This Sunday evening, March 14th (check your local listings for the air time for your zone),Turner Classic Movies will run Rex Ingram’s THE MAGICIAN (1926) as part of its “Silent Sunday Nights.”  If you love silent films, if you love old timey melodrama, if you love vintage movie magic and crumbly Gothic architecture, if you love mad scientists with laboratories full of bubbling beakers and twisty retorts and scenes set in the very bowels o’Hell, where demonic satyrs prance and prey and fair maidens scream at the threat to their maidenhood, then you owe it to yourself to tape, TiVo or sit up with a mug of Postum… because this movie has it all!

THE MAGICIAN is based on the 1908 novella by W. Somerset Maugham, better known for such later books as Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge.  Written in the first half of 1907, The Magician is widely accepted to be a thinly veiled swipe at Aleister Crowley (pictured right), the famed occultist, cosmologist, libertine, self-described mystic, prophet and sex magician.  An heir to a brewery fortune, Crowley dabbled in esoterica at Cambridge but quit his studies when his interests veered too far from the curriculum.  In 1898, Crowley was inducted into the occult society Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and divided his flat on Chancery Lane into separate rooms for the practice of white and black magic.  Maugham and Crowley were introduced by a common friend, painter Gerald Kelly (whose sister Crowley had married), in a Bohemian cafe on the Rue d’Odessa.  Maugham took an instant disliking to Crowley, whom he felt was a  braggart and a boor, albeit amusing.  He did sample a bit of Crowley’s bravado for The Magician‘s mesmerist villain, Oliver Haddo, but too many writers have over the years overstated the connection.  One reader in particular who felt the story cut too close to the bone was Crowley himself, who reviewed The Magician in Vanity Fair as “Oliver Haddo” and branded Maugham a plagiarist for borrowing elements from his life, as well as from such books as H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and Franz Hartman’s The Life of Paracelcus. (The one book Crowley didn’t accuse Maugham of ripping off was a far more likely inspiration – George du Maurier’s Trilby, with its mad hypnotist antagonist Svengali.)  In later years, Maugham denied ever reading the review while Crowley claimed that Maugham had owned up to his sins in a private meeting.  A fabulist and self-promoter of the first water, Crowley would inspire such vivid fictional malefactors as Hjalmar Poelzig of THE BLACK CAT (1934),  Julian Karswell of NIGHT OF THE DEMON (US: CURSE OF THE DEMON, 1957, based on a short story by M. R. James), the cult leader Mocata of THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (US: THE DEVIL’S BRIDE, 1967, based on the 1934 occult novel by Dennis Wheatley), the unseen but oft-referenced Adrian Marcato of ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968, based on the novel by Ira Levin), Emeric Belasco of THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973, based on a novel by Richard Matheson) and Lord Henry Blackwood of Guy Ritchie’s SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009).  Crowley is also one of the historical figures pictured (back row, second from left) on the cover of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.  But enough of “the wickedest man in the world.”  Time to talk about “the world’s greatest director.”

That’s how Erich von Stroheim described Rex Ingram, short listed in his heyday as one of Hollywood’s top 5 filmmakers and second only to D. W. Griffith.  Born in Dublin to an Irish clergyman and his British wife, Ingram studied law at Trinity University but came to America in 1911 after the death of his mother.  Ingram paid for his studies of sculpture at Yale University by working in the train yards of New Haven.  Gravitating to New York, he made the acquaintance of Thomas Edison’s son Charles and wound up on the Edison payroll, learning the craft of movie-making as a jack-of-all-trades in those picaresque years before the Hollywood studio system regulated the production of films using the standardized model of Ford Motors.  Ingram floated from one East Coast film studio to another, acting and writing (as Rex Hitchcock) and ultimately directing his first feature in 1914 at the age of 21.  After serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the First World War, Ingram wound up on the payroll of Metro-Goldwyn Studios.

In 1920, Ingram was chosen to direct screenwriter June Mathis’ adaptation of the “unadaptable” novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The first female executive in Hollywood, Mathis (pictured at left, between Valentino and Ingram) wielded a power unimaginable for a woman in Hollywood even to this day; against the better judgment of studio head Richard Rowland, she hired not only Ingram but an unknown day player named Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla… aka Rudolph Valentino.   Costing more than $650,000 (at a time when the average studio production cost $60,000), THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1921) earned back $9 million and was the highest grossing film that year.  Despite his great success at Metro (where he made a star out of backlot extra Ramon Novarro), Rex Ingram was not cut out for the assembly line aesthetic of Hollywood.  (In this regard, Ingram was a kindred spirit to Frenchman Maurice Tourneur, who also did good work at MGM but split from the studio over artistic differences.)  Denied a shot at directing the 1925 epic BEN-HUR: A TALE OF THE CHRIST (a bloated $4 million spectacle for which he continues to receive erroneous credit), Ingram headed back across the Atlantic to Nice, in the south of France, where he established his own Victorine Studios.  Ingram would continue to make films for Metro but on his own terms.

The team Ingram assembled to make THE MAGICIAN is an interesting one.  Missing from the production credits but conspicuous in her absence is June Mathis, who jumped ship at Metro-Goldwyn after the merger with Louis B. Mayer and took a job at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount; I wonder if it was Mathis’ interest in mysticism and the occult that inspired Ingram to adapt the Maugham book in the first place.  Leading lady Alice Terry was Ingram’s wife, so no surprise there.  The Indiana-born Terry was a top-billed actress of her day and had acted opposite Valentino in THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE and Lewis Stone in a dual role in Ingram’s THE PRISONER OF ZENDA (1922).   For his heavy, the diabolical, homonculus-growing Dr. Oliver Haddo, Ingram chose Prussian actor Paul Wegener.  As had Ingram in his native Dublin, Wegener started off studying law in Freiberg but switched to acting with Max Reinhart’s troupe in Berlin.  In 1913, Wegener starred as THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE, a free adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic doppelgänger tale William Wilson, whose legacy can be discerned in such contemporary works as FIGHT CLUB (1999) and ADAPTATION (2002). Fascinated by the Jewish fable of The Golem, Wegener co-directed and appeared in three film versions of the tale, the most famous in 1920.  Made in partnership with Carl Boese, THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD is a precursor of James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), which departs from Mary Shelley to depict its Creature not as a maturing/evolving humanoid but in a shambling, stiff-legged fashion similar to Rabbi Lowe’s clay automaton.  While at this late date it may seem to have been a no-brainer for a director making a horror film to cast the star of a previous, successful horror film, in 1926 the horror genre was far from being a going concern.  Germany had produced THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919) and NOSFERATU (1921), both of which were exhibited in the United States, but topics focused on the fantastic and grotesque were considered tasteless, vulgar, and potentially harmful to children.  It would not be until the one-two punch of Universal’s DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN in 1931 that horror began to take its rightful place alongside melodramas, westerns, musicals, romances and war films.

Certainly, horrific subjects were not unknown in the silent era, nor were they (for all the carping of the critics) unprofitable.  The first known film adaptation of Frankenstein was shot by the Edison Company in the Bronx in 1910 (a year before Ingram hired on) and there were several stabs at Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - the most notable (at that point) played by  John Barrymore in 1919.  Lon Chaney had made a cottage industry out his repertoire of grotesque characters, most notably in Universal’s expensive literary adaptations THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923) and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925).  Chaney, “the Man of a Thousand Faces,” also played one of the silver screen’s first ever mad doctors in THE MONSTER (1925), based on the 1922 stage play by Crane Wilbur and directed by Roland West.   If THE MONSTER seems to beat THE MAGICIAN to the punch as the first of this kind of horror picture, it’s worth noting that West’s film (even with the participation of Chaney’s corpse-like clinician Dr. Ziska) bears more of a resemblance to the “old dark house” thriller, a vein West would continue to mine with THE BAT (1926, based on a successful stage play) and its own “talkie” remake THE BAT WHISPERS (1930).  Where THE MAGICIAN seems to be the true forebear of James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN and the host of “mad scientist” movies that Universal and its rivals cranked out through the 30s and 40s is in the details of the isolated tower pied-à-terreur of Oliver Haddo, the vaulted, dungeon-like laboratory, the dwarfed assistant and the fetishistic sexuality of Haddo, who prefigures a host of Classic Horror weirdos, most notably Bela Lugosi’s Murder Legendre in WHITE ZOMBIE (1932), Erich von Stroheim’s Dr. Crespi in THE CRIMES OF DR CRESPI (1934), Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorius in THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), Peter Lorre’s Dr. Gogol in MAD LOVE (1935), Lugosi’s Dr. Vollin in THE RAVEN (all 1935), just about anybody Lionel Atwill played between 1932 and 1946 and all the sundry High Priests of Arkham and Karnak who tried to use the undying Kharis as a wingman in Universal’s “Mummy” movies.  The film’s wild card is a vignette set in Hades, a drug hallucination (or is it?) visited by Haddo upon the heroine to break her will of chastity.  Featured prominently in this hellish aside is Hubert I. Stowitts, famed dance partner to Anna Pavlova and a professed metaphysician in his own right.  Ingram’s production manager was Harry Lachman, who spun an entire movie out of this brief sequence as the director of the Fox Film Corporation’s DANTE’S INFERNO (1935) and later directed the mad scientist programmer DR. RENAULT’S SECRET (1942), while cinematographer John Seitz went on to lens some classic film noir titles, as well as Billy Wilder’s Gothic masterpiece SUNSET BLVD (1950), which some film scholars feel was inspired in no small part by Ingram’s (truly lost) TRIFLING WOMAN (1922, based on a novel by Marie Corelli, aka Mary Mackay), also shot by Seitz.  Put to work as a gofer on Ingram’s set was a young Englishman named Michael Powell, whose father ran a small hotel in nearby Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.  Later an acclaimed filmmaker in his own right (with and without partner Emeric Pressburger), Powell’s PEEPING TOM (1960) is a psychological study in obsession and fetishism that, with Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), diverted the course of American horror (for better or worse – you make the call) from mad doctors to schizos, slashers and serial killers.  Without Dr. Haddo, would we now have Dr. Lector?  Or Jigsaw?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  If you live for this kind of thing, as I do; if you want to see the first stirrings of the as-yet unborn horror genre in America, if you want to see one of the first mad movie scientists fly his freak flag high, then watch THE MAGICIAN. Long unseen, long considered lost (the claim appears as early 1967, in Carlos Clarens’ An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, and was echoed by Peter Haining in The Ghouls in 1971), unsuccessful in its day but influential as Hell, THE MAGICIAN is a seminal work of movie maniacism and dramatical devilry.