The stars (1962)

That, "severe yet impassioned figure," William S. Hart. indulges playful "Little Mary" on United Artists lot. which she helped establish and where he fought for survival. revolved remained constant There were villains and they were rarely stars (until, during World War I, Erich Von Stroheim emerged as "the man you love to hate" ) . There were heroes mainly of the jut-jawed, clean-limbed variety, (like J. Warren Kerrigan, Francis X. Bushman, Harold Lockwood, Carlyle Blackwood). There were, it seemed, dozens of youthfully beautiful heroines, whose principal characteristics were often epitomized by their screen names (like Arline Pretty, Louise Lovely). Each of them was, as one critic said of Lillian Gish, "a permanent lyric of jumpiness." The early moguls — notably Zukor — were under the impression that one star was as good as the next, so long as the name had been properly sold; and many a Broadway name trekked west, seeking an easy fortune in movies. A few of them, like the Farnum brothers, did well. Most of them, however, proved rather too mature in appearance and manner for the tastes of their new audience, which tended to take a somewhat simplified view of things. Thespian reputations built on a talent for the then fashionable declamatory style of the stage meant little to it; beauty, the ability to communicate a sort of average attractiveness did. If the hero seemed to be a swell guy, the heroine a sweet child, they were taken to the collective bosom. The intimacy of the movie medium, the relative cultural naivete of the audience defeated older, perhaps more serious, talents, and the first group of movie stars was drawn from the younger players. Those who were merely pretty or handsome faded fairly quickly, their comeliness to be replaced by another group who would, in turn, be replaced by yet another youth movement when the first wrinkles appeared. Such temporary stars are an ongoing movie phenomenon which need not detain us long. Their only real interest is as a mirror of a decade's fads and fashions. But in that first group of stars, as is true in each generation of beautiful people, there were a few who were more than merely pretty. For them, physical attractiveness was merely the key which enabled them to unlock some basic response in the vast majority of their audience. So basic was this appeal, so much of us — or, at least, of our longings — did they express, that they became the prototypes for most future stars. In this chapter we consider two such people: Douglas Fairbanks, the perfect American hero; and Mary Pickfonl. a common-denominator sort of girl, the ideal wife, daughter, sister of a generation. Allowing for superficial variationbased on changed tastes in style, dress and manner. Doug and Mary are still very much with us on the screen today. The same may be said of William S. Hart and Theda Bara. although their own careers were comparatively brief. Miss Bara was the movie industry's first try at a foreign temptress. They tried too hard, and poor Theda was laughed off the screen. But the foreign woman, more sensual, more worldlywise than the typical American heroine, abides — exotic, temperamental, dangerous, but infinitely attractive. \^ illiam S. Hart's demise may be blamed on his times. Temporarily, the romanticism of the 1920's, its insistent debunking of the old, rural values, forced him from the screen. But The \^ esterner, a sort of last Adam ranging a lost Eden, is too important a figure in American mythology to disappear completely. He returned, impersonated by others, in scripts that explored the type more deeply than did those of Hart, during our search for values in the 1930's. His type is still with us today, a more and more poignant reminder of what we lost when we uprooted ourselves from the land and decided to live lives of noisy desperation in a world growing more hectic every day. As for the Keystone Kops, they were the first great comedy stars, an ensemble of unparalleled virtuosity, creating nearly all that was great in screen comedy. These, then, are our prototype screen personalities. A little of them survives in nearly every film made today, just as a little bit of Griffith's work survives in everything we see on the screen. They did not know it then, but they were creating, these early stars, the almost unchanging personality profile of the American film. 21