At the end of June I’m giving a show of early crime-fiction movies at the Deadly Ink Conference in Parsippany. We’re going to look at three silent films:
- The Great Train Robbery, which was the first narrative film and also the first Western
- The Musketeers of Pig Alley, the first gangster movie, and
- The Cheat, which was not like anything else I can think of.
The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter in 1903, captured the attention of the moviegoing audience because for the first time it told a story, the tale of how robbers came and tied up the station agent, robbed the train, murdered two railroad employees and a passenger, and were captured or shot by a posse of Westerners, who left a jolly square dance to track them down. It was filmed in the woods of New Jersey. No actors were listed in the credits, but film scholars have discovered that Broncho Billy Anderson (later a famous Western movie cowboy) played three separate parts: one of the robbers, the murdered passenger, and a tenderfoot who wanders into the hoedown and is forced to dance by cowboys who shoot at his feet. As there were no close-up shots of actors’ faces, an actor could play many parts without being recognized. To show an actor’s face without showing his hands and feet was felt to be cheating the audience, who after all had paid good money to see the whole actor.
D. W. Griffith brought a greater sophistication to the process. He and his colleagues were inventing the vocabulary of moving picture images in the same way that the Elizabethans invented English as we know it. In The Musketeers of Pig Alley, filmed in New York City in 1912, the shots are elegant, the crowd scenes varied and focused, the acting restrained yet convincing, the gang war tense and thrilling. Lillian Gish stars; Elmer Booth is charming as the boss of the gangsters; young Lionel Barrymore has a bit part. No credits are listed for the actors, once again, for the longer the movie industry could put off crediting the actors the less they would have to be paid.
The Cheat, directed by Cecil B. DeMille in Hollywood in 1915, makes a big fuss over crediting the actors, giving each of the three stars a little vignette at the beginning. Jack Dean, playing the stockbroker, is shown working at his business. Fannie Ward, his wife, models an expensive hat. Sessue Hayakawa, the Asian ivory dealer, examines an ivory figurine and brands it with a hot iron in the shape of his chop.
But I’m not going to show my audience this, because I haven’t time to show the whole picture. I’m going to tell what happens in the first half: the foolish wife in her lust for new clothes gambles the Red Cross fund on a stock deal, and loses; the ivory dealer, who we thought was her platonic friend, offers to make up the money in exchange for sexual favors, to which she agrees; her husband comes into sudden wealth, and gives her enough to discharge the debt; in the dark of night she goes to the ivory dealer to pay him. Why doesn’t she mail him a check? Ah, but then there would be no movie.
Having described the first half, I’ll show them the last half of The Cheat, cutting straight to the sex and violence. The lighting is moody, the shots are as interesting as anything Griffith did, and Sessue Hayakawa’s acting is superb. Plus he’s a total hunk. See it if you get a chance. Better yet, come to the conference.
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