Silent spectacular comes to town
`The Greatest Love Story of the Ages,' blared a half-page ad for film in The Sun
One of the pleasures of going through old newspapers is the ads, which are sometimes more interesting than the stories.
This is particularly true for silent movie ads in the 1920s, when millions of Canadians and Americans attended theatres each week.
Studios outdid themselves with big movie productions and massive hype, but the movies and their stars have virtually all faded from memory. Most silent films no longer exist, because they were shot on nitrate film, which decomposes with age and is highly flammable.
A good example of one of these lost spectaculars is Man, Woman, Marriage, a 1921 drama starring Dorothy Phillips and directed by her husband, Allen Holubar.
“The Greatest Love Story of the Ages,” blared a half-page ad in The Vancouver Sun on May 15, 1921. “The Drama Eternal.”
The limits of technology meant that films of the day had to be shot on short “reels” that were only 10 or 20 minutes long. But Man, Woman, Marriage was such an epic, they boasted it was on nine reels. A story said that Holubar had shot 80 million miles of film making it, and that the movie had cost $400,000, a fortune at the time.
In the film, Phillips played several women through the ages, starting as “the mate of a cave man fierce in her love” before moving on to play “a gorgeous Amazon ruling by Mother Right.”
At the end she emerged as “the girl mother of today, fighting again the battle of her sex, rooting evil forces, struggling from the man-shackles of marriage to a new triumph of Mother Right.”
But it wasn't all peaches and cream. The ad said the audience would “sob with her” as a “woman failing — the slave girl weeping amidst barbaric beauties of Pagan Courts, (and) the helpless bride of medieval days.”
It sounded like a big production. “Thousands of players!” said the ad. “Thousands of horses! Wild Animals! New Screen Wonders!”
But the ad for its Vancouver stint at the Allen Theatre was toned down compared to an earlier ad in the Jan. 22 edition of Paterson, N.J.'S Morning Call.
“Hordes of women ride barelegged, bare-armed, bare-chested into the Mighty Battle of the Amazons, with a woman as their leader,” it read. “The pagan courts of Roman throned with women, barbaric, beautiful, while a slave girl weeps among them. The Bacchanalian dancers in the orgy of life and splendor and feasting among the men and women of today.”
“Today” would be the Roaring '20s, when Prohibition made drinking liquor in the U.S. illegal, and the public responded by going on a decade-long bender in speakeasies. The ad is illustrated with a modern woman and man drinking cocktails, beneath a Roman man and a scantily clad woman quaffing wine from goblets.
Pretty racy, but the movie seems to have been a bit of a dud, commercially speaking. The opening was delayed several times — it was originally slated to première in Hollywood in January 1921, but didn't appear there until June. It opened on the East Coast in the U.S. first and played across Canada before getting to California, the opposite of the normal run.
Director Holubar died of complications from gall bladder surgery in 1923, and Phillips' star dimmed. Like many silent actors, she had a hard time after sound arrived in 1927. But she was very successful in her day — her Internet Movie Database listing has 154 titles, and she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She died in 1980 at the age of 90.
The biggest movie ad in Vancouver on May 15, 1921 was for The Orphan, a “real western drama” with “range riders, outlaws, gunfighters (and) rough riding” starring William Farnum.
Thomas Meighan was the lead in a Paramount picture, The City of Silent Men, which showed “the famous Bridge of Sighs in the Tombs of New York (and) the interior of Sing Sing, world famous prison.”
Another movie, Gypsy Blood, featured Pola Negri, “the world famous continental beauty.” Negri was born in Poland, became a star in Germany and crossed the Atlantic to make it in Hollywood. She was offered the part of Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, but turned it down.