Of late I’ve been exploring a few silent movies from the ‘teens and the ‘twenties, not out of any particular interest in the things, but in the process of researching the oh-so-minor screen star Mabel Van Buren.
Mabel Van Buren? I can just hear the question marks popping into view above readers’s heads, possibly accompanied by some kind of whimsical SPROIIIIIING sound effect. Who the hell was Mabel Van Buren, you wonder, and why the hell does Scott Foglesong want to know about her?
Ms. Van Buren, you may be interested to hear, was the first actress to play “The Girl” a.k.a. “Minnie” in a movie version of David Belasco’s hoary old melodrama “The Girl of the Golden West.” The Jesse L. Lasky Film Players, precursor to modern-day Paramount, produced a silent film version of the play in 1915, only ten years after its New York premiere, and only five years after Puccini’s operatic adaptation. The director, believe it or not, was Cecil B. DeMille — he of Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments, and The Greatest Show on Earth. (He also directed a fair number of sleazy little potboilers, but posterity will remember him as Mr. Bible Epic.)
My interest stems from putting together this summer’s lobby exhibit on Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West at the SF Opera. As part of that project, I’ve been creating a documentary video on the various film versions of the original play. (There were four in all, in case you’re wondering.)
Thus Mabel. Although I was hoping to include a scene from the 1915 flick, it hasn’t been digitized in any way that I can access as of yet. There are extant prints, to be sure, but they’re locked away in climate-controlled vaults at the Library of Congress, where their oh-so-fragile nitrate selves won’t deteriorate any further until preservationists can get around to them.
Mabel Van Buren was a leading lady for only a few films. She started a bit too late in life. She was 37 when she made Girl of the Golden West, and given the tendency of the camera to add five years and ten pounds, she had “older-woman-supporting-role” written all over her.
That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, at least in terms of any of her work surviving the ravages of time. Her few starring roles were in lesser movies that have mostly vanished, but as a supporting player she was in some of the blockbusters of the 1920s, and those have remained extant. Her most lasting work is found in the two flicks she made with Rudolph Valentino, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Beyond the Rocks — but even then, Beyond the Rocks escaped oblivion by only the barest of chances. Long thought to be lost forever, a single partly-damaged nitrate print was discovered in a private Dutch collection in 2002.
By the undemanding standards of silent film acting, Mabel was pretty decent. She had a pleasant screen presence, immediately simpatico and natural. She made an excellent middle-aged lady type, such as her society matron role in Beyond the Rocks. That isn’t to say that she was some great actress: in Beyond the Rocks it’s quite clear that you’re looking at a very nice lady playing the part of a very nice lady.
But Beyond the Rocks contains a surprise, and that’s Rudolph Valentino. He has a thankless and one-dimensional role in a threadbare soap opera, but imparts to a boring pretty-boy English aristocrat a distinct charm and sparkle. I’ve tended to think of Rudolph Valentino as little more than the male bimbo with gobs of Cleopatra-style eye makeup who mugged his way through The Sheik. But in Beyond the Rocks he injects badly-needed lightness into a dreary flick that is little more than an excuse for Gloria Swanson to pose her way through several dozen costume changes.
All things considered, a very short scene between Rudolph Valentino and Mabel Van Buren stands as one of the highlights of an otherwise dismal potboiler. They’re just sitting at a table in a Parisian café, exchanging a few lines of dialog via intertitle cards. No big deal, but given Valentino’s deft insouciance and Van Buren’s uncomplicated friendliness, the scene remains a pleasure to watch. That’s more than I can say of Gloria Swanson’s scenes; her shellacked phoniness epitomizes the affected artificiality of silent-film acting.
Rudy V. and Mabel Van B.: lightness and charm
During my research I came across a letter from the mid-1930s that Mabel wrote to Cecil B. DeMille. The message is heartbreaking; she is begging DeMille to employ her husband, no matter in how minor a capacity. Her career was over (her last film appearance is as an extra in a W.C. Fields flick), and her husband wasn’t doing any better. Apparently they were nearly destitute. Thus a woman who shared champagne with Valentino in a Paris café — at least in a movie — was reduced to beginning for favors from a now long-ago director.
DeMille found a walk-on part for her husband, but hired him with the proviso that he stay off the sauce during the shooting.