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Running Down a Villain
It took a lot of digging into the past of Warner Oland, arch villain of the screen, for the interviewer to discover where they had met before.
By Edgar Donaldson
I STOOD at the fence and watched the professional bicyclists "burn up the track." It was a blazing hot day, and the air was thick with dust and the odors of fresh popcorn and squeezed lemons and half-eaten oranges. But everybody on the county fair grounds was gathered at the race track, and not a soul seemed to mind the heat. For this was a real race. A man had just shot out of the bunch of riders and was making for the lead. Everybody held their breath and clenched their hands — if he made it he'd probably come in first. He began to swing in toward the fence to pass number three, edging in warily for all he was going so fast. And then — suddenly number three flopped over in the dust, the ambitious one's wheel struck the fallen machine, and the contender for first honors sailed through the air in a parabolic curve and struck the fence.
There were shrieks of horror from the grand stand. I ran to the rescue, and the pink lemonade man and I undraped the injured rider from the rails and carried him to a shady spot, where somebody
He's the screen's Oriental authority.
else administered first aid.
That was in September, 1900.
Recently I went to see Warner Oland, who has been featured in Pathe serials for some time now ; you may remember him in "The Lightning Raider," with Pearl White, and in "The Third Eye."
"Your face is familiar," I told him, "but I can't seem to place you. What have you done.''" You see, I wasn't much of a screen
0
fan then, and so hadn't seen him playing the villain for Pathe or Famous Players, or in any of the many pictures in which he's been the >^ wily Oriental ; he has a remark
able wardrobe of Chinese costumes, as you probably \jLlif know, and is an expert on ^jjS| Oriental make-up. ' j lie mentioned the fact that he'd translated a number of Strindberg's plays ; having been born in Sweden, it was easy for him to handle the language in which they were written. But I've never read any Strindberg.
Then he recalled his experience at Williams College, where he produced Sir Christopher Marlowe's "Jew of Malta."
Well, perhaps I'd seen him on the stage, in support of Viola Allen or Sothern and Marlowe. I hadn't. Neither had I seen him playing with Laurence Irving, son of the late Sir Henry, in "The Daughters of Monsieur Dupont."
"Well, perhaps — that is to say, while I was studying in Boston when I was just a youngster I acted as night guard for a patient at a private sanitarium for a week, and when he escaped from me one evening I spent six hours looking
for him. Perhaps " Quite delicately he left the sentence
hanging in mid-air.
"I was not the lunatic," I told him firmly. It began to look hopeless. Had I by any chance ever been connected with a public school in Boston? Oland had spent three days tramping through Boston with portable scales, with a doctor who was weighing the school children. Another false hunch !
And then — but you've guessed it long ago, of course. Ple'd been the bicycle rider I untangled from the fence way back at that county fair in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1900.