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Rex Ingram

1893–1950

 

In the heyday of the cinema between the wars, the world's largest film production company was the conglomerate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM.  At the heart of this giant firm was the Irish-born film director Rex Ingram, who was one of the profoundest influences over the most popular entertainment of the day.  To some he was as mysteriously romantic as the films he created.

      He was born Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock, on 18th January 1893 at 50 Grosvenor Square in Rathmines.  This was a wealthy, exclusive district of Dublin, inhabited by many wealthy Protestants.  His father, the Rev. Francis Hitchcock, then a divinity lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, was not one of them.

      Rex Ingram was educated at St Columba's College in Rathfarnham, but there was no money to send him to university.  On leaving school at the age of eighteen he immigrated to the United States.  He reached New York on 3rd July 1911, and never saw Ireland again.  His original intention was to go into business, but the friend of the family who had invited him over provided Ingram with the means to study art at Yale University from January 1912.

      A little over a year later, in 1913, he went to work in the film industry, which by then was a decade old.  He worked for Edison, Vitagraph, and for the Fox Company both as an actor and as a script writer.  His tall, dark-haired, handsome figure was a striking presence in films such as The Artist's Madonna, with Lillian Walker in 1913, and many others.  Soon he moved out to Hollywood in California, where the sunlight and cheap land had attracted the bulk of American film makers.

      The film industry was then a young man's business, and at the age of twenty-three Ingram directed his first film for Universal, The Great Problem.  He set up his own production company, and went on to direct Black Orchids, Reward of the Faithless, The Flower of Doom, and Under Crimson Skies.  He joined Universal in 1916, where the full scope of his talents were realized by June Mathis, and more films followed.  During the Great War he served briefly with the Canadian Air Force.

      In 1920, then twenty-seven, he joined the Metro Company, which had been set up in 1915.  Here he made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from the international best-selling novel of 1916 by Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867-1928).  This both brought to the screen Rudolph Valentino and made a star of Alice Terry.  The film was a huge international success, largely through the astonishing screen presence of Valentino, and it made a fortune for Metro - it also meant lasting fame for Ingram.  In 1924 the company became part of MGM, for whom Ingram developed his later pictures.

      Alice Terry, who also had Irish roots, was a beautiful, charming, and witty redhead - though always a blonde in her films - with whom Ingram at once fell in love.  They were married in November 1921, though there were to be no children.

      Ingram next made The Conquering Power, which again starred Alice Terry.  His next great discovery was another Latino star, the young Mexican Ramon Novarro, who played the two main roles in The Prisoner of Zenda.  Ingram went on to make Trifling Women, Scaramouche, and Where the Pavement Ends from the South Sea tales of John Russell.

      He had ambitiously hoped to direct the original Ben-Hur, which would have provided great scope for his visual imagination, and deprived of this he spoke about retiring, but his friends van Stroheim and Dmitri Buchowetzki insisted he return to work, claiming that he was the world's greatest director.  The friendship with the eminent von Stroheim, a notoriously difficult man, was an important one.  When von Stroheim's Greed ran into difficulties, Ingram saved the project by cutting the initial twenty-four reels down to eighteen.

      Like so many others, Rex Ingram began to feel constrained by the Hollywood studio system.  Alice Terry retired and they moved to Europe, establishing (with the help of MGM) the Victorine Studios in Nice (which still exist: it was there that Truffault filmed La Nuit Americaine or Day for Night).  Ingram sought out locations in Europe and especially in North Africa, to which he was especially attracted.  At one time he even thought of becoming a Muslim.  Here he made The Arab in 1924, filming in Tunisia with Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry and Haydee Chikly, daughter of the Arab film pioneer Albert Chikly.  (In their enthusiasm for Arab culture the Ingrams adopted a young Tunisian, Abd-el-Hader.)

      In these years he also made Mare Nostrum (1925), again based on an Ibañez novel of 1918.  This was followed by The Magician (1926), from the novel by Somerset Maugham, and The Garden of Allah (1927), from the Robert Hichens novel, which later gave its name to a famous Hollywood restaurant.  For The Garden of Allah Ingram had taken his crew over to Tunisia, where he now made friends with the local ruler.

      The film business was changed forever with the introduction of sound the following year.  The Three Passions in 1928 was his last silent film.  Ingram made one sound picture in 1931, Baroud (Les Hommes Bleus, issued in the US as Love in Morocco), again set in North Africa, this time against a Moroccan background, in which he also played a part.

      Ingram had started out as an artist, and in 1933 he gave up films, to return to his first loves, painting and sculpture, to which he gave powerful and expressive forms.  He now had time to travel and to write.  He published two novels, The Legion Advances, about North Africa, and Mars in the House of Death, about bull-fighting in Spain and Mexico - themes which suggest the continuing influence of Ibañez.  Like many men of great intelligence, Ingram was easily bored, and the attractions of Europe, Africa and Islam faded.  He and Alice Terry returned to Hollywood, to live in Los Angeles.

      He was recognized by an honorary degree from his alma mater, Yale University, and received the Legion d'Honneur from France, and the Order of Nichan Iftkar from the Bey of Tunis.

      Rex Ingram died unexpectedly in a Hollywood hospital on 22nd July 1950 at the age of fifty-seven.  Alice Terry survived him, only dying in 1987 at the age of eighty-seven.  She was a substantial source for the admiring and thorough biography by the Irish film historian Liam O'Leary, a man who did much at the National Film Foundation in London, and in retirement in Dublin, to restore to public view Ireland's contribution to the cinema.  His admiration of Rex Ingram was shared by such diverse cinematic talents as Kevin Brownlow, David Lean ('in everything he did the camerawork is impeccable'), and Michael Powell, who had been his apprentice in Nice ('the greatest stylist of his time').  The film historian David Thomson claims Rex Ingram remains 'an important director with a rapturous visual style'.

      In all, Ingram made more than twenty-seven films, and was one of the most distinguished figures in the silent cinema.  Like many of the great film makers of that era, his fame was eclipsed by the coming of the talkies, and by later remakes of his best films.  But by those who love the early cinema, and recognize talent in all its forms he has not been forgotten.  To this day The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is still one of the great landmarks in the development of the modern cinema.