Pordenone Dispatch. 2.

My "discovery" this fest is a pair of Griffith performers largely lost in the shadows of Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess. Robert Harron, best known as the boy in the modern section of Intolerance, is the shy boy turned country minister in True Heart Susie, and the delightful Clarine Seymour is the conniving flirt from Chicago who lures him from Gish with wiles not lost on the audience. Both actors died young, before their careers had a chance to catch fire - Seymour from an emergency operation, Harron from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, both in 1920. But before that they were featured in a handful of Griffith features, often together, and they make a great team.

Griffith's war propaganda drama The Girl Who Stayed Home (1919), a pro-draft film ostensibly starring Carol Dempster and Richard Barthelmess, is dominated by Harron (as Barthelmess's wise guy younger brother, a college lady killer nicknamed "The Oily Peril") and Seymour (as his sometime Cutie Sweetheart, a proto-flapper who lives off the presents of her often older admirers). Given the billing, it seems odd that the actual girl who stays home is Seymour, who has a complete change of character (though not personality - her feet still tap out jazz and ragtime while knitting socks for the boys on the front) when her boyfriend Harron transforms from a fop to a hero in basic training. Their energy brings the film alive and Dempster (as a French-raised daughter of a Confederate veteran) just disappears into the background while the Huns menace her purity.

Harron is unexpectedly effective as a charmer of a Mexican bandito - the good bad guy that silent westerns loved so much, though in this case, he's more of a rogue than an actual bandit - in Griffith's Scarlet Days (1919), an otherwise routine western melodrama starring Carol Dempster as the eastern girl come west to find her mother, who has supported her from afar as a hearty barmaid in a rowdy frontier town, and Ralph Graves (looking like the lost Duke cousin from Dukes of Hazzard) as the wholesome Virginia boy destined to be her boy. But Harron dominates and Seymour is a firecracker as the feisty little Mexican barmaid (and little she is - so diminutive you wonder how she can pack so much energy) who loves the bandit.

Cabiria didn't just launch a thousand lavish historical epics, it launched the cinema's first muscleman hero. Maciste, the loyal slave of the ostensible hero, was by far the most endearing character in the film. Played with jolly passion by Bartolomeo Pagano, he was spun off into his own series of films, playing a kind of proto-Santo (the Mexican wrestler turned movie icon) who is the same person onscreen and off, a big teddy bear of a hero who jumps to the rescue of citizens in distress.

In the first solo outing, Maciste (1915), he's all but called down from the screen by a desperate young woman and, outfitted in a suit that just makes his chest and shoulders and timber arms look so much bigger, he launches into a kind of "Perils of Pauline" adventure, full of cliffhangers and decidedly creative escapes from the repeated ambushes and captures launched by the bad guys. In the later Maciste in Love (1919), the lovesick lug falls for the daughter of a millionaire and goes off to search for her when she's kidnapped by enemies of her industrialist father. Through them all, he radiates warmth and joy, as if nothing gives him greater pleasure than getting the upper hand on a gang of thugs, or concocting an escape that involves butting his head through the ceiling of his prison - while he's still bound head to foot!

This is the real birth of the muscleman genre that made a comeback with the 1958 Hercules with Steve Reeves. In fact, while the unending peplum knock-offs arrived stateside under the Hercules name, in Italy, most them were actually Maciste films, reviving this beloved character. However, none of the subsequent actors succeeded in recapturing the big kid charm of Pagano.

Posted by dwhudson at October 12, 2006 5:08 AM