When Knighthood Was in Flower (Cosmopolitan Productions, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. on January 3 I watched a movie I’d heard about but never actually seen on Turner Classic Movies: When Knighthood Was in Flower, a 1922 epic starring Marion Davies as Princess Mary Tudor,sister of King Henry VIII (Lyn Harding, a beefy-looking British actor best known for playing Professor Moriarty twice in the last two Sherlock Holmes movies with Arthur Wontner as Holmes) and her love for the mercenary soldier Charles Brandon (Forrest Stanley) despite the wishes of her brother the King to marry her off to the aging King Louis XII of France (William Norris). When Knighthood Was in Flower began life as a novel by Charles Major in 1898, which he first published under the pseudonym “Edwin Caskoden” – which may explain why one of the leading characters in the film was named Sir Edwin Caskoden (Ernest Glendinning) and got considerably more screen time than Charles Brandon, the nominal male lead. The film was shown as part of a long-overdue “Star of the Month” tribute to Marion Davies, whose reputation has suffered from the “black legend” depiction of her as the haplessly untalented would-be opera singer “Susan Alexander” in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Welles’ film was a thinly veiled biopic of William Randolph Hearst, who can politely be described as Davies’ mentor. Davies was actually a quite talented light comedienne who was at her best in contemporary stories, but Hearst tended to cast her in overblown epics. I love the story about how Hearst tried to hire writer Frances Marion to write for Davies, and in order to persuade her to take the job he told her, “I am willing to spend $1 million on each of Marion’s pictures.” “That’s just the problem!” Frances Marion exclaimed. “She’s a talented light comedienne, and you’re drowning her in production values.” When word of that reached the rest of Hollywood, a lot of people thought, “At last, one of us had the guts to tell him what was wrong! The rest of us never dared!”

When Knighthood Was in Flower was actually the first Davies film on which Hearst spent $1 million. The TCM host announced that this was the first film ever made that cost that much, but it was wrong; D. W. Griifith’s 1916 film Intolerance went over $2 million – the most expensive movie ever made until another megalomaniac millionaire, Howard Hughes, spent over $4 million on the 1929 World War I aviation epic Hell’s Angels . And Universal falsely promoted Erich von Stroheim’s 1921 film Foolish Wives as “the first million-dollar picture,” using a neon sign on the company’s New York headquarters to announce the running total of its production cost, with the “S” in Stroheim’s name replaced with a dollar sign. (That was one of the reasons Stroheim got the largely undeserved reputation for extravagance that ultimately destroyed his directorial career.) A Broadway stage adaptation of When Knighthood Was in Flower by Paul Kester premiered in 1901, and according to the Wikipedia page on the novel, the first screen adaptation was produced by Biograph in 1908 with D. W. Griffith writing the script and Wallace MacCutcheon directing. It’s a pity Hearst didn’t spend whatever it would have cost to get Griffith to direct this film instead of the person he actually hired, Robert G. Vignola, an Italian’born filmmaker with a spotty reputation. Vignola shot most of the film in mid-shots and master takes, though he and cinematographers Ira Morgan and Harold Wenstrom shot a couple of luminous close-ups of Marion Davies, including one scene in which she’s lighting candles to express her anguish at being parted from the man she loves strikingly reminiscent of the great scene Gloria Swanson shot for Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1928) that’s included in Sunset Boulevard (1950). The scenario was by future director Luther Reed, though imdb.com lists future producer and studio head William LeBaron as one of the writers. (It also lists original author Major, but not Kester, who first dramatized this story for the stage.)

The version of When Knighthood Was in Flower was a restoration produced by a company called Undercrank Films based on a 12-reel road-show print in the Library of Congress, which did not have the original color tints and also did not have the technical credits, since these were printed in a program book you were expected to buy in the theatre. The people at Undercrank added a list of technical credits from a surviving copy of the program but didn’t try to match them to the typographical style of the title credits, the actors’ names or the intertitles. They also hired Ben Model to accompany the film on his synthesizer, which is set up to duplicate (as much as possible) the original sound of a Wurlitzer theatre organ, and that scared me a bit since I hadn’t cared for the accompaniment he had put on another 1922 film, the John Barrymore Sherlock Holmes, but his work here was tasteful and appropriate. What struck me about this film was the sheer spunkiness of Marion Davies’ performance. This was the film that convinced Charlie Chaplin that “she would have become a star even without the cyclonic Hearst publicity,” and it’s easy to see why. Throughout the film Mary Tudor is fiercely independent, almost feminist in her determination to make her own way in the world and not let the rich, powerful men in her life tell her what to do. (One wonders if she behaved with this level of independence towards the real-life rich, powerful man who had essentially bought her her career.) She’s able to avoid having actually to have sex with Louix XII – the title card wittily explains that Louis had bought himself a Queen but not a wife – and fends off the advances of Louis’ nephew and heir, Duke Francis (a very young William Powell in only his second film – and yes, it was odd to see this movie just days after having watched the mature Powell in After the Thin Man!), who expects to inherit Mary as well as the throne of France when his uncle finally croaks.

While this film isn’t as entertaining as it could have been with a stronger director – Vignola pretty much stages the action scenes on autopilot – there’s a great scene early on in which, defying her royal brother’s order, Mary Tudor goes to the home of soothsayer Grammont (Gustav von Seyffertitz, who had just played Professor Moriarty to John Barrymore’s Holmes – so this is a “doubles movie” in that it features two Moriartys, von Seyffertitz and Harding). The moment she steps into his hut it looks like we’ve suddenly entered the world of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, so either Robert G. Vignola had more of an awareness of state-of-the-art filmmaking for the time or another director staged these scenes. When Knighthood Was in Flower remained fallow after this version until 1053. 41 years later, as The SWord and the Rose, one of Walt Disney’s “frozen funds” productions in Britain with Glynis Johns as Mary, Richard Todd as Brandon and James Robertson Justice as Henry VIII, directed by Ken Annakin. It’s a pity no one thought to remake it with Katharine Hepburn in the 1930’s; Hepburn actually did remake a Davies film, Quality Street, based on a Sir James Barrie play (Davies’ version came out in 1927, Hepburn’s in 1937), and film historian Gary Carey – who wrote of Davies, “She got good reviews, and not just from Hearst’s reviewers” – said Davies was actually more naturalistic and less mannered in the role. Whatever its faults as a story or a film, When Knighthood Was in Flower made a beautiful vehicle for the feisty side of Davies’ persona.