'June Mathis: The Rise and Fall of a Silent Film Visionary' by Thomas J. Slater
'June Mathis: The Rise and Fall of a Silent Film Visionary' by Thomas J. Slater
June Mathis was remembered for producing the film that made Rudolph Valentino a star, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). But her career included many other remarkable accomplishments as outlined in the new biography, June Mathis: The Rise and Fall of a Silent Film Visionary.
Author Thomas J. Slater reminds readers of a fact long overlooked but given increasing attention by film scholars: women played important off-screen roles during the movie industry’s formative decades and Mathis was among the most important. Slater unearthed this quote from the July 1923 issue of Photoplay magazine: “Probably the most powerful woman in the motion picture industry today is June Mathis.” By that time, she was the production head at Goldwyn, one of Hollywood’s top studios.
She earned her prominence through hard work. Slater notes that in her less than 12-year motion picture career, Mathis wrote screenplays for 99 films—not including the ones never produced. From early on, she took interest in the technology of filmmaking, the craft of storytelling in the new medium, and she aspired to “improve” those pictures, elevating them into art.
Many of Mathis’ screenplays are melodramatic and Slater becomes an apologist for melodrama, defined as the social made intensely personal, expressed through operatic emotion. Slater situates her success in anchoring melodrama to reality “in details of settings, scenery, costumes, appearance, and most importantly, actors’ expressions and gestures.”
Encouraged by her mother, Mathis was on stage and on tour from an early age, leading an unconventional life for a woman of her epoch. Why she switched from theater to film in 1915 is as unclear as many of her motivations. The paper trail is thin at many points. Slater finds what critics thought about Mathis more easily than what she thought of herself. The celluloid trail is also patchy early on. Like most silent movies, many of Mathis’ films are lost.
Slater admits that establishing Mathis as an auteur is difficult, given the gaps in the historical record and the collaborative nature of her medium, but repeatedly insists that the recurring theme of her screenplays concerned what today might be called toxic masculinity. “Mathis condemned the idea of male identity based on violence and greed,” he writes. Her screenplays offer criticism, implicitly and explicitly, of militarism and avaricious capitalism. However, much of her work is also problematic now but characteristic then of the era’s unthinking racism.
Mathis never lived to see the end of the silent movie age, dropping dead in 1927 while attending a theater performance in New York. By then, her career was in decline, stemming from wrangling over the production of the epic Ben-Hur (1925). Some have said the writing was already on the wall as Hollywood studios merged into bigger corporations linked to Wall Street with an ethos that praised men as inherently more “efficient” and sensible than women, who were increasingly pushed from the industry’s power positions. By the late ‘20s, “Mathis’s privileging of art over commerce was totally at odds” with Hollywood’s direction. She was spending too much money trying to produce quality products in an industry that wanted to sell popcorn.
June Mathis: The Rise and Fall of a Silent Film Visionary is published by University Press of Kentucky.
