Although he was handsome enough to be leadingman, Rex Ingram (1892-1950) made his mark in Hollywood for his aestheticambition as a director. He was in his stride during the height of the silentera, the 1920s. By then, a grammar of cinema had been written, the mechanics ofmotion pictures worked out and the thespian melodrama of the earliest moviesrefined to a more naturalistic style. Although he had to be talked into it,Ingram directed Rudolph Valentino in the actor’s breakout film, The FourHorsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). Ingram fashioned the actor into a starthrough one of the most memorable scenes in silent cinema, an atmospheric tangoin which Valentino, dressed as a gaucho, sweeps his lover off her feet with an eroticcharge of menace.
The enormous critical and popular acclaim of TheFour Horsemen elevated Ingram to the first rank in Hollywood, yet he was aquarrelsome employee of the studio system and soon shunted aside. The coming ofsound closed the curtain on his film career. Ingram devoted the remaining yearsof his life to his first love, sculpting.
As Ruth Barton insists in Rex Ingram: VisionaryDirector of the Silent Screen (University Press of Kentucky), the director wasa visual artist at heart, captivated by the potential of the new medium of film.Although he broke into the industry as a scenario writer for Edison and otherearly studios, story writing was never his strength. At his best, he sculptedfrom light and shadow.
Readable as well as informative, Barton’sbiography links the salient facts of Ingram’s life to his work as an artist andhis time in culture. Ingram grew up on the low rung of the Anglo-IrishProtestant gentry, a class that evaporated under the harsh light of the IrishRepublic despite their general support for Ireland’s independence. While henever met W.B. Yeats, Ingram was infused with the poet’s sense of Celtictwilight. He was a visionary filmmaker but, as Barton readily admits, his placein history is harder to assign than peers such as Erich von Stroheim or D.W.Griffith. Most of Ingram’s films no longer exist or survive only in fragments.
