At Cinema Reborn - Barrie Pattison's introduction to the Sydney screening of STELLA DALLAS (Henry King, USA, 1925)

Editor's note: This post was first delivered by Barrie Pattison as the introduction to the Sydney screening of Henry King's 1925 silent Stella Dallas  at the recent Cinema Reborn season. In Melbourne the film was introduced by critic Jake Wilson. Jake later expanded his piece and posted it on his Substack blog MOVING TARGETS. Click on the link to read Jake's thoughts (and consider taking out a modestly priced paid subscription). Barrie has now slightly expanded his thoughts on the film and they are published below.

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Ronald Colman, Belle Bennett, Lois Moran, Stella Dallas

I’ve been curious to see how today will go, because we have an odd situation now. Streaming has put more money into recovering early film than ever before. Outfits like Turner, René Chateau and the Warner Archive, along with national organisations have recovered titles that we never thought we’d see again, besides some we didn’t know existed. There is more vintage film available now than there’s ever been during my life time but the traditional ways of accessing it are going away. TCM, Home video and Film Societies are all fading and, of course, Australia hasn’t had a National Film Theatre for fifty years - a scandal in its own right.

YouTube is a great resource but it has not been embraced by opinion makers. Movies still don’t exist unless they are launched with free liquor and press books or at least tea and a biscuit. However old judgments are being challenged. Veteran Hollywood directors like Leo MacCarey and Norman Taurog, who were thought old fashioned and ham-fisted, turn out to have been the lively young men of their day.

 Henry King, who made today’s film, was associated with snooze fests like his stodgy Song of Bernadette or Love Is a Many Splendored Thing but, when I finally made it to the ground zero for all this activity - the the Pordenone Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, which Google translates as a “festival of dumb films”, the first thing I saw was a young Henry King doing action hero in a World War One serial.

As a director, King pulled away from the pack with his 1921 Richard Barthlemess Tol’able David, whose groupings and pace suggest a departure point for the So-Called “Golden Years of Hollywood” - and a milestone in the Americana dramas that are still today one of their productive streams.  

 Five years later, when Sam Goldwyn wanted to prove the value in his new association with United Artists, he recruited Henry King for his prestige production of Stella Dallas, from a best-seller by a woman named Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote Now Voyager,  another dysfunctional mother- daughter relationship piece.

Goldwyn’s strategy of recruiting the best people for his productions asserts here. His masthead performer Ronald Colman would get top billing. Colman would be the only silent movie leading man to remain an A-Lister into the fifties. However Belle Bennett was not a star though she had been a featured player in some ambitious productions. Bennett campaigned for the key role, Stella Dallas, making herself over, putting on weight and dressing cheap - not unlike Shelley Winters promoting herself for A Place in the Sun. This was Bennett’s own place in the sun, her one remembered performance. She's billed below Colman and elegant Alice Joyce. Following this she did have the lead in a few similar films. She comes well out of The Woman Who Was Forgotten, of which I have a copy, but Belle Bennet would die young in 1932.

 The support cast is notable -  Doug Fairbanks junior still a teenager, the appealing Lois Moran, who had been an item with Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Hersholt from Von Stroheim’s Greed, later to become the forties’ The Courageous Dr. Christian and young writer-to-be Winston Miller. You’ll see his credit on My Darling Clementine. The script of Stella Dallas itself is by the prestigious Frances Marion,  one of the most important women in Hollywood as a result of her work with Mary Pickford. She would be given one of the first writing Oscars for Norman Taurog’s The Champ. Stella Dallas is shot by the great Arthur Edison, who filmed Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty and Casablanca and cut by Stuart Heisler, later director of the admired Storm Warning, one of the first screen treatments of the Ku Klux Klan.

Their combined efforts returned Goldwyn’s over-spend and a handsome profit, along with enthusiastic notices even with the perceived resistance to these “women’s picture” melodramas. Stella Dallas  is more a “weepy” than any comment on division in what was claimed as a classless society. 

It was definitely state of the art for 1925, though the film never became a film studies favourite. 

 This substantial success must have factored into getting Henry King his Fox Corporation contract, which would run thirty years and make him one of the most influential - and richest - people in Hollywood. He’d make the Will Rogers State Fair, the Dionne Quintuplets movie with Jean Hersholt again and Tyrone Power films including Americana hit Jesse James. King’s most notable work was a run with Gregory Peck, starting with The Gunfighter and 12 O’Clock High. 

 Delmer Daves, one of the next generation directors on the Fox pay-roll, told me he always found himself tongue tied, going into Henry King’s office and seeing a photo of Lillian Gish in The White Sister on the wall. "What could you say to someone like that?" Delmer quit Fox because he could see all the best projects would be given to people Studio Head Darryl F. Zanuck had been working with for twenty years - like John Ford & Henry King.

Among the later Henry King films, I rate the neglected David and Bathsheba the most interesting and revealing. Zanuck expected another nice Sunday school production like The Robe or Song of Bernadette but King had become a determined Catholic, after a conversion while making The White Sister with Colman in Italy. He double crossed Zanuck and delivered a film for grown-ups  -  incorporating all that Biblical scholarship that gets re-cycled in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and Bruce Beresford’s King David. 

 A wealthy Hollywood Studio employee and Catholic - it’s easy to see why Henry King was never canonised by Marxist commentators.

 Stella Dallas itself also had an afterlife. Goldwyn produced a terrible sound do-over with Barbara Stanwyck directed by King Vidor and there’s a 1990 Bette Midler film, along with rip-off versions. In one, it’s Al Jolson standing in the rain, as the grief-stricken parent, watching the daughter’s wedding through a window.

None of these have the resonance of Henry King’s film. Like other repeatedly re-cyled properties - think Beau Geste, Ben Hur or Rain - all pieces anchored in the attitudes and values of the silent period, subsequent filmmakers have their effort cut out to time-shift them

 Well, I don’t know whether you’ve thought about it, but we are among the first few people in history who are able to experience one hundred year old drama in pretty much the form of its original presentation. Myself, I rate that a great privilege.