There comes a time in the history of every profession when a few of its leading lights get together and decide that in order to give prestige and dignity to their brotherhood there should be certain entrance requirements. And when the motion-picture directors start anything like that I want to be there.
It is comparatively easy to codify the qualities and training that go into the making of a doctor or lawyer. But standardize motion-picture directors? It couldn't be done.
One might insist, for instance, on thorough artistic training- believing that to be the source of much of the skill of Rex Ingram. One might hold out for world travel, knowing that to have done much toward familiarizing Fred Niblo with the ways of different peoples. Or thorough technical training might seem an essential considering the case of Alan Dwan.
But where would many of our most accomplished directors come in if any such standards were adopted? What about James Cruze, for instance?
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Asked what prepared him for becoming a motion-picture director, he remarks quizzically that it was weeding onions at twenty-five cents a day that did it. Eventually, after repeated questioning, you discover that that was what made him leave home. He wanted to find something easier and more exciting to do, so he tried acting. After he had acted for a while in everything from Shakespearean stock to fly-by-night medicine shows, he decided that a little schooling wouldn't be amiss. He couldn't save money from his stage earnings so he decided to try something else for a while. He tried just about everything else. He was messboy on a transport to Manila, he went to Alaska and worked in the salmon fisheries. He was a cook, a bell boy, a waiter, a day laborer, a farmhand. Somewhere in the midst of all those careers- he professes not to remember just where- he earned money enough to go to dramatic school. But that didn't hold him for long.
For three years he trouped in a road company playing "The Heart of Maryland." There were other people in that company who have since become famous, but he won't give permission to tell who they are because perhaps they are not so proud of their humble beginnings and their struggles as he is. Like many another actor be drifted into pictures because he was hard up. Fans who followed pictures years ago will remember him- one of the most ingratiating and magnetic heroes of those early productions.
He always wanted to forego the grease paint and become a director- but it wasn't until he acquired the embonpoint fatal to a screen hero that any one would let him. Now he can grow fat as he pleases without worrying, for he is firmly established behind the camera.
His best-known productions are One Glorious Day, The Old Homestead, and The Covered Wagon. One Glorious Day showed a sense of whimsy and satire which I confess seem wholly lacking in him on first acquaintance. The Old Homestead showed that he knew more of showmanship than of New England. It was The Covered Wagon that revealed in him a depth of feeling hitherto untouched. And I think that his attitude toward this picture reveals the trait in the man that is most important to his work. It is hero worship.
When James Cruze read some of the descriptions in The Covered Wagon he was seized with the beauty and descriptive power of Emerson Hough's prose and wanted to approximate it as nearly as he could in pictures. He followed the original slavishly in his admiration for the great talent of the author. It is said that because of this faculty of his for considering what the author intended to convey instead of twisting a story to embody all his own favorite dramatic devices he is to be given Harry Leon Wilson's "Ruggles of Red Gap" to direct, and possibly "'Merton of the Movies."
It seems almost as though James Cruze had been chosen by Fate to be scurried through these myriad adventures and ideally equipped for the work of making motion pictures. But his career hasn't been easy; far from it. If he has made big, worth-while pictures it hasn't been because he has been favored. Most of the big successes came to him as hand-me-downs. All the then more important directors in the Paramount fold had so little faith in them as screen material that they refused to direct them.
It is a far cry from tramping a platform in the flare of torches selling wondrous cure-alls with the promise of a show thrown in to screening American epics, but his adventures along that road are what have made James Cruze a versatile director.
Doris Irving, "The Making of a Great Director," Picture Play Magazine, July, 1923, pages 85, 96.
© 1999, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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