Josef Swickard — Sunset Visions (1924) 🇺🇸

From the larger, established companies the public need expect but slight reply to their demand for better pictures. Instead of finer quality, the motion-picture manufacturers — yes, just that — still concentrate upon settings, background, investiture, adding little that is new or vitally progressive to the screen.”

Josef Swickard was speaking, and his recent formation of a company to produce his own films is the result of perseverance, of faithfulness to ideals.

“I want to make artistic films. Why say that the public does not desire such pictures? Have they had many opportunities to judge? Are not the films to-day, with a few exceptions, being ground out on the same old formula? I ask you, consider now — what more can the screen attain along present lines? Settings can scarcely be more gorgeous than at present; we have here the most beautiful women, the handsomest young sheiks, in the world.

“My goal, now that the opportunity is mine to begin to execute my plans, is to portray characters from life in whose struggles and heartaches there was much drama. Men who have suffered and toiled, who have exerted a constructive influence. Some day I hope to make a little series, inexpensive but artistic, detailing the lives of our music masters — Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, and perhaps of our great dramatists. Mozart’s is a poignantly beautiful story.”

Thirty-two years of theatrical work, eleven of them in the movies — for he is another of those pioneers of the Keystone Cop days — have taught Mr. Swickard, however, that one’s ideals must be worked out in practical fashion. So, for all this while, playing mostly ministers and failures and saintly rôles until he raised a mustache and thereby, he claims, developed a more unique personality, he has acted the parts that the producers wanted, with the germ of his great ambition dormant in his heart.

A few years of comparative neglect followed his first outstanding screen rôle in “The Tale of Two Cities,” but his portrayal of the old Frenchman in The Four Horsemen established him as a character actor of ability and of personal charm. And ever since that time we have seen him more and more frequently.

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Photo by: Mojonier

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1924