GROSS/9 1921 - sex, war, the sweep of history and finally some dancing
A beautiful, subtle anti-war epic.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, REX INGRAM, REX INGRAM PRODUCTIONS, 1921, 134 MINUTES. U.S. GROSS: $11,846,301.
The context
We’re into the 1920s, the pre-history of the cinematic form is well-and-truly over and the apex of the silent era has arrived. Dozens of the most important movies in history - in creative, cultural and technical terms - belong to this final decade before sound took over.
The economics is in place, capital is flowing, the supercharged creative production-line that is the Hollywood system has displaced all the other local systems and, in fact, already offers the only viable model for the concentration of resources and talent needed to make movies at scale everywhere in the capitalist world (where a hundred mini-Hollywoods are already being built).
This is also the era of Hollywood Babylon - the uncontrolled migration of libertines and desperate wannabes and freaks who flocked to the coast in search of recognition, expression, freedom. But it’s also the liberated era before the paradoxical nuclear over-reaction of the Hays Code simultaneously neutered and hyper-stimulated the new form. And the money machines that we still know - MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount and their peers - all originated in this decade.
The film
Where to start with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? It’s a sprawling dynastic epic that starts in the new world and returns to the old. In fact, the action - the whole narrative weight of the film - does something we’re not used to: it travels West to East across the Atlantic, from the wild and dynamic new world to the stultifying, collapsing old. It’s like a kind of unwinding of the frontier storyline. History run backwards. And this awkward reversal structures the whole film. We slip down the spiral of Atlantic history. It doesn’t end well.
We start in Argentina, on the pampas, where the beef cattle roam (listen, I’m going to hold off on the story of the Argentine beef industry, of the trans-Atlantic trade, the fleet of refrigerated steamships invented for the purpose for fear of losing you all together). There’s filial rivalry on the ranch, sexy tango dancing in Buenos Aires, a family divided by war, grimly realistic fighting on the Western front, gilded-age excess in Paris and jackbooted German nastiness in the occupied zone.
Rex Ingram, our director, was an artist before (and after) he was a film director - a painter and sculptor on a grand scale. Michael Powell was apprenticed to Ingram in the South of France later in the twenties and David Thomson says he spoke of Ingram’s “charisma, knowledge, taste, and capacity for being easily bored.” It’s easy to see Ingram’s influence on Powell’s work - bold, painterly, expressionistic. In this film Ingram is like a 19th Century novelist. He wants to bring us the whole sweep of history and he composes scenes that are recognisable tableaux - the rancher looking out across his endless herd of cattle, a palace overrun by carousing soldiers, the improvised military hospital, the artist’s studio, the mud and blood of the battlefield.
I could write 40 pages about this film. It’s an exceptionally subtle and complex work of art. But I won’t do that. I’ll give you three vignettes, one from each act.
Act one, Argentina: the libertine
In the first part of the film, among many other things, 25 year-old Rudolph Valentino essentially invents ‘the latin lover’. The Buenos-Aires nightclub tango scene at the beginning of the film is absolutely torrid - and surely prototype for a thousand scenes like it from the whole history of film - sexual tension, testosterone, booze. Julio - Valentino’s character - is, somewhat uncomfortably, sponsored by his indulgent grandfather, the priapic patriarch Madariaga.
Madariaga (‘the Centaur’ they call him), in the manner of a Shakespearean elder, pushes his grandson to challenge the hapless non-speaking character dancing the tango with the sexy woman played by Beatrice Dominguez. There’s a bit of argy-bargy between the men but Julio cuts in and Dominguez gives him a look that I suspect would have been enough to provoke the Hays Code all on its own.
Act two, Paris - partying as war closes in
Julio goes on a journey. On Madariaga’s death his whole family leaves behind dusty, coarse gaucho-land and disperses into the much more civilised old world - more fool them. The German son-in-law (waxed moustache, military bearing) back to his country and the French (floppy hair, lavishly-appointed palais) to his. Julio, the prodigal, on moving to Paris, takes up residence in fabulously seedy Monmartre and fills his splendid double-height studio with all the essential sorts - bearded philosophers, nude models, soaks of one kind and another - and drinks wine, lots of wine.
He teaches tango, gigolo-style, to swooning flappers at tea dances and becomes the darling of the beau monde. When he falls for the beautiful young wife of an influential Senator, though, things turn ugly. As the war closes in the fun comes to an end and although he’s a foreigner and not required to fight, he joins up on the French side. The decadent becomes, of course, a selfless hero.
Julio’s father, favoured son-in-law of patriarch Madariaga - do try to keep up - had been spending his time in Paris burning through his inheritance by extravagantly stocking his various homes - and his fabulous Marne Valley chateau in particular - with ridiculous artefacts (there’s a gold bath he’s been assured belonged to Napoleon) but, in the suffering of the peasantry and in the desperate fighting around the chateau he finds humility and love for others.
Act three, the Marne Valley, humanity prevails
Horsemen has been called the first anti-war film. War and conquest are rejected throughout. There’s an uncomplicated humanism. I’ll venture to say it’s the humanism of a man brought up at the edge of the metropole, where the empire and its warlike ways had less purchase. Rex Ingram was born in Dublin (he’s ten years younger than James Joyce - they shared the city in their youth) and life took him to the French Riviera via Yale and Hollywood.
This film would have been impossible in 1920s Britain. Audiences for war films in Britain were soaking up dramatic reconstructions of WWI battles and weeping at stories about young men who didn’t return. Raucous audiences sang along to the patriotic songs played by cinema accompanists and, of course, many of the men present would have known the battles represented and almost everyone would have known the loss of a loved-one or a friend.
And being opposed to war in the old world in this period meant having to acknowledge the tricky position of an imperial power - even those who condemned war couldn’t avoid contamination by a kind of awkward moral ambivalence and there’s usually some kind of self-righteous dialogue about the ultimate necessity of war. This movie offers only condemnation. We’re not asked to consider the merits of this war, only its horror. Not the complicated, compromised pacifism of the artists of the imperial nations but a directly-stated revulsion for killing.
There are some stereotypes. The Germans are cruel, straight-backed militarists with carefully-combed blond hair (in one scene a batman waxes a general’s moustache). It’s fascinating to note that so much of the language and imagery here could easily be transposed to a war film from twenty or thirty years later. For the Kaiser read Hitler. For super-culture read Übermensch. Our French son-in-law, whose chateau has been over-run by the German troops, appeals to his nephew, one of the jack-booted occupiers, as that gold bath is looted, but is told “What else can you expect - this is war!”
Anyway, in this act, the fighting reaches its climax. Impressive wide shots from height show the shelling of mediaeval villages, soldiers and civilians alike are brutally and realistically killed. In a powerful scene that’s like something from Rome, Open City, a group of villagers is lined up, defiant, for execution by firing squad in the rubble of their village while the German officer who ordered their killing contemptuously eats an apple.
The film’s resolution is Shakespearean in that, by the final scene, all the principals are dead and the surviving secondary characters are left to consider human folly and to embrace each other. What’s left of the divided family is reunited in the ruins of the old world they must regret returning to with such haste. It’s as if they were punished for the vanity of thinking you can reverse history and go back to where you came from.
I watched the film on YouTube. It’s tinted (including some clever red, white and blue work for a patriotic scene in a Parisian cabaret).
The gross figure at the top ($11,846,301) is from one of the dumb lists I’m using for this project. I can’t tell if it’s US-only or what. Anyway, I listened to a BBC Radio programme about The Big Lebowski the other day and learnt that this splendid Coen Brothers movie grossed only $8M in the U.S. in its year of release.
The David Thomson quote is from his Biographical Dictionary of Film, which I will not cease to go on about (new edition coming in 2027).
Carl Davis’ 1992 score is essentially perfect. This interview is fascinating, although I think it’s just a fragment - I’d like to know more!
The four horsemen in the title are not just any four horsemen but Albrecht Dürer’s. They get a namecheck in the Parisian section and some very frightening fire-breathing expressionist puppets stand in for them at critical moments.
This film was remade in 1962, by Vincente Minelli (although it was apparently a huge flop) and, of course, the action is transposed to the Second World War. Must see.
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list.
And here’s another top-grossing list.