Phantom Silent Joan
Joan Crawford, the epitome of classic Hollywood movie stardom, made a total of seventy-nine features, give or take, in prominent roles, and fifty-six of those features were made for MGM from 1925 to 1943. Twenty-two of them were silent films. Of those silents, three of them are absolutely or officially lost unless someone finds them in an attic somewhere. These lost ones are Rose-Marie (1928), a silent version of the operetta, Dream of Love (1928) where she played a gypsy (and which was a botch according to its reviews), and The Duke Steps Out (1929), which starred her friend William Haines, and about which she said, “This picture was created strictly for him. I might as well have stayed home.” But of the others that do not circulate or get shown on TV at all, which might still be around and which are gone for good? And which ones might tell us something more about her?
We do still have the two other films she made with Haines, Spring Fever (1927) and West Point (1928), both of which turn up fairly regularly on Turner Classic Movies. She is supporting him in those movies, but there are touching moments between them where he seems to be trying to laugh her out of her self-seriousness and her anxiety about everything. Early Crawford studies did not include her role in Frank Borzage’s The Circle (1925), but that movie also gets played on TCM now, and it shows that she got a good small showcase part in period costume for the film’s prologue. It has often been written that she was just a showgirl in musical numbers with her friend Myrna Loy in Pretty Ladies (1925), which has usually been listed as her first movie, but that isn’t true. Still billed under her real name, Lucille LeSueur, Crawford gets a solid supporting role as a warm friend to star ZaSu Pitts. I caught it on YouTube before it vanished.
That first year at MGM, when she was probably twenty-one years old, Crawford did lots of extra work in movies, even standing in for Norma Shearer in Lady of the Night (1925), where she can be glimpsed for a fraught split second when the two characters that Shearer is playing confront each other in the backseat of a car. This movie also plays on TCM sometimes, but there are two key films Crawford made in 1925 that still exist but rarely get shown: Old Clothes (1926), a comedy with child star Jackie Coogan, and Edmund Goulding’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925), her first real breakout part. I’ve been told that Sally, Irene and Mary played at Film Forum twenty years ago, but it hasn’t been seen since.
Crawford was up against 150 other girls for her role in Old Clothes. “That little part meant the world to me back then,” she said. Crawford was determined to land the role, even going so far as to get on the casting couch with Coogan’s father, who she later called “a dirty pig.” That movie might not tell us much about Crawford, but surely Sally, Irene and Mary would. I once met a collector, Tom Toth, who had a print of this picture, and I’m very sorry I never got a chance to see it. With all the interest in Crawford, why has this key film barely been shown since its release?
The Boob (1926) plays on TCM, but that’s a very poor comedy where she only has a bit role. Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), her film as comedian Harry Langdon’s leading lady, does get shown every now and then, but what about Goulding’s Paris (1926) and The Taxi Dancer (1927), both of which might still exist? (There’s a fragment from The Taxi Dancer that can be seen online, and it’s tantalizing.) Winners of the Wilderness (1927) is definitely still extant: I saw a copy of it on YouTube before it was yanked. This is a real eye-opening piece of Joan Crawford silent ephemera where she plays a French noblewoman in period costume in a surprisingly convincing fashion. She probably couldn’t have managed that in a talkie, but silent films allowed for such elasticity.
Of her other films from 1927, The Understanding Heart, an adventure with Francis X. Bushman, might still be around, while The Unknown is clearly her best circulating silent film, a gruesome study in love and amputation starring Lon Chaney that still gets played a lot, and deservedly so. Twelve Miles Out (1927), her first film co-starring John Gilbert, exists in a truncated sixty-two minute version with badly translated intertitles. Though it’s disappointing, it still deserves to be seen on TCM.
1928 was the year that Crawford hit pay dirt as a star with Our Dancing Daughters (1928), and that movie still gets trotted out to Charleston with its sequel Our Modern Maidens (1929), while the adventure Across to Singapore (1928) is still around and turns up on the TCM schedule. The Law of the Range (1928), a western with Tim McCoy, might still exist, but it does not get shown if it does.
In 1928, Crawford made another film with Gilbert called Four Walls, and surely Four Walls, Sally, Irene and Mary, Paris and The Taxi Dancer are four of the ten largely unshown phantom Crawford silents that would tell us more that we need to know about her. I recently read online that Four Walls might be “held in a private collection.” And immediately I thought: What do I have to do to get into that private collection? Sleep with Jackie Coogan’s father? Like Joan herself, I will do what it takes.
by Dan Callahan