Kevin brownlow the wind bluray
“Rex was an artist,” wrote Michael Powell, “but an amateur artist, a show-off a bit of an actor, because of his good looks, but not a good actor a showman, certainly, with a sure instinct for and appreciation of the theatrical.” 6 By 1916, Ingram was directing his first film, The Great Problem. He found work as an actor and writer with film companies in and around New York. Talented, rootless and ambitious, Ingram emigrated when he was eighteen and went to train as a sculptor at Yale University. In a tradition of great Irish fantasists – Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett – he was a Protestant, a product of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.
Ingram was born Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock in Dublin on January 15, 1893. He never stooped, he never gave any publicity and was a little huffy – he was very Irish. Yet his films of the 1920s are compulsive, even hypnotic viewing today – while many half their age are quaint but amusing relics. His last 20 years were devoted to writing, sculpture, travel and the life of a gentleman aesthete. Ingram’s only talking picture, Baroud ( Love in Morocco, 1932), is a fascinating fiasco, at once behind and alarmingly ahead of its time. “His passion for pictorial form, so eloquent in the silent movies, appeared old-fashioned in early talking films.” 4 Or that is the received opinion. Yet once sound arrived, Ingram himself looked like a tradition in decline. His heroes (Valentino in Four Horsemen, Novarro in Scaramouche, Ivan Petrovich in 1929’s The Three Passions) contend less with whatever social codes hold sway around them than with a once-mighty father figure – loved or loathed – whose legacy is fading from the screen. In 1936, Dietrich recreated another Terry role from The Garden of Allah (1927), but only after Garbo turned it down.ĭramatically, just about every Ingram film shows the death of a stable patriarchal order and the birth of a new age of uncertainty, ambiguity and peril. Sternberg reshaped this character for Marlene in Dishonored (1931), with sequences that stretch from hommage to outright plagiarism.
Her androgynous, possibly bisexual spy in Mare Nostrum (1926) predates Garbo and Dietrich as the first recognisably modern woman in American films. Her icy blonde allure (she rarely appeared on camera without her wig) anticipates Grace Kelly in the Hitchcock films of the 50s. Meanwhile, his presentation of Alice Terry moved beyond the sentimental Victorian view of womanhood that prevailed before the 20s. While Ingram may not have been gay, his camera undeniably was. Watching Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1920) or Ramon Novarro in Scaramouche (1923), we see flashes of Jean Marais in Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950), Helmut Berger in La caduta degli dei ( The Damned, Luchino Visconti, 1969), Antonio Banderas in La ley del deseo ( The Law of Desire, Pedro Almodóvar, 1987) – all films by overtly gay auteurs. Unfailingly, Ingram infused his camera with sex, most often of a highly ambiguous kind. Married for 30 years to his pleasant but underwhelming leading lady Alice Terry, he was plagued by rumours that he was keener on his exotically handsome leading men. Stylistically, Rex Ingram was the man who shocked Hollywood into the 20 th century. The patron saint of sheer visual obsession, Ingram made images so primal they are a world in themselves. If we look closely, whole sequences by Ingram shine through in films by Orson Welles, Josef von Sternberg, Luchino Visconti, James Whale and Stanley Kubrick. Yet Ingram and his lush pictorial style are visible in both. In everything he did the camerawork was impeccable.” 2 Michael Powell, who began as his assistant in the late ’20s, wrote: “For me, he was an inspiration, an ideal.” 3 It is hard to imagine more radically different directors than Lean and Powell. David Lean said: “The man who really got me going was Rex Ingram. Yet Ingram, of all the silent directors, had the greatest impact on the sound era. Of his 27 films, less than half survive and only a few are available on DVD or Blu-Ray. His myth weighs little against the fact that most of his work is downright hard to see. As a romantic rebel who walked out on MGM to work in Europe and North Africa and run his own studio in Nice. As a sexually ambivalent Svengali who discovered Valentino and other stars.
We may know him as the key Hollywood filmmaker of the 1920s. We are aware of him, these days, less as a director than as a fantasy of what a director might be. Rex Ingram may be the best-known enigma in film history. Issue 76 January 15, 1893, Dublin, Ireland.