Cullen Landis — That Ridin’ Landis Kid (1924) 🇺🇸
A bewildering mixture, Cullen Landis. A star-gazing poet and Western boy-hero, his blood thrilling at the exploits he enacts, make-believe though they be.
At twenty-eight there’s something eternally boyish about Cullen. The implied belief that all this excitement of the Western movie is real to him, endows even the impossible melodramatic pictures in which he has appeared recently with a semblance of plausibility.
“Like Westerns?” — incredulously. “Why, I love ‘em! Down in Tennessee, when I was a kid, all I read and thought about was ‘wild West stories.’ Oh, boy, but I ate ‘em up!” Somehow the intensity in his voice was oddly out of keeping with its Southern drawl. “Wanted to be a detective — that’s why I got a job reporting on a paper — I’d been reading how reporters followed clews and found criminals.
“Now I’m crazy about these Western pictures. Love to ride and fight. Besides, they make money. Don’t kid yourself the public wants highbrow photo plays. Maybe the minority does, but the box office is what counts. I always ask, did a certain picture make money? Well then, it’s a good picture, no matter what the critics say.”
Cullen has knocked about the studios for years; before he started acting, he was prop boy and assistant and held almost every subordinate job on the lot.
“I learned a lot about character portrayal when I played on the stage here a few weeks ago with Miss Marjorie Rambeau in ‘The Valley of Content.’ A wonderful artist — and she told the stage director to let me work out my role in my own way. In the past that has been one fault with the movies, the director tryin’ to boss the works, tell you how to do everything. But now they’re letting the actor use his brains sometimes.
“This picture I’m in now, Charles K. Blaney’s production for Vitagraph, ‘One Law for the Woman,’ taken from one of Blaney’s old melos, is full of hokum, but d’you know I almost believe in it myself! Hero goes blind, fights the villain, escapes, his faithful horse finds him, they roll down a cliff, in the excitement he recovers his sight in time to rescue the girl as the mill is blown up, fade-out kiss, horse registers jealousy. Great stuff, that, touches the heartstrings and the imagination. It’s what the sit-by-the-fires dream of doing themselves.”
Cullen is undoubtedly one of the most popular actors on the screen.
High-keyed, restless, that spirit finds outlet in many and constantly varying activities. Sports of all kinds, making automobiles out of odd heaps of junk, organizing newsboys’ baseball teams and playing” with them as though he were one of them.
“Next I’m to do ‘Magnolia,’ Booth Tarkington’s play, for James Cruze — a romantic Southern story. And after that, my own production, ‘The Ridin’ Kid from Powder River.’ Every time I start to produce it something happens to the financial backing and the thing falls through. But I’ll never give up and now it looks like I’ll really get to do it the first part of 1924.”
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, April 1924