Cesare Gravina — A Successful Portrayer of Failures (1924) 🇺🇸

Any years ago a man stood in a theater called La Scala, quite the finest in Milan, conducting the orchestra while a young girl sang.

Destiny is strange; in the long, changing years, the girl became a great success. Her name is Mary Garden. Another friend the man had, a comrade of his boyhood. His name was Enrico Caruso.

And the orchestra leader? To-day he is playing pathetic old fellows, life-beaten but happy-spirited failures, in the movies. And the peculiar thing about him is that he, himself, isn’t a failure at all, for Cesare Gravina owns a string of theaters in Brazil and other South American countries. He might live in quietude and comfort there at home, but he prefers to stay in Hollywood and work. In Merry-Go-Round, he gave the screen one of its finest moments. You surely remember him as the old clown who, dying, kept right on smiling for the children, and doing his funny tricks so they wouldn’t see his suffering.

Such a polite, odd little fellow, Cesare Gravina! With the self-effacement of the old who realize that this busy younger generation hasn’t much time to bother, he stands aside, begs your pardon apologetically if you shove against him. Always smiling, always bowing, always saying, “Si, si,” it is only in his expressive pantomime that he tells you things — a hint of sorrow, somehow, even though he laughs, and perhaps a vague suggestion of adventure behind that veil that he never lifts. But to nobody here has he told why he gave up his beloved music to start all over again in the movies.

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Photo by: Roman Freulich (1898–1974)

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, August 1924