The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Metro Pictures, 1920, released 1921)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 28) at 9 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies for their “Silent Sunday Showcase,” which because it was Memorial Day eve they showed one of the greatest of all silent films, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1920, released 1921). The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was based on a novel by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez published in 1916, while World War I was still going on, and translated into English by Charlotte Brewster Jordan in 1918. Jordan’s English edition became the best-selling novel in the U.S. in 1918-1919, making a movie adaptation almost inevitable. The film version was produced by Metro Pictures in 1920 (that’s the copyright date) and released in 1921. It’s best remembered as the film that launched the brief but stratospheric career of Rudolph Valentino, an Italian-born actor (true name: Rodolfo Guglielmi) who’d emigrated to the U.S. in the early teens, got jobs as a professional dancer (including replacing the almost as young Clifton Webb as partner to Bonnie Glass, who then was considerably better known than either man) and then moved to Hollywood in search of a film career. Alas, the only jobs available to a swarthy “exotic” type were small villain roles in “B” movies, including two with Mae Murray (in one of which, The Delicious Little Devil, he got “noticed” for the first time) directed by her then-husband Robert Z. Leonard, and a supporting role opposite the legendary cross-dressing star Julian Eltinge, whose films frequently played on his gender ambiguity (either he was cast as a woman impersonating a man, a man impersonating a woman, or in a dual role as both).

The Four Horsemen was actually an ambitious anti-war epic about a Spanish émígre named Julio Madariaga (Pomeroy Cannon) who moves to Argentina (as Blasco Ibáñez himself did) and works his way up from poverty to super-wealth, eventually owning acres of land and fine cattle, sheep and other herd animals to graze on them. He has so many children by so many different women the titles allude to the mystery that so many of the workers on his ranch physically resemble him – anticipating the joke in the film The Mouse That Roared that the first Duke of Grand Fenwick was “in the most literal sense, the father of his country” – but the two who actually have any claim to legitimacy are his two daughters, who both marry immigrants. The older daughter marries a Frenchman named Marcelo Desnoyers (Josef Swickard) while the younger one, Elena (Mabel Van Buren), marries a German, Karl von Hartrott (Alan Hale). The Hartrotts have three sons, including Otto (Stuart Holmes), and Karl puts his three boys through military drills much like the way Baron von Trapp raised his kids in The Sound of Music until Maria came along and loosened him up. Madariaga aches for a son from his other son-in-law and the kid finally arrives in the person of Julio (Rudolph Valentino), though when Julio grows up he’s uninterested in the rough-and-tumble life of a rancher. Instead he hangs out in a disreputable district of Buenos Aires and frequents a tango bar – and the sight of Valentino dancing the tango with an unnamed partner became one of the most iconic star introductions in movie history.

Early on both Marcelo Desnoyers and Karl von Hartrott decide to relocate their families to their ancestral homelands, whereupon the Hartrotts all become good little German soldiers while Julio, who still couldn’t care less about his family or (once it starts) the war, hangs out at the Tango Palace and starts a career as an artist. Whether he’s any good at it or not is unclear (in Blasco Ibáñez’s book, which I’ve read, it’s made clear he’s just mediocre), but he runs up big tabs at various hostelries, eateries and wherever else he can burn through his family’s money. He lives in a rooming house with two freeloader “friends,” a dispossessed Spanish aristocrat named Argensola (Bowditch M. Turner) and Tchernoff (Nigel de Brulier), a Russian refugee who lives upstairs from them and has a large book containing Albrecht Dürer’s famous etchings of the Book of Revelation, which is where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come in. When World War I – or the “Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II – breaks out, Tchernoff predicts that it is the start of the Biblical apocalypse and the Four Horsemen – Conquest (pioneering African-American actor Noble Johnson), Famine, Pestilence (C. C. Cooper) and Death – will run roughshod throughout Europe and claim the lives of millions of people.

Eventually Julio falls into a semi-serious relationship with Marguerite Laurier (Alice Terry, who became Mrs. Rex Ingram and starred in a lot of his movies whether she was any good in the roles or not, which sad to say she usually wasn’t), wife of Étienne Laurier (John St. Polis), a rich man whom her family forced her to marry. On a tip, Étienne visits Julio’s room and finds him and Marguerite smooching. Étienne challenges Julio to a duel, but fortunately the outbreak of the war calls it off. Eventually Otto von Hartrott ends up in the German army and participates in a siege of the great castle Marcelo Desnoyers bought on the banks of the Marne River, and as the Germans retreat in the face of a French counter-offensive they blow up the castle (a sequence that is one of the most viscerally exciting parts of the novel and still packs a punch in the film), Marguerite Laurier becomes a nurse and helps take care of the wounded, and her husband Étienne is blinded by a war injury; she ends up as his caregiver but doesn’t want him to know that, which is more believable in a silent film than it would have been in a talkie when the audience would have been wondering why he didn’t recognize her voice. Julio’s younger sister Chichí (Virginia Warwick) marries René Lacour (Derrick Ghent), sole heir of Senator Lacour (Mark Fenton), who after wangling an assignment far from the front lines eventually volunteers for an artillery corps and ends up losing his left arm in combat. Julio finally has an attack of conscience, national pride or sheer embarrassment and enlists, and predictably life as a soldier turns him around and lets loose his inner hero – until both his and Otto von Hartrott’s lives end when they confront each other in a foxhole and a stray shell from one side or the other takes out both of them simultaneously.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a great movie, a finely wrought adaptation of a novel that’s surprisingly impressive for its time and its didactic purpose, ably scripted by June Mathis and both produced and directed (the actual credit is “directed and supervised”) by Rex Ingram, one of the greatest and most woefully underrated directors who ever lived and worked. I remember being astounded when I read in Gary Carey’s book on MGM, All the Stars in Heaven, that Ingram was born in Dublin and his birth name was Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock – so two of the greatest directors of all time were born with the name “Hitchcock,” and though they achieved fame in different eras of film history Rex Ingram was only eight years older than Alfred Hitchcock. (Ingram was born in 1892, Hitchcock in 1900.) The Four Horsemen is that rarity in cinematic history, a true ensemble movie – Valentino dominates every scene he’s in but it is not a star vehicle for him (or anyone else) – though the other thing that’s amazing about it besides the overall quality of the direction and script is how powerfully understated Valentino’s acting is. One of Valentino’s biographers, Irving Shulman, told a story of how he and Richard Barthelmess both auditioned for D. W. Griffith, and Barthelmess got the part because he played subtly and powerfully while Valentino overacted. Evidently Valentino got the message, because here and in his subsequent starring vehicles Valentino underplays so well he seems almost not to be acting at all. Valentino’s less-is-more acting style probably would have fitted him for sound films if he’d lived long enough to make them, even though I remember downloading his two surviving records (both made for Brunswick in 1923 but not released until 1938, 12 years after his death) from archive.org and being startled that Valentino’s voice was a baritone and not the tenor I’d always imagined from his silent films. It gave me an interesting insight into why so many late-1920’s moviegoers were flummoxed by many early talkies featuring stars who turned out to have quite different voices from the ones they’d always imagined!