The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  “Fighting Bill Fox,” Film Daily called him. “Bill Fox won’t let anybody hog the show. There will be a Fox theater in every big city in this country if the need exists.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “The Wonder-Thing”

  It was all for the sake of the movies. All the buying and building, all the getting and giving of money, all so that he might return to a position of creative leadership. After more than twenty years in the business, Fox was still enchanted: “To me, the film always remains the wonder-thing.”

  No more hokum: Fox movies really did improve during 1925 and 1926. Although the “best minds” review board never materialized—evidently, O’Neill, Ferber, Cather, and Woollcott had better things to do than moonlight in the movie business—money and new studio facilities compensated well enough. High-quality filmmaking talent continued to arrive at Fox Film, so that by the spring of 1926 the studio had some twenty-five staff directors. Among them were Howard Hawks, whom Sol Wurtzel had found on the golf course, unemployed after quitting his job as an assistant director at M-G-M; Allan Dwan, known for his Gloria Swanson and Douglas Fairbanks movies; and a name from the past, Raoul Walsh, who had left Fox Film in 1920 because of Fox’s constant meddling and had gone on to direct for First National, Goldwyn, United Artists, and Famous Players–Lasky. Lured by a promise of great stories, Walsh returned to Fox Film in February 1926.

  No more penny-pinching, either: Fox nearly doubled the studio’s production budget, increasing it from $6.6 million in 1924 to $8.2 million in 1925 and then to $12 million in 1926.

  The most immediate beneficiary of Fox’s largesse was John Ford. Extraordinarily talented, the director also had extraordinarily good timing. He had proven himself with The Iron Horse when Fox had needed a breakthrough movie, and now—with F. W. Murnau’s arrival in the United States delayed until July 1, 1926, by contractual obligations at Germany’s UFA studios—he was in the best position to profit from Fox’s ardent desire for a new genius director. So much did Fox need someone to believe in that he continued to support Ford wholeheartedly even though the five movies he directed after The Iron Horse were all financial disappointments.

  Lightnin’ (1925), based on a record-setting, long-running Broadway play about a brawling long-married couple, evidently intimidated Ford with towering expectations. He copied the play slavishly and ended up with a broad comedy marred by “crude and farfetched” clowning. Kentucky Pride (1925), told from the point of view of a horse, was essentially another Fox Film “mother love” tearjerker, an equine version of Over the Hill where a young male horse wins a high-stakes race and saves his mother from an abusive owner. Despite cameo appearances by some of the biggest names in horseflesh—among them, Man o’ War, in his feature film debut, and Morvich, winner of the 1922 Kentucky Derby*—Kentucky Pride did poorly at the box office. Then came The Fighting Heart (1925), an undistinguished story about a prizefighter (Iron Horse star George O’Brien) from an alcoholic family; and then the “tepid, draggy,” “silly, dull,” Thank You (1925), about an underpaid clergyman. Ford’s first release in 1926, The Shamrock Handicap, was no better, hampered by a far-fetched plot wherein a partially paralyzed Irish immigrant jockey cures himself by riding a horse to victory in a big race. Five consecutive letdowns: in his early thirties now, Ford was struggling to define his creative vision under Fox’s intensely hopeful gaze.

  Nevertheless, Fox continued to proclaim “the genius of John Ford.” It helped that The Iron Horse did roaring business when it went into wide release on October 4, 1925. It helped also that Ford managed studio politics astutely. When asked by Film Daily in June 1925 to name his greatest movie, he chose The Iron Horse and handed credit up to the top: “Whatever success is attained by the picture is due largely to the remarkable facilities placed at my disposal by William Fox.”

  In mid-1926, Ford hit his stride again, in no small part because Fox gave him the best possible chance to do so, with 3 Bad Men, the historical sequel to The Iron Horse and the concluding episode in the trilogy that Fox had envisioned unfolding from FPL’s The Covered Wagon. A love story, 3 Bad Men takes place amid the 1877 land and gold rush in the Dakotas and reportedly cost $800,000. Ford spent eight months filming in then-remote Jackson Hole, Wyoming, using more than 3,000 Native Americans, 1,500 cowboys, 2,500 horses, and a specially built reproduction of the town of Custer.

  Making the most of Fox’s vote of confidence, Ford learned from the mistakes of his five previous movies and came back with a tour de force that grandson Dan Ford calls “quite possibly his best silent film.” Indeed, compared to The Iron Horse, 3 Bad Men has tighter dramatic construction, faster telegraphing of character, and a more nuanced perspective on history. Unabashedly sentimental, the movie follows the romance of two young westward travelers, Irish immigrant cowboy Dan O’Malley (George O’Brien) and former Virginian Lee Carleton (Olive Borden). After would-be horse thieves murder Lee’s father, she is rescued by a trio of thieves who are wanted throughout North America. The leader of these “three bad men” decides that Lee needs a husband, and the obvious candidate is Dan. Outwitting the villainous, white-hatted sheriff (Lou Tellegen) who runs the gang that killed Lee’s father, the three criminals ensure the young couple’s safe passage to a plot of farmland rich with “harvests of golden grain!” The bad men die in the process, yet their spirits survive. At the end of the movie, three silhouetted figures look from a distance toward the O’Malley home—where Dan and Lee now have a baby son named after all of them. Then the “bad men” literally ride over the hill into the sunset. In Ford’s view, consistent with Fox’s idea of his own life, it’s the outsiders who build America while institutional authority tends toward corruption and stagnation.

  Technically as well as thematically sophisticated, 3 Bad Men is filled with lively visual imagery. One standout scene, set in a barroom, shows the two lesser bad men following a portly patron who is walking forward briskly while the camera pulls back fluidly at a matching pace. Then, just as the first man seems about to break through the screen, a bar cart zooms in from the left to block his path and fill the bottom portion of the frame. The sequence adds nothing to the story, but it’s delightful, and Ford doesn’t press his luck with the audience’s patience. He gets the whole business done in a matter of seconds and moves on.

  Yet, 3 Bad Men isn’t entirely timeless. The movie falters in its step across the decades not because of its lack of sound but because of intertitle card references, given in dialogue by otherwise likeable characters, to “Dagoes” and “Chinks.” That was probably Fox’s fault rather than that of Ford, who signals his sympathy for marginalized others with an early scene of an American Indian watching helplessly as hordes of white settlers surge across his people’s land. Fox movies were routinely titled in New York after directors shipped their cut. For 3 Bad Men, Fox assigned Ralph Spence, the snappy title writer who had successfully rewritten Mark Twain for A Connecticut Yankee. Ford would have had no authority to challenge Spence’s work. Fox, of course, could easily have excised the racist language—but racism was just the sort of ugly fact of American life that he was content to ignore until it hit too close to home in the form of anti-Semitism.

  If 3 Bad Men didn’t cause the same commercial sensation as The Iron Horse, probably because there was so little breathing room between the two movies, it did well enough. Nationwide, exhibitors reported spellbound audiences, and critics pronounced 3 Bad Men an artistic triumph that established John Ford “among the elect” of Hollywood directors.

  Fox Film had an even greater success during these transitional years. What Price Glory (1926) was more than a spectacular movie about history. It was history, an event of public conscience that called upon audiences to acknowledge what many knew already from experience, that the recent world war had been nothing so much as a tragedy. It took courage to make the movie. Although the play version of What Price Glory was still running successfully on Broadway when Fox paid $100,000 for the film rights, M-G-M had already told
the same basic story, about two U.S. soldiers on the battlefield in France, in its hugely successful The Big Parade (1925), which had been written by What Price Glory’s co-author, Laurence Stallings, a marine veteran who had lost a leg in battle in France. Named by the New York Times as the best movie of 1925, The Big Parade took in a record $6 million at the box office. Skeptics predicted that the topic had been exhausted and that movie audiences would never want to revisit it from the darker perspective of What Price Glory.

  Yet Fox was determined not to soft-pedal the horrors of war, as in many ways The Big Parade does. What Price Glory was something of an expiation for him. He had played a part in the deception, making jingoistic pro-war movies even though secretly he had been horrified by the war’s devastation of property and human life. Trusting that others felt the same sense of incompleteness regarding this most significant public event of their lives, Fox decided it was time to tell the truth.

  Great stories, he had promised Raoul Walsh to lure him back after six years’ absence, and so he gave What Price Glory to Walsh as his first assignment upon his return. The movie took more than seven months to make on the Fox Hills outdoor lot, where, following a relief map prepared by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the studio built a replica of the northern French town of Bouresches and its surrounding area. For further accuracy, several times a week Walsh, the principal actors, and many extras watched thousands of feet of film borrowed from the British and French war departments.

  The end result was a tougher, grittier version of the war than The Big Parade had dared to venture. Handsome, elegant Sergeant Quirt (Edmund Lowe) and tattooed, fun-loving Captain Flagg (Victor McLaglen) are U.S. Marines who, after serving together in China and the Philippines, arrive to fight in France. In scenes of romantic comedy, Flagg and Quirt compete for the affection of the beautiful Charmaine (Dolores del Rio) in the town where their unit is stationed. Yet, because history has sent them into a “rain of blood and steel,” they must also endure trench warfare, night raids, and artillery engagements. The images are unflinching and relentless: fiery explosions lighting up the sky; thick clouds of smoke; showers of sparks; poison gas attacks; rifles planted upside down next to barren trees; a background of destroyed buildings. The Big Parade had offered viewers a happy ending, with its American solider hero reunited in peacetime with his French sweetheart. What Price Glory concluded ambiguously. In the final scenes, a wounded Quirt has won the love of Charmaine and, because of his injury, is not included in new orders to return to battle. Yet, he is a soldier. Hearing the bugler’s call, Quirt stands up straight and calls out to Flagg to wait for him. An anguished Charmaine watches from the doorway and says, “They came back once—they came back twice—they will not come back three times.” The last scene shows the battalion marching off rapidly, with Flagg supporting Quirt, the two laughing, heading toward likely death.

  What Price Glory became an instant sensation. At the world premiere in Los Angeles at the Carthay Circle Theatre on November 19, 1926, “Applause came fast from every part of the house.” Four days later, when the movie opened in New York, at the Sam H. Harris Theatre, on Forty-Second Street, first-night spectators—who, along with Fox, included Mayor Jimmy Walker, Gloria Swanson, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Mr. and Mrs. Rube Goldberg—“found themselves gripping their seats.” As Fox had envisioned, the movie’s blunt force was its greatest strength. Carl Sandburg, in his Chicago Daily News review, called What Price Glory “a masterpiece” that would “shake the whole emotional structure” of the viewer: “It’s war as real as you’ll ever see it, and withal it’s a sermon on peace, for in it you’ll find, as nearly as you’ll ever find, the answer to that question—what price glory, anyway?” Motion Picture News called it “beautiful in its savage simplicity” and “Fox’s greatest triumph.” Film Daily named What Price Glory “undeniably” the best movie of 1926. Altogether, What Price Glory took in $2 million.

  The money and the acclaim benefited longtime Fox executive Winnie Sheehan. Since the spring of 1925, when Fox hired James Grainger to take over Sheehan’s role as head of Fox Film sales, Sheehan had been on tryout as head of West Coast production. What Price Glory was a test case. Although Fox retained final creative authority, Sheehan supervised the movie at ground level, and studio publicists aggressively touted him as the executive in charge. Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter to Fox that Sheehan didn’t really understand What Price Glory. Until he read the reviews, Sheehan kept insisting that the movie was mainly a comedy and that battle scenes were a relatively minor element. He went so far as to clock the movie for laughs, counting seventy-four of them.

  To Fox, success was all that mattered. In the fall of 1926, Sheehan officially became head of production for Fox Film, stationed at the Fox Hills studio and overseeing Sol Wurtzel’s Western Avenue operations as well. Wurtzel took the insult as he took all insults from Fox, with his head bowed and no word of protest. He had been a clerical employee before Fox made him a studio head and, having recently marked his ninth anniversary as West Coast superintendent, he had the longest tenure of anyone in a similar position in Hollywood. At least he hadn’t lost his job or his title. Besides, no one else was knocking on the door to hire him.

  Not only experienced hands like Ford and Walsh, but novices also found a remarkably supportive atmosphere at the revamped Fox Film. Director Howard Hawks failed miserably with his first movie, The Road to Glory (1926), which he also wrote, about a young woman who loses her faith in God after going blind and suffering the death of her father. Motion Picture News savaged the movie as “poorly directed . . . to the slushy verge of sheer absurdity” and predicted that it would evoke a “horse laugh” from any thinking audience. Even Hawks thought the movie was “pretty bad.” He wasn’t fired or even demoted. Wurtzel merely advised him, “[F]or God’s sake, go out and make entertainment.” Hawks’s next project, Fig Leaves (1926), a romantic comedy about modern-day newlyweds Adam and Eve (George O’Brien and Olive Borden, both from John Ford’s 3 Bad Men), splashed money on the screen. One highlight was a Technicolor fashion show in which Borden wore an alleged $50,000 worth of costumes designed by the soon-to-be-famous Adrian. According to Hawks, Fig Leaves made all its money back in one theater. He was off and running.

  Other bright spots among Fox Film’s 1925–1926 releases included Frank Borzage’s first movie for Fox, Lazybones (1925), which took Buck Jones out of his usual cowboy action movies and cast him as a small-town, good-hearted no-account who shapes up after he adopts his sister’s daughter, Kit. Except for the fact that the story sidles up to the broad definition of incest by having Lazybones (Jones) plan to marry the grown-up Kit, until he realizes she loves a man her own age, the movie exudes low-key charm and “fairly radiates sympathy and human interest.” The Johnstown Flood (1926) introduced young ingénue Janet Gaynor, recently hired by Fox Film for $100 per week, and, in footage shot at the Fox Hills lot, had “the most daringly spectacular flood scene ever filmed.” Several other titles showed that Fox was once again reaching up to the higher shelves of literature: The Ancient Mariner (1925), based on the Coleridge poem and improbably starring Clara Bow, and The Silver Treasure (1926), an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

  As he fixed his hopes on new directors and better stories, Fox discarded the stalwart, gentlemanly J. Gordon Edwards, who had directed most of Theda Bara’s movies and the 1921 Betty Blythe hit The Queen of Sheba, but who hadn’t made a successful movie since. Edwards belonged to the past, and Fox had no interest in looking backward. It was a tough world, he told Moving Picture World editor W. Stephen Bush: “Your exhibitors are hard-headed, cold-blooded business men . . . If Fox helps them to pay the interest on their mortgage, why, they will take his pictures, and if someone else in their judgment does better, they don’t hesitate a moment to make the switch. No, there is positively no sentiment of any kind in this business.”

  In the late spring of 1924, after Edwards finished editing It Is the Law, Fox quietly let the director go. Edwards wasn
’t ready to leave. He still wanted to work; moreover, he still needed to work because he had stock market debts that would soon reach nearly $350,000. He wasn’t, however, the type to protest. Instead, shortly after his dismissal, the modest, self-effacing Edwards went to Hollywood to look for another job. Having directed more than fifty movies for Fox Film, he had no strong contacts elsewhere, and it was too late to cultivate them. No one wanted him. He then went to Europe for ten weeks and got the rights to the play The Jest, which he planned to direct for his own company, Edwards Productions. He never even got started. Instead, he returned to New York, and in early 1925, a report circulated that Fox had taken him back, as a supervisor of directors—perhaps there was some sentiment in this business after all. A few months later, Fox evidently gave Edwards 3,000 shares of the new Fox Film Class A nonvoting stock.

  The arrangement didn’t work out. By the end of 1925, no longer employed at Fox, Edwards was preparing to go back to Hollywood for another round of job hunting. On Christmas Day, when he was scheduled to check out, fifty-eight-year-old Edwards died in his room at the Plaza Hotel. The official cause of death was pneumonia. Photoplay diagnosed his ailment differently: “A broken heart.”

  There were no tributes in trade papers, no commemorative ads or posthumous acknowledgments from Fox Film of all that J. Gordon Edwards, one of the great pioneering film directors, had contributed to the studio’s success. Neither did the studio send out any press releases extolling Edwards’s accomplishments. Cobbling together information readily at hand, most publications ran only short obituaries, some just a few lines long. Film Daily was more generous, providing a two-paragraph, front-page death notice and, a week later, a four-sentence encomium that called the director “A prince among men; one of the finest who ever entered into this business of motion pictures.” Then history moved on. If his longtime employer couldn’t be bothered to remember Edwards, why should anyone else?