Victor Varconi — Hungary Sends a Missionary (1924) 🇺🇸
Time was when any deep and essential emotion in pictures had to be registered either by some frantic tortured wringing of the hands, or some strained expression on a player’s face. Shades and nuances were virtually unknown, and the real business of putting over the significance of a scene was usually left to a subtitle.
This custom is now being outgrown as a really finer technique is developed. The beginning of this technique was really the performances of European actors, and more recently the very direct influence exerted not only by them, but also the directors who have come to Hollywood. The actors have not thus far been so much in the spotlight, but there is one who probably will be, and that is the Hungarian, Victor Varconi.
“He’s a marvel with his eyes.” That was the dictum of Cecil De Mille [Cecil B. DeMille] shortly after he had begun directing Varconi in “Triumph.” “He can say more by shifting his glance or dropping his eyelids, or even by a slight movement of the corner of his mouth, than most other players can while emoting in a hundred feet of film.”
The players who have made their reputation appearing under De Mille’s direction during the past decade are ample proof of Mr. De Mille’s judgment, for nearly all of them have gone on to stellar heights. Is it not likely, therefore, that Varconi will do the same?
Varconi has been seen in this country in two pictures that he played in abroad — one of these “The Red Peacock,” had Pola Negri as the star, and the other, “Sodom and Gomorrah,” pretty generally released as “The Queen of Sin.” De Mille saw him in the latter and tried to engage him, but Varconi was under contract abroad.
Later, Varconi obtained a release from this agreement and came to America. When he arrived in Hollywood about the first thing that he did was to locate Mr. De Mille, who gave him one of the three featured rôles in Triumph. Then he was cast again with Leatrice Joy in Changing Husbands.
When Mr. De Mille engaged him it was with the understanding that he should learn to speak English. Now he not only speaks English, but boasts a vocabulary of slang.
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1924