Katherine Hilliker — The Motion Picture Alibi (1922) 🇺🇸
If a spark of life remains in a dying picture Miss Hilliker generally puts it on its feet
by Adela Rogers St. Johns and Katherine Hilliker
I suppose there are a great many people who unconsciously imagine that the titles of a screen drama are photographed right along with the picture.
Of course they know that when the handsome young hero with the vaseline hair-cut clasps the blonde heroine in his arms and makes an impassioned speech, the following subtitle “Agnes, Be Mine” doesn’t register automatically upon the silver sheet.
But the public, which is so apt to take the good things for granted, generally assumes that the titles which run through a picture are as simple as the A B C’s from which they are constructed.
Their unanalyzed conception of titles is limited to introductory ones, such as
“Little Nell, the sheriff’s only daughter, who had just returned from an eastern boarding school” and spoken words like this: “with the grass not yet green on my poor sister’s grave, I cannot be your wife.”
Or they may even possibly remember explanatory titles of this caliber: “The bonds had been placed in the safe to be opened on Dorothy’s eighteenth birthday, but when the door swung open —”
Beyond that, they neither know nor speculate.
The caverns of inconsistency bridged.
The holes of impossibilities filled up.
The chasms of indecency avoided.
The abyss of poor acting skirted.
The crags of carelessness leapt.
All these accomplished by the little 10 to 45 word titles, the public does not even suspect.
Many a lady’s reputation and many a man’s heroism have been saved by a clever subtitle.
Many a censor has been tripped, foiled, utterly routed by a few flickered words that made things that did appear to be not what they seemed.
The title is to the screen production what the alibi is to a criminal lawyer.
When every other defense fails, resort to your old friend the alibi.
When you can’t get it by the exhibitors or the censors any other way — fix it up with a title.
Insidiously, quietly, unostentatiously. titles camouflaged many a picture until you can’t tell whether it was one of the Dotty Dimple series or part of the memoirs of Casanova.
This is an expose of the motion picture alibi — the subtitle. Of course, it is much more than that. In the past year we have seen titles by William deMille [William C. deMille], Will Rogers, Rupert Hughes, Anita Loos, and Charlie Chaplin that were gems of wit and literary construction.
The people that are always agitating about making pictures without any titles remind me of people who prefer a salad without any dressing. When the American public as a whole reads so little, why take away one of their few enforced opportunities to absorb literature?
Listen in on the following and I will show you how all this is done: I met Katherine Hilliker one very rainy afternoon at the Goldwyn studio, where she had reached what in studio parlance is known as the “raw meat stage” over some titles she was preparing for two Italian productions which Samuel Goldwyn imported for release this fall. “Theodora” and d’Annunzio’s “The Ship.” Now Katherine Hilliker, formerly a San Francisco newspaper woman, is considered one of the best title writers in America. She first won fame by her clever educational titles for the Chester travel pictures Since then she has titled everything from “Passion” to sausage comedies.
I fell upon her.
“It is too rainy to play,” said I, “and much too damp to work. Come and tell me about some of the artistic crimes you have prevented, some of the really difficult things you have done with titles. Come and explain to me the hardest situation you ever had to camouflage, the most risqué thing you ever had to get by the censors.”
“They won’t sound much to tell,” warned Miss Hilliker; “it’s like a bridge hand — always looks easy to play after you’ve done it I can only give you a few scattered, illustrative examples.
“I just got through titling Theodora. It’s an Italian picture and very temperamental. I can give you two instances of what you want from there, if you’ll soothe Mr. Goldwyn’s feelings by stating that I say, and mean, that it’s a really great picture.
“They evidently had forgotten to ship some of the film, because they started a hectic scene in the royal box of the amphitheater, with the Empress Theodora in the center of it, scheming to save her former lover from death by asking the emperor to give him to her that she may torture him properly. About half way through the scene, the Empress is suddenly missing. The rest of the scene proceeds without her.
“So I shot this title as she speaks just before she vanished: ‘Bind his mouth and take him to my torture chamber. I shall go before to prepare his reception.’
“Miscasting is another thing that has often and often to be covered with titles. I did a picture not long ago in which Alice Brady was starred in the role of a chorus girl. This little footlight queen marries the heir-apparent of one of those exclusive, blue-blooded Knickerbocker families that came over in the Mayflower. (My, that boat must have been crowded.) Anyway, the chorus gal’s new mamma-in-law is the last word in aristocracy. She still thinks the population of New York is 400.
“Unfortunately, the actress who was cast to play this grande dame, while she may be an estimable woman and a good thespian, resembled nothing so much in looks, manners, and actions as my red-headed, Irish washlady. Instead of suggesting a Mrs. Van Beekman, she suggested Mrs. O’Flarety.
“So I introduced her like this: ‘Caroline Podge Van Beekman’s only regret in life was that she hadn’t been born a Van Beekman, having achieved, with the aid of her father’s millions, an ambitious marriage, she had spent her days in trying to forget that she had ever been a podge.’
“Naturally, her son’s marriage to a chorus girl didn’t sit well on this lady’s social digestion. It was more delicate than that of a real Vere de Vere.
“But even her humble birth wouldn’t have excused the way that old hen behaved. Of course her new relative-in-law had been in the chorus, but according to the scenario she had remained virtuous and ignorant nevertheless. Notwithstanding which, said Mrs. Van Beekman conspires to trap her, and endeavors to throw her into the clutches of an unspeakable cad of her own set.
“So, early in the story, when the poor mother first hears of her son’s mésalliance, I had the villain say to her: ‘Of course it’s terribly shocking, especially in view of her past.’
“And strengthened it later by preceding the bride’s homecoming with this: ‘Mrs. Van Beekman was a poor dissembler, and the scandalous insinuations to which she had listened hampered her welcome.’
“But here is pure invention of my own that saved a comedy from complete oblivion. The producer brought it to me with tears in his eyes and wanted to know if I could fix it so he could get it by the censors; otherwise he was going to lose a lot of money.
“I felt so sorry for him, I told him I wasn’t mercenary either and I’d take it for half that.
“The story dealt entirely with sausages. Links — miles of them. The young couple were poor and lived in a tiny furnished room where they weren’t supposed to cook, but where they got their meals in a tin can over a gas jet. One day the young husband went out to hunt meat for his mate — having only one thin dime as a club. He bought a lot of sausages. Now these sausages were a lot for a dime because they were no longer on speaking terms with the Pure Food Act. They were, one was led to believe by the action of everyone who came within smelling distance, absolutely non compos mentis. Anyone who got a whiff of them fainted.
“It was not funny. It was extremely nauseous and disgusting. I lost ten pounds myself the week I worked on it and I have never felt really happy with a sausage since. But you couldn’t cut out the sausages because that’s all there was.
“But the Muse of Poetry sent me an inspiration.
“I put in this title spoken by the butcher, as he displayed his wares to the young husband, who staggered back clasping his proboscis: ‘Take these garlic sausages. They is grand, so near closing time I sell him to you cheap.’
“I never heard of a garlic sausage — but that one little word saved the picture from being loathsome and made it quite giggly. Garlic is always funny — decomposition rarely is.
“Sometimes title-fixing is merely a case of psychology. That happened when I was titling ‘Star-Dust,’ a picture made from Fannie Hurst’s famous novel.
“The girl has, according to time-honored custom, married the son of the old miser who holds a mortgage on her father’s home — the father whom she adores. It is thoroughly established that she is making this marriage solely and only to Save her father’s home for him. Then, without anything happening, immediately after the marriage she packs her things and gets out, leaving the old man more than ever at the mercy of the dastardly skinflint and his tighter half.
“Whereupon, since the girl didn’t imagine that this marriage was going to be easy to take and since she had as vet accomplished nothing by it, you decide she is a fool.
“Consequently, I inserted this title as spoken by that lady: ‘What’s more, I told paw he was a fool to carry your father’s mortgage any longer, and he’s going to see him about it in the morning. I don’t care if he is your father, he’s no better than anybody else, and if he had an ounce of pride he wouldn’t be accepting charity.’
“Thus the girl knows that she hasn’t got by her mother-in-law, that her sacrifice has been in vain, and your sympathy is with her when she takes her shoes out from under the old lady’s spare bed and beats it.
“In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I used a trick title that I considered very necessary to sustain the suspense. I did not want the audience to realize that the man was insane. I was afraid they would begin to see this too early, so I used a trick, such as mystery writers use: ‘You will probably think my story the mutterings of a madman, so incredible are its horrors, but I assure you that I am hopelessly, entirely sane.’
“This reassured the audience, and at the same time was strictly true to type, since anyone who is insane always begins by telling you he’s not.
“And yet in another story — a French melodrama — I had to do just the opposite and by titles declare that the villain was insane. He was so darn villainous — the story so terribly melo — (this chap went about slaughtering innocent people wholesale, stealing fortunes from widows, ruining pure young maidens, locking the hero in vaults and turning on the poison gas, blowing up churches and orphan asylums) — that I knew no American audience would ever swallow him as a sane human being.
“So instead of letting him be a villain, I slapped him with this introductory title: ‘Brooding over ancient grudges is a sure road to insanity, and the most dangerous person in the world is the mentally unbalanced criminal who has still enough clutch on reason to simulate sanity. His neighbors knew him only as — — a newcomer in their midst, twisted in mind and body, taciturn and forbidding. But no one ever witnessed the maniacal rages and bitter broodings to which he was prone in solitude.’
“And you bet no one ever did, because there weren’t any.
“And then some people want to do away with titles.”
“Well,” said I, “some people want to do away with pictures altogether.”
“Might as well,” said Katherine Hilliker.
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This film doctor is a charming young woman with a sense of humor and mind. Her cheerful philosophy is reflected in her own titles
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The April issue of Photoplay Magazine will be on sale on the newsstands March fifteenth. You, as a reader of this magazine, will profit by the change, as the editors will be the better able to give you last minute news and comments covering the entire moving picture field. Rapid changes are taking place in the industry that are likely to make 1922 a record breaker. You want this information as rapidly as it develops. The fifteen days gained means closer contact with big events in the film world.
Remember — In the future, Photoplay goes on sale the fifteenth of the month.
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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, March 1922