The Ace of Hearts (Goldwyn, 1921)

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

After Sweet Music TCM put on “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart for a pair of films that represented romantic triangles, though that was about all they had in common. The second one was The Patsy, a 1928 comedy starring Marion Davies that I’d already posted on in 2016 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-patsy-mgm-1928.html) and 2021 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-patsy-mgm-1928.html) in which the triangle was two women – Pat Harrington (Davies) and her sister Grace (Jane Winton) – and one man, aspiring real-estate developer Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell). The first one was a considerably darker film, The Ace of Hearts, from the Goldwyn Company in 1921, in which the love triangle was two men and one woman. The Ace of Hearts was an attempt to reproduce the success of the 1920 film The Penalty by re-teaming the principal three creative people involved: director Wallace Worsley, writer Gouverneur Morris (a direct descendant of the original Gouverneur Morris who was a signatory to the U.S. Constitution) and star Lon Chaney, Sr. This time Morris concocted a tale of a secret society of anarchists who first mark certain individuals for death and then carry out the killings. The society has an elaborate set of rituals in which they first debate whether the intended victim deserves to be eliminated and then deal a set of playing cards, with whoever gets the ace of hearts being charged with carrying out the murder.

There are between seven and nine members of the club, but the key characters are Farralone (Lon Chaney), Forrest (John Bowers) and the sole female, Lilith (Leatrice Joy), whom they both love even though she disdains any interest in men, love or sex because of her devotion to “The Cause.” (Morris carefully avoids any explanation of what “The Cause” is or why these people consider it so important.) The opening scene shows the members of the secret society debating whether their latest designated victim really deserves killing, and judging from how he’s described in the film’s titles – an older rich man, influential in New York society, who’s growing increasingly egomaniacal and oppressive – he sounds an awful lot like a prototype of Donald Trump. At least two members of the club, including Forrest, have been stalking the intended victim for three weeks; Forrest has been working as a waiter at the restaurant where the victim always has breakfast at precisely 7 a.m. Forrest draws the ace of hearts on the third go-round (if no one gets the ace of hearts on the first deal, they just keep dealing until someone turns up with the death card), and he’s outfitted with an ingenious bomb concealed in some sort of package with a dial concealed in its fastener that, once turned to the left, sets off a bomb which will explode five minutes later. Only Forrest has an attack of conscience; he demands that Lilith marry him the day before he’s scheduled to carry out the assassination. He’s already taken out a marriage license for them, and she agrees. After they spend the night together – with the lovelorn Farallone hanging outside their apartment building all night with only a stray dog for company – he has the proverbial second thoughts. She does, too, but eventually Forrest shows up at the restaurant at the designated time for the murder.

The intended victim upbraids him for refusing to wait for him to read the menu and give him his order – thereby letting us in the audience know he’s as much of an asshole as we’ve been told he was by the gang who want to kill him. But just then Forrest sees a young couple who’ve got married secretly because her parents don’t approve of him, and identifying himself and Lilith with them, he decides he can’t go through with the assassination because the bomb will blow up the whole restaurant and kill the nice young lovers, too. (One would have thought the mad scientist who cooked up the murder bomb could instead have invented something that would conceal a poisoned needle, so only the intended victim would have been killed and everyone else would have been spared.) Earlier there’d been a scene in which Forrest and Farralone jostled each other in the street, and I had briefly wondered if Farralone had sensed that Forrest wasn’t willing to go through with the killing and had pickpocketed the murder weapon intending to use it himself, but no-o-o-o-o. Instead Forrest and Lilith take a train going west, while the remaining seven members of the circle debate who will assassinate Forrest and Lilith for their treachery against the group. Farralone draws the ace of hearts, only his plan is to take the murder bomb and explode it at the group’s meeting, killing all of them and eliminating them as a threat to the established order. Watching Forrest and Lilith has convinced Farralone that only love and compassion, not violence and death, can be the basis of a new and better world order. When the police find the wreckage of the anarchists’ headquarters, they discover Farralone’s body, still clutching the ace of hearts.

When Jacqueline Stewart announced the movie, my husband Charles wondered if it had been inspired by G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), though the two stories have nothing in common except that both center around a secret society of anarchists (and in Chesterton’s novel all the supposed anarchists turn out to be police detectives infiltrating the group undercover). The Ace of Hearts is a good movie but also a frustrating one, due in large measure to Wallace Worsley’s direction. The directors this movie really needed were all still working in Germany: Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene (director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which Goldwyn Pictures distributed in the U.S.), F. W. Murnau or Paul Leni. Any one of them could have given this film the nightmarish mise-en-scène it truly needed; though Worsley had worked with Lon Chaney before in The Penalty and afterwards would direct him in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, his treatment of this wild story is all too tame. It also doesn’t help that Chaney doesn’t get to do one of his fabled character make-ups (as he’d done in The Penalty, in which he played a cripple with no legs), and he looks oddly stockier and heavier-set than he would five years later in Tell It to the Marines (about which I’ve joked that Chaney essentially made a John Wayne movie well before John Wayne did!), my reference point for what Lon Chaney looked like out of makeup. Charles also wondered just when The Ace of Hearts was supposed to be taking place: he asked if audiences of the time read it as a contemporary story or as one taking place 20 or 30 years earlier, when anarchist assassins were very much “in the news” and among their most prominent victims were President William McKinley, Russian Czar Alexander II and Italian King Umberto Emmanuel. The Ace of Hearts isn’t a bad movie; it’s just not as good as it could have been, and John Bowers and Leatrice Joy aren’t especially strong as the romantic leads, though they’re serviceable and get the job done.