Jack Mulhall — Discovered (1926) 🇺🇸
You never can tell beforehand about an interview. A star who ought to be tremendously interesting and give you a marvelous story may turn out to be duller than last year's fashion magazines, whereas some inane-looking little blonde may have so many ideas that you wish the editor would turn the whole magazine over to her.
It's a gamble every time.
I went to see Jack Mulhall with high hopes, and let me add at once that I was not disappointed. He wouldn't talk about himself, however, unless I tricked him into it — that was the only difficulty. But set a thief to catch a thief — I've been interviewed myself, and found afterward that a clever interviewer had made me say things without my knowing how it was done.
Driving along the edge of Central Park to Jack's New York apartment, I checked up on my information about him. A dashing young leading man, one of the few who had successfully braved the Spanish invasion which had been led by Valentino; Irish as the Blarney stone; a fine trouper, one of the best, certain always to give a good performance — surely one of those points would turn into a hook on which I could hang my story.
Not at all! Up one of the sleeves of the engaging young man's extremely well-tailored coat was another point, far better than any of those I had thought might work out.
We got off to a bad start, from my point of view. We sat by a big window, listening to the riveters working on a new building near by — nowadays the sound of riveting is as much part of New York as baying is part of a bloodhound — and I tried to make Jack talk about one Jack Mulhall, without success.
He'd talk — oh, sure! All about the play he had seen the night before, said to be one of the worst ever produced in the city. But instead of making fun of the play, he made fun of himself — he burlesqued his own response to it. I mentioned the Cossacks, a Russian troupe then performing at Madison Square Garden, and added that their riding couldn't touch that of our American cowboys — you see, I knew that he was an excellent rider, and thought I'd trap him into talking about himself that way. No use. I learned a lot about the 101 Ranch, where he had once made a picture, and did drag forth the name of an organization of cowboys of which he had been made a member — and promptly forgot the name of it — and there we were.
"How did you like being directed by Al Santell?" I asked, knowing perfectly well that he must have liked it, because people always do — I was just stalling till I could think of another lead. That was when I struck pay dirt, so to speak.
"Say, wait till you see 'Subway Sadie!'" he exclaimed, with that eager, boyish enthusiasm that is one of his most delightful characteristics. Subway Sadie was the picture he had just finished with Santell. "That man's a great director. He can make people be perfectly natural. He's got what Chaplin had when he directed A Woman of Paris — he and Lewis Milestone and Mal St. Clair all have that same touch, they all belong to the new school of directors, it seems to me. They're not so busy thinking about technique that they have actors turning into marionettes.
"Why, I've worked with directors who — well, let's say I had to open a door and come into a room." He was. up and across the room to the nearest door in an instant, and had stepped into the adjoining room and shut the door. "Now, I come in." He walked in, naturally, and closed the door. "See? That's the way I'd naturally do it, isn't it? But no! Here's the way I'd have to come in, according to some directors." Out he went once more. The door opened, slowly. He stood there for a moment with his left hand on the knob, then came into the room, reached behind him with his right hand, and closed the door. Try it yourself and see how stagy the effect is. "Dramatic, they'd say. Artificial as the dickens, isn't it? Or maybe I'd just have to cross the room. They'd be at me — 'Head up, Jack! Chest out! Don't slump!'" He strutted back to his chair, reminding me of an actor of whom one of the critics said that he thought acting meant following his chest around.
"Santell would never have you do that sort of thing. He wants you to act like a human being. That's one reason why Classified was so successful. Then, too, he knows what he wants and how to get it. He doesn't rehearse you till you nearly drop, and then shoot a thing over and over. Sometimes — pretty often — he'll shoot a thing twice, and let it go at that, and both shots will be good.
"Take Subway Sadie. Dorothy Mackaill plays a girl who works in a big New York department store, in the fur department, who wants to be a buyer and go to Paris — that's her idea of heaven. I play a boy who's a subway guard. Now, there's a love scene in it that — well, we're sitting on a bench in Central Park, she and I, just staring off into space, perfectly happy, not even holding hands, just thinking about each other. And I say, not even looking at her, 'Let's you and I get married, Sadie,' and she says, 'All right,' and I reach over and take her hand and put an engagement ring on it. None of this wild clutching of her to me and all that — just a nice, real love scene. Honestly, the way that man can direct a scene "
Nothing, you see, about "Wait till you see me in this! I do this — I do that" the litany chanted by so many leading men. That's Jack Mulhall — giving somebody else the credit.
The riveters added some sort of infernal machine to their other equipment, and in despair I bade him farewell.
"Be sure to see Subway Sadie!" he shouted after me, as I got into the elevator.
Propelled by his enthusiasm. I went up to the studio the next day and lunched with Al Santell.
"I don't know whether that film is good or not," he told me. "Dorothy and Mulhall are awfully good, I think. You know their parts, don't you?. Well, I've tried to keep the picture right in line with the kind of people they portray. New York has been done over and over on the screen, of course — the side of New York that's all night clubs and "
"Caviar," I suggested. "Caviar and Rolls-Royces."
"Yes, and I've tried to show the New York that's sardines and Chevrolets," he answered. "Not the New York of the four hundred, but the New York of the four million. Want to see part of Subway Sadie?"
I did, of course. And though I saw it before it had been titled — save for the working titles which Santell had supplied, some of which were so good that it will be a crime if they're taken out — and before it had been cut for tempo, it was one of the most delightful pictures I've ever seen.
It seemed to me that Santell had got out of a great city what D. W. Griffith used to get out of a sleepy little country town.
After seeing that picture I was convinced that First National has discovered oil in its backyard in the trio made up of Santell, Dorothy Mackaill, and Jack Mulhall.
"Why, with those two you can create a team that will succeed the famous old ones — another Bushman and Bayne combination, one that the fans will love the way they did May Allison and Harold Lockwood," I told Santell, as I emerged blinking from the darkness of the projection room. "They'll be the perfect lovers of the new school. You could do a lot of pictures along the lines of this one, and — oh, but you've already thought of that, of course."
He admitted that he had.
"The next one will be 'The Charleston Kid,' based on a story of Gerald Beaumont's," he told me. "After that, I'd like to do another one I have in mind, and then —"
"If these First National people have any sense, you'll do a whole series," I told him. "Separate pictures, of course, but along these lines. Showing the kind of New Yorkers who go to Coney Island instead of Paris, and to the movies instead of the opera."
"Yes, that's what I'd thought of doing," he replied.
Now, I may be wrong about all this. I thought it over on the way home, and wondered if people want to see reality on the screen, or if they prefer a lot of symbolism — pictures in which the heroine drops a white rose and the villain steps on it; pictures in which the heroine is just a sweet little thing with no money and no friends and, after being in New York three days, has an apartment on Park Avenue and a Hispano-Suiza limousine, but is still sweet and pure; pictures in which the heroine is an immigrant who can dance, and gets a job in the chorus, and immediately the premiere danseuse breaks a leg or back or something, and the heroine takes her place and is the sensation of New York.
I can't answer that question. It's up to you.
But no matter what kind of pictures you like, go to see Subway Sadie. It's worth your time and money. Even the people who go to movies on passes are going to like it — more than that cannot be said!
Jack in a scene with Dorothy Mackaill in Subway Sadie. Those two make such a perfect team that it is planned to use them together in a series of films.
Try to talk to Jack Mulhall about himself and he bursts into a paean of praise for some one else, as Inez Sabastien — see opposite page — discovered when she tried to interview this cheerful Irishman.
Photo by: George Maillard Kesslère (1894-1979)
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, October 1926