The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (206 page)

There’s no denying the energy of his best work, the unruly inventiveness, and the subversive attitudes. Thus, his Cannes prizewinner,
Ballad of Narayama
, is a brutally physical realization of a cherished Japanese legend. Still active, Imamura stands up for the modern Japan, as if to point to the genteel ways of Mizoguchi and Ozu. But the exposé works both ways. And there is no doubt as to who are the greater artists.

Thomas Harper Ince
(1882–1924), b. Newport, Rhode Island
Should Ince be treated as a director, or as a producer? Or is his relevance simply a matter of the historical contrast he offers with D. W. Griffith? Ince is not a name that rings many bells today; yet, he had a very active career and, in the early 1920s, was thought of as one of the most important, and self-important, of men. It was Buster Keaton, in
The Playhouse
(21), who mocked Ince’s overweening claim to story, production, and direction on films that were made by his company. Keaton’s joke seems to have made ostentation retract, and research discovers few full-length films that Ince directed on his own.

Nevertheless, he was a pioneer in the way he insinuated himself into film production and set about organizing it. In addition, in 1916, he built new studios at Culver City that were to become the basis of the MGM complex (his second home—just down the street—would later be the home of David O. Selznick, and thus a famous logo image). “Thomas H. was my Ince-spiration,” said Keaton of
The Playhouse
. But, in fact, Thomas H’s shameless self-aggrandizement seems the original of a brand of ambition central to American films. In that sense, he was the first tycoon, more businesslike than Griffith and much more prosperous. Remember that he died in early middle age, and it is possible to surmise that he might have become one of the moguls of the 1930s.

His own origins were theatrical. He had been in stock and vaudeville for some ten years before he entered the infant film industry, probably through the agency of his wife, Eleanor Kershaw, who was an actress in Griffith’s company. Ince was briefly at Biograph before moving on to Independent to direct. From 1911–14 he directed several hundred one-or two-reelers. But he seemed less interested in the product than in the marketing of it. He joined the New York Motion Picture Company and went to California to make Westerns, hiring a Wild West show for authenticity and buying up land for a celluloid range. The “Western” as a spectacle owes much to Ince’s labor as did William S. Hart whose films Ince supervised. In 1914 he directed his first feature,
The Battle of Gettysburg
—and, probably, his last, for he plunged into production and supervision.

In 1915, with Griffith and Sennett, he formed Triangle, the clear forerunner of United Artists. Ince himself produced
The Coward
(15, Reginald Barker) and
Civilization
(16), which, reputedly, he codirected with Barker.
Civilization
was as much a success as
Intolerance
was a failure. It is set in a mythical country, deals portentously with the threat of war, and is dedicated to “the mothers of the dead.” Nothing suggests that Ince thought or felt deeper than such blatantly rabble-rousing sentiments. Nor that he was shy about seeing himself as the benign patron of civilization.

In the last years of the war, he continued to produce William S. Hart movies, and his stable of directors included Barker, Irvin Willat, Frank Borzage, Arthur Rossen, Victor Schertzinger, and Jack Conway. He left Triangle in 1918 and produced films for Adolph Zukor to distribute. In 1919 he joined with Sennett, Maurice Tourneur, Allan Dwan, and Marshall Neilan in Associated Producers. Ince continued to be released through Zukor until late in 1921—producing such films as
Beau Revel
(21, John Griffith Wray);
The Bronze Bell
(21, James Horne);
The Cup of Life
(21, Rowland V. Lee);
Mother o’ Mine
(21, Fred Niblo); and
Passing Thru
(21, William A. Seiter). When he broke with Zukor, Associated Producers went over to First National, and in his last years Ince maintained his “personal supervision” on
The Hottentot
(22, Horne);
Skin Deep
(22, Lambert Hillyer);
Anna Christie
(23, Wray);
Bell Boy 13
(23, Seiter);
Her Reputation
(23, Wray);
A Man of Action
(23, Horne);
Scars of Jealousy
(23, Hillyer);
Soul of the Beast
(23, Wray);
The Sunshine Trail
(23, Horne);
What a Wife Learned
(23, Wray);
Barbara Frietchie
(24, Hillyer);
Christine of the Hungry Heart
(24, George Archainbaud);
Idle Tongues
(24, Hillyer);
The Marriage Cheat
(24, Wray); and
Those Who Dance
(24, Hillyer).

Ince contributed something else to Hollywood legend—the mystery of his death—and it is probably the aspect of his career that is most interesting now. In November 1924, William Randolph Hearst threw a yachting party on his boat, the
Oneida
, sailing off the southern California coast. The passengers included Marion Davies, Chaplin, Ince, Elinor Glyn, and the young Louella Parsons. Ince was taken off the yacht at San Diego. He died two days later, and the official cause of death was given as heart failure following what had been severe indigestion. But rumors sprang up that there had been drinking on the boat, that shots had been fired, that Chaplin (and/or Ince) had made a pass at Marion Davies. It is one of the great Hollywood enigmas still, in that richly scandalous moment of the early 1920s. And surely it is beyond solution now.

Rex Ingram
(Reginald Hitchcock) (1893–1950), b. Dublin, Ireland
1916:
The Great Problem; Broken Fetters; Chalice of Sorrow
. 1917:
Black Orchids; The Reward of Life; The Flower of Doom; His Robe of Honour; Humdrum Brown
. 1919:
The Day She Paid
. 1920:
Shore Acres; Under Crimson Skies
. 1921:
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Hearts Are Trumps; The Conquering Power
. 1922:
The Prisoner of Zenda; Trifling Women; Turn to the Right
. 1923:
Scaramouche; Where the Pavement Ends
. 1924:
The Arab
. 1926:
The Magician; Mare Nostrum
. 1927:
The Garden of Allah
. 1929:
The Three Passions
. 1933:
Baroud
.

Few careers are as mysteriously romantic as Ingram’s. He was obviously an independent and unusually imaginative man; those few of his films that survive suggest that he is an important director with a rapturous visual style.

He was the son of a clergyman who brought him to America in 1911. At the Yale School of Fine Arts, he studied sculpture. He worked for Edison, Vitagraph, Fox, and joined Universal in 1916, but he was “discovered” by June Mathis and assigned to direct Valentino in
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
and
The Conquering Power
, both of which also starred Ingram’s wife, Alice Terry. He was known as a director of swashbuckling spectacles and of supernatural or horror movies.
Trifling Women
, based on one of Ingram’s own stories, has Barbara La Marr as a femme fatale. That film,
Scaramouche, Where the Pavement Ends
, and
The Arab
all starred Ramon Novarro. Ingram had hoped to be allowed to direct
Ben-Hur;
when disappointed he threatened to retire, and von Stroheim and Dmitri Buchowetzki insisted on his return, calling him the world’s greatest director. Von Stroheim and Ingram were friends—itself a sign of Ingram’s imaginative reach—and when
Greed
was beset by problems, it was Ingram who cut it from twenty-four to eighteen reels.

In fact, Ingram and Alice Terry left America after
Ben-Hur
, complaining of studio ineptness, but allowed MGM to help them set up their own studio, Victorine, in Nice. There they made
The Magician
, from a Somerset Maugham novel, photographed by John Seitz, starring Paul Wegener as an Aleister Crowley–like evil genius. Stills suggest that it is, at the least, an ornate fantasy with erotic undertones.
Mare Nostrum
was made in the Mediterranean and for
Garden of Allah
Ingram took his company to North Africa. He made only one talking picture,
Baroud
, also in Morocco, in which he acted.

One of Ingram’s apprentices in the south of France was Michael Powell, who has testified to Ingram’s charisma, knowledge, taste, and capacity for being easily bored. Ingram became fascinated by Islam, but neither he nor Alice Terry enjoyed sound.
The Three Passions
and
Baroud
were failures, and Ingram and Terry went back to live in Los Angeles where he worked as painter, sculptor, and novelist, rarely tempted by the movie scene. Alice Terry, maybe, was never quite wild enough for his visions.

There is a useful biography of Ingram, by Liam O’Leary, that stresses the Irishness and the unusual interest Ingram felt for so many things beyond film. But Powell’s tribute, and that of David Lean, suggest that for the 1920s, in the English-speaking film world, Ingram personified artistic ambition and a visual style that made one think of painting. Of course, his life was also a bold gesture meant to show the hopeless vulgarity of Hollywood.

John Ireland
(1914–92), b. Vancouver, Canada
Over the years, I know of two young women who caught one glimpse of John Ireland as Cherry Valance in
Red River
(48, Howard Hawks) and had to know more. I suggested that he might have been related in some way to Liberty Valance in John Ford’s picture—and both of the young women knew just what I meant. In other words, that rangy, dangerous cowboy from Valverde way in
Red River
may stop a bullet, but he grows in your mind. More or less, as the years go by, I value most of all the actors and the characters who will not stay as they were made. So John Ireland is here now as someone I always want to know more about.

He spent his childhood years in New York, and then he was a carnival swimmer and a theatre actor before doing movies. By the standards of 1947, I daresay, he looked like a villain, what with that leer and the grating voice. But look at Ireland then with modern eyes and you’ve got a knockout—there are some whose looks are forty or fifty years ahead of public taste. Ireland nearly made it. He got a supporting actor nomination for
All the King’s Men
(49, Robert Rossen), and he played the lead in B pictures. But he was most employable as a threat or a hood, and it’s as if he took that opinion to heart and turned away from being the flawed hero that was within his reach.

Later on still, he went to Europe and did shlock, combing his hair forward. Those of us who noticed forgave him. And we feel the self-destructiveness as well as the glory in the fact that after
Red River
, it was not Howard Hawks or Montgomery Clift who went off with Joanne Dru, but John Ireland: another young woman who noticed the way he watched her.

It’s a very long list, for a guy who seemed to have swallowed his cynic’s pills very early in life:
A Walk in the Sun
(46, Lewis Milestone); Billy Clanton in
My Darling Clementine
(46, John Ford); a vicious gangster in
Railroaded
(47, Anthony Mann);
The Gangster
(47, Gordon Wiles);
Raw Deal
(48, Mann);
Joan of Arc
(48, Victor Fleming);
A Southern Yankee
(48, Edward Sedgwick); as Bob Ford in
I Shot Jesse James
(49, Samuel Fuller);
Roughshod
(49, Mark Robson);
Anna Lucasta
(49, Irving Rapper);
The Doolins of Oklahoma
(49, Gordon Douglas);
Cargo to Capetown
(50, Earl McEvoy);
Vengeance Valley
(51, Richard Thorpe); trying to prove his innocence, with Mercedes McCambridge, in
The Scarf
(51, E. A. Dupont);
Little Big Horn
(51, Charles Marquis Warren);
The Bushwhackers
(52, Rod Amateau); as Quantrill in
Red Mountain
(51, William Dieterle);
Hurricane Smith
(52, Jerry Hopper); after A-bomb spies in
The 49th Man
(53, Fred F. Sears).

He then coproduced, codirected (with Lee Garmes), and acted with Joanne Dru in
Outlaw Territory
(53), and carried on as if nothing had happened: in Korea in
Combat Squad
(53, Cy Roth);
Security Risk
(54, Harold Schuster); with Dru again in
Southwest Passage
(54, Ray Nazarro);
The Fast and the Furious
(54, Edwards Sampson, with Ireland), a film written and produced by Roger Corman;
The Steel Cage
(54, Walter Doniger);
Queen Bee
(55, Ranald MacDougall);
Hell’s Horizon
(55, Tom Gries);
Gunslinger
(56, Corman); and Johnny Ringo in
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
(57, John Sturges).

He was forty-three, and it was 1957 in Hollywood. All the lights were going out. The marriage to Joanne Dru had broken down. Ireland’s B pictures were close to dead. One longs for a book that tells us what he felt then.
Party Girl
(58, Nicholas Ray);
Spartacus
(60, Stanley Kubrick); with Elvis and Tuesday Weld in
Wild in the Country
(61, Philip Dunne);
55 Days at Peking
(63, Ray);
The Ceremony
(63, Laurence Harvey);
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(64, Mann);
I Saw What You Did
(65, William Castle).

He did at least another thirty films, including
Guyana: Cult of the Damned
(80, Rene Cardona) and
Messenger of Death
(88, J. Lee Thompson), with a final bow called
Waxwork II: Lost in Time
(92, Anthony Hickox). But he never got to play Old Man Clanton.