by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent yesterday evening watching a quite interesting film
on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”: Mare Nostrum, a 1925 production by director Rex Ingram. Born
Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock in Dublin in 1892 (so two of the all-time greatest film directors had the
original name “Hitchcock” — and though they did their work in different eras of
film history Rex Ingram was only eight years older than Alfred Hitchcock),
Ingram got his start as a director in 1914 with a short film called A
Symphony of Souls and hit the big time in
1921 with his mega-hit The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and
introducing Rudolph Valentino, who’d been kicking around Hollywood for five
years or so playing oily Latin villains but who got his big break as the hero
of Ingram’s film. Ingram followed this up with another Valentino vehicle, The
Conquering Power, and then when he got
tired of working with Valentino he launched the career of another silent-screen
idol, Ramon Novarro, in the 1922 version of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche. All these films were made for Metro Pictures
Corporation, the production arm of the Loew’s theatre chain, whose president,
Marcus Loew, regarded Ingram as his company’s savior because the profits from
his blockbuster hits were keeping the company alive. In 1924 Loew bought the
Goldwyn Studios, which had been floundering since a boardroom coup drove Sam
Goldwyn out of the company in 1922, and absorbed Louis B. Mayer’s independent
production outfit (which had been releasing most of its films through Metro) to
create the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer combine. The whole point of the merger that
created MGM was to regularize production and ensure the Loew’s theatres an
ongoing supply of quality films, and for that purpose Loew put Mayer in overall
control of the company. Mayer brought along with him Irving Thalberg, whom he’d
hired away from Universal, as his vice-president in charge of production.
Ingram was appalled at the factory-like system Mayer and Thalberg were
introducing, and he told Loew he wouldn’t work for them. Fine, said Loew; you
don’t have to. Instead Loew told Ingram he could set up his own production
company, and Loew would back him as long as his films were released through
Metro-Goldwyn — as the company was styled on the credits of Ingram’s films
since he hated Mayer so much he didn’t want Mayer’s name on them. Ingram set up
shop in Nice, building his own studio (and attracting celebrity visitors,
including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who set one scene of Tender Is the
Night at Ingram’s Vittorine Studio in Nice)
and looking for stories that would involve close-by European locations so he
could shoot as much as possible on actual locations instead of working in the
studio. For his first independent film he picked Mare Nostrum because it was a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez —
whose Four Horsemen had been
Ingram’s biggest hit — and also because its locales included Spain and Italy,
both easily accessible from his redoubt in the south of France.
Like The
Four Horsemen, Mare Nostrum is a
multi-generational story set just before and during World War I (or “The Great
War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) and dealing
with divided loyalties. Ulysses Ferragut (played as a boy by Kada-Abd el-Kader,
whom Ingram and his wife Alice Terry adopted, and as an adult by Antonio
Moreno) is caught between his uncle, “The Triton” (Uni Apollon), who wants him
to go to sea and be a sailor like most of the preceding male Ferraguts, and his
father, attorney Esteban Ferragut (Alex Nova), who wants him to go into his
business and become a lawyer. As a boy,
Ulysses (one wonders why, if his dad did not want him to be a sailor, he gave him such a nautical
first name!) is fascinated by a painting The Triton has on his wall of
Amphitrate, the Greco-Roman goddess of lost sailors on the Mediterranean — also
known, as the opening titles helpfully inform us, as Mare Nostrum (“our sea”). Needless to say, the sea wins out over
the law as his chosen career, and when next we see him he’s saved enough money
to buy his own ship, a fast freighter he names the Mare Nostrum, with a typically eccentric movie crew of whom we
meet the first mate, Toni (Fredrick Mariotti), and the cook, Caragol (Hughie
Mack), the closest this film has to a comic-relief character. Everything goes
well until, on a routine trip to Naples, he meets Freya Talberg (Alice Terry),
and immediately falls in love — or at least in lust — with her, mainly because
she’s the spitting image of that painting of Amphitrate his uncle had when he
was a boy. Freya is traveling with an older, stouter and severely dykey-looking
woman, Dr. Fedelmann (Madame Paquerette — quite a few of Ingram’s actors,
especially in his European films, were billed with only one name), an
anthropologist who’s doing a tour of ancient ruins. Ulysses follows them to the
ancient Greek city of Paestum — and it’s beautiful to see the actual ruins of Paestum
playing themselves instead of being represented by crude studio mock-ups! — and
then returns to Naples and hangs out with Freya for weeks, delaying the sailing
of the Mare Nostrum and thereby
putting himself and his crew in severe financial jeopardy. It gets worse: Freya
and Dr. Fedelmann are actually spies — Freya is Austrian and Fedelmann is
German — and they’re anxious either to get Italy in the war on their side or at
least keep her neutral. (A lot of people don’t realize that Italy, an ally of Germany
in World War II, was actually on the other side from Germany in World War I,
fighting as part of the Entente
with France, Britain, Russia and eventually the U.S.)
Toni ultimately gives up
on his captain and takes the Mare Nostrum back to its home port, Barcelona, without him. Freya successfully
lures Ulysses into taking a sailing ship out into the Mediterranean for some
undisclosed purpose to help the German/Austrian war effort — though at the last
minute, having fallen genuinely in love with him, she has a change of heart and
tries to talk him out of the job he’s been given by Fedelmann and German Count
Kaledine (played by French actor Fernand Mailly in obvious imitation of
Ingram’s good friend, Erich von Stroheim), which it turns out is to refuel U-boats
in the middle of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Ulysses’ son Esteban (Michael
Brantford) — product of a loveless marriage, arranged by Ulysses’ parents, with
Doña Cinta (Mademoiselle Kithnou) — leaves Barcelona on his own and goes to
Naples to find his dad, only after haunting the place where his dad is supposed
to be staying — only he’s never there because he’s at Freya’s virtually 24/7 —
for a week, he gives up and goes home just one day before Ulysses finally returns to his place. Ulysses gets a royal
chewing-out from his housekeeper, who tells him his son “deserves a better
father than you,” and with the Mare Nostrum already out to sea under Toni’s command Ulysses
signs onto a tramp steamer bound for Marseilles and intends to work his way
from there back home to Spain. But while he’s on his way the German U-boat he
helped refuel sinks a British passenger liner, the Californian, and while the ship Ulysses is on rescues many of
the passengers aboard, he learns his son was on that ocean liner and was killed
by the German torpedo attack. The rest of the movie is about how Ulysses
avenges himself against the members of the espionage ring; he spots Count
Kaledine on the streets of Marseilles, calls him out as a “Boche spy” and
organizes what amounts to a lynch mob against him — though he’s ultimately
captured by the authorities instead of killed on the spot. Then he receives a
note telling him to go to a certain address which “could mean much for your
happiness,” and when he goes he finds Freya — who’s genuinely in love with him
and is sorry for her role in the affair, and he’s ready to take her back when
he sees a ghostly vision of his dead son shaking his head, whereupon he throws
her to the floor and leaves.
Freya wanted his help because the Germans learned
of Freya’s change of heart when Dr. Fedelmann intercepted a letter Freya had
written Ulysses confessing all and pleading for his forgiveness. Crossing a
line through her name on a list of active agents, Fedelmann orders that Freya
be sent instructions for her next espionage assignment using a code the Germans
know the French had already broken (a story detail Blasco Ibáñez and/or the
film’s screenwriter, Willis Goldbeck, copied from the real-life end of Mata
Hari) — and when Ulysses turns down Freya’s plea for help escaping to neutral
Spain, she’s duly arrested and executed by a firing squad. In a line Josef von
Sternberg and his writer, Jules
Furthman, ripped off six years later for Dishonored (with Marlene Dietrich basically playing Alice
Terry’s role as a woman spy trained to get secrets out of enemy men by seducing
them), Freya goes to her execution wearing a fancy dress, jewels and a fur
coat, announcing that these were the uniform in which she served her country.
Ulysses decides to complete his revenge against the Germans by refitting the Mare
Nostrum (ya remember the Mare
Nostrum?) as a gunship, replacing all his
crew except Caragol the comic-relief cook (ya remember Caragol the comic-relief cook?) with trained French military
sailors and setting out on the Mediterranean to destroy German ships — only
that pesky German U-boat ambushes the Mare Nostrum and sinks her in the middle of a storm. Luckily,
Ulysses is able to get off a shot with one of the ship’s guns and sink the sub,
so both ships go down with all hands and the film ends with a final vision of
Ulysses and Freya, dressed as Ulysses’ boyhood vision of Amphitrate, embracing under
the water as the titles explain that, like
the hero and heroine of a 19th century Romantic tragedy, they have
finally been united in death. (Not surprisingly, Louis B. Mayer and Irving
Thalberg cabled Ingram in his Riviera redoubt and asked him if he could please,
pretty please, come up with a
“happy” ending. Ingram, secure in Marcus Loew’s support and already treading on
thin ice by giving his villainess the last name “Talberg,” told them politely
but firmly to go fuck themselves, especially since The Four Horsemen had had a similarly unhappy ending and had been an
enormous hit.)
In his introduction to the TCM showing Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve
rather contemptuously dismissed as “a nodule from one of Hollywood’s most
illustrious family trees”) claimed Mare Nostrum is Ingram’s masterpiece. I’m not so sure — I’d rate The
Four Horsemen, The Conquering Power and
Ingram’s next independent movie, The
Magician, ahead of it — but it is a brilliant film from a pioneering and
long-forgotten director who deserves a place in the pantheon. As Charles (who
arrived about midway through the movie, just after Ulysses’ and Freya’s first
breakup) noted, it’s the sort of film that seems to exist in a dream reality of
its own, equally divorced from real life and Hollywood conventions, then and
now. Ingram wasn’t a particularly innovative director technically — though some
of the special effects are stunning, others (particularly the staged shots of
ships in the Mediterranean) are done with models of toy-ship-in-the-bathtub
levels of believability — and all too often his actors resort to the sort of
arm-flailing and exaggerated facial expressions a lot of people who’ve never
watched a silent film start-to-finish think they were all acted like. Also, though Ingram had quite a good eye
for male talent, he stuck himself with his wife Alice Terry as the female lead
in film after film — and like a lot of other actresses personally involved with
their directors, he had a far
wider idea of her range than her talents deserved. What makes Ingram a great
director, and virtually everything he made worth watching, was his combination
of a pictorial sense — there are scenes here, including one of Doña Cinta
dealing with the trauma of her husband’s betrayal by becoming intensely
religious and going to church a lot, that have the piquant composition and
delicate play of light of an Old Master painting — and a dreamlike sense of
story reality that draws you in to Ingram’s world and makes you forget how
realistically improbable the events of the film are. (In that regard — if in no
other, though one can certainly trace a chain of influence from Mare
Nostrum through Dishonored to Notorious — Ingram does remind one
of the “other” Hitchcock.)
Mare Nostrum wasn’t released in the U.S. until January 1926 and, though it wasn’t a
blockbuster hit like Ingram’s previous films, it did turn a profit, and Ingram was able to go on to make
the even greater and more haunting The Magician (with Alice Terry and German actor Paul Wegener in a
story of a mad scientist attempting to create an artificial human via an
ancient alchemical recipe — it was obviously influenced by The Golem, which also starred Wegener, and was equally an
influence on Frankenstein), which
also was a success though not a hit. Alas, Ingram’s third film on his own, an
adaptation of Robert Hichens’ novel The Garden of Allah, was a major box-office flop, and just as it was
bombing his protector at the company, Marcus Loew, suddenly died. Louis B.
Mayer and Irving Thalberg gave Ingram an ultimatum — either close down his
independent studio and come to work in Hollywood under the same strict rules as
all MGM’s other directors, or quit. Ingram chose to quit, spending most of the
rest of his life in the Middle East and becoming a writer, though he made at
least two other films, a final
silent called The Three Passions
produced by a British company for United Artists release in 1928 and a
Gaumont-British production from 1932; imdb.com lists two Ingram films after 1928, Baroud and Love in Morocco, but I suspect these are just alternative titles for
the same movie. He went so “native” in the Middle East he even converted to
Islam, though he eventually returned to Hollywood, gave a number of interviews
about his career (in one of which he sniped at the continuing cult around
Rudolph Valentino and said any decent-looking young man could have played the
lead in The Four Horsemen) and
died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 21, 1950, at age 58. Mare
Nostrum was remade in Spain in 1948 (no
U.S. studio has gone near the story again, though one can’t help wishing
Sternberg would have done a talkie remake with Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant,
just as one can’t help wishing Ingram would have made his version with
Valentino and Garbo instead of the rather bland actors he used, Antonio Moreno
and Alice Terry) and imdb.com lists a 2014 project called Mare
Nostrum as “in development,” though they
haven’t received a report on what the story will be and therefore it’s unknown
whether it will indeed be a remake of this tragic, haunting film.
