Hawthorne of the U.S.A. was our third film from 1919. It starred Wallace Reid, whom we last saw in a leading role in Carmen, from 1915. There are a variety of other familiar faces as well: Lila Lee, the female lead, and Theodore Roberts both appeared in Male and Female, from just a few weeks back, and Charles Ogle we’d seen as far back as 1910 playing the monster in Frankenstein, and also more recently in Romance of the Redwoods. Also present was Harrison Ford as the protagonist’s best friend, or as IMDB calls him, Harrison Ford (II). I’ve been vaguely aware that there was a silent film star with the same name as the modern actor, but this was the first time I’d seen him in an actual film. The film itself is based on a play, and is essentially a romantic comedy, though with a slight satirical tinge. It begins with Reid winning a fortune at Monte Carlo, and making some vaguely anti-monarchical statements. This encourages some revolutionaries from the fictional country of Bovinia to draw him into their attempts to overthrow Bovinia’s king. Once he arrives in Bovinia, he ends up falling in love with the king’s daughter, and gets involved in various other intrigues. Overall it is a lightweight, occasionally amusing film, with no serious political points to make, excepting possibly the out-of-style viewpoint that the solution to foreign instability is just a good dose of American common sense. The revolutionaries even today seem reminiscent of the Bolsheviks, and certainly must have seemed that way to the audiences of 1919, but the source play was performed on Broadway in 1912 (and, as an aside, starred Douglas Fairbanks), so 1917 is presumably not the specific satirical target.
Next week we watch True Heart Susie, our final film from 1919, and our third feature from D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish and Robert Harron. After that we’re going to take a couple of weeks to watch some shorts from the teens, and then move on to the 1920s. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
