Richard Abel: Harry Carey - "Bright Star of the Early Western Sky" (2023 Pordenone introduction)

Robert Thornby: The Fox (US 1921), starring Harry Carey. Photo: Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research.

Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 2023.

Programma a cura di Richard Abel.

Richard Abel (GCM): " In mid-March 1919, the Des Moines Tribune’s film reviewer, Dorothy Day, warned: “Teachers, if rows and rows of seats that should have bloomed forth in tangled boy heads, showed amazingly empty, Monday afternoon and maybe this afternoon, too, don’t be puzzled for those eager little chaps are seeing Harry Carey, one of their greatest screen idols, in person.” This was one of many personal appearances Carey made in cities at the time, and Day herself warmed to him, as a “regular fellow,” in words she imagined boys would understand: “Carey is no dude, and he makes his appearance wearing his huge black sombrero, a green and black checked wool shirt and regular cowboy boots. He chews gum and talks just exactly like you ‘knowed’ he would. His voice is deep and, well, just exactly like it looked on screen. His face is tanned and his light brown hair is just as likely to be mussed as not and he caresses his chin with his thumb when he’s puzzled – just like he does on screen.” "

" Two years later, in the Chicago Tribune (16.1.1921), Mae Tinée, far from a fan of cowboy stars, confessed: “I love Harry Carey’s lined face. I love his easy, indifferent way of getting himself across. I like the way he wears his clothes; the way he rides a pony; the way he walks and that tight-lipped smile of his that he uses so rarely. The western hero deluxe – that’s Harry Carey.” It should be no surprise that even two newspaper women could rank him as no less popular at the time than his movie cowboy rivals, William S. Hart and Tom Mix. "

" Yet it took Carey (1878-1947) slightly longer than Hart to become a movie star. The son of a prominent lawyer and director of a sewing machine company in the Bronx, Carey graduated from a military academy, and enrolled at New York University to study law, but contracted pneumonia from a boating accident. While recuperating, he wrote a play titled Montana that told “in vivid colors of pulsating life a romance of the great Northwest.” He then headed a stock company to tour productions, with himself as the play’s lead, that for three years in the mid-1900s netted a good profit. But a second play set in the Klondike, Two Women and That Man, flopped badly, leaving him strapped financially, and Henry Walthall helped him join Biograph in 1911. During the next three years, he played many secondary character roles, often as a gangster, in D. W. Griffith films, and became well enough known to sign with Universal in 1915. Working with producer-director Francis Ford, Carey initially starred in a series of two-reel westerns, which allowed him to set up his own production unit and develop the character of “Cheyenne Harry” (initially one of Montana’s secondary characters) in a dozen or more two-reel and three-reel westerns, sometimes from his own scenarios. "

" Beginning with Straight Shooting (1917), all of his films now became features directed by Jack Ford, often with Hoot Gibson as a sidekick and Olive Golden as a love interest (she eventually became his third wife). From then on, he adopted several signature gestures: sitting on a horse semi-slouched with arms resting on the saddle horn, subtly letting a gloved finger scratch his chin to express puzzlement or amusement, a tight quarter-smile, a hooded cool stare, one crossed arm holding the other at the elbow. Over the next few years, Ford and Carey paired up for an unusually successful series of westerns, released as one of Universal’s top brands. Perhaps the most intriguing was the lost Phantom Riders (1918), in which a villainous cattleman’s band of masked, white-clothed horsemen recall the Ku Klux Klan riders in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. By then, depicting “the cowboy as he really is,” Carey was earning $1,250 a week, making him one of the highest-salaried western stars. "

" After Ford left Universal for Fox in 1920, Carey continued making westerns with other of the company’s directors. When Universal decided to make Hoot Gibson its top western star, Carey made one last Jewel film, Man to Man (1922), and continued acting in westerns for other companies, including Pathé’s Satan Town (1926), which paid tribute to Hart’s classic, Hell’s Hinges (1916). During the transition to sound films, Carey and Olive briefly toured on vaudeville stages, but soon the voice that fit his persona so well led him to act in early talkie character roles. M-G-M then took a chance on starring Carey in Trader Horn (1931), which was so successful that he soon became a star in “B” westerns. But he kept appearing in “A” feature supporting roles, including Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), earned an Oscar nomination for playing  the Vice-President presiding over the Senate in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and had a crucial role as a B-17 crew chief in Howard Hawks’s Air Force (1943). Carey bonded with John Wayne in The Shepherd of the Hills (1941), and went on to work with the Duke in other films, most notably also with his own son, Harry Carey Jr., in Hawks’s Red River (1948). "

" After Carey died in September 1947, Ford dedicated 3 Godfathers (1948), a remake of his 1919 film Marked Men, to him, and cast his son, Harry Carey Jr., in one of the central roles. At the film’s beginning, Ford eulogized Carey as the “Bright Star of the early western sky.” A final tribute came in Ford’s The Searchers (1956), when Wayne adopted a characteristic Carey gesture of holding his left forearm with his right hand, and when, framed in the doorway at the end, he walks away from the woman he once loved and lost, played by Olive Carey. " – Richard Abel