r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I decided to check out Turner Classic Movies because the news channels were doing All Hurricane Ian, All the Time, and I stumbled on a night of silent movies because yesterday was “Silent Movie Appreciation Day” and in honor of that TCM allowed their “Silent Movie Sunday” host, Jacqueline Stewart (whom I love if only because she proves you don’t have to be either white or male to be a film geek), to introduce a program of silent films of which I caugut the last one. It was a 1926 film called Beverly of Graustark and it was a co-production of MGM and William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. Given those facts, I don’t think you need two guesses as to who the female star was: Marion Davies. As I’ve noted in these pages before, Davies was a woefully underrated actress whose public image has been shaped forever, it seems, by the pathetic (in both senses) portrayal of her as the on-talent opera singer “Susan Alexander” in Citizen Kane. In real life she was a quite talented light comedienne and Hearst screwed her over (as opposed to whatever else they were doing that could be described as “screwing”) by insisting on casting her in pretentious costume dramas for which she was singularly ill-suited. When Hearst cast her in the range of what she could do effectively, she was quite good – in his book on MGM Gary Carey noted, “She got good reviews, and not just from Hearst’s reviewers” – ahd he said she was better in the 1927 film of James M. Barrie’s Quality Street than the far more highly regarded Katharine Hepburn in the 1937 sound remake. I love the story of how MGM screenwriter Frances Marion was approached by Hearst to write for Davies, and when she demurred, he told her, “You don’t understand. I am prepared to spend $1 million on each of her pictures.” “That’s just the problem!” Frances Marion told Hearst. “She’s a great light comedienne, and you’re drowning her in production values.” (When word of that got around Hollywood, according to Frances Marion’s own recollection, other writers and production people thought, “At last! One of us had the guts to tell Hearst what Marion Davies’ career problem was! The rest of us never dared!”)
Beverly of Graustark was made in 1926 but the basic story had been created in 1904 as a magazine serial by a now-forgotten writer named George Barr McCutcheon. It had already been filmed five times before 1926, including a 1914 version with Liinda Arvidson (the first Mrs. D. W. Griffith) in the lead, and the plot outline of the 1914 version on imdb.com was quite different from the film TCM showed last night: “It is 1900. Grenfell Lorry is the son of wealthy American parents. On a train in New England Lorry meets a mysterious young woman, Miss Guggenslocker, and finds himself irresistibly attracted. Soon he is following her across the ocean to Graustark, a small, remote mid-European kingdom threatened from within and without by power-hungry schemers who will stop at nothing to become its next rulers. Here, he discovers Miss Guggenslocker is actually the princess of Graustark, and the object of many of these schemes.” The 1926 version was extensively remodeled by the screenwriter, Agnes Christine Johnston (who would go on to write what’s probably Davies’ all-time best film, Show People, two years later). In her version the heroine is named Beverly Calhoun, and unbeknownst to her, her cousin Oscar (Creighton Hale) is the rightful king of Graustark. As a child, Oscar was shipped off to the U.S. by the evil General Marlanax (Roy D’Arcy, in a refreshingly unmannered performance, at least by his usual standards), who covets the throne of Graustark and isn’t going to let anybody else stand in his way. Unfortunately, just after the delegation from Graustark arrives in Washington, D.C., where the Calhouns live, Oscar goes out skiing, takes a bad fall off a cliff and ends up alive but too badly injured to move.
So Beverly disguises herself as Oscar and makes the journey incognito. Her only companion on the trip is an elderly relative (Charles Clary) who’s either her father or her uncle (it’s not clear which). When they finally reach Graustark after a journey across Europe (represented by some truly amazing vistas of mountain passes; I’m presuming the scenes were locations in the L.A. area but they aren’t that familiar from other movies), Beverly is offered a hot drink. She doesn’t take it but her relative does, and he falls asleep. Obviously the drink was drugged so it would be easier to kill the true heir to the Graustarkian throne. The coach in which they’re traveling is waylaid by a mountain-goat herder named Dantan (Antonio Moreno, the male lead), who informs Beverly and her traveling companion that all the people in her party are traitors out to kill “him,” and he disarms them by forcing them to take off their clothes (down to their underwear in this truly “pre-Code” movie). General Marlanax is shocked to see the caravan with the new “King” arrive on schedule and with the monarch still alive, and from then on the film turns into a one-joke movie as Beverly is forced again and again into situations that might “out” her as a woman. “He” is introduced by servants – all men – who have the job of undressing her, shaving her and helping her bathe. Beverly has appointed Dantan as her bodyguard but he wants to sleep at the foot of her bed to protect her against further assaults by Marlanax’s men. She persuades him to sleep in the ante-room instead and says she’ll call him if there’s any trouble.
At one point Marlanax sends a woman, Carlotta (Pauline Duval), to seduce the new king who is really beverly in disguise – only Beverly is able to talk Carlotta into lending her her gown so she can walk around the palace grounds as a woman. While dressed that way, she meets Dantan, who’s attracted to her, and the two make a date to go swimming –but both arrive late because in the meantime Dantan and Beverly, in male drag, have started a game of chess and it’s taking forever. Along the way, Johnston has pulled the gag director Rouben Mamoulian and writer Salka Viertel supposedly originated in Queen Christina seven years later of having the central male character feel sexually attracted to what he thinks is another young man even though we in the audience know she’s a woman. Dantan even tells “him” that once a man meets the “right” woman, he just knows it’s her. Marlanax spots Beverly in a one-piece bathing suit and he finally figures out her true gender. There are odd complications, including Dantan challenging Beverly to a duel because he thinks they’re both in love with the same woman, and a final scene in which Dantan fights a duel with Marlanax and is saved by the arrival of cousin Oscar, who has recovered from his skiing accident and arrived in Graustark’s capital.
The final scene was shot in two-strip Technicolor (one of the best-preserved examples from the silent era, with an overall harmonious tone reminiscent of an Old Master painting instead of the neon-bright hues of the three-strpi process that replaced it), in which Oscar is finally on the throne of Graustark, Beverly is beside him as his princess cousin, and they’re talking about how she should marry a prince to secure their family’s position as hereditary rulers of Graustark – only Oscar jokes about how his cousin isn’t into princes and prefers goat-herders instead. Naturally, as anyone who’s seen a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta could have guessed, Dantan turns up and is revealed actually to be a prince of a neighboring country, Dausenberg, so he and Beverly pair off at last and she gets her wish, expressed before she left the U.S, to marry a prince. Beverly of Graustark is not a great film – it doesn’t help that its director was Sidney Franklin, a quality filmmaker but also a relatively placid one who knew little about comedy – but it’s a highly entertaining one. Marion Davies’ FTM drag is actually quite convincing – though it doesn’t approach the absolute perfection of Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett a decade later – and despite Franklin’s lack oif a true comic sense (or maybe because of it!), the gender role-reversals are quite appealing. It’s generally agreed that Davies did her best in silent films – when sound came in she was hitting the awkward age of the early 30’s, a tough time of transition for female actors then and now, and though she could control her chronic stutter when she was singing or speaking memorized dialogue, it still flared up now and again and made her discernibly nervous. We have Marion Davies and her unusual career clout to thank for the survival of Beverly of Graustark; unlike most stars of the period, she was allowed to keep copies of her own films, and either she or her estate donated them en masse to the Library of Congress, from which this version was preserved, digitized and supplied with a new organ score by Ben Model that worked nicely. I hope the Spreckels Organ Society would feature Beverly of Graustark on one of their silent movie nights with live organ accompaniment!
