Malcolm St. Clair — Sex, With a Sense of Humor! (1926) 🇺🇸
That is the kind toward which Malcolm St. Clair aspires.
One of the most difficult jobs I ever did was to write a review of "The Grand Duchess and the Waiter." It was almost impossible to explain on paper the charm of that lovely film.
I find myself faced with exactly the same task in attempting to describe the man who made that picture, Malcolm St. Clair.
There are two types of interviews — those in which you meet a celebrity, keep his mind on your work, have a dull time and get a mild set of nothing to work into a story. And there are those that happen once in a green moon where you encounter a real personality, have a perfectly swell time talking about what really interests both of you and come away with a series of impressions as brightly colored and as intangible as soap bubbles. Most stars and many directors can be put in a single sentence. But not Mal St. Clair. The nearest you can come to it is to say that his general idea seems to be that the world is so full of a number of sins he is sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Cecil De Mille once told me that if his pictures didn't explain him, nothing ever can.
Malcolm St. Clair didn't say that, but of him it happens to be true.
Besides his "Grand Duchess" Mal created "Are Parents People," "A Social Celebrity," "Good and Naughty," and "A Woman of the World, " pictures of light love and lighter laughter, sparkling with charm and fresh imagination, and blessed with a surcease of bunk and blah.
Alter meeting Mal St. Clair you know those qualities didn't get into his pictures by accident.
He is a very young man to be as wise as he is. Just twenty-eight and six feet three inches tall. His eyes are gray and his height has taught him to duck his head so that he gazes down upon the world from beneath very heavy brows.
We went for lunch at New York's smartest and most expensive restaurant and he talked and ate with equal rapidity. He is known as the fastest worker on the Lasky lot, his production schedule being so far ahead of every other director's that he saves about $50,000 on the cost of every feature.
"Listen," he says, and then he tells you — a little bit of everything. He sits pushed down upon his chair and his quality of aliveness is so intense that if he sprang up every once in a while and hit the ceiling it wouldn't surprise you.
"Listen, don't you think" he starts and the enthusiasms and the loyalties and impulses come tumbling out, salted with gossip and wise observations.
His next picture is to be Dreiser's "An American Tragedy," a grim story that ends in the death house at Auburn prison.
"Listen," says Mal, busily consuming macaroni and chicken livers. "Dreiser's right simply calling it An American Tragedy. The commonplaceness of murder and capital punishment in this country! It happens all the while. Dreiser took two books to tell it, but any good news reporter writes the same story every six months and gives it half a column.
"Listen. Who do you think ought to do the part? Not any of the chaps suggested, do you think? Not Glenn Hunter or Charles Emmett Mack. Good actors, both of them, but not right. It ought to be someone new to the screen who will be Clyde Griffiths and not a movie actor."
"How will you find him?" I managed to interpose.
“Listen." He gulped his favorite brand of cold tea hurriedly. "He'll come. I'll keep on making tests. I don't care if I make a thousand. Betty Bronson turned up for Peter Pan. I'll get my Clyde Griffiths. " He grabbed the French rolls.
"Menjou told me you know more about the camera than any other man," I said.
His very broad grin spread over his face like a spotlight. "Listen," he said. "Adolphe thinks I'm a good dog director, now that I've refused to do his 'Ace of Cads.' But it was Adolphe who gave me the break. I've been the most fired director in pictures. Honestly. Listen. This has never been told before.
"When I was a kid I wanted to get on a paper. So Harry Carr — you know Harry Carr, the west coast movie critic — got me on the Los Angeles Times. I wanted to be a cartoonist. The job Harry got me was office boy. Five dollars a week. There isn't any lower form of life than being a newspaper office boy. It was terrible. But I got to be the cartoonist. Then I was terrible.
"Harry, who at that time was sporting editor, began dabbling around with movies. He suggested the same dabbling to me. I went over to the Sennett lot, as a comedy cop. I was hired and fired, two tires to every hire. Finally they ran out of directors. So they let me be one. I got fired some more. Then Gilbert Seldes, when I was quite permanently fired, wrote a blurb in which he referred to one of my pictures as a subtle achievement.
"Sennett saw it, found out what it meant and hired me back again. I went, both in and out. Then I did two reelers — 'The Fighting Blood' series and on to Warners where I directed Rin-Tin-Tin. Honestly.
"Listen. I've got an idea that there is a new type of sex abroad today. Sex with a sense of humor. I want to do a story called The Popular Sin about divorce. Of course, there wouldn't be so much divorce if more people had a sense of humor, but if they did have the sense of humor, there would be less re-marriage. Love is the laughter of the gods, don't you think? I want to do that kind of stuff. Romantic realism. Glyn sex is too intense. It's timed. Three weeks. Six days. His hour. Their moment. Hot and soon over.
"But if you're a romantic realist you're everlastingly in love — with somebody. Like Pola. Listen, Pola's marvelous. Wonderful. It's great directing her. Honestly. Pola would like to play Czarinas and things all the time, so that when she got interested in a man she could knock him over and drag him off. Not a third of her charm screens. She's remarkable.
"Listen. This world is full of charming people. Truly. I know a couple of hundred myself. Louise Brooks. You met Louise, didn't you? Charm? Ye gods! Menjou. With that face like a mask. I believe it was years before he knew he had it for he's not like that inside. But that marvelous face. Imagine being ruled by your face that had nothing to do with you."
He looks up and behold he knows a beautiful blonde across the room. He rushes over to say hello to her and rushes back.
"When Paramount gave me my first real chance in Are Parents People? he said, "I said I wanted Menjou in the cast. They told me I could have him if I could get him. 'He's a dog director,' said Adolphe when I was mentioned. 'That's all he ever will be. I won't work with him.'
"I felt I had to have him for that father role. Actually, Menjou needed the part, too. He was playing too much of the society slicker. He had to show the public the — the — well, you can only call it sweetness — he really has. That role had the quality of it. So I went to him and said, 'Chaplin gave you your chance, didn't he? He let you get away from heavies and do your stuff. Give me a chance and save me from the dogs.' He did and now The Grand Duchess and the Waiter is his most successful picture. Mine, too.
"Listen. Do you think I slipped with A Social Celebrity? I did. That was simply a character idea. Not a story. That was the fault in it. There wasn't enough to it. There has got to be something pretty heavy in a plot you want to treat very lightly. Otherwise it blows away on you. That's why I refused The Ace of Cads. I can see it only as a character idea, not as a real plot."
He was attacking an ice now. "Listen," he said. "There are no subtleties except mental subtleties. Those can be either comic or tragic. They are never in between, thank heaven. That's why if you stick to them, you can't be dull. I'd rather do the comic ones, so I slant toward sex in my pictures, where the most comic of them lie. But it won't take any change in method to do An American Tragedy. I'll show the tragic subtleties in that case. But you see why that boy has got to have as much charm as the Waiter had to have for the Grand Duchess. Only he'll make you cry instead of laugh." He paid his check and glanced at the time. We looked at each other in astonishment. Somewhere three charmed hours had disappeared. "Look at that," he said. "I don't want to but I've got to go to Long Island. There are final shots of 'The Show-Off’ to be done. Ford Sterling is going to be great.
I'm not so very keen on doing the great American boob. Largely because I don't particularly believe in him.
"But Sterling's great. But I want to stick to these charming people who actually enjoy being in love."
His long legs flapped in their oxford bags as he raised himself up into some vast altitude.
"Give me an epigram before you go," I begged.
"Listen. Give me time to think as much as I'm able. I know. When you've learned to get the most amusement out of the most trifling thing, you've got the world licked."
In his Sennett days Mal was an extra boy where Chester Conklin was a star. But Mal's gone up in the world since then and their friendship makes Chester chesty.
Only a wife — Mrs. Malcolm St. Clair — but pretty enough and chic enough to star in one of those sophisticated comedies so expertly directed by her husband. The rise of St. Clair, from a director of slapstick to one of the most subtle directors of light comedy, has been most encouraging to other ambitious young Americans.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, September 1926