If you’ve ever wondered what silent films would have looked like had talkies been held back a few years, this is a good example. It will also show you aspects of America you will see in no other film. For years it was thought lost.
In the 1990s, Howard Hughes’ attorneys made a historic decision – to hand over the Hughes films and papers to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This included three silent films, Two Arabian Nights (1927), The Racket, and The Mating Call (both 1928).
Searching for an outstanding silent for our Thames Silents series, my production partner David Gill and I flew to Las Vegas to see Lewis Milestone’s The Racket. This was the first film to deal with the censorable subject of the gangsters’ links with politicians – it was about Al Capone, with Louis Wolheim in the lead. Both Milestone and Hughes received death threats but made the film anyway.
In the viewing room, we were intrigued to see a cluster of ancient green filing cabinets, on top of which were scattered the miniature aircraft used in Hell’s Angels. We were underwhelmed by The Racket – although very good of its kind, it was based on a play and looked it. “Half a great film,” we agreed.
There was just time to see the first reel of The Mating Call – and we wanted to see more. It would take years for Jeff Masino and his Flicker Alley to make the film available. But it was worth the wait.
Rex Beach may have been from “the he-man school of literature”, but he was an ideal novelist for pictures – he wrote The Spoilers (1914), one of the first American features, a recently rediscovered Gold Rush epic called Winds of Chance (1925), and The Goose Woman (1925). He also co-produced the powerful Lon Chaney film, The Penalty (1920).
Photoplay’s review of The Mating Call said, “James Cruze has directed a picture of great romantic appeal.” A surprising description for a small-town murder story featuring the Ku Klux Klan. But there was no doubt that Cruze’s direction was superb.
A pioneer actor before he became a prolific director, Cruze should be acknowledged as one of the great talents of the silent era. He was of Danish origin, brought up a Mormon in Utah, where as a child he watched the covered wagons go west. He became a member of Belasco’s New York stage company, joined the film business with Thanhouser in 1908 and was popular as a star of serials. It was ten years before he became a director, with the Lasky company. He was incredibly fast and efficient – in his heyday, the mid-1920s, he was turning them out every eight weeks or so. He would always shoot on location and had a strong eye for documentary.
While Cruze is best known for The Covered Wagon (1923), his biggest picture was Old Ironsides, about the American struggle with the Barbary pirates in the early 19th century. It was such a difficult picture to make that it apparently turned his hair white. Many of what reviewers thought his finest films have been lost – the most heart-breaking loss may be Hollywood (1923), a parody of silent film-making featuring everybody who was anybody.
Cruze, a heavy drinker, was extremely gregarious; when you turned up for a party there was one bowl full of dollar bills for his pals who were out of work. And another full of cocaine sachets – all the fashion in those “days of innocence”.
As so often, once a director has made a smash hit and fails to follow up, he falls down to Poverty Row. Howard Hughes, the wealthy playboy, and a film enthusiast of the first order, offered a welcome alternative; with his Caddo Company he was able to transform minor projects through major budgets. His Two Arabian Nights won for Best Comedy when the Academy Awards had that category. He rescued several careers – Cruze’s, for instance – and bought Thomas Meighan’s contract when Paramount was ready to let him go.
Meighan’s first film had been made in England, with Gladys Cooper. In America, in 1915, he began at the top – as a star with Cecil B. DeMille. In 1919, he made the long-lost The Miracle Man (1919), directed by George Loane Tucker. Meighan was responsible for getting it made – he held the rights – and it was a tremendous hit, boosting the career of a character actor called Lon Chaney. Also that year, Meighan was in Male and Female by DeMille, which was another hit. Meighan’s contract after this gave him $1280 a week and a say over direction, casting, editing, etc. When Valentino rose to stardom he tried (and failed) to get the same.
The Mating Call features two exceptional actresses, Evelyn Brent and Renée Adorée. Evelyn Brent (real name Betty Riggs), unforgettable in Sternberg’s Underworld and The Last Command, was part Irish, part Italian. She started in pictures in 1916 at Fort Lee, where she played with John Barrymore in Raffles the Amateur Cracksman (1917) and moved to England for a while. She also worked on a picture in Spain and returned to America, courtesy of Douglas Fairbanks, who wanted her as his leading lady in The Thief Of Bagdad (1924). She was kept waiting for months; nothing was being shot and Mary Pickford was getting suspicious, so Brent quit and made a slew of programme pictures – until Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em (1926), her debut at Paramount with Louise Brooks, directed by Frank Tuttle, established her talent at last.
Renée Adorée and Thomas Meighan had made a hit together with Tin Gods (1926), directed by Allan Dwan, and now lost. Of The Mating Call, Variety said the picture would help Meighan in his comeback, but that it really belonged to Miss Adorée.
According to historian Tony Fletcher, Renée Adorée was born Jeanne Reeves in Lille in l898. Her parents were circus performers. Her English father, a comic, was, like Chaplin, from Lambeth. Renée and her siblings followed the parents’ tradition. Just before the War, their father died of typhoid and the family split up. Renée worked as a dancer, tableaux model, and at the Folies-Bergères. Coming to England, she joined a theatrical troupe under Claude Fleming. She travelled to Australia and made her first film – £500 Reward – in 1918. She continued to Canada and then the United States, appearing in vaudeville. In 1920 she reached Hollywood and appeared in her first American film, The Strongest, directed by Raoul Walsh.
Through the next ten years she made forty films – including such classics as The Big Parade – the last being Call of the Flesh in 1930. Becoming seriously ill, she collapsed on the set but insisted on finishing the film. For almost three years, she was confined to a TB sanatorium. At one point she contemplated suicide, having a gun smuggled in. Six months after leaving the sanatorium she was dead.
The Mating Call was controversial in 1928. The Ku Klux Klan, which had been expanding long before The Birth of a Nation, had reached a membership of 4 million. Howard Hughes was as brave to deal with this subject as he was to tackle gangsterism, for no walk of life was entirely free of Klan members.
But the film’s view of the Klan is unfamiliar; Klansmen are shown exercising puritanical control over their community. The film has them wearing black robes, but according to Evelyn Brent, it was still banned in some cities.
I expected Variety to say something sensible about the Klan in their review, but to my surprise they didn’t. “Sequences having to do with Klan activities in a small American town are lacking in punch. Subject of the K.K.K. is pretty blah for dramatic purposes at this late date, anyhow.” A Texas exhibitor, however, admired the handling of the Ku Klux angle: “Both Kluck and Anti-Kluck can see this good picture.”

Kevin Brownlow