We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
53
His Face Is His Misfortune
Doomed from the first to play sheiks, because he looked like the popular conception of one, Ricardo
Cortez thinks that movies are another name for grief.
By Margaret Reid
IT is a face almost any young man might be proud to own. A more than ordinarily handsome face, dark, romantic, insinuating — the sort that induces lady fans to turn a coldly critical eye on their hitherto satisfactory beaus. A face that fits neatly into the romantic tangents of almost any gal.
In the beginning, producers took one look at this face and cried, in their various dialects, "Whoopee — here's a sheik!" Because it was dark, they declared it dangerous to women and forthwith consigned it to such roles as required highvoltage s. a. — and little else.
So that, children, is why Ricardo Cortez has no particular affection for the movies and would rather not talk about his career, if you don't mind. He is in the movies — they are his business and he is a good business man. But he tosses no phrases about his art. To him that would be as silly as a realtor dilating on the artistic message of selling lots. Ricardo thinks that another and more apt name for movies is "grief."
"Because I happened to go into pictures at a time when all characters were stereotyped, my face has been held against me ever since. And after all these years of being a well-dressed come-on for the susceptible ladies in. the cast, I am pretty well fed up.
"Perhaps it's the innate vanity of actors that they want their abilities taxed to the full. I left the brokerage business, because I hated the dull routine. I went into pictures, because acting seemed a vivid, satisfying job. But that delusion has been kicked out of me. It is no more stimulating than being a broker. It pays better, but after you've made a certain amount of money, the pay check isn't quite as important as appeasing some unreasonable urge to make more of yourself."
He is deprecating when he talks about his workapologetic for referring to a topic that he thinks must bore others, because it has lost most of its significance to him. You get the impression that he thinks he is
Photo by Hommel
Ricardo Cortez left the
brokerage business, because acting seemed a vivid, satisfying job, but he doesn't think so now.
terrible on the screen. It is almost wistfully that he speaks of the one picture in which he was really happy. This was D. W. Griffith's "The Sorrows of Satan."
"Only a Griffith," Ricardo observes, "would have had the temerity to cast me as a starving English author. It was a splendid role, and working for Griffith, and with an artist like Carol Dempster, was incentive such as I never felt before."
It is still, incidentally, remembered in the studios that Griffith, the arch-technician and mentor of every detail, practically gave Ricardo free rein in this picture. Par