Portrait from How I Broke Into The Movies
With the recent discovery, restoration, and availability on Warner Archive disc of
Why Be Good? and
Synthetic Sin, I thought this an opportune time to post the second
world internet premiere from the book
How I Broke Into The Movies.
How I Broke Into The Movies was published in 1930 and contains articles on the title theme written by movie stars of the day like Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Al Jolson, Greta Garbo, and 53 other notable actors. The first article from the book was published in
my posting on Marion Davies. This second article was written by the inimitable flapper with the black helmet who starred in the discovered films previously mentioned, and might possibly be the first time (although not the last time) that Colleen Moore took pen to paper as a published writer.
This article continues after the WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE break.
How I Broke Into The Movies by Colleen Moore
Right click to open the image in a new tab.
Why Be Good? and
Synthetic Sin are the last silent films Colleen made - although technically they are sound synchronized. In the time following Al Jolson's history-making
You ain't heard nothin' yet, studios were transitioning to sound by releasing silent films with timed music and sound effects recorded to shellac discs. The disc was started when the movie began and thus movie and sound were synchronized.
Why Be Good? and
Synthetic Sin were both discovered in an Italian archive almost ten years ago; fortunately, the Vitaphone discs for
Why Be Good? were complete and available but only the final disc of
Synthetic Sin was found. For the theatrical showings and on disc,
Why Be Good? is sound synchronized while
Synthetic Sin has a piano score until the last reel when the disc is used.
*
These pictures of domestic goddess Moore were published
in the January 1922 issue of Pantomime magazine.
Colleen's career started in 1917 with an appearance in
The Bad Boy. She, like many other actresses of the time, wore her hair in long curls to emulate the most successful and highest paid actress of the time, Mary Pickford. It wasn't until 1923 when Colleen was begging First National Studio for the starring role in their film of the best-selling novel
Flaming Youth that her mother offered this sage advice:
Why don't we cut your hair and then make [the studio] give you a test for the part? Out came the scissors, Colleen got the part and
Flaming Youth became her biggest film hit to date. The film made Colleen Moore a huge star (and for a time the highest paid actress in Hollywood). Girls everywhere cut their hair into a Dutch bob and copied her style of dress. Before Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and Joan Crawford, Colleen was the quintessential flapper.
This clip is all that remains of Flaming Youth the
film that put Colleen Moore, and flapperdom, on the map.
Several other films with Colleen are available online including the WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE of the (public domain) silent film
Ella Cinders which I've (personally) scored using (public domain) jazz tunes from the 1920s courtesy of
archive.org.
Ella Cinders was a huge hit for Colleen in 1926. Based on
the popular comic strip of the time (and the tale of Cinderella),
Ella Cinders enters her hometown beauty contest to win a chance to make movies in Hollywood. Of course, there's a mean stepmother and two ugly stepsisters as well as a ball and a handsome
prince, and Colleen excels as the put-upon Ella. At this point, her skill as an actress had been honed for almost ten years and her comic mug as she learns to act from a book (similar to the scene of Marion Davies' acting mug in
Show People) is classic. Colleen is poignant, pretty and priceless.
WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE
I've uploaded Colleen Moore's Ella Cinders with a custom score
using jazz tunes from the 1920s to both archive.org and YouTube.
A list of the songs and artists is below.*
The Scarlet Letter is Colleen's last film, a 1934 talking version of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. It's a mashup of a movie, starting with humor and then veering down the dramatic path with the classic story of adultery. Colleen is fine in her performance but the movie is a little too mundane to be engrossing, coming down to a curio best viewed by fans of Colleen Moore.
The Power And The Glory was the first screenplay written by Preston Sturges to be made into a movie, and won the 1933 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film is often cited as a precursor in narrative style and theme to
Citizen Kane. Colleen herself has called it out as her best and she is wonderful in an understated performance (aging from her 20s to her 60s) playing off her equally skilled co-star Spencer Tracey. The version available on YouTube looks to be from television with hard-coded Spanish subtitles (the credits are not original) and can be seen in six parts.
Colleen Moore was a smart woman and realized the historical significance of the motion picture business and her involvement in it. In 1944, she donated fifteen of her movies to the Museum of Modern Art where she felt they would be stored and protected. Unfortunately, MOMA did no such thing and the films were left to rot when they were finally discovered again in the 1970s. Thus, many of Colleen's films, if available, are incomplete and in poor condition. This is why the discovery and restoration of
Why Be Good? and
Synthetic Sin has been celebrated.
Colleen left acting after
The Scarlet Letter and turned her talents to a hobby that she had since childhood: dollhouses. Her love for dollhouses started when she was four years of age and her father made her one out of cigar boxes. Over time, he made three more and Colleen began collecting miniatures for the houses. Kathleen's Collection (as it was called) continued into adulthood and bade her father to ask one day in 1928
Why don't we build a fairy castle to house your collection? The set designers and construction people of First National Studio became the
architects of what was referred to as
Colleen's Folly. The interior has running water and electricity, solid gold chandeliers (studded with diamonds and emeralds), scores copied in tiny notes by composers such as Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and leather-bound miniature books written in small-scale handwriting by Noel Coward, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edna Ferber and John Steinbeck (among others). You will also see glass slippers small enough to fit a 5-inch tall Cinderella, a pistol so small enough to fire tiny silver bullets, a floating spiral staircase, unsupported and a carved ivory floor. Now referred to as
Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle, it has a scale of one inch to one foot and has been on display at the
Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago since 1949.
In 1968, Colleen published her autobiography called
Silent Star. Although it certainly dealt with her films and marriages (three to the point at which it was published), she also recounts many stories of other actors that she lived through first hand or heard from others. She recounts among other infamous tales, the Fatty Arbuckle trials, the William Desmond Taylor murder, Wallace Reid's drug addiction and death, Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, D.W. Griffith's fall from Hollywood grace, and the marriage of Jean Harlow and Paul Bern. It's a fascinating and charming look at the early days of Hollywood and the writing reflects Colleen's effervescence.
Having spent her post-Hollywood years earning a living in real estate and finance, the publisher of
Silent Star asked her to pen a second book and in 1969, she published
How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market. In 1986 a third book was published in which Colleen played a major role. In 1967 King Vidor (a lifelong friend who also directed Colleen in
The Sky Pilot in 1921) started researching the unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor for a movie that financial whiz Colleen would produce. The film never came to fruition but Vidor's boxes of research were found after his death and became the nucleus for the best-selling book
A Cast Of Killers by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick.
Colleen had no children of her own but was mother to the children of Homer Hargrave, her third husband who died in 1965; they had been married since 1936. In 1982, she married for a fourth time. She died six years later of stomach cancer, leaving behind a legacy of laughter, wonder and imagination.
This interview was published in a 1929 book by Lee Shippey called
Personal Glimpses of Famous Folks and Other Selections from the Lee Side o' L.A..
This interview was published in the March 1922 issue
of Pantomime magazine, an early Hollywood fan magazine.
See my Pinterest page for a slew of
pictures of Colleen from throughout her life and career.
*For more information on sound synchronized films, see the Vitaphone Project. Other Colleen Moore web sites include The Silent Collection featuring Colleen Moore and The Colleen Moore Project.
*Listing of songs used in
Ella Cinders:
