Henry King, Virginian (1922) 🇺🇸

Before I met Henry King I was chiefly impressed by the fact that he had directed one of the greatest pictures ever made, “Tol’able David.”

by Delight Evans

After I met Henry King I was chiefly impressed by the fact that he has very blue eyes and was born in Virginia.

Which is, to me at least, the answer to the question, “Why is Henry King?”

Because that is something you are often asked these days, if you are concerned with pictures at all. Henry King made Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave, which was rated one of the best photoplays of its year, and which made stars of Douglas MacLean and Doris May. For awhile one didn’t hear so much about Henry King. And then came Dick Barthelmess’ first stellar story, Tol’able David. You know the rest; but I’ll tell you anyway. Such a critic as Heywood Broun forgot himself so far as to make a pun like “Long Live the King” when he’d seen David and the director’s later Barthelmess films. You go to meet the newest great man of the film industry. You wait a while and then the door opens and a young man, very much tanned, bursts in. He looks like those young men of the African veldt that Cynthia Stockley is always raving about. Those tanned young men with brilliant blue eyes, who follow adventure into “the great open spaces.” Henry King had just been arguing with a taxi driver and that was why he was late. But he looked romantic anyway.

I never saw a man who liked to talk about taxicabs as much as Henry King. I thought he would never get tired of talking about taxi-cabs. Was he a motor maniac, I wondered; or was he imbibing atmosphere for a film which would star the splendidly suave Mr. Barthelmess as a Broadway bandit? Then I caught on. Henry King was so afraid that I was going to interview him that he would have done anything to escape the ordeal. From the first moment I saw him I had no intention of interviewing him. You couldn’t. He isn’t one of those directors. He’s an entirely new kind of director. Sometimes I suspect he isn’t a director at all. A director could never have got such a fight on the screen as that which occurred in David. A director — But Mr. King doesn’t think of himself as a director anyway. He began as an actor and he continues as an actor. He would rather act than direct. Except when there’s a fight scene. He just loves fights.

I didn’t ask him how he got those quietly tragic or tense scenes that have hit audiences and everybody between the eyes the past six months. I didn’t have the nerve. It would have been like asking Anatole France how on earth he ever managed to think up all those beautiful words.

Besides, it’s all so simple, he says. Doesn’t see what he’s done to make people sit up, anyway. Why, he just tells a story, that’s all. Just picks out a good story and goes ahead and tells it.

“Not,” he accidentally explained when he thought I wasn’t listening, “not the story of Harry Splivens and Mary Whoosis and Jake Blitz and a lot of other people. Just the straight, simple story of Harry Splivens, and what happens to him, and what he does, and what he thinks about. You’ve got to tell a story if you want to make a good picture. If you haven’t a corking story, you can sometimes evolve a pretty good picture out of an ordinary yarn. If you let it work itself out and let the characters behave as they want to. “You’ve got to think in terms of pictures. We didn’t make a literal translation of the stage play, Sonny. We used the theme of the stage play on which to build our little drama. Films demand different treatment. I don’t use a continuity. Not a regular, cut-and-dried continuity, though of course I make notes. A continuity holds you down. It makes your picture a product like flivvers or soup. Machine-made stuff doesn’t go. Not any more.”

He didn’t volunteer any opinion as to what is wrong with the picture business. I think he thinks it’s a pretty good old game after all, and he seems to get a lot of fun out of it.

He’s been an actor ever since he was seventeen. Stock, Repertoire. Pictures. When he was nineteen he played Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both roles. Now he wouldn’t do it for a million dollars; he says he knows better. But just the same he is going to sneak back to acting some day, if he happens on a story to suit him. He doesn’t believe a director can act too. Though he made a good job of it in a corking picture he did for Pathé, “Help Wanted — Male,” in which he directed Blanche Sweet and also played her leading man. He liked doing that because it was mostly outdoor stuff and he didn’t have to put any makeup on.

Henry King would probably laugh if you accused him of working on inspiration. But that is exactly what he does. He waits for ideas for big scenes and they always come. I wouldn’t advise everybody to do it that way. He just happens to have the knack of clutching ideas as they fly by.

Ever hear how the funniest scene of Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave came to be? King was working on the set which shows the hero, MacLean, behind the bars. Hero is fidgeting. His leave is about up. He has got to know what time it is. King couldn’t have him just look at a clock. That was old stuff. He thought and thought. For once with him the idea remained elusive. Inspiration passed him by. In desperation he had the guard walk past MacLean’s cell and had the hero ask him what time it was. He knew it wasn’t funny, but he couldn’t help it.

They rehearsed the scene. “What time is it?” asked MacLean of the guard. Then, from somewhere back of the director’s chair, came the sepulchral voice of a stage hand: “Whadda you care; you ain’t goin’ no place.”

That remark, made into a title, got one of the biggest laughs of the season. And the stage hand was prevailed upon to sit in the director’s chair for the rest of the afternoon.

Mr. King, however, has evolved his best scenes all by himself. The right scene of David — the suspense, the terror, the realism. The pathos of Sonny— a story, which was, on the stage, only bathos. And now the smash of The Bond Boy, another tale of the Virginia mountains. He isn’t a one-picture director. He is too safe and sane. He doesn’t depend upon a particular punch or a single situation. He gets into the heart of a story and stays there.

It has been hard to get through this story without making a pun on his name. But if I had, I would never have been able to face him again.

And as I told you, he has very blue eyes, and he was born in Virginia. And you know what that means.

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Meet Henry King, the newest great man of the film art

Henry King directing Richard Barthelmess in a scene of The Bond Boy

Apeda Photo

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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1922

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see also

• Malcolm McGregor — Yale to Hollywood (1922)
• Henry King — Motography’s Gallery of Picture Players (1914)
• Henry King, of the Balboa Company (1915)