crew members had to help with one another’s jobs. Directors had to work regular business hours, from 9:00 a.m. till 4:30 or 5:00 p.m., or else risk getting fired. Night shoots were severely restricted; overtime was forbidden; and no more than ten extras could be used without special permission. Among featured players, Fox told Sol Wurtzel, he wanted only bargains: not the $75-a-week actor for $75, but the $250-a-week actor for $75.

  Inevitably, morale broke down. The exodus of acting talent that started at Fox Film in the late 1910s continued. Madlaine Traverse, denied a two-week vacation after making fourteen movies in eighteen months, quit in April 1920. “Emotional actress” Gladys Brockwell, frustrated by the shallowness of her “fallen women” roles, left around the same time. A few months later, unhappy with his scripts and publicity, Raoul Walsh’s actor brother George quit at the end of his four-year contract.

  Even the stalwart William Farnum departed. Movie audiences were beginning to eye a new sort of dashing, debonair, urbane leading man typified by Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, Ramon Novarro, and Ronald Colman. Farnum shed 50 pounds from his bulky 250-pound frame, and Fox tried to remake the forty-four-year-old actor’s image, casting him as a virtuoso violinist in Heart Strings (1920) and as the brilliant but troubled English stage actor Edmund Kean in A Stage Romance (1922). Motion Picture News commented, “Mr. Farnum struggles bravely with the material . . . But he belongs in virile subjects of the Zane Grey pattern.” The relationship wound down respectfully. When Farnum’s $10,000-a-week contract ended in 1922, Fox hired him for five movies at $65,000 apiece. Once again, the actor returned to the two-fisted, blue-collar roles in which he had started at Fox Film, playing an honest sheriff fighting crooked politicians in a lumber town in Without Compromise (1922); an outsider fighting cattle rustlers in Brass Commandments (1923); and finally, as The Gunfighter (1923), “with bullets flying like hail.” In decline, Farnum remained the gentleman Fox had always believed him to be. During location shooting in Victorville, California, on one of the actor’s last movies for Fox, about thirty people got involved in a crap game with about $10,000 or $12,000 at stake. Crewmember R. L. “Lefty” Hough recalled, “Farnum ended up with all the dough,” but “gave it all back to every guy who had lost.”

  In 1923, by mutual agreement, Fox didn’t renew Farnum’s contract. Officially, the actor was leaving to produce his own movies. It wasn’t true; he never did. He would make only one more major-studio movie in the 1920s, The Man Who Fights Alone (1924), for Famous Players–Lasky.*

  Fox now had only one bona fide star, Tom Mix. With his white hat, geranium-embroidered shirts, $200 cowboy boots, and fearless stunt work,* Mix consistently put on a profitable show in low-budget Westerns that sold easily to neighborhood and small-town theaters. Yet, increasing fame had made him meaner, more egotistical, and more likely to head for the liquor cabinet. Lefty Hough said, “Mix was a kind of guy I would hate to tangle with. He would shoot you; he’d kill you.” At home, Mix’s wife, Victoria Forde, began carrying a small pearl-handled pistol for protection against his hot-tempered rages. Recognizing that Mix might at any moment blow up his own career, Fox kept him in the horse opera department, where, accompanied by his loyal sidekick, Tony the Wonder Horse, he turned out eight or nine features per year.

  By 1924, Fox Film seemed stuck in the movie industry’s second tier. Many believed that the studio was headed for oblivion. Often, Washington Post columnist Nelson B. Bell noted, “ ‘inside stories’ would break as to the probable manner in which Fox would be kicked around by the rest of the boys until he might be absorbed, manipulated or annihilated.”

  Along with exhibition difficulties, there was another reason that Fox kept his head down during the early 1920s. The audience, American society, was
changing. A tone of malice was seeping into public behavior, as if modern life and economic hardship had eroded many of the traditional restraints against incivility. Earlier, Fox had had to face the fact that not all individuals were as good as he wished. Now, a growing body of evidence indicated that in groups, too, his presumed “wonderful public” was not necessarily so.

  The early 1920s saw a vigorous revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Formerly a mostly rural, mostly Southern, scattered affiliation of white supremacists intent on terrorizing former slaves, the KKK now emerged as a well-funded national organization with three million secret members nationwide and a broadened mandate to oppress not only African Americans but also Catholics and Jews under the rallying cry of “100 percent Americanism.” Klan activity quickly reached as close as New Jersey, which had fifty working Klans by mid-1921, and Manhattan, where a local headquarters was set up at a house on Central Park West. In February 1923, Klan members set ablaze three wooden crosses, each more than fifteen feet high, on Long Island. One was in Lynbrook, only three miles from Fox’s home in Woodmere.

  Upstream intellectually, the pseudoscience of eugenics aimed to improve the human race through selective reproduction. Madison Grant’s anti-immigration screed, The Passing of the Great Race, first published in 1916, was reissued to considerable acclaim in 1921 and 1923, and became one of the Aryan supremacy movement’s foundational texts. Other influential books of the times included The Rising Tide of Color, written by Massachusetts lawyer and Harvard history PhD Lothrop Stoddard, who warned that intermarriage with “inferior races” would turn America’s Nordic descendants into a worthless “walking chaos,” and Kenneth Roberts’s Why Europe Leaves Home, which decried “the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and southeastern Europe.”

  Privately, Fox never embraced these racist currents of thought, but neither could he bring himself fully to resist them. After U.S. secretary of the interior Franklin K. Lane called on the movie industry to throw its weight behind the Americanization movement, Fox made—with the script pre-approved by Lane’s office—the fear-mongering melodrama The Face at Your Window (1920), about a Russian secret agent who incites rebellion at a U.S. factory. “ ‘Keep your shirt on,’ was not the slogan in making this picture,” commented Carl Sandburg in his Chicago Daily News review. “This film produces enlightenment through a mental shake-up similar to the physical results that follow the imbibing of wood alcohol.” No matter that only three years earlier Fox had infused a passionately pro-Russian Revolution message into Theda Bara’s The Rose of Blood. That movie had reflected public opinion at the time. Now different political winds prevailed.

  Fox had learned little since his racially divisive The Nigger in 1915. The Face at Your Window included scenes of white-robed night riders storming in on horseback to quash a riot of angry workers. Unsurprisingly, KKK imperial wizard William Joseph Simmons, who said he was looking for mainstream movies that promoted Klan values, seized upon The Face at Your Window as a recruiting tool. It mattered little to Simmons that the movie wasn’t very good, with hazy, out-of-focus photography, horrible overacting, and long, sanctimonious titles. Everyone knew those white-sheeted men on horseback were Klan members, and they were the movie’s heroes.

  Around the country, Klan groups appropriated The Face at Your Window. In May 1921 a Columbia, South Carolina, theater advertised it as “The picture with a 1921 ‘Ku Klux Klan.’ ” Tennessee’s King Kleagle urged fellow Klansmen to organize screenings to recruit new members, and in Atlanta the Klan distributed placards for The Face at Your Window with an endorsement by Simmons. The effect spread far beyond the South. In December 1921 the local Klan council in Portland, Oregon, sponsored a showing of the movie at the municipal auditorium, promising that it would “tell the truth about the Ku Klux Klan.” Also on the bill were the Klan-made feature The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Ride Again and an “explanatory” lecture by a local Klan leader. More than a thousand people showed up. Well into 1922, The Face at Your Window traveled to Klan meetings around Oregon; concurrently, the Klan advanced its candidate for the Republican nomination for governor so aggressively that he would lose by only several hundred votes.

  Ostensibly, Fox was stunned. “Our film The Face at Your Window does not deal with the Ku Klux Klan, and there was no intention at the time of the writing of the story or the production of the film to assist the Klan or to spread its teachings through the film,” he wrote to the NAACP, which had questioned the studio’s involvement with Klan propaganda. “This Company will not sanction the production of any films that attack or cause prejudice against any race or sect of people.” To the contrary, Fox insisted, The Face at Your Window “was intended to depict the ever present danger of malcontents and traitors within this country” and to encourage American patriots to cast out such undesirables “socially, politically and if necessary, physically.” But what about those night riders? According to Fox, they weren’t Klan bigots but American Legion members who “have been quickly summoned to quell the disturbance and to establish law and order.” Never mind that an 1871 federal law specifically prohibited “night riding” and defined it as a high crime of rebellion.

  Actually, rather than being unaware of Klan-like images, Fox seemed to regard the group as more of a harmless curiosity than a social menace. Filmed shortly after the movie’s release, a January 1921 Fox News segment showed a Klan initiation ceremony at “Camp No. 1” in the woods of Stone Mountain, Georgia, with Imperial Wizard Simmons presiding. While advance publicity for the segment, made with the Klan’s permission, described the costumes as “outlandish,” “terrifying,” and “grotesque,” it also accepted Simmons’s reassurance that Klan members were merely “Avengers of the Wronged” defending American ideals. Perhaps Fox granted that possibility. However, even after the NAACP complained to him in August 1921, and after he repudiated the Klan in his response, he allowed The Face at Your Window to remain in circulation for at least another eight months and to fall into the hands of Klan leaders. The most likely explanation is not that Fox didn’t care or wasn’t troubled, but rather that profits were so hard to come by.

  Even as he distanced himself from the issue of racial prejudice, Fox could not ignore the rising tide of anti-Semitism. The 1920s would turn out to be one of the worst decades in American history for prejudice against Jews, and the motion picture industry, with its predominantly Jewish leadership, drew sharp attack. In January 1922, testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on censorship, Rev. William H. Chase of Christ Church, Brooklyn, named Fox as one of the “four or five Hebrews” who were “outraging the moral laws of the country” and plotting to control elections “from aldermen up to president.” In the last of a three-part series “The Jews in America,” published in February 1923 in the mainstream magazine The World’s Work, the Yale-educated, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Burton J. Hendrick denigrated motion pictures as “a business of the crassest sort” that was run by “ex-buttonhole-makers, basters, and pressers, whose knowledge of the English language is very limited.” Fox’s photo ran as one of the article’s illustrations.

  Only narrowly did Fox avoid a targeted attack in the notorious “International Jew” series that ran in Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, between late May 1920 and mid-January 1922. Although he would later disavow anti-Semitism, Ford had been taken in by the spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed that a secret Jewish conspiracy aimed to destroy modern civilization and create a universal Jewish state. In early 1921, word got back to Fox that the Dearborn Independent, which all Ford dealers were required to carry, planned to run an article on him.

  With the hyperrationality he could often summon in a crisis, Fox sent a mutual friend to Detroit with a business proposition. If Ford persisted with his plan to run the article on Fox, Fox News, which twice weekly sent its newsreels to theaters nationwide, would begin a series on automobile safety. Since most of the cars on the road were Fords, most accidents would involv
e Fords. Whenever there was a fatality, a Fox camera crew would promptly go to the scene to learn about the victim and his family and would then hire an expert mechanic to analyze the wreck for defective parts. “We will probably get one hundred of these accidents a week from now on, and I am going to take two of the best ones to appear in our newsreels, one on Monday and one on Thursday,” Fox advised the go-between. “The first two or three weeks, I don’t believe the people in our theaters will pay any attention to it. But after a few weeks, I just don’t know how many people will want to ride in Ford cars.”

  No profile of Fox ever appeared in the Dearborn Independent. The newspaper did, however, run two articles in February 1921 about the movie industry. The second one, “Jewish Supremacy in the Motion Picture World,” included two paragraphs about Fox and falsely accused him of having started his career by running a peep show “whose lure was lithographed lewdness.” Fox let it go.

  Although he had masked his emotions in handling Henry Ford, Fox’s rage and sense of powerlessness about anti-Semitism exploded toward his most convenient target, West Coast studio manager Sol Wurtzel. While supervising production of Oliver Twist, Jr. (1921), which updated Dickens’s novel to the twentieth century, Wurtzel made the mistake of assuming that Fox wanted a story fairly faithful to the original text. The movie therefore depicted a cruel, miserly, clearly Jewish Fagin recruiting children to a life of crime. Unfortunately, Wurtzel sent the rough cut to Fox just as the Dearborn Independent was running its two articles assailing Jews in the movie business. Watching the movie, Fox was horrified. As he wrote to brother-in-law Jack Leo, “it is hardly befitting that this Company should attempt to make or revive the hatred that Dickens’s [sic] caused when he originally wrote Oliver Twist . . . to picture Fagan [sic] as a Jew encourages race hatred.”