This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Red Mark at SFSFF 2024
Frank Capra famously defined his aspiration as a Hollywood director to be just not another name in the opening credits but “the name above the title.” An even more rarified position was the director who literally signed his own films, asserting his authorship with a handwritten credit when all other talent took their notice in typeface. Ernst Lubitsch earned this right toward the end of his career, as did Howard Hawks and Don Siegel. And so, too, did James Cruze.
To see Cruze’s signature emblazoned on screen at the beginning of The Red Mark with the slightly goofy flourish of a schoolyard John Hancock, it’s hard not to wonder, what gave him the big idea?
Cruze’s trajectory to success was typical of the time, requiring constant reinvention and shameless striving. He began by touring with medicine shows, became an actor at Thanhouser Studios, and then switched to directing. He directed dozens of feature films and, by 1926, was reportedly the highest-paid director in Hollywood.
The reasons for Cruze’s present-day obscurity are understandable. He weathered the transition to talkies poorly and ended his career making cheapies for Republic Pictures. He died in 1942, well before a subsequent generation of historians began collecting oral testimonies from the industry’s pioneers. He didn’t write treatises about his directorial technique for the fan magazines in the manner of his peers. Perhaps he simply thought his own aesthetic pontification superfluous. But when Columbia University professor Victor O. Freeburg published his tome, Pictorial Beauty on the Screen, in 1923, he dedicated it to Cruze.
But the biggest impediment to grasping Cruze’s enormous reputation back in his heyday is the simple fact that much of his silent work is lost. His storied epics, The Covered Wagon (1923) and Old Ironsides (1926), are still available, but they are anomalies next to the slice-of-life comedies and raucous satires that were his specialty. No one alive today has seen One Glorious Day (1922), Hollywood (1923), Merton of the Movies (1924), or The Goose Hangs High (1925), but they were highly regarded upon their release and often championed by Cruze’s contemporaries as the heart of his work. “Good as he is at outdoor stuff,” observed Iris Barry in 1926, “he is best at American domestic comedy … Cruze practically cannot make a bad picture.”
One Glorious Day (1922)
Will Rogers stars as a mild-mannered professor temporarily possessed by Ek, a Viking ghost from Valhalla, in Cruze’s satire of the twin fads of the 1920s: spiritualism and Prohibition. The National Board of Review cited the film’s “exceptional grasp of the possibilities of the screen in the realm of imagination,” and the New York Times raved, calling it “a skillful and ingenious piece of work.” Its critic, Mordaunt Hall, returned to praise the film again in a subsequent feature, asking, “Was there ever a more glorious motion picture?”
The Covered Wagon (1923)
This large-scale western, shot largely on location, became the highest-grossing film that year and the template for all big-budget outdoor adventures for the next decade. The Iron Horse, Tumbleweeds, 3 Bad Men, and even The Gold Rush were made in its shadow. And that shadow was long: in 1948, when silent films were mostly mocked as primitive entertainment, The Covered Wagon still had a sufficient reputation to be cited as a key predecessor in the ad campaign for Red River! Ironically, Cruze, who hadn’t demonstrated any prior affinity for the genre, was assigned the film largely on producer Jesse Lasky’s unverified assumption that the director had indigenous ancestry.
Hollywood (1923)
Cruze’s satire of an aspiring actress who can’t catch a break as everyone around her (even her grandpa) gets cast in pictures is one of the most sought-after lost films of the silent era. Replete with dozens of cameos—from Charles Chaplin and Pola Negri to Cecil B. DeMille and exhibition impresario Sid Grauman—the film was also awash in camera tricks and absurdist flourishes. Robert E. Sherwood’s account of a dream sequence is vivid and tantalizing: “[T]he Centerville pants presser imagined himself a knight errant who had journeyed to the Twentieth Century Babylon to rescue his girl from the clutches of that dread dragon, the Cinema. It was utter insanity. The various stars, garbed as sheiks, licentious club-men, aristocratic roues, bathing girls, apaches, and the like, moved about in weird confusion through a distorted nightmare. There was slow motion photography, reverse action and double exposure; no sense was made at any given point.”
The Mating Call (1928)
After the box-office failure of his $2 million seafaring epic Old Ironsides, Cruze chased money wherever he could find it. The Great Gabbo, his infamous ventriloquist musical with Erich von Stroheim, was distributed by fly-by-night Sono Art-World Wide Pictures and financed by a pair of shady characters, one of whom was serving a prison sentence for usury at the time of the film’s premiere. But before that Cruze made The Mating Call for Howard Hughes’s Caddo Company. It’s a highly-polished work of vigorous claptrap about a war veteran who returns to find his sweetheart stolen by a local member of “The Order,” an off-brand KKK knock-off that has no racial axe to grind but does insist that local drunkards stop threatening their mothers’ financial security. This being a Hughes production, the sight of a skinny-dipping Renée Adorée, rather than a social statement against vigilante terrorism, was likely the production’s primary motivation. But it still carried Cruze’s signature in the credits, the mark of an artist in search of a project—and a patron—worthy of him.