War Relic and Forgotten Man: Richard Barthelmess as Celluloid Veteran in Hollywood 1922–1933

Abstract

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s the Hollywood industry's attempts to imagine the Great War veterans' experience on screen were characterized by tensions between traditional and modern versions. Throughout much of the 1920s the veteran was a ‘relic’ of the past to be honoured and feted. But during periods of social unrest and particularly the financial crises of the 1930s, the veteran became an unwelcome reminder of the war's cost and a threat to the social order, a ‘forgotten man’. This article focuses on the popular star Richard Barthelmess whose career traversed this period and this representational trajectory. His roles as a wounded flyer in The Enchanted Cottage (1924) and as a reformed addict in Heroes for Sale provide the subject of this study, which explores the role of popular film culture in the construction and commemoration of the World War I veteran in the American cultural imagination.

Keywords:

• veterans
• Hollywood
• World War I
• cinema
• United States history
• shell shock

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank The British Academy for providing me with a small research grant to research this paper. I would also like to thank Jonathan Auxier in the Warner Brother's archive, USC and Ned Comstock at the USC Cinematic Arts Library, Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library for invaluable assistance. And thanks to the anonymous reader at JWCS, Martin Hurcombe, David Mayer, Helen Day Mayer, Michael Williams, Linda Ruth Williams, and Mary Hammond for reading drafts and making helpful suggestions.

Notes

1 The term b'gosh, a derivation of ‘by gosh’, was a name given to dramas set in rural New England which ‘featured the lives of village and country folk linked to farmland and/or seacoast and far removed from the sophistications and perceived moral evasions and relativisms of city life’ (Mayer: 193).

2 I am indebted to Helen Day Mayer and David Mayer for drawing my attention to the importance of the integration and movement of gestures in acting style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their impact on film acting and film style of the silent period. I am especially grateful to Helen for her thoughts on Barthelmess’ performance style.

3 Chaney had by this time had become the standard in the performance of disability on screen particularly as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame a year earlier and the legless gangster ‘Blissard’ in The Penalty in 1921. Chaney's star persona, as it circulated in the fan and trade press, centred on the virtuosity of his performance as a means of justifying the grotesque and gruesome nature of his characters.

4 The same scene appears in a Motion Picture Magazine story of the film that appeared in April 1924 (Anderson 60–61).

5 Barthelmess played non-white roles throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. His role as the ‘chinaman’ in Broken Blossoms (1919) was central in establishing him as a ‘versatile’ actor. While I have not dealt with this aspect of his persona it is important to note the centrality of his whiteness in the emphasis on his performance in these ethnic masquerades.

6 The name ‘doughboy’ held the connotations of the transformative force of battle and whiteness that were enshrined in Ernest Moore Visqueney's statue The Spirit of the American Doughboy. At the time Moore's sculpture had been a popular choice for memorials and monuments that were being built throughout cities and towns in the United States, and it was mass produced in miniature throughout the 1920s (Budreau: 139).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Hammond

Michael Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in Film and English at the University of Southampton. He is the author of The Big Show: British Cinema Culture and The Great War (Exeter University Press 2006). His current research is concerned with the impact of the Great War on the aesthetic practices of the Hollywood studios between 1919–1939.