Films Based on Augusta Wilson's 1867 Novel St. Elmo

Recently I made one of my frequent visits to Lantern, the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful resource that makes available full texts of 20th century magazines devoted to film, television and radio. I always find interesting items there, and this time I stumbled across an advertisement for the 1923 silent film, St. Elmo. You can see that ad below. I knew there had been more than one film version of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson's novel, so I decided to investigate; here's what I found. 

First, some background in case you aren't familiar with Wilson. She's one of Mobile's legendary residents; although born in Columbus, Georgia, she spent most of her life in the city. She published nine novels before her death in 1909, and some of them such as St. Elmo and Beulah made her one of the bestselling American novelists of her day. 

Like many female authors of that time, she began writing to supplement her family's income. St. Elmo sold over a million copies and made her the wealthiest female writer in America before Edith Wharton. Only Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur sold better among American novels in the nineteenth century.

There is a town in Mobile County named after the novel. Several of her works, including St. Elmo, can be found via Project Gutenberg. A recent book about Evans is The Life and Works of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835–1909 by Brenda Ayres [Ashgate, 2012]. 

In her entry on Wilson in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, Sarah Frear describes the story of St. Elmo. "In it, Evans depicted a moral struggle between good and evil. The novel's male protagonist, St. Elmo Murray, is at first a cynical and cruel man, but he is gradually converted to Christianity through his love for the virtuous heroine, Edna Earle. Edna willingly gives up her literary career when she marries St. Elmo, and this choice reflects Evans's belief that women were happiest, and most powerful, when they devoted themselves to their families and homes." Perhaps Wilson created a bit of wish fulfillment for herself in this story. 

From what I can determine, five silent film versions of the novel were made: two short ones in 1910, one in 1914, and two more in 1923. The first 1910 version was produced by the Thanhouser Company and released in March. The second one, produced by Vitagraph, came out the next month. You can follow the links below to Wikipedia articles giving more details on both films. The Internet Movie Database also has entries here and here. Both films ran for one reel, or some 10-12 minutes. 

The 1914 version was released in August and "promised 194 gorgeous scenes". Follow the Wikipedia link below for stills from a couple of them and more information on the film. This version was much longer, running six reels. I know a bit about silent film history, but did not recognize any cast members in these three films. I would imagine they are known only to serious silent film buffs and scholars.

However, I am familiar with the leads in the 1923 American version of Wilson's novel. John Gilbert played St. Elmo Thornton in the rising star period of his career. In 1924 Gilbert changed to MGM Studios and soon became as big a box office draw as Rudolph Valentino. Known as "The Great Lover", Gilbert made three films with Greta Garbo. Gilbert's career declined after the arrival of talkies, and he died in 1936 at the age of 38.

His co-star in St. Elmo was Barbara La Marr, known as "The Girl Who Is Too Beautiful." By 1923 she was a major star, but her career did not last much longer. A hard-partying young lady, alcoholic and probably a drug addict, La Marr died in 1926. She was 29 and married to her fifth husband at the time. She and Gilbert reportedly had a steamy affair during production of St. Elmo.

Another familiar name is Warner Baxter, who had a much longer career and died in 1951 at 62. Among many other films silent and sound, he played The Crime Doctor in a series of ten movies popular in the 1940's. 

The last film adaptation of the novel, also released in 1923, was a British production. Like so many silent films, apparently no prints of any of these five versions of Wilson's novel have survived. 

The ad below for the 1923 American film claims "For the past twenty years St. Elmo has been the most called for book in the libraries throughout America." One might think Wilson would be seldom read today, but she still has her fans. Some of them have commented enthusiastically on the GoodReads site. A much longer modern reaction can be found at Vintage Novels. 

 

 

 



Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History 

 

 

Title page of a United Kingdom edition. The book was published under her maiden name; she did not marry Colonel Lorenzo Wilson until 1868.

 

 

 



A still from the Thanhouser Company's one reel silent film released in March 1910

Source: Wikipedia

 



A New York newspaper ad for Vitagraph's April 1910 adaptation, also a short single reel film.

Source: Wikipedia




Poster for the Balboa Amusement Producing Company's 1914 release
Source: Wikipedia 

Ad for St. Elmo from Motion Picture News 12 September 1914

 

Source: Lantern 

Advertisement for the 1923 Fox Film Corporation release

Source: Motion Picture News July-August 1923 via Lantern

Film Actresses from Alabama before 1960 (1): Lois Wilson

Source: BhamWiki.com

One of the earliest actresses from Alabama to find success in Hollywood, Lois Wilson is probably unknown to most state residents today. Although born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 28, 1894, her family soon moved to Birmingham where she grew up. 

We can find some interesting information about the family in the 1910 U.S. Census. Her father is A.K. Wilson, a Canadian native. Her mother Constance was born in Pennsylvania. Also listed are three other daughters, all younger than Lois, and grandfather William Wilson. The family lived in the city's 15th Ward. 

She graduated from Alabama Normal College in Livingston, which is now the University of West Alabama. Apparently Wilson just missed the era of famed educator and reformer Julia Tutwiler, who directed the school from 1881 until 1910.

By 1915 Wilson was teaching school. We can assume her ambitions ran beyond that; she entered a Miss Birmingham contest sponsored by the Birmingham News and Universal Pictures. By winning she received a trip to Hollywood for an audition. After a brief period in Chicago, she won her first film role--a small part in a short, The Palace of Dust. She made four other films in 1915 alone. By the time she more or less retired from the movies in 1941, Wilson had acted in more than 100 silent and sound motion pictures.

Wilson appeared with various established or up-and-coming film stars of the silent and early sound eras: Pola Negri in Bella Donna [1923], Rudolph Valentino and Bebe Daniels in Monsieur Beaucaire [1924], Louise Brooks in The Show Off [1926], Bette Davis in Seed, Davis' second film [1931] and Tom Mix in Rider of Death Valley [1932].

She worked with Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici in 1916. Wilson played heroine Molly Wingate in one of the most popular westerns of the silent era, The Covered Wagon [1923]. In that same year she appeared in Hollywood, one of the earliest films using cameos by a parade of stars--in this case ones such as Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Noah Beery, Mary Astor, William S. Hart and Alan Hale. She played Shirley Temple's mother in Bright Eyes [1934].

In 1922 Wilson was in the first group of WAMPAS Baby Stars of actresses expected to be major stars. That campaign was a promotional effort by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers and ran annually until 1934.

In 1926 she played Daisy Buchanan in the first film version of The Great Gatsby released just a year after the novel was published. Like so many silent films, this one has not survived but a one-minute trailer does exist. Thus we have an Alabama actress playing a character based on Alabama native Zelda Fitzgerald. 

Wilson made other films with Alabama connections. In 1921 she played the title character in Miss Lulu Bett; her male co-star in the film was Milton Sills. You can read a long review of the film by Fritzi Kramer here. A few years later Sills would star in Men of Steel, a picture filmed mostly in Birmingham. In 1922 she appeared in Manslaughter with Thomas Meighan. Two years later Meighan would be in the Birmingham area to film Coming Thru. 

After 1941 Wilson made only one more movie, The Girl from Jones Beach in 1949. The comedy starred Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo; Wilson played the mother of Mayo's character. She did not completely retire from acting, however. She had a couple of roles in Broadway productions and did network television work on the soap operas The Guiding Light and The Secret Storm.  

Wilson was a good friend of silent film star Gloria Swanson and made an appearance on the 1957 episode of the television series This Is Your Life when it profiled Swanson. In 1950 Swanson had played former silent star Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd., one of the great films about Hollywood. 

Wilson died at 93 on March 3, 1988, in Riverside Hospital in Reno, Nevada. She is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. She never married. Whether she ever returned to Alabama after leaving in 1915 is currently unknown. 

.

Picture-Play Magazine December 1918
In the section titled "Favorite Picture Players" she follows Mary Pickford and Alice Joyce

Wilson made the cover of Picture-Play in April 1923.

Motion Picture Studio Directory for 1919
Wilson's entry is in the right hand column, 3rd down

Silent Filmmaking in the Birmingham Area, Part 5: Homegrown Silents

Parts 1-4 of this series covered silent films made in the Birmingham area by producers from outside the state. This posting covers local efforts in the city to make silent films. 

Please note that all of these items are identified on the Birmingham Public Library's Digital Collections site as being published in the Birmingham News and I have so designated them here. However, internal evidence in at least two of these items indicates publication in the Birmingham Post or Post-Herald. 

This article about a "home motion picture" appeared in the Birmingham News in the April 28, 1925, edition.

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

According to the above article, "Things You Ought to Know about Birmingham" would be showing at the Trianon Theater the first week of May, 1925. The Trianon was located on 2nd Avenue North and had opened in 1913 as probably one of Birmingham's first movie theaters. I presume the "Imperial Film Comany" is not the same firm by that name as the one that became the largest in India in the 1920s and 1930s, but so far I've found nothing else about it. As best I can determine, the "2,000 feet" length of the film would have run under 20 minutes if shot in 35mm.

The article below appeared in the Birmingham News on February 12, 1928. The caption reads:

Here are the four principles in "The Love Beat," a Birmingham-written movie that is being produced by The Post and the Alabama theater with local characters. In the upper left hand corner is Miss Leatlha Martin, who plays the part of "Sally;" center, Olen Deitz, "Jimmie," a Post reporter; upper right, Miss Myrtle Burgess, "Johanna." In the lower center is Guy McNaron, who plays "Steve," another Post reporter and husband of "Sally." The other lower scenes were made when the party was on location at Mountain Brook estates on the road in front of the home of Warner S. Watkins, local broker.


Some quick research has produced nothing about these individuals, so deeper digging will be required.

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

The next appeared in the Birmingham News a few months later on August 4, 1928. 

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

Another item on an individual film appeared in the Birmingham News on July 14, 1929. This production was a product of the group noted in the article above, the "Birmingham Amateur Movie Association". That group also produced another film in 1929, "What Price Pearls."

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

I hope to do some research in the future to shed further light on these individuals and films. Whether any of these films survive is unknown at this time. None of them appear in the Internet Movie Database, but that resource is known to be weak in information about silent and early sound films.

Mines, Mills & Moonshine: Silent Filmmaking in the Birmingham Area, Part 4

Part 1 of this series can be found here; part 2 here; and part 3 here. 

           We don’t consider Birmingham a hotbed of silent filmmaking because it wasn’t. Yet three feature films were made in the area before the movies learned to talk. In recent posts on this blog I’ve discussed each of these films in some detail: The Moonshiner’s Daughter [1908?], Coming Through [1925] and Men of Steel [1926]. Since those pieces were written I’ve come across more information about the production of Men of Steel and would like to share it here.

            By way of introduction, let me quote myself on the South’s role in silent film production. “Silent filmmaking arrived in the South very early in the twentieth century. Beginning in 1908, the Kalem Company operated in Jacksonville, Florida, each winter. At least eight films were made between 1916 and 1926 at Norman Studios, also in Jacksonville; all featured totally black casts. For about a decade until 1919, when most filming had moved from the northeast to California, Florida was known as the “Winter Film Capitol of the World.” In addition, the very first Tarzan film, Tarzan of the Apes staring Elmo Lincoln, was shot in Louisiana in 1918.”

            Men of Steel was filmed in Ensley and released by the First National company in July 1926. The premier was held at the Mark Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York City. The studio’s advertising declared it “One of the Greatest Pictures ever produced.”  Directed by George Archainbaud, the film’s cast included three popular stars of the day: Milton Sills, Dorothy Kenyon and Victor McLaglen. Kenyon and Sills married just months after the film was released. According to the BhamWiki site, the local premier took place at the Franklin Theatre in Ensley.

A copy has not survived, but the film seems to have been just over 90 minutes long. Men of Steel was based on a short story, “United States Flavor” written by Ralph G. Kirk and published in a Saturday Evening Post issue in 1924. I have yet to determine whether the story is set in Birmingham or why the city was chosen for filming.

            As I noted in the earlier piece, “A synopsis of the film’s story by Hal Erickson can be found online at the allmovie.com site. ‘Sills plays Jan Bokak, a self-educated steelworker who finds himself in the middle of a romantic triangle. Two different girls -- wealthy socialite Claire Pitt (May Allison) and blue-collar worker Mary Berwick (Doris Kenyon) -- simultaneously fall for Bokak. It later develops that Claire and Mary are actually sisters, the first of a series of surprising plot twists leading to Bokak being accused of a murder he didn't commit. In the gutsy climax, the actual villain attempts to kill Bokak by pouring a vat of molten steel upon him!’”  That summary probably came from advertising material.

            Shortly after I completed the original Men of Steel piece, a new digital resource became available—Lantern, the Media History Digital Library. Included here are numerous issues of 20^th century magazines related to film, television and radio.  I hope to use this resource to investigate the other two films, but for now I’ve included some of the photographs and advertisements related to Men of Steel I found in Lantern. Of special interest is the photo taken on the set at the Ensley Mills with what must be director Archainbaud, some of his crew and a camera high above one of the vats. Note the man in the vat and the clothing worn by the men. I wonder what the city’s temperature was that day? Maybe they were filming in winter.

            Finally, I’ve included something else on the subject of Birmingham’s silent film history. This clipping from the Birmingham News published on April 28, 1925 is online at the Birmingham Public Library’s DigitalCollections. The article describes the release of a silent film made by the Imperial Film Company, Things You Ought to Know about Birmingham. Being shown at the Trianon Theater, it “shows more than one thousand Birmingham citizens” and “many local scenes and places.” Yet another fascinating topic for research! 

This piece originally appeared on the DiscoverBirmingham.org site in November 2013.

Mines, Mills & Moonshine: Silent Filmmaking in the Birmingham Area, Part 3

Part 1 of this series can be found here and part 2 here.

               A third silent film shot in the Birmingham area was Men of Steel, filmed in Ensley and released on Sunday, July 11, 1926. An advertising tag line used for the film was a modest one: “One of the Greatest Pictures ever produced.” All the details of international distribution are unknown, but the film did appear in Portugal in December 1927 and Finland in February 1928. Running time for the film is given by various sources as 96 or 100 minutes.

            The film premiered in New York City at the Mark Strand Theatre on Broadway. Opened in 1914 with a capacity of 2,989 people, the Strand managed to survive as a cinema in one form or another until it was demolished in early 1987.  In its review the next day, the New York Times noted about the film that “all the stupendous paraphernalia of a steel plant has been used, with the happy result of making that fascinating industry vivid without sacrificing narrative in the picture.”

This picture was a First National production. The company had been founded in 1917 when 26 of the largest cinema chains in the United States merged and created one chain of more than 600 theaters. Thomas L. Tally was the guiding force behind this effort, which was intended to compete with dominate Paramount Pictures. First National would produce, distribute and exhibit its own films.

 Quickly the firm signed Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin to the first million-dollar contracts in film history. In 1928 Warner Brothers bought a controlling interest in First National and continued production under its banner until 1936. Among the almost 400 productions the company released were such classics as So Big (1924, based on Edna Ferber’s bestselling novel), The Lost World (1925, based on the Arthur Conan Doyle novel), and Little Caesar (1931, from W.R. Burnett’s novel), one of the early gangster classics with Edward G. Robinson.

           Movie herald for Men of Steel. These two-sided pieces were included in film press kits and copies were provided to individual theaters to hand them out on the street, etc.

Source: eBay Item #370760843105 accessed 3-12-13

            Men of Steel was based on a short story, “United States Flavor” written by Ralph G. Kirk and published in the Saturday Evening Post issue of June 14, 1924. Kirk was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1881 and died in 1960 in San Diego, California. Between 1921 and 1953, mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, he published numerous short stories, most of them in the Post. In 1923 he published a book, Six Breeds, a collection of five dog stories, including two that had been published in separate editions in 1917 and 1918. A 1922 film, The Scrapper, was based on his story “Malloy Campeador.” Little else is known at the moment about Kirk, and I haven’t seen the story yet and don’t know if it is set in Birmingham. Since Kirk was from another steel producing state, the story may be set there. Why Birmingham was chosen for a filming location is currently unknown.

Cover of a book by R.G. Kirk

Source: Amazon

            The Film Daily, a trade newspaper that covered the film and later television industries from 1915 until 1970, ran a front page column-long review of Men of Steel in its issue for Tuesday, July 13, 1926. “The picture has a punch that reaches wallop proportions at several climaxes,” reviewer Kann gushed. “’Men of Steel’ impresses,” he concludes. Unfortunately, the review makes no mention of filming in Birmingham. The same issue of the paper also contains a two-page advertisement for the film, crowing that “N.Y. Strand Busts Town Wide Open with ‘Men of Steel.’” The ad also reproduces a telegram from the Strand’s Joseph Plunkett who wrote breathlessly to executive Richard A. Rowland that “WE HAD TO STOP SELLING TICKETS FOUR TIMES STOP AUDIENCE VERY ENTHUSIASTIC.”

I have not been able to locate an image of the movie’s poster for use at theaters, but an article by Mark Caro published in the Chicago Tribune on March 13, 2012, gives us a few hints about its quality. Caro profiles Dwight Cleveland, who has amassed a collection of more than 35,000 such posters. Cleveland mentions “a brilliantly colored poster touting Milton Sills in "Men of Steel" (1926) and depicting one guy punching another in the face.  To Cleveland, ‘Men of Steel’ illustrates a key problem with his hobby. Although Sills and that silent film are long forgotten, the poster is a beautiful stone lithograph that the collector argues should be judged on its artistic merits. ‘That's a poster that should sell for 10,000 bucks at some point, when people really understand how important the artwork is,’ Cleveland said. ‘Then they'll realize this is a great example of early lithography, and it will rise. Now if it's just going to be valued by movie people, they're not going to think it's so important.’"

          Men of Steel was directed by George Archainbaud, an actor and manager who came to the U.S. from France in 1915. Before his death in 1959, he had worked primarily as a director in silent and sound films and television. He is perhaps best remembered today for several westerns, including some featuring Hopalong Cassidy. In 1932 he directed The Lost Squadron, in which three World War I aviators find jobs as stunt flyers in Hollywood after the war.

            The male lead in Men of Steel was Milton Sills, a popular star of the time; the movie was one of four he made in 1926 alone. Sills also wrote the script for the film based on Kirk’s short story. Born in Chicago in 1882, he attended the University of Chicago and worked there after graduation. In 1905 he joined a stock theater company and toured the country before settling in New York and making his Broadway debut in 1908. By 1914 Sills had moved to Hollywood for his film debut in The Pit. By the time he arrived in Birmingham his success put him in films of the largest studios and opposite such stars as Gloria Swanson and in such box-office hits as The Sea Hawk (1924). In 1927 Sills was among the 36 people who founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  

 Milton Sills [1882-1930]

Source: Wikipedia

            Staring opposite Sills was Dorothy Kenyon, a native of New York who was fifteen years younger. She made her first film in 1915 and by 1924 appeared in Monsieur Beaucaire with Rudolph Valentino. She continued to act in films well into the sound period and had a few television appearances in the late 1950s. She died in 1979.  Sills and Kenyon carried their relationship beyond the set in Birmingham; they were married in October 1926 and had a son before Sills' death from a heart attack in 1930.

Doris Kenyon [1897-1979]

Source: Wikipedia

            Other individuals acting in the production included Victor McLaglen, May Allison and Frank Currier. Born in England in 1886, McLaglen served in World War I after several years on the boxing circuit. He even fought heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in an exhibition match. McLaglen acted in several silent films in Britain before moving to Hollywood where he quickly became a popular character actor, often playing intoxicated Irishmen. He was still acting in films and television until his death in 1959. His son Andrew McLaglen became a director in both film and television.

Victor McLaglen [1886-1959]

Source: Wikipedia

            Georgia native May Allison appeared on Broadway in 1914 but quickly moved to Hollywood. She became very popular in a series of some 25 films with leading man Harold Lockwood. However, his death in 1918 during the influenza pandemic resulted in a decline in the public’s interest in her. Allison made her final film, The Telephone Girl, the year after Men of Steel and then retired. She died in 1989.

May Allison [1890-1989]
Source: Wikipedia

            Born in Connecticut in 1857, Frank Currier acted in more than 130 films between 1912 and 1928. He also directed a number of films during that period.  He appeared in such silent classics as Ben-Hur and died in 1928.

            A synopsis of the film’s story by Hal Erickson can be found online at the allmovie.com site. “Sills plays Jan Bokak, a self-educated steelworker who finds himself in the middle of a romantic triangle. Two different girls -- wealthy socialite Claire Pitt (May Allison) and blue-collar worker Mary Berwick (Doris Kenyon) -- simultaneously fall for Bokak. It later develops that Claire and Mary are actually sisters, the first of a series of surprising plot twists leading to Bokak being accused of a murder he didn't commit. In the gutsy climax, the actual villain attempts to kill Bokak by pouring a vat of molten steel upon him!” 

            According to BhamWiki.com, Men of Steel premiered at the Franklin Theatre in Ensley, although no date is given. Located at 1819 Avenue E, the theatre was built in the early 1900s and closed in the early 1930s. The building remains vacant today.

            All three of these silent films made in the Birmingham area—Moonshiner’s Daughter, Coming Through, and Men of Steel—are among the many “lost” films of the silent era. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation has estimated that 90 percent of films made before 1929 are lost. These movies were made on nitrate film, which is highly flammable and chemically unstable. Improperly stored, these films can turn to toxic mush or powder in the canister. Sometimes "lost" silent films will surface in various unexpected places. In 2010, the Russian state film archive gave the Library of Congress copies of ten U.S. silent films believed lost but discovered in storage.

            Little is known about the local details of making these three silent movies. Hopefully some research in Birmingham area newspapers will uncover further information.

            If you would like to learn more about silent filmmaking, the print literature and web resources are vast. My own interest was sparked years ago by Kevin Brownlow’s book, The Parade’s Gone By [1976], an excellent place to start.

This piece first appeared on the Birmingham History Center's blog in May 2013.

Mines, Mills & Moonshine: Silent Filmmaking in the Birmingham Area, Part 2

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

           

      Apparently the second of the Birmingham silent films was Coming Through, released in mid-February 1925 and premiered at New York City’s Rialto Theatre on the 17^th. The 70-minute drama was produced by the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, which had been formed in 1916 by the merger of the Famous Players Film Company of Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky’s Feature Play Company. Lasky would oversee production of Coming Through. Two years after the picture’s release Lasky was one of the three dozen individuals who established the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The company that he and Zukor founded evolved into one of the largest silent filmmakers in Hollywood with stars that included Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow and eventually became the Paramount Pictures Corporation.

Jesse L. Lasky [1880-1958]

Source: Wikipedia

            Coming Through had been shot in the second half of 1924, primarily in Brookside, the mining town in Jefferson County incorporated in 1896 and the mining camps of New Castle and along Oxmoor Road. A few actual mining scenes were completed in a New York studio, probably for safety reasons. The film was based on the 1924 novel Bed Rock by Jack Bethea.

Jack Bethea [1892-1928]

Source: Bham Wiki

Born in Birmingham in 1892, Bethea started work as a reporter for the Birmingham Age-Herald while still in high school. By 1916 he had moved to the Birmingham Ledger as city editor.  After another paper, the Birmingham Post began publication in 1921, he became news and then managing editor there. He was named editor in 1928.

Bed Rock was actually his second novel; the first, Half-Gods, had been serialized in the popular Collier’s magazine the year before. The second novel, as “Coming Through”, was also serialized in that magazine before book publication. Bethea also published short stories during this period and joined a local writers’ group the Loafer’s Club that also included Octavus Roy Cohen, a very popular author in his day. Two more novels set in the Birmingham District coal mines quickly followed, The Deep Seam [1925] and Honor Bound [1927]. Alabama agriculture was the subject of his final novel, Cotton [1928].

        Suffering from health problems and depression, Bethea hanged himself in his room at the Tutwiler Hotel on July 2, 1928. In late April of that year a film version of Honor Bound had appeared, advertised as “A Daring Drama of Life in the Convict Labor Camps.” The movie featured an uncredited extra earning $7 a day named Jean Harlow; it was her first appearance on film.  Although perhaps melodramatic by current standards, his mining novels depicted the wrenching changes industrialization was bringing to his native state.

The Tutwiler in the 1920s

Source: Bham Wiki

            Although the novel is set in the Cahaba coal fields south of Birmingham, Jesse Lasky moved the setting to Brookside and other nearby mines and camps. The Brookside mine had opened in 1886 and by 1900 the mine’s modern equipment made it the most advanced in the area and the headquarters of the four Sloss mines there. Yet by the time Hollywood came to town, the mine had been closed after a 1920 general strike.

Brookside coal mine entrance on a 1908 postcard

Source: Bham Wiki

        The cast and crew arrived in Brookside in the fall of 1924 and were met at the train depot by a welcoming crowd of locals. Pam Jones’ article “Brookside” (Alabama Heritage #85, summer 2007, pp 26-37) profiles the one-time “wild west town” that was reaching for middle-class respectability at this time. The film group stayed in local private homes during filming, since travel from Birmingham would require too much time. Jones’ article has a photograph of Lasky and actors Thomas Meighan and Wallace Beery on the set of the film, but does not specify whether the scene is Brookside or the New York set.

Director A. Edward Sutherland was probably a little nervous as filming began. Coming Through was his first film behind the camera, after an acting career spanning almost 40 films including one directed by Charlie Chaplin. Sutherland directed over 50 movies during three decades and worked in television into the mid-1960s. He had married five times before his death in 1973.  

A. Edward Sutherland [1895-1973]

Source: Wikipedia

            In its entry on the film, BhamWiki summarizes the story. “Meighan played the typical ‘quiet and strong, kindly and brave’ hero, Tom Blackford, who marries a reluctant mine owner's daughter, Alice (Lee). The owner (played by John Miltem) makes Blackford a mine superintendent, hoping to see him fail. To hasten his downfall, he hires Joe Lawler (Beery) to make life miserable for Blackford. Lawler conspires with a saloon keeper (Laurence Wheat) to provoke a strike. Blackford manages to foil the scheme, however. In the culminating fight sequence, Lawler gets thrown off a mine tipple when his crowbar gets caught in the conveyor. In the end, Alice confesses her love for him [Blackford].”

            Three of the actors cited were well known at the time. A Pennsylvania native, Thomas Meighan began acting on Broadway by 1900 when he was only 21. In 1914 he appeared in his first film and acted steadily until his death from cancer in 1936. At the height of his career Meighan made $5,000  or more a week and acted opposite such female stars as Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. Meighan was Sutherland’s uncle by marriage.

Thomas Meighan [1879-1936]

Source: Wikipedia

            The female lead in Coming Through was New Jersey native Lila Lee. At seventeen she signed with Famous Players-Lasky and within a few years acted with Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino (in the very popular Blood and Sand in 1922) and other stars of the day. She remained popular into the late 1930s and also died in 1973 just weeks before Sutherland.

Lila Lee [1901-1973]

Source: Wikipedia

1923 portrait of Coming Through star Lila Lee

Source: Bham Wiki

            Born in Kansas City in 1885, Wallace Beery made about 250 films in a career lasting over three decades until his death in 1949. He was the younger brother of two actors, William Beery and Noah Beery; and uncle of another, Noah Berry, Jr. Among his roles were King Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood (1922) with Douglas Fairbanks, and Professor Challenger in The Lost World based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel. He won a Best Actor Oscar for The Champ (1931) and played Long John Silver in a classic version of Treasure Island (1934). A heavy drinker who often played villains, Beery had a reputation for abuse of both colleagues and others including first wife Gloria Swanson. A young couple named Ida and Evan Lollar welcomed Beery into their home during filming. The actor apparently spent time exploring the saloons along the town’s Main Street.

Wallace Beery [1885-1949]

Source: Wikipedia

            Beery had a close call on the set after a night of such carousing. He and Meighan were acting that scene atop the coal tipple, a structure for loading the ore into railroad cars. Beery slipped and nearly fell to what would have been serious injury or death. For the rest of the shoot Beery had to be watched carefully after hours by the crew.

An abandoned coal tipple in West Virginia

Source: Library of Congress

Tipple Foundation, Exterior Southeast. Brookside Coal Mine, Tipple (Foundation), Mount Olive Road, North of Five Mile Creek Bridge, Brookside, Jefferson County, AL, ca. 1968

Source: Library of Congress

            Coming Through premiered in New York City on February 17 and the New York Times’ critic Mordaunt Hall was not kind in the next day’s paper. “The narrative of this effort might make an excellent bedtime story for an old ladies’ home, as all its dramatic teeth have been pulled and the hero, Tom Blackford (Thomas Meighan) seems to deserve a pair of wings,” he wrote in the first paragraph. After describing scenes from “a picture so utterly lacking in drama”, Hall closes with a restatement of his opening. “The narrative is as flat as the proverbial pancake, with only a few scenes of a coal mine to relieve its monotonous trend.”

            The film ran for 70 minutes, or 7 reels in the days of 10 minutes per reel. As with The Moonshiner’s Daughter discussed in part 1 and so many silent movies, Coming Through is currently a “lost film.” Perhaps a copy will turn up somewhere someday.

This piece first appeared on the Birmingham History Center blog in February 2013.