THOSE WERE THE DAYS!

Radio Record, 24 June 1938, Page 15

THOSE WERE THE DAYS!

When Villains Were Villains And Heroes Were Virtuous Written for the ‘‘Record"

by

SARI

? oo H-HA, my proud beauty, soon the tune will come when I shall break your spirit and crush your lily-white form in my arms... ." "Oh; spare me, sir, a fate worse than death, ‘for my dear, departed mother’s sake... ." Characters on the screen have never been heard talking like that, except in fun, but there was a time when ‘they looked as if they might be doing it. Those were the silent days, when the movie villain really was a villain. You just knew by his clothes and moustache and the look in his eyes that evil was afoot, and wrong Was about to be done. . The young men and women of to-day would iaugh heartily, and rightly so, at the crude efforts of those early

Times; Dut it 1S douvtiul it they thrill aS Much now to the glamour of Joan Crawford or the charm of Gary Cooper us their fathers and mothers did to ¢ se

tne seauctiveness OL LNCGd Hadaltd, tue villainy of Stuart Holmes, or the heroics of Maurice Costello. Very likely they thrill a good deal less; for the picturegoers of to-day are blase compared with those of two decades ago, whose enthusiasm over melodramas that would now be regarded as insults to the intelligence was somehow. delightfully simple and childlike. That, at least, is how it appears to us from our superior position in Time: though if the film industry progresses with anything like the same rapidity in the next 25 years as it has in the past, we shall probably be regarded with similar good-natured condescension by the film fans of 1963. ERVERSELY enough, the old-time screen villains often seemed much more appealing than the leading men, for several reasons. For instance, they usually were

dark; they usually were tall; and they wore their clothes well. They were interesting, ‘too; they had the air of having been places and done things. Like Little Eric THE heroes, on the other hand, were too often sadly blonde, with too, too much of a goodly atmosphere about them. They were rather like adult editious of Little Bric hefore that incredible creature, going rapidly to the devil, so far forgot himself to say "Bother" ("to such depths had the wretched child descended!"’), and haying caught his fool in a septic rabbit-trap, expired horribly. Like the busband in "Kast Lynne.’ who was such a mullethead and so noble aud pure that he was sickening, the antique xereen hero did not seem to understand the deeper, secamier, more alluring side of life.

COULD you blame Alma Rubens if she gave her husband the air for Lou Tellegen? Remember Tellégen as the villain? How he eyed the tetnpting bit of baggage he was about to ensnare, and-with great subtlety on the part of the director-proceeded to polish a red apple and take a huge bite out of it with a wicked air? You just knew what he was up to, and delicious thrills and chills chased up and down your

spine. Conrad Nagel was dull fare indeed with his righteousness as the husband, after Tellegen made a few passes at that apple.

Good-Bad Man JDEFINITELY, however, the villain was an evil character in earlier films. He was the man you loved to hate. The thicker he laid it on, the better you liked it. And then Bill Wart came along. William S. Hart deserves a pardgraph all to himself, because to him the movie industry owes the idea of a "goodbad" man, a character who has a good many human faults but who atones for them all in the last ree]-when he gene erally Iuid down his life for the heroine, or else slipped quietly out the bacl way, with his face working with suppressed emotion, while the heroing slipped into the arms of the other, nobler fellow. Heroes were models of perfect purity, and villains were whiskery and rotten to the eore for a long

time after Bill Hart’s first appearances, but his characterisations proved pdpular-and producers took the hint. To-day, the old-time villain’s place has beeu usurped by the modern hero-villain. Edward G. Robinson, Wallace Beery and George Raft are typical of the players who are in direct line of descent from Bill Hart. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, because of their appearance and personalities, they are usually cast in chafacter leads. For the modern girl is not dumb enough to aecept the sugar-coated hero of the early film era. She wauts something with more flavour. What does she get? The hero, with all the charm and interest of the villain added. Tt makes the story not quite su easy to predict, and it is much nearer to real life. OME memorable old-time villains who come to mind ine clude Ralph Lewis, leader of the carpetbaggers in "The Birth of a Nation" ; (Continued on page.39).-..

‘Those Were The Days --e OLD SCREEN VILLIANS (Continued from page 15),

Alan Hale, the eurly-headed, blonde villain (quite a departure) in "The Covered Wagon," with Lois Wilson and J. Warren Kerrigan thwarting nis schemes; Stuart Holmes, villain who pursued Theda Bara through many a murky reels; Francis X. Bushman, who formerly had played heroes entirely, as Messala, the hard-boiled schemer in "Ben Hur," who opposed the hero, Played by Ramon Novarro; Lowell Sherman, the villain who made things wretched for Mabel Normand in "Moily 0"; Fred Kohler, huge, muscular giant, without whom it was once almost impossible to make a western; Mitchell Lewis, of many, many villain roles, (These last two, together with Alan Jfale, still play heavies in films), Noah Beery as the heavy in "The Four Horsemen" will never be forgotten; he outd!ld all the villains worth mentioning for years-particularly when a military villain was required. Do you remember "Beau Geste"’? What a nasty Foreign Legion officer he was! When he'd lift his upper lip to roar You didn’t need a sound track to guide you. The sound rose to. your own lips. [RICH VON STROHEIM was so successful a villain that he created.a chimera which devoured him. He was so hated for his Prussian officer roles, with his sleek. shaven head, his heelclicking, his monocled, cold eye, that @ personal reputation began te roll up like a snowball.. It downed him. He was too good an actor, He personified to the. motion picture audiences everything that war. propaganda had painted the typical German officer to be. He was hissed and even struck ar in public places. Women réfused to sit at tables near him in restaurants. The situation was fantastic;.in private life Von was well known to be a evoted husband and father, a gentleman, and a refined person. Try to tell that to the American fans who saw. bim dui his dastardly deeds. Much the same fate confronted Bela Lugosi more recently. His sereen and stage reputation pursued him into private life. American girls recoiled from him and clutched their throats in alarm -all because Bela had been so con: vincing- as the yampfre count in "Draenia." , HeLsRook BLINN and Lon Chaney were other heavies. Chaney was always the centre of interest in pis films. hile justice was meted out 10 nim and he suffered horrible deaths in the endings, during the run of the film he held the stage. In "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and in "Phantom of the Opera" Lon Chaney was hideous. so hideous that, in spite of themselves, audiences pitied him, and he achieved sympathy thronzh it. While he was never let off anything in the way of punishment in the Story, he did attract sympathy. It was a further stage in the blossoming of the "character leads" of to-day.