Mare Nostrum (Rex Ingram, 1926)

Pâquerette, Antonio Moreno, and Alice Terry in Mare Nostrum

Ulysses Ferragut: Antonio Moreno
Freya Talberg: Alice Terry
The Triton: Apollon Uni
Don Esteban Ferragut: Álex Nova
Young Ulysses: Kada-Abd-el-Kader
Caragol: Hughie Mack
Doña Cinta: Mademoiselle Kithnou
Esteban: Mickey Brantford
Pepita: Rosita Ramírez
Toni: Frédéric Mariotti
Dr. Fedelmann: Pâquerette
Count Kaledine: Fernand Mailly
Submarine Commander: Andrews Engelmann

Director: Rex Ingram
Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck
Based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Cinematography: John F. Seitz
Art direction: Ben Carré
Film editing: Grant Whytock

The Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez is known today mostly for the melodramatic novels, many of them family sagas that reflect the early influence of Zola's Naturalist explorations of heredity as destiny, which attracted the attention of Hollywood filmmakers: Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922; Rouben Mamoulian, 1941) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921; Vincente Minnelli, 1962), as well as the ones that were used for Greta Garbo's American debut, Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926) and The Temptress (Niblo, 1926). The Four Horsemen in particular had been such a success, creating the phenomenon of Rudolph Valentino, that it was quite logical for its director, Ingram, to go back to Ibáñez as a source when he launched his European-based production company in 1926. Mare Nostrum was also a vehicle for Ingram's wife, Alice Terry, who had starred opposite Valentino in Horsemen. Unfortunately, he had no Valentino at his disposal this time, and Antonio Moreno, who had just starred with Garbo in The Temptress, is a rather pallid substitute. Still, Ingram had the advantage of being based on the French Riviera, putting some spectacular locations like Marseille, Naples, Paestum, and Pompeii close at hand. The glimpses of these places in Mare Nostrum during the interim between two World Wars are the most fascinating thing about the film, outweighing the clumsiness of the adaptation, which drags in too much backstory about Ulysses Ferragut's family history and a few too many secondary characters we don't care about as much as we seem to be urged to do. Terry makes the most of her role as the femme fatale, and there's a great campy bit by the actress known as Pâquerette as the large but sinister German villain.

It (Clarence G. Badger, 1927)

William Austin and Clara Bow in It

Betty Lou: Clara Bow
Cyrus T. Waltham: Antonio Moreno
Monty Montgomery: William Austin
Molly: Priscilla Bonner
Adela Van Norman: Jacqueline Gadsdon
Mrs. Van Norman: Julia Swayne Gordon
Elinor Glyn: Elinor Glyn
Newspaper Reporter: Gary Cooper

Director: Clarence G. Badger
Screenplay: Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton; Titles: George Marion Jr.
Based on a story by Elinor Glyn
Cinematography: H. Kinley Martin
Film editing: E. Lloyd Sheldon
Costume design: Travis Banton

Was Elinor Glyn's Cosmopolitan magazine story "It" really a sensation, or is that just hype? Odds are it was the latter, because Glyn, who has a cameo in Clarence G. Badger's film It, billed as "Madame Elinor Glyn," was a master self-publicist. "It" gets several definitions in the course of the film, all of which are really just a relabeling of what has always been called "sex appeal." In the end it boils down to "whatever Clara Bow had." (One of those definitions, delivered by the Madame herself, is "Self-confidence and indifference to whether you are pleasing or not," which actually doesn't fit Bow's character, Betty Lou, who is never indifferent to whether she is pleasing the object of her attentions, Antonio Moreno's Cyrus T. Waltham. She even flings herself on his desk to flirt with him.) It is really just routine rom-com stuff: Girl spots boy, girl lands boy, boy makes a premature move and gets slapped for it, girl rejects boy because he thinks she's an unwed mother, boy pursues girl but she rejects him again when he wants to make her his mistress instead of his wife, girl concocts revenge plot that goes awry so that at the end girl gets boy anyway. Today, It is mostly a rather creaky relic whose interest lies mainly in its display of Bow's abundant charm and comic finesse and in the appearance of Gary Cooper in an uncredited bit as a newspaper reporter -- he barely even gets a foot in the door in the film. The credited director, Clarence G. Badger, had a long and undistinguished career, and even though some of the film is said to have been directed by Josef von Sternberg, it would be hard to single out his contribution. Moreno, the leading man, is stuck with an unfortunately fluffy mustache, and the comic support by William Austin is marred by the fact that the orthochromatic film stock turns his blue eyes almost white, making him look more than a little creepy. The climax takes place on a yacht called -- get it? -- the Itola, which I think was originally the Capitola but had its first syllable lopped off for the sake of the joke.