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Paul Fejos in America

The period between 1926 and 1931 is probably the least known, the least understood, and the least sympathetically considered in the whole history of American cinema. Most film historians present 1927 as the apogee of "pure" silent cinema, with such works as The General, The Kid Brother, Long Pants, Seventh Heaven, Underworld, The Cat and the Canary, Wings, and, above all, Sunrise. 192829 is seen as a period of chaos and transition, as studios scramble over themselves to adapt to sound: it is the period of a few last silent masterpieces, the uncomfortable hybrid of the "part-talkie," and the early, static, stage-bound full talkies. Redemption is assumed to occur in 1930-31, as directors find ways to overcome the limitations of the primitive sound systems and begin to restore to the camera and the Moviola some of their previous flexibility and freedom. Here the ritual names are those of Lubitsch and Mamoulian. In orthodox accounts of this period, the same names, the same titles, and the same anecdotes occur with depressing regularity. In the process, whole careers, and important stages of development in the work of significant artists, have vanished almost without trace. Certainly, any study of this period is crucially affected by the fact that so many important films are lost, destroyed, inaccessibly tucked away in vaults and archives ranging from California to Moscow, or, where they can be viewed, are to be found only in single, often mutilated, archive copies. Even with the fashionable immigrant directors of the period, Murnau's Four Devils, Lubitsch's The Patriot, and important films by Sjostrom and Stiller are not at the moment available for study in any form. Even granting this, it remains astonishing that most film histories, even today, pay virtually no attention to the work in this period of such men as William K. Howard, Gregory La Cava, W. S. Van Dyke, Harry D'Arrabie D'Arrast, Monta Bell, and Malcolm St. Clair, all of whom made several films of outstanding quality and importance, but who might as well not even have existed for all the attention they receive. Whether one looks at their films in the framework of individual careers, studio history, or genre study, they possess undeniable significance and even a brief acquaintance with them would shake up some of the received opinions and blind dogmas relating to this period. In the field of sexual comedy, for example, such films as A Gentleman of Paris, The Grand Duchess and the Waiter, and Man, Woman, and Sin, besides continuing to sparkle and delight for their own sake, throw into new relief Chaplin's A Woman of Paris and the films of Lubitsch. The director who has suffered most from this neglect (mainly because his American career falls completely into the 1923-31 framework) is probably the Hungarian-born Paul Fejos-though there have recently been signs of a welcome revival of interest in his work. Few people today have even heard of Fejos and yet his first two American films, The Last Moment and Lonesome, were among the most highly praised of 1928, appearing on many ten-best lists; he became, for a brief period in 192830, the top director at Universal; and, while working on the musical Broadway in 1929, he and his cameraman Hal Mohr designed a crane that allowed him to move the camera across a vast set with complete freedom and mobility (thus making nonsense, incidentally, of the still widely held belief that Lubitsch, in The Love Parade, and Mamoulian, in Applause, were the first directors of talkies to employ extensive camera movements).1 Short as it was, his American career is of considerable importance, and it produced at least one film, Lonesome, that deserves to be considered as one of the classics of the period. Fejos was born in Budapest in 1897, of a family of landed aristocrats whose ancestry went back to the fifteenth century.2 He went to medical school, obtaining his degree, and fought in World War I both in the cavalry and the air force. After the war, he returned to his first love, theater, and then di-