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

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

After that Turner Classic Movies turned its hosting duties over to Jacqueline Stewart for her “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature, which was another of the greatest movies of all time: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (copyrighted 1920, released 1921). It’s best known today as the film that launched Rudolph Valentino’s short-lived star career, but lt has a lot more to offer than that. It was based on a novel of the same title by the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibañez, whose other books included Blood and Sand (a bullfighting story that reunited him and Valentino), The Torrent and The Temptress (which became Greta Garbo’s first American films). The film was directed by Rex Ingram from a script by Valentino’s good friend June Mathis, and I remember how astonished I was to read in a film history that Ingram’s birth name was Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock. Ever since then I’ve loved the coincidence that two of the greatest movie directors of all time were born with the name “Hitchcock,” and though they’re identified with different eras in film history Rex Ingram was only eight years older than Alfred Hitchcock. Jacqueline Stewart’s introduction claimed that this was Ingram’s first major film, but the credits – particularly the elaborate border around the main title and the principal title cards with the “RI” monogram in each corner – certainly suggest that Ingram already had a major reputation. By chance I was able to get a copy of Blasco Ibañez’s novel at the late, lamented Casa del Libro store on University Avenue in Hillcrest – which seemed to have been photo-reproduced from the first English-language edition – and I’m struck by how close the movie came to the book even though it was published while World War I was still a going concern and the film ended with an epilogue acknowledging its end but saying that the forces of fear and hatred that led to it were still going strong.

The Four Horsemen – the title refers to the Book of Revelation and the titular riders and beasts that herald the Last Judgment – starts in Argentina. Julio Madariaga (Pomeroy Cannon), who’s been nicknamed “The Centaur” for his omnivorous appetite for women, has sired two children, Chichí (Virginia Warwick) and Elena (Mabel Van Buren). Both of Madariaga’s daughters marry men in their dad’s employ. Chichí marries Marcelo Desnoyers (Josef Swickard), a Frenchman who fled to Argentina to avoid the draft for the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Elena marries stuck-up German military type Otto von Hartrott (Alan Hale) and has three sons by him, all of whom he lines up in military formation before they can have breakfast as if he’s auditioning to play Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Marcelo dares to return to France himself to raise his family there, even though he has just one son, Julio (Rudolph Valentino), a habitué of nightclubs where he can tango to his heart’s content. He’s also pursuing a career as a painter, though he isn’t very good, he seems to see art mostly as an excuse to meet women (when we first see him in Paris he’s got three scantily clad models in his living room posing for him), and he’s got a friend named Argensola (Bowditch M. Turner) who has less artistic talent than Julio and no family money either. Julio is in the middle of romancing a married woman, Marguerite Laurier (Alice Terry, who would become Mrs. Rex Ingram, though as so often with directors personally involved with their stars he had an awfully inflated view of her talents), wife of Senator Étienne Laurier (John St. Polis), whom she was forced to marry by their families and who comes to the tango bar looking for excitement. Also in the character mix is Tchernoff (Nigel de Brulier), a Russian émigré who lives in the flat above Julio’s and Argensola’s rooms and warns them that the apocalypse is coming. He shows them a rare book – a copy of the Book of Revelation with woodcut illustrations by the great German artist Albrecht Dürer – and uses it to illustrate his warning. Then Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gets assassinated, World War I breaks out, and the characters face various moral dilemmas on how to serve their respective countries while still remaining true to themselves. The Hartrott kids all join the Kaiser’s army and become little bloodthirsty killing machines, exactly as dad trained them lo those many years ago.

Julio’s mother Doña Luisa (Bridgette Clark) at first is overjoyed that Julio is an Argentinian and therefore doesn’t have to fight France’s battles. Ultimately Julio decides that he is French after all and he needs to volunteer, and there come a series of excellent battle scenes in which the horrors of no man’s land lead Julio to grow a moustache and tasteful beard (I was reminded of the World War II cartoons by Bill Mauldin, “Willie” and “Joe,” in which he showed the lousy conditions U.S. servicemembers were living in by the growths of beard he gave them). The book has two big scenes which show Julio in action – in one of which he kills his cousin Otto von Hartrott (Stuart Holmes) and in the next of which he dies himself – but Ingram and Mathis collapsed the two scenes into one and has a German artillery shell blow them both to smithereens. Meanwhile, Marguerite Laurier (ya remember Marguerite Laurier?) has volunteered to be a nurse, and it’s a good thing because Étienne was blinded in battle and now she has the skills to take care of him. She’s restive in her new role as full-time nurse to a blind man and makes plans to run off with Julio, but just then she gets a ghostly vision of him which makes her realize Julio is dead and therefore no longer an option. The finale is an epic dramatization of the Four Horsemen as described in the Book of Revelation, done with all the pictorial splendor and visual imagination Ingram was capable of – one can trace a fascinating line of influence from Ingram’s Mare Nostrum (1925) to Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored (1931) to the “other” Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), all of which are tales that blend sex and espionage – and though a deus ex machina appears in the form of American entry into World War I, which breaks the stalemate between the two sides, nonetheless the film is a striking anti-war parable and a warning that this carnage should never be allowed to happen again. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a stunning tale, a timeless classic and a movie that deserves to be seen not just as Valentino’s breakthrough film but a major work of art in its own right. It got remade for some reason in 1962, with Glenn Ford (of all people!) in the Valentino role and the plot moved up one war to World War II; I’ve never seen that version and I’d assume it was terrible, but this one is a masterpiece and deserves your attention.