Fool's Paradise

Cecil B. DeMille: Fool's Paradise (US 1921) with John Davidson (Prince Talat-Noi), Mildred Harris (Rosa Duchene) and Conrad Nagel (Arthur Phelps).

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone. Corona emergency security: half programming, half capacity, COVID certificate required, temperature measured, hand hygiene, face masks, distancing.
    Musical interpretation: Gabriel Thibaudeau and Frank Bockius.
    Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in Italian, 5 Oct 2021.

THE GOOD IN THE WORST OF US (US 1915)
(Haar verleden vergeten)
regia/dir: William J. Humphrey.
scen: Elizabeth R. Carpenter.
cast: Harry [T.] Morey (il contadino/the farmer [E. L. Lee]), Carolyn Birch (sua moglie/the farmer’s wife [Minnie]), Gladden James (malvivente/the criminal [Jim Colby]), Mary Maurice (moglie dell’uomo assassinato/wife of the murdered man). prod: Vitagraph.
uscita/rel: 26.8.1915.
copia/copy: incompl., 35 mm, 268 m [879 ft, orig. l. 1,000 ft], 13’06” (18 fps); ; did./titles: NLD.
fonte/source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.

Olivia Hărşan, María Hernández, John Jacobsen (GCM 2021): "The writer Elizabeth R. Carpenter, sometimes credited as E. R. Carpenter, sold stories and scenarios to a variety of film companies, including Vitagraph, Kalem, Selig, Edison, and Lubin. Piecing together her biography before 1913, when Reel Life magazine (30.09.1913) hinted that she was already an established author, is challenging. Her first known published short story, “The Dean’s Checkmate”, won the New York Evening Telegram’s weekly Prize Story Contest (the story appeared in the paper on 13.01.1910), and a cheque from the Triangle Film Corporation now in the Cinémathèque française’s Harry E. Aitken Collection, dated 23.11.1912, as payment for a scenario titled “A Chase for a Fairy” (no film with this name is known), suggests her success began earlier than previously assumed. By the next year she had sold stories to the Reliance Film Company, and the name “E. R. Carpenter” also appeared regularly in the press during this time in association with stories she sent to the Photoplay Clearing House, an organization that corrected, marketed, and sold scripts."

"William Lord Wright’s “Photoplay Authors” column in the New York Dramatic Mirror makes mention of Carpenter several times, quoting her in 1914 boasting of selling an average of more than three scripts per month. She also reported she was selling more synopses than finished scripts, as they paid just as well and took less time to write. Her popularity in 1914 was such that her name appeared on posters for Vitagraph’s Widow of Red Rock, and in 1915 Motion Picture News, when reporting on the Sidney Drew comedy she wrote, Rooney’s Sad Case, praised her for her versatility (11.12.1915). The New Jersey-based Carpenter disappears from the public eye in 1919, after her last known screen credit, World Pictures’ The Quickening Flame, for which she wrote the story."

"The year 1915 was undoubtedly the busiest of Carpenter’s career; she is credited with 11 known films, including The Good in the Worst of Us. Identified at the 2014 “Mostly Lost” workshop in Culpeper, Virginia, the film was partly shot in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and presents a snapshot of melodrama in the early silent era, which, as Jane Gaines notes in Pink-Slipped (2018), owes a great deal of its development to women screenwriters."

"With The Good in the Worst of Us, the melodramatic elements at play – misunderstandings, the importance of trust, and the restoration of peace and virtue through death – drive the plot forward as a woman escapes the criminal she lives with, then marries a farmer and leads a contented life. The past returns when the criminal threatens her after robbing a house and murdering a man, making her reluctantly steal her husband’s money to help him. The farmer discovers her aiding the crook’s escape, and the crook is shot by the police, culminating in the film’s plot twist. Carpenter’s scenario successfully plays with audience expectation, withholding information from us and the farmer/husband until the very end, when it’s revealed that the wife’s intentions were pure, thus restoring peace and reuniting the family."

"Director William J. Humphrey (1875-1952) was first known for his portrayals of Napoleon on stage, which led to Vitagraph hiring him in 1908 to play Bonaparte and other historical figures. By 1910 he was also directing for the company, remaining with Vitagraph until 1917, when he began working for other studios. In 1919 Moving Picture World reported that he had set up his own production company, the Humphrey Picture Corporation (22.02.1919), though its one announced film, Atonement, was released as a Pioneer Film production. Humphrey continued acting long after he stopped directing and writing." – Olivia Hărşan, María Hernández, John Jacobsen

FOOL’S PARADISE (US 1921)
(Paradiso folle)
regia/dir: Cecil B. DeMille.
scen: Beulah Marie Dix, Sada Cowan, suggerito dal racconto di/suggested by the short story by Leonard Merrick, “The Laurels and the Lady” (1896).
photog: Alvin Wyckoff, Karl Struss.
mont/ed: Anne Bauchens.
cost: Clare West [Mitchell Leisen, Natacha Rambova].
asst dir: Cullen Tate, Karl Struss.
cons: Florence Burgess Meehan.
cast: Dorothy Dalton (Poll Patchouli), Mildred Harris (Rosa Duchene), Conrad Nagel (Arthur Phelps), Theodore Kosloff (John Roderiguez), John Davidson (Prince Talat-Noi), Julia Faye (Samaran, moglie principale/his chief wife), Clarence Burton (Manuel), Guy Oliver (Briggs), Kamuela C. Searle (Kay), Jacqueline Logan (Girda), George Fields (a Mexican), Pal (Chum, il cane/the dog), John Brown (orso lottatore/wrestling bear).
prod: Jesse L. Lasky, Famous Players-Lasky Corp.
dist: Paramount Pictures.
première: 16.12.1921 (Criterion Theatre, New York; 11,000 ft).
uscita/rel: 19.3.1922 (8,681 ft).
copia/copy: DCP, 109 min (da/from 35 mm, imbibito/tinted); did./titles: ENG.
fonte/source: Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, Culpeper, VA.

Leslie Midkiff DeBauche (GCM 2021): "Oh, to have been in the room when Beulah Marie Dix (1876‒1970) and Sada Cowan (1882‒1943) transformed Leonard Merrick’s quiet short story “The Laurels and the Lady” into Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacle, Fool’s Paradise. Merrick’s protagonist Willy Childers was an inept, consumptive poet, hopelessly in love, stuck in a dusty South African backwater, who languishes, experiences momentary happiness, and dies. Dix and Cowan swapped Willy for Arthur Phelps, also without literary talent, but notably an oil speculator in the boomtown of El Paso, Texas. While Willy’s English mother sent him to South Africa’s mining country to try to spark some proper ambition in him, Arthur is a can-do American whose eyesight was damaged fighting on the battlefields of France in World War I."

"While Willy’s love object is Rosa Duchene, an actress who comes to South Africa to perform in La Dame aux Camélias, Arthur’s Rosa Duchene is a ballerina devoted to her art and to flirting. She arrives in nearby Hope City to portray Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, stealing men from their lovers and turning their hearts to ice. Willy never actually meets his Rosa, though Arthur does: in France, in Texas, and in Siam(!). Then, there’s Poll Patchouli. In South Africa she owns a shop which sells “bad scent.” On the Texas-Mexico border, Poll dances with more abandon than form in a cantina owned by the jealous Roderiguez, who throws a mean knife."

"It was originally reported that Olga Printzlau and Sada Cowan were adapting the Merrick story for DeMille, but Printzlau’s name soon disappeared, and the magazine Camera (11.3.1922) informed readers that Cowan adapted the original text while Dix wrote the scenario. We’re currently unable to ascertain whether one or both writers added a flying carpet, an exploding cigar, a dog named Chum, a pit full of crocodiles, and a happy ending."

"Three changes Dix and Cowan made to Merrick’s popular story demonstrate their mastery of Hollywood cinema’s narrative form. First, they deployed World War I strategically. A short, simple scene on the lawn of a French hospital early in the film economically sets the story’s time and introduces its main character. A shrapnel wound has damaged Arthur’s eyesight, but his stay at the convalescent hospital provides the opportunity to meet Rosa Duchene, sparking the narrative’s trajectory. As a wounded doughboy, his heroic credentials are established from the start."

"Contemporary audiences would have recognized the troubles of a disabled veteran returning home, and topicality was an efficient and conventional tool for Dix and Cowan to use as they constructed a plot which became progressively zany. Tapping into World War I also encouraged a particularly ideological sense-making: this young American may be down now; he may be infatuated with a fickle, French beauty; but he will succeed (by getting rich), and will come to recognize Poll’s greater worth (she can sew buttons onto his shirts). After all, Americans helped to win the War, and Arthur had the gumption to ask Rosa for her handkerchief as a keepsake."

"Second, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, Dix and Cowan send Arthur – whose sight has been restored – to Siam to woo Rosa. She is there to study ancient religious dances and to play the coquette for Prince Talat-Noi. The exotic destination isn’t as random as one might imagine: DeMille was friends with writer-lecturer Florence Burgess Meehan, considered an expert at the time on all things Siamese, and she became a consultant on the film. What happens to Arthur in Siam dovetails with what he suffered in France: if the Great War nearly robbed him of his sight, Siam bestows greater insight. Siam also provides a contrast, setting post-war America in sharply modern relief. The first images in Fool’s Paradise show El Paso’s bustling, multi-ethnic Main Street, where women drive motorcycles while their babies ride in sidecars, and oil derricks stand sentry, promising wealth beyond measure. Siam looks more traditional. There, women wash clothes in the river, mahouts guide their elephants along a path, and the scalloped domes of buildings evoke an orientalist fantasy (which looks especially stunning in a currently unpreserved color print at the George Eastman Museum). Unsurprisingly, the production ran over-budget: a tantalizing article in Exhibitors Trade Review (24.12.1921) states the film was presented at 11,000 feet when it premiered at New York’s Criterion Theatre, which, if accurate, makes one wonder exactly what was in the now-lost 2,319 feet."

"Although played for racist laughs, in El Paso a Black man can shine shoes one day and strike it rich the next; a Native American woman can sit outside her tent smoking a pipe, nonplussed as men shove a piano through the open tent-flap. Conversely, in Siam society has performed the same rituals and danced the same formalized steps for a very long time. Arthur disdains its ancient customs, and after saving a literal sacrificial lamb, he exclaims, “You fellows have some idea of Sport!” Siam is beautiful, but Texas, though rough, is ready for a young man who will now quit writing terrible poems and get about the work of building a dynamic, democratic country."

"Dix and Cowan’s third significant addition to the scenario is humor. Here, too, they demonstrate skill and wit. It is no accident that Poll Patchouli steals the show. In fact, all the female characters are plucky and competent. Dix and Cowan write them as imaginative, determined, and good at their jobs – and they all do have jobs. Poll, though, is the funny one. Watch the taxidermy ducks fly when she imitates Rosa’s curtain call. After Arthur leaves her for Rosa, Poll warns Chum, his dog, “You’d better go with him  – or he’ll quit you, too – for a French Poodle!” Beulah Marie Dix and Sada Cowan added action, fun, and scenes of both fire and ice to this now Americanized plot. The ads as well as title credit were correct when they advised viewers that Leonard Merrick’s story “The Laurels and the Lady” only “suggested” Fool’s Paradise." – Leslie Midkiff DeBauche

AA: Fool's Paradise was screened 30 years ago in Le Giornate del Muto's double DeMille retrospective. I failed to see it then and now finally caught up.

In that retrospective the big discovery was the realistic Cecil B. DeMille in several stark straight dramas with a social conscience.

But equally prominent was the Cecil B. DeMille of the grand spectacles with a genuine appetite for extravaganza, phantasmagoria and exoticism. CB DeMille belongs also to the heirs of Méliès and to the lineage of the cinema of attractions in huge setpieces showcasing the dancer Rosa Duchene (Mildred Harris, also remembered as the first wife of Charles Chaplin) and revealing ancient cults of Siam, known today as Thailand).

The tale of the war-traumatized Arthur Phelps (Conrad Nagel) comes to Frank Borzage territory, but the contrast to the genuine transcendence of Borzage and the blatant showmanship of DeMille could not be bigger. Equal to both is the fairy-tale approach, the faith in the miracle cure, and the insight in blindness: the blind one can see, and the one with good eyesight can be blind in the most profound fashion.

We have everything: beautiful women in elegant dresses, handsome men, art titles, casual diversity in New Mexico, oil boom towns, alligator ponds, melodramatic excess and stylish overacting.

And even a sense of humour. The male lead is un poète maudit, and he must travel half the world to realize that he has no talent. Love is blind, until finally Arthur realizes that true love was at his fingertips all the time. As for the love object, Poll Patchouli (Dorothy Dalton), she states that "only a great love can eat the things I cook".

The DCP has been created from a marvellously beautiful colour print. DeMille is a master of surfaces, and in this presentation surfaces are made to matter. An evening of splendid entertainment.

Gabriel Thibaudeau and Frank Bockius rose to the occasion with their inspired and energetic musical interpretation, rewarded with a standing ovation.

A memorable quote: 

"If we give life a promissory note, the interest is likely to be more than we can pay".