Out Yonder (Lewis J. Selznkick Pictures Corporation, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wanted to get Threesome out of the way because there was a Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” film on at 9:30 p.m. that sounded quite interesting to me. It was called Out Yonder and was produced in 1919 by Lewis J. Selznick (father of David O. Selznick). The director was Ralph Ince, who like his more famous brother Thomas H. Ince branched out from directing to producing and formed a couple of short-lived independent studios. The script was by Edward J. Montagne, based on a play by Pauline Phelps and Marion Short. Montagne’s is a name I’ve seen on more recent credits even though this Edward J. Montagne died in 1932 and the name I’ve seen in more recent credits was his son, also named Edward. Out Yonder is a pretty typical class-conflict drama of the time, but Phelps, Short and Montagne give us a surprisingly sophisticated exploration of the power of stories to shape our perceptions and our places in the world. The story centers around a young woman named Flotsam Bart (Olive Thomas, one of the screen’s most enigmatic stars, who died of an accidental overdose of drugs in late 1920 while on vacation with her husband, Mary Pickford’s ne’er-do-well brother Jack; this happened in September 1920, after she’d made five more films following this one, including The Flapper, probably the first screen story to depict the youthful women rebels of the 1920’s). She’s the daughter of lighthouse keeper Amos Bart (John Smiley), who named her “Flotsam” because the day she was born, her mother died but not before telling her that the soul of a drowned and washed-up baby girl had magically been transported into her. At least that’s the story she’s been told all her life. Flotsam is an inveterate reader of fairy tales and, like a lot of other women who read fairy tales, she dreams of a handsome young prince who will rescue her from the dreary life of being a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter. Said prince arrives in the person of Edward Elmer (Huntley Gordon, who shifted to character rules as he aged, so it’s a bit of a surprise to see him as a romantic leading man).

Flotsam rescues Elmer and his aunt (Marie Coverdale), who has raised him since the mysterious deaths of both his parents when he was still a child. While we don’t get to see the actual rescue, we hear about it when Flotsam shows up at the Elmer family yacht (which it’s nice to report looks like a standard yacht and not a battleship-sized craft like the Russian oligarchs of today have had boult for themselves). At first the Elmers and their friends on the yacht think Flotsam is a man – probably because she’s wearing pants. (A lot of nonsense has been written about who was the first woman to wear trousers on screen; in his autobiography Josef von Sternberg claimed to be the first director who had had a woman wear pants on screen in his 1930 film Morocco, starring Marlene Dietrich, but there are plenty of earlier examples, including Dietrich herself in her 1928 film The Ship of Lost Men. Offhand the earliest examples I can think of ini which women wear pants on screen as their normal attire, not to disguise themselves as men, were this one and another film from 1919, the German movie Genuine.) Though Olive Thomas doesn’t look at all masculine – for someone who later achieved fame as the screen’s first flapper, her role here is very much the sort of thing her sister-in-law Mary Pickford would have played – she nonetheless has to work hard to convince Edward’s aunt that she’s really a girl. Once sle realizes this, the aunt decides she wants to adopt her. Edward wants to marry Flotsam, but she’s got a rival in the way, Clarice Stapleton (Louise Prussing). Meanwhile, Capotain Bart lives at the lighthouse with a sidekick, Joey Clark (Edward Ellis, who also went on to a career as a character actor after he got too old to play leads; his most interesting film is probably A Man to Remember, a 1938 RKO ‘B” directed by Garson Kanin from a script by Dalton Trumbo, in which Ellis played a small-town doctor whose life of public service is revealed through flashbacks).

Years before Captain Bart and Joey Clark served together on a ship during which Bart got into a drunken brawl with one of the passengers, John Hamilton, and accidentally killed him, then dumped his body overboard. Now Captain Bart is re-living the incident big-time because the young man who’s courting his daughter is the spitting image of John Hamilton, and in a later scene Edward explains that he is John Hamilton’s sun; though his mother resumed her maiden name “Elmer” and raised him under it until her own death two years later. Slowly the appearances we started out with and the stories the characters have believed about themselves all their lives are revealed to be wrong. Flotsam isn’t the daughter of Captain Bart after all; instead of the natural daughter of her mom, she was the baby washed up on the shore two decades before, and Captain Bart raised her as his own. It also turns out that Captain Bart didn’t kill John Hamilton after all; Joey Clark did, but he boasts that he can never be held to account for it because the witnesses are all dead and the evidence no longer exists. Only, even in this genuinely “Pre-Code” movie, producer Selznick, director Ince and writer Montagne wouldn’t be allowed to let a murderer go unpunished; Joey falls to his death over a railing at the lighthouse, and we see his body washed up ont he shore below. While we never learn exactly who Flotsam was – both Charles and I were expecting and dreading a plot twist in which it would turn out that Edward and Flotsam were brother and sister à la Die Walküre, Il Trovatore or H.M.S. Pinafore – in the end Flotsam takes her leave of the lighthouse life that’s the only one she’s ever known and goes off with the Elmers to marry the rich young prince and presumably live happily ever after (a fate tragically denied to Olive Thomas herself).

Out Yonder is very much a film of its time in many ways, but he’s also a quite modern one. Its real theme is the lies we tell each other about our pasts and the extent to which they come back to haunt us, and that’s all too relevant today. Incidentally, Out Yonder survived only in a print from The Netherlands, with the credits and intertitles in Dutch, and to prepare this version new credits and title cards were prepared,mostly back-translated from the Dutch except when the original Dutch was incomprehensible and new titles were written to match the action on screen. It’s the ongoing dilemma of film preservation: many long-lost treasures are still moldering away in vaults somewhere, and others like Out Yonder need lots of tender living care (and money for their restoration) to become living works of art again.