By John Exshaw
Saturday, 26 February, saw the triumphant return of director Rex Ingram – or at any rate, his most celebrated film – to the city of his birth, as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse thundered once more across the big screen at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. Last seen at the same venue in 1993 (the centenary of Ingram’s birth), the film was showing as part of the recently-concluded Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, and, as on that previous occasion, the score was again performed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, this time under the direction of David Brophy.
Ingram’s masterpiece not only propelled Rudolph Valentino and Alice Terry to international stardom but made Ingram himself the leading director of his day, with complete power over all future projects and his own studio in the south of France. But while Valentino has retained his iconic status – albeit of a somewhat dubious and necrophiliac character – Ingram’s reputation (along with that of scriptwriter June Mathis, the driving force behind The Four Horsemen), has been allowed to slide into undeserved obscurity. Even this showing, in his native city, was billed as a 90th. anniversary of the film itself, rather than as a tribute to Ingram; had it been screened here last year, as it was in July at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in L.A., it could at least have been promoted as commemorating the 60th. anniversary of Ingram’s death in 1950.
Be that as it may, The Four Horsemen proceeded to play to a gratifyingly full house at the NCH – and on an evening when people might otherwise have been expected – at least by self-regarding politicians – to show some passing interest in the results of the general election, held the day before. Then again, perhaps Ingram’s film, itself allegorical, struck a chord in a country recently devastated by its own version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Greed, Cronyism, Clerical Criminality, and the IMF. With tickets ranging from a not-inconsiderable €25-€35, the screening also proved something of a recession-buster, attracting an audience comprised largely of the well-heeled, together with a sprinkling of the self-consciously “ortyâ€, all hoping not to be noticed in their look-at-me outfits and silly hats.
But at least those who may have winced at the prices received some bang-for-their-bucks in the shape of an unscheduled appearance by the great Kevin Brownlow, the nearest thing to a secular saint this city has seen since Sir Bob Geldof moved his wagon to London many moons ago. And, it must be said, the city, as unofficially represented by Arthur Lappin, chairman of this year’s Jameson’s Festival (and perhaps better known as the producer of such films as In the Name of the Father, The Boxer, and In America), responded appropriately, awarding “the great film historian and film-maker†with “our very own Voltaâ€, a somewhat unprepossessing modernist paperweight named after Dublin’s first cinema, opened in 1909 by the unlikely figure of James Joyce (who would, by the way, long after his brief fling with the film business, go on to name-check Ingram in Finnegans Wake). In presenting Brownlow with his Volta for “distinguished services to international filmâ€, Lappin, displaying all the cunning one might expect of a successful producer, proceeded to paraphrase chunks of Kevin Spacey’s speech given in honour of Brownlow at last November’s honorary Oscar ceremony in L.A., thereby saving himself the trouble of composing anything new while also allowing him to name-check Spacey, who was apparently a guest of the Festival earlier in the week.
Brownlow, whom one strongly suspects would rather shave his head with a cheese grater than give speeches, seemed, nonetheless, genuinely delighted with both the award and his enthusiastic reception. His response, and his introduction to The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, went as follows:
"I’m very touched and flattered, and I love the Irish connection because my father came from Cork and I married a girl from County Waterford. And when we were going around Hollywood, practically everybody looked at her red hair and said where are you from? And when she told them, she said it’s extraordinary, you would be amazed at how many Irish people made Hollywood. I wanted to do a documentary and call it Even Adolphe Menjou Spoke Gaelic. I wanted to do a documentary on Rex Ingram and every Irish television station turned this down, one by return of e-mail.
Rex Ingram, whose real name was Hitchcock – as he told Alfred when he first met him, you should change your name, you’ll never get anywhere with a name like that – he disliked Hollywood and he couldn’t stand Louis B. Mayer, and he made him open a studio for him in the south of France, where he made the wonderful Mare Nostrum and other films, and was presented with the Legion of Honour.
It’s hard to believe that this picture was made 90 years ago. I can almost think of it as the first modern film. Modern is not always something one associates with anything complimentary but it looks so sophisticated and it’s just incredible it was nearly a century ago. Ibáñez, the writer of it [the original novel], was a crazy Republican who was constantly being arrested and thrown in gaol, and amazingly this picture was made by the French during the War, which is a fact that’s only just come out. Many Irish people were associated with its making: the writer June Mathis; cameraman John Seitz, who went on to do Sunset Blvd., he was half-Irish; and of course Alice Terry, whom we knew well – Alice Taaffe as she was originally. She said that the producer Marcus Loew spent so much money, the gag at the time was, “Through Marcus Loew’s pockets rode The Four Horsemen.â€
This is the original 1921 version of The Four Horsemen. David Gill, Patrick Stanbury and I restored it, and the extraordinary thing is, when Valentino died they reissued it in 1926 and they cut all the nasty scenes of the Germans misbehaving, which was very ironic because Ibáñez had written it out of a sense of fury at the atrocities committed by the Germans which he witnessed as a journalist, and he wanted Spain to come in on the side of the Allies. It was of course banned in Germany, but it shows you what the direction of American pictures might have been had it not been for those wretched scandals that made so many scripts look juvenile for so long. Patrick Stanbury, my partner, is up there synchronizing this and you’re going to hear a wonderful score by Carl Davis. Thank you very much."
And so we were off to the Argentine and Valentino’s immortal tango, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra doing full justice to Davis’ score as the story moved to Europe and the outbreak of war. Although the Concert Hall was not, obviously, designed as a cinema and the house-lights were never dimmed as much as one might have wished, everyone seemed to agree they had witnessed something special, with the applause intensifying when a picture of Ingram appeared on the screen at the end of the film – clearly a case of Rex mortuus est, vivat Rex!
Prior to the film, I managed a brief hello with Kevin once he had emerged from a talk on Ingram given by film historian Professor Luke Gibbons, an event your correspondent would have attended had anyone bothered to inform me it was on. As I aware that Kevin was in the middle of an insane schedule (up at 4:00 a.m. for a 6:00 a.m. flight to Heathrow, followed by a further flight to Los Angeles, in order to be re-presented with the honorary Oscar he had already been given last November, this time at the Oscars proper), I pretty much confined myself to suggesting that he refuse to do it unless they give him a second Oscar. Oh they will, said Kevin, but then they’ll take it back again. . . . Go figure, as I believe the expression is.
Anyway, we agreed to meet again in the bucolic surrounds of Killruddery House in Wicklow for the Killruddery Film Festival, which runs from 10-13 March and at which Kevin will be presenting, inter alia, Abel Gance’s monumental La Roue (1923), Flaherty and Van Dyke’s White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), and Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration (1915). Further information on the Festival can be found at http://killrudderyarts.com/filmfestival/.