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This chapter discusses Hawks’ film Twentieth Century, a film written with Ben Hecht and Charles MacAruthur. Hawks talks about working with John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, and describes the public’s reaction to the outlandish style of comedy featured in the film.

Capellani joined the Metro Picture Corporation in late 1917. This period was to be the most fruitful of his American career. He directed prestigious productions with famous stage actors such as Katharine Harris Barrymore in The House of Mirth (1918) and above all the great Alla Nazimova in three of her greatest successes, which made her a star of the silent screen.

Introduction to John Barrymore and his masterful achievements on the stage in the early 1920s. Warners lures him to Hollywood in 1925with athree picture deal that he considers too lucrative to pass up. Spying Dolores from Jack Warner’s office, he casts her on the spot as his leading lady in The Sea Beast. While Maurice remains in New York trying to save enough money to pay his way west, Jack and Dolores’s romance blossoms under the wary but welcoming eye of Mae Costello. Barrymore yields happily to Mae’s mothering as the family awaits Maurice’simminent arrival.

Maurice brings with him to Hollywood a diary in which he confides his rage and revulsion at the fact of his demotion from head-of-household to lowly chauffeur, now having to drive his wife and daughters wherever they wish to go. Without an income of his own he has to do as they say, even after discovering that his twenty-two-year-old daughter Dolores had become romantically involved with forty-three-year-old, hard-drinking Jack Barrymore. The result is a steadily escalating domestic war that takes another two years to reach the crisis point. Meanwhile, Dolores continues her rise into the front ranks of Hollywood stars. Helene lags behind, but holds her own.

Dolores gives birth to her first child, Dolores Ethel Mae Barrymore, nicknamed Dede. Helene gives into actor/director Lowell Sherman’s daily proposals and marries him in a lavish ceremony held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Though they have reconciled, Helene chooses not to ask Maurice to give her away. John Barrymore does the honors instead. Married life again goes awry for Helene. The couple fight constantly, with Sherman’s omnipresent mother, Julia, adding insult to injury. The small movie parts Maurice had been getting evaporate with the Crash of 1929, forcing him to return to vaudeville to make ends meet. While performing in a sketch in Stockton, California, he befriends a young woman named Vivienne Sengler. She sues him a year later on a bogus charge that he had backed out of his promise to marry her. Eventually, she drops the case, but not before dragging the Costello name through the mud.

Vruwink’s sterility casts a pall on his marriage to Dolores, who desperately wants more children. For this and other reasons, she starts drinking heavily. Helene is offered permanent residence at the Motion Picture Country Home, and with Le Blanc now training with the Merchant Marines, Dolores’s custody of Deirdre is made official despite the fact that Le Blanc continues to welsh on his support agreements. Dolores makes her last film appearance in This Is the Army. John Blyth Barrymore, an unruly and difficult youth, tries his family’s patience. Le Blanc sues Helene for custody and a protracted legal battle begins.

Maurice retires to the Motion Picture Country Home, where he will spend the rest of his life. After her father is awarded custody, Deirdre is shuffled around before being reunited with her mother at the Wolff Sanitarium. In October 1950, Maurice suffers a massive heart attack, from which he never entirely regains consciousness. He dies in the hospital the morning of the 29th. Vruwink is fed up with Dolores’s drinking and moves out. After a brief reconciliation he leaves again and she files for divorce. Following a short-lived attempt at stage acting, she retreats to an empty house and the relative solace of her drinking.

Dolores retires to her Fallbrook ranch to raise Tony far from any parental threats to her guardianship. She consolidates her control over her grandson by getting power of attorney, but takes no chances of any reattachments between mother and son by barring Dede from the ranch. At age fifteen, Tony leaves the ranch to go live with his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles. John Blyth (now John Drew) Barrymore burns his bridges in Hollywood and heads off to Italy to make a fresh start in pictures. He returns after a few years, but despite a number of well-received television appearances, he self-destructs. Dolores gives up drinking but is diagnosed with emphysema after a lifetime of smoking. She dies in Fallbrook at the age of seventy-five.

With the death of Rudolph Valentino in 1926, John Gilbert is the biggest male sex symbol in films. Despite fights at MGM, he is still at the top of their roster-this chapter takes a look at other male stars of the period, Douglas Fairbanks, Ronald Colman, William Haines, John Barrymore, and quotes interviews with Gilbert aboit his feelings on stardom and acting.

This chapter focuses primarily on Wyler's first prestige project, Counselor-at-Law, starring John Barrymore. It recounts the director's behind-the-scenes problems with the star actor, but also analyzes Wyler's successful transformation of a hit play by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Elmer Rice for the screen. In what was the first of a dozen Broadway hits that Wyler brought to the screen, he displays early-on his gifts for making a play look and feel cinematic. The chapter also touches on his attempts (with John Huston) to bring Laughing Boy to the screen, as well as briefly discussing his film Tom Brown of Culver, which was made in part on location.

A background of the talkies, and his earliest experiments (Hollywood Revue, and the disastrous His Glorious Night and Redemption) in 1929 and '30. Background on early studio "revues." Early signs from the press and MGM that things are not going well, and Gilbert is no longer worth his new salary. In 1929, Gilbert marries-and quickly separates from-Broadway star Ina Claire.

When MGM hired J. E. Williamson for a follow-up to Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea to be titled The Mysterious Island, filmed in Technicolor, the production took four years to complete. Verne’s own plot was abandoned, but many of the new movie’s motifs would reappear in later Verne films beginning in the 1950s, The Mysterious Island proving to be a classic of early science fiction. At the time, however, it was a commercial failure, and there was to be no more Verne science fiction for two decades; other Verne films remade stories already brought to the screen during the silent era with narratives familiar from the stage. The most ambitious was a remake of Michael Strogoff incorporating battle footage from two recent European versions, but in the wake of the Russian Revolution, audiences in the United States lost interest in heroism during czarist Russia, and the result was another commercial failure. Similarly, the range of Verne titles in print declined precipitously, and only the appearance of the first Verne societies and biographies in English pointed to a possible revival.

In the introduction to the book, the editors introduce the topic of John Barrymore’s performances in the cinema, and provide an overview of the various methods and approaches used to analyse his work in the book to follow.

The author discusses Barrymore’s performances onstage prior to his roles in performances of Shakespeare’s plays. The chapter discusses Barrymore’s work in plays such as Peter Ibbetson, The Fortune Hunter, Justice, and The Jest. The author shows how his pre-Bard experiences onstage enriched and fulfilled the performative imagination that emerged when Barrymore eventually tackled Shakespeare.

John Barrymore’s 1922 Hamlet introduced Freudian interpretation as a means of character development into American acting. It also provided Barrymore with a screen star persona that based his acting virtuosity on portraying unstable characters. This chapter explores the way his star persona was articulated through the production and reception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) and then in The Mad Genius (1931) a decade later.

This chapter examines John Barrymore’s performance as the titular character in Sherlock Holmes (1922), focusing on the reception of Barrymore’s performance as the titular title character. The chapter shows how Barrymore’s star image was taking shape at the same time as the Holmes character was being adapted to visual culture. Barrymore’s performance is explored in the context of Sherlock Holmes as an adaptation.

In 1924, John Barrymore joined Warner Bros. to star in Beau Brummel, the Clyde Fitch play made famous by stage actor Richard Mansfield in 1890. Here, as this chapter explores, Barrymore fused elements of Classicism, Neo-Romanticism and Realism in his screen performance. In doing so, as the chapter suggests, Barrymore preserved the traditions of earlier generations of actors while modifying them for modern audiences and new technologies.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Moby-Dick experienced a resurgence, and two loose adaptations traded on the novel’s increasing prestige, The Sea Beast (1926) and Moby Dick (1930), both starring John Barrymore as Captain Ahab. This chapter examines Barrymore’s role as early interpreter of Melville’s work onscreen. Differing substantially from the source text, these films prioritize the maiming of a young and heroic Ahab, whose status as possessor of a confident, desirable masculinity is radically compromised by his injury – a situation with special and tragic resonance to the interwar period.

In four films made from 1926 to 1932, Don Juan, Eternal Love, Arsene Lupin, and Grand Hotel, John Barrymore played a series of leading men embroiled in passionate affairs. He showed himself adept at playing the accomplished flirt, the psychologically damaged lothario, the drunken target of seduction, and the sophisticated partner in crime. As this essay shows, these roles display a breadth of characterization and reveal Barrymore’s skill as an actor in both silent and sound films.