r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a showing of the 1927 silent film The Beloved Rogue, which my husband Charles had no recollection of having seen before even though I posted about it to moviemagg on October 6, 2010 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/10/beloved-rogue-united-artists-1927.html). The star was John Barrymore and the film was yet another attempt, after Beau Brummell and Don Juan, to cast Barrymore as a Douglas Fairbanks-style action hero even though TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart said Barrymore didn’t care for these sorts of parts. She even told a story about him getting up from his seat during a screening of one of his action silents – she didn’t say whether it was this film or another – and pointing to his own image on screen, saying, “What a ham!” The impression I had from reading Gene Fowler’s biography of John Barrymore (and Fowler had actually known him!) years ago was that the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the only silent film Barrymore made that he actually liked.
But it’s also possible that one reason Barrymore didn’t care for action roles is that, unlike Fairbanks – who at least in the teens and 1920’s took good care of himself physically and was able to do his own stunts – Barrymore knew he would need a stunt double for the heavy-duty action scenes. In The Beloved Rogue Barrymore’s stunt double was Paul Malvern, who in the 1940’s became a producer at Universal, and in my previous comments on The Beloved Rogue I praised the efforts of director Alan Crosland(who had just directed Barrymore in Don Juan, the first feature released with a Vitaphone music and sound-effects track even though it didn’t contain dialogue; after he did The Beloved Rogue Crosland would return to the studio that had made Don Juan, Warner Bros., and direct The Jazz Singer, the film whose smash success would put an end to the silent era even though only about 10 percent of it contained dialogue) and editor Hal Kern (who would later head David O. Selznick’s editing department) for making the transitions between Barrymore and Malvern and back almost seamless.
The Beloved Rogue isn’t a great movie even though the life and career of the real-life medieval French poet François Villon would seem to have the potential for a masterpiece; But it’s a quite charming one and quite well cast: Barrymore as Villon, Conrad Veidt (in his first American film) as King Louis XI – a superstitious monarch under the thrall of his court astrologer (played to the nines by the great character villain Nigel de Brulier) – and the unfortunately-named Lawson Butt as Charles, King of Burgundy, which when this film takes place was still an independent principality and who was seeking to take over France and become its king. To accomplish this, Charles wants his friend Thibault d’Aubigny (Henry Victor, who 14 years later would turn up at Monogram in King of the Zombies in a part originally intended for Bela Lugosi) to marry the king’s ward, Charlotte de Vauxcelles (Marceline Day, a year before she was Buster Keaton’s leading lady in his first MGM film, The Cameraman), but it’s hate at first sight between them because Charlotte has such a bad case of the hots for Villon she’s actually got one of his books in her home altar and is actually disappointed when she first meets him because he’s not the “beloved rogue” she was expecting.
But, of course, her initial distaste soon ripens into love and by the end of the movie she and Villon are together after Villon has rallied the eggars and lowlifes of Paris to defend the city and Louis’s throne against the attempt of the Duke of Burgundy to overthrow him. At one point Villon has managed to convince the superstitious king not to execute him because Louis’s own death will fall just 24 hours after Villon’s. The rhel hero of The Beloved Rogue is the production designer (a job title he actually coined!), William Cameron Menzies, who designed utterly magnificent sets for a movie that – unlike some of the others Menzies worked on later, especially ones he directed himself (like the original Invaders from Mars) – had a big enough production budget to do credit to his designs.
