Cinevent Notes: TRIUMPH (1917) with Lon Chaney

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Richard M Roberts
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Cinevent Notes: TRIUMPH (1917) with Lon Chaney

Postby Richard M Roberts » Wed Apr 30, 2014 2:50 pm

TRIUMPH

This is a tale of a Girl named Nell (Dorothy Phillips) who has ambitions to be an actress. While awaiting the train to New York, she meets the leading man of a repertory company (William Stowell) and when they get to the Big Apple, he introduces her to the company’s Stage manager (William J. Dyer) who with lust in his eye, gives her the lead in a play hoping for returned favors. But Nell falls in love with the writer of the play, Paul Neihoff (Lon Chaney) who has a sad and tragic bent and is in fragile health. The melodrama is in the intrigues and escapades of the theatrical life, of which Young Nell is about to get a crash course in….

TRIUMPH is one of the many movies made by Universal Pictures from 1914-17 in which then $75 a week contract player Lon Chaney appeared in, playing everything from bandits to old men to villains of every shape and size. In TRIUMPH, he requires little makeup as the essays the part of the struggling playwright trying desperately to get his play produced before he ruins his health. The film stars Dorothy Phillips, one of Universal’s top leading ladies of the late teens, married to Actor and Director Allen Holubar. TRIUMPH is interesting in that it is one of her few surviving films a well, the fate of all of Universal’s silent stars thanks to Universal’s general lack of care regarding preservation of their output.

Phillips’ most well-known surviving film is THE HEART OF HUMANITY, a 1918 WWI saga more remembered today for one of Erich Von Stroheim’s hated hun portrayals than her performance. Dorothy Phillips started at Essanay in 1911, working as leading lady to Francis X. Bushman and Bryant Washburn. She moved to Carl Laemmle’s Imp Company in 1914, and quickly became one of Universal’s busiest leading ladies, but like so many of that first generation of silent stars, she barely register today even with film historians, though she was a big deal at the time. Phillips had married Allen Holubar in 1912, he is most remembered today as having been the first to play Captain Nemo in Universal’s 1916 version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. When he formed his own independent company in 1921, Phillips went with him, and starred in Holubars productions until his death in 1923. Re-emerging into the Industry in 1925, Dorothy Phillips continued in second-lead roles for various studios through the end of the Silent Era, then continued as a bit player into the 1960’s. She died at the Motion Picture Home in 1980.

Lon Chaney’s own performance in TRIUMPH is a very understated one for him, but he is very effective, eliciting much sympathy for his doomed playwright. His hard-work at Universal had paid off in terms of billing since his coming to films in 1914, as he had moved from shorts to features very quickly, but unfortunately his salsry had not risen above the $75 a week he had begun at. In 1918, Chaney went to Universals Front Office and humbly asked for a raise to $125 a week, not an unfair request after four years of solid service to the Company, but apparently was rather caustically rebuffed, being told he wasn’t even worth a raise to $100 a week. The patient-but-strongwilled actor immediately packed up his make-up case and left the lot.

After a few nervous and quiet months, Chaney was hired by William S. Hart to play the villain in Hart’s western RIDDLE GAWNE (1918) and Chaney’s performance brought positive attention from audiences and critics alike. Chaney soon found himself a busy freelancer whose fame would be boosted even further by his role as the fake cripple in George Loane Tucker’s megahit THE MIRACLE MAN (Paramount 1919), guaranteeing that Universal would now be paying their prodigal and frequently returning actor way more than $125 a week from now on.


Director Joseph De Grasse was the older brother of silent movie meanie Sam De Grasse, both coming from a large French-Canadian Family who emigrated to America in the early 1880’s. Working first as a journalist, Joseph became enamored of the Theater and became a stage actor in the 1890’s. BY 1910, Joseph De Grasse was working for the American Pathe’ Company as a leading man along with his wife, actress Ida May Park. By 1915, both husband and wife had moved behind the cameras to become Directors.

De Grasse became one of Universal’s very busy filmmakers of the teens (he also directed Lon Chaney’s other surviving Universal feature from 1917, THE SCARLET CAR) and was one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Directors Association, which preceded the Directors Guild of America. By the late teens, De Grasse had a fine reputation as a craftsman, and was busily freelancing, his two most well-known films being THE HEART OF THE HILLS (1919) with Mary Pickford and THE OLD SWIMMIN HOLE (1921) with Charles Ray. He retired from directing in 1926, but would still do an occasional acting turn in films through the thirties (he can be seen in the John Wayne Monogram oater THE DAWN TRAIL (1934)) and he passed away in Eagle Rock, California in 1940.

Of TRIUMPH’s five reels, only the first three and a half survive, but the restoration of the film brings us the ending through stills and text. Though perhaps not a major Chaney discovery, any film from his long apprenticeship at Universal is an important find, and it’s an interesting and sensitive tale.



RICHARD M ROBERTS

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