The First Degree (Universal, 1923)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 14) my husband Charles and I watched another double bill from Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature, which is actually on Monday at midnight Eastern time but we get it at 9 p.m. Sunday. The double bill consisted of a 1923 film from Universal called The First Degree, a bleak melodrama starring a quite good actor named Frank Mayo, and one I’d already seen on a previous “Silent Sunday Showcase,” Too Many Kisses (Paramount, 1925), though I was eager to see it again because I think Charles was working the night it was on before and I figured he’d be interested in it. (I wrote a moviemagg blog post on it on November 30, 2020 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/too-many-kisses-paramount-1925.html.) Directed by Edward Sedgwick (who’s usually thought of as a comedy specialist because he was in charge of most of Buster Keaton’s late silents and early talkies at MGM, but who also was brought in to reshoot the ending of the original 1925 Lon Chaney, Sr. version of The Phantom of the Opera after Rupert Julian’s version wasn’t considered exciting enough) from a script by George Randolph Chester based on a story called “The Summons” by George Pattullo, The First Degree turned out to be a surprisingly good film. It was long thought totally lost until the Chicago Film Archive discovered a nearly complete print (containing about 90 percent of the originally released footage) discovered in a batch of instructional films about agriculture. Just how that mistake could have happened became apparent early on, in a scene in which a small-town grand jury is investigating the theft of some sheep belonging to local farmer Sam Purdy (Frank Mayo, top-billed). It’s the sort of small town still common in the early 1920’s when the streets are shared between walkers, bicyclists, horseback riders, horse-drawn carriages and motor vehicles, and the presumably stolen sheep amble down Main Street as if no urbanization is going on.

Sam Purdy has been summoned to testify before the grand jury, though no one will tell him what the case is or why they want to talk to him. When he arrives in the grand jury room he blurts out that he’s killed someone, though he insists it was an accident and he didn’t really mean to. Through a series of flashbacks, Sam Purdy tells his story: he was a respectable employee of a bank and was engaged to marry Mary (Sylvia Breamer, delivering a powerfully low-keyed performance a far cry from the simpering coyness all too many silent-era ingénues fell into) until the piece’s villain, Sam’s half-brother Will Bass (Philo McCullough – I’ve heard of the fictional detective Philo Vance but this is the first time I’ve heard of a real person named Philo!), enters the picture. Will is obsessed with Mary and is determined that if he can’t have her, no one else will – and particularly not his ambitious half-brother. Will gets his chance when the local bank is robbed (I’m not sure but I think we were supposed to think Will, who also worked there, masterminded the robbery) and Sam is caught with the money. He insists he grabbed the tin box containing it from the two real crooks, but nobody except Mary believes him. Sam is convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, and when he emerges he’s spent his time in stir studying law. Two years later he’s been admitted to the bar and is running for county prosecutor when Will shows up again, demanding blackmail money. Sam gives him a small roll of bills but Will decides it’s not enough, and he denounces Sam as an ex-con.

The townspeople literally run him out of town on a rail – they lock him inside a boxcar and send him off as the train pulls out – and Sam ends up in an even smaller town than the two he’s lived in earlier. He gets a job, saves his money and is determined to buy a farm. He’s already made the down payment and taken possession when his nemesis Will shows up and once again demands money. Sam is appalled at the sheer gall of his half-brother turned blackmailer, and the two have a fight on the proverbial dark and stormy night. The fight ends with Sam killing Will – or at least thinking he has – and after he’s told the story to the grand jury, guess who turns up. It’s Will, who’s been arrested for stealing Sam’s sheep (ya remember the sheep?). Will pleads with Sam to tell the grand jurors Sam gave Will the sheep so Will will be let off the hook, and once again Sam is nonplussed that this horrible man who’s already ruined his life in two different places is expecting him to save his ass once again. Sam ultimately refuses to lie for Will, and the grand jury foreman tells Sam that if he had lied the way Will wanted him to, they’d have arrested Sam for perjury. In the end Sam gets his life, his farm and his wife (Mary had taken a trip out of town but she returns just as Sam is being exonerated and released from the grand jury room; she pulls up in a vehicle whose windshield sign identifies it as a “bus” even though it’s just an ordinary car, and Charles wondered whether the person operating it could see through the sign well enough to drive) back and Will gets led off to jail.

Aside from being a fascinating story of a man able to re-invent himself in ways that are impossible now in the age of computers and the Internet, The First Degree is remarkable in the later movie genres it anticipates. The bank robbery itself takes place at night and looks like somebody spliced in a sequence from a film noir made 20 years later (and the cinematographer, Benjamin F. Kline, later shot one of the iconic films noir, Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 vest-pocket masterpiece Detour), while the confrontation between Sam and Will on the dark and stormy night anticipates Universal’s later horror classics – so much so that one expects to see a parade of villagers walk by and ask Sam and Will which way the monster went. The First Degree is quite a remarkable movie, and one wonders why it wasn’t remade in the 1940’s when film noir had become a viable genre: it’s fascinating to imagine Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Sam and Mary, with Raymond Burr as the villain. It’s also intriguing for the main title card, which instead of saying “Carl Laemmle Presents” says “Carl Laemmle Offers” – an intriguing distinction from his usual production credit. Frank Mayo was one actor whose career burned out in the early 1930’s and he ended up working for years in minor character roles, often uncredited; his last film was as the Master Architect in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949) – presumably he designed the Temple of Dagon the revived Samson brought down at the movie’s end – though he survived until 1963.