Beyond the Rocks (Paramount, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In honor of the film preservationists and collectors commemorated in Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!, here is a celebration of one of the most important long-lost silent movies brought back by a preservation archive, Beyond the Rocks, made at Paramount in 1922, directed by Sam Wood and starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. The note here came from a movie journal entry dated May 27, 2006, probably the day after my husband Charles and I first watched it.

I ran Beyond the Rocks, the film TCM showed last Sunday as part of a seven-film tribute to Rudolph Valentino. This was the one that was rediscovered in 2003 by the Nederlands Filmuseum in the middle of a private collection of old film reels that had been donated to them, and though virtually the whole movie was there (only a couple of minutes seemed to have fallen through the cracks completely) the reels were not together in the collection and the film had to be pieced back together — and some of the reels were not as well preserved as others. There are two sequences badly beset by nitrate burns — one a relatively unimportant shot of a train going through a tunnel and one a much more significant scene at a cocktail party at which the principals meet — but otherwise the film is actually pretty well preserved (certainly we’ve seen worse!) and a welcome rediscovery, especially given that it’s the only film Valentino and Gloria Swanson made together and it was one of the three films whose absence she most lamented in her autobiography (the others were the 1925 film Madame Sans-Gêne and the last reel of her marvelous 1927 production of Sadie Thompson). Swanson recalled that the Fatty Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor scandals broke just before they were about to start shooting Beyond the Rocks — which had not only the marquee value of the stars’ names (though Swanson got top billing and insisted it was her vehicle; she was already an established star while Valentino, despite having already made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, was still considered an up-and-comer whose career could be helped by a male lead in a Swanson film) but also that of a superstar writer, Elinor Glyn, known for such racy tales as Three Weeks, His Hour, Her Moment (in his autobiography Charlie Chaplin joked about the shortening time sequence of those titles) and, most famously, It — which from Dorothy Parker’s review seems like an Ayn Rand novel with the politics deleted (the hero is a super-powerful industrialist named John Gaunt) — and the film script she wrote for It which had a totally different plot from the novel (which itself appears in the film as the hot book of the moment which the characters in the movie read and discuss).

As a result, the script by Jack Cunningham (a name which surprised me in the credits; I’d assumed Glyn had adapted the novel herself) had to be rewritten at the last minute and much of the romantic heavy-breathing between the leads discarded, while according to Robert Osborne’s intro there were actually two versions of each kissing scene: a short one for the U.S. release (since one of the first edicts Will Hays had rendered as Hollywood’s morals czar was that a kiss could last only a few seconds on screen) and a longer one for Europe — though even in this European print the romantic scenes still seemed a bit on the short side and hardly the heavy-breathing romantic fireworks one would have expected from these two iconic stars in their only on-screen teaming. Beyond the Rocks is a heavily contrived story that moves its characters willy-nilly around the world to surprisingly little effect (this is the most peripatetic movie I can think of other than the Beatles’ Help!). It starts in a fishing village off the coast of England, where Captain Fitzgerald (Alec Francis) is living in a genteelly poor retirement. He and his two homely daughters (“products of a misalliance in his youth,” the title explains), played by Mary Foy and Adele Watson, are counting on his beautiful daughter Theodora (Gloria Swanson) to marry a rich man and thereby restore the family’s fortunes.

On a boat trip around the coast Theodora’s boat capsizes and she’s saved from drowning by Lord Hector Bracondale (Rudolph Valentino) — a title explains that he had an Italian grandmother to explain Valentino’s exotic and decidedly un-English appearance in the role. Of course, they’re smitten with each other at first sight, and he’s charming, drop-dead gorgeous and filthy rich — so what more could Our Theodora want? But she’s put off considering him as a mate any further by a chance remark by a female member of his entourage that he’s “not the marrying kind,” and instead Theodora goes through with the marriage her dad has arranged for her with self-made millionaire Josiah Brown (Robert Bolder, a fireplug-shaped actor with a striking resemblance to Louis B. Mayer — Gloria Swanson was only five feet tall and Bolder looks just an inch or two taller in their scenes together) even though she endures the ceremony with a fixed expression on her face that makes it look like she’s going to puke at any moment. The not-so-happy couple head to Switzerland for their honeymoon and Theodora wants to go climb the Alps — only Josiah, the spoilsport, decided that just getting to their hotel was exercise enough and he bails on the trip. She loses her footing at the edge of a crevasse (Gloria Swanson always prided herself on doing her own stunts and probably did so here, though the “mountain” is all too obviously a papier-mâché construction on the Paramount backlot and she’d have only had a few feet to fall) and is dangling by a rope when in comes Hector to save her life again, though since the rope is too heavy to be pulled with both of them on it he first has the two of them lowered to the nearest ledge to await rescue, which gives them plenty of time to vibrate with mutual affection.

From there the film flits to Paris, where the two meet at the palace of Versailles (whose exterior is pretty obviously a painted backdrop, perhaps painted over a blown-up photo of the original à la Black Narcissus) and there’s a DeMille-like flashback to the glory days of the ancien regime in which Valentino and Swanson appear as forbidden lovers then. (It’s indicative of how ill at ease Valentino always seemed in stories set in his own time that here, and during a later scene also set in the past with he and Swanson romancing each other in the guise of an historical couple, his performance takes on a smoldering quality it pretty much lacks in the bulk of the film.) Then it goes to England again, where a pageant is being staged on the grounds of a major estate and Hector locks the man who’s supposed to play Theodora’s lover in a closet so he can take the part himself. Theodora, torn between duty to her husband and attraction to her lover, decides to write them both — telling Josiah she intends to join him in London and resume their marriage, and telling Hector she can’t see him again — only yet another of the omnipresent feminine busybodies who populate the dramatis personae steams open the letters so she can read them, then puts them back in the wrong envelopes. When Hector reads Josiah’s letter and realizes what’s happened, he drives to London to intercept the other letter before Josiah can read it — only he arrives too late. Broken by his wife’s apparent infidelity (though the filmmakers have played the usual games with us in leaving it open as to whether anything carnal ever did happen between Hector and Theodora), Josiah decides to accept the offer of a friend to join him on an archaeological expedition to the Sahara despite Hector’s warning of the danger from desert tribes. (I couldn’t help but joke, “I’m Rudolph Valentino, damnit! I know something about desert tribes!”) Josiah — who given that he couldn’t handle even a simple mountaineering trip in the Alps would seem to be an unlikely candidate for desert archaeology (in, you guessed it, recycled sets from The Sheik) — duly gets killed in the inevitable desert-tribe attack until a force from the local colonial government arrives and restores order, and on his deathbed Josiah blesses the union of Theodora and Hector. The final scene takes us back to the coast of England and Hector’s yacht, on which he and Theodora are traveling and he says they have made it beyond the rocks of their early relationship and found safe harbor with each other (the only explanation of this film’s title we’re ever going to get). The End.

As silly and improbable as this story is, Beyond the Rocks has one thing going for it big-time: the direction by Sam Wood. In terms of camera setups it’s pretty unadventurous — there are so few closeups it’s all too apparent how short Gloria Swanson really was (anyone who first saw her in Sunset Boulevard — where Billy Wilder had John F. Seitz shoot her almost always from below, while shooting down on William Holden from above, so she appeared to tower over him even though he was really a foot taller — will inevitably be jarred by earlier films that reveal her truly diminutive stature) — but he manages to get some of the most marvelously understated performances of the silent era from his cast. There are almost none of the statuesque poses, the hammy hands-on-forehead gestures, or the registrations of disgust by hurling oneself to the ground and making one look like a building that’s just collapsed in an earthquake. Instead the actors behave surprisingly naturalistically — much of this film looks more like a talkie with the sound turned off than a silent film — making their points with a minimum of gesturing. This film underscores Gloria Swanson’s contention in her autobiography that the prestige films of the silent era always had fully written-out scripts and the actors recited their dialogue from memory, and the only change when sound came in was that now there were microphones and recording machines capturing the lines they’d been speaking all along. Wood’s direction plays against the melodrama of Glyn’s plot, especially in the finest scene in the film (ironically, one Swanson isn’t in): the confrontation between Josiah and Hector. Robert Bolder, who previously throughout the film has been an almost comic character, takes on a true sense of dignity as his reactions switch from anger (he’s ready to kill Hector) to real-looking tears to sorrow to resignation; and Valentino also plays the scene with dignity and an appreciation of the impossible situation all three of these people are in. In this scene, more than any other in the movie, Beyond the Rocks breaks through the contrivance of its plot and the last-minute moral compromises the filmmakers had to make and achieves a startlingly intimate depth of emotion.