Warner Oland — A Highbrow Villain from the Arctic Circle (1918) 🇺🇸

August 14, 2024

What? You never heard of Umea? Well, to climb down off the high horse, I never did myself until just the other day. Now I know all about it.

by Randolph Bartlett

I know that it is a seaport in Sweden on the Gulf of Bothnia, on the sixty-fourth parallel of latitude, which means that it is about even with the southernmost point of Greenland. I know that it is within two hundred miles of the Arctic Circle, and has a mean annual temperature of 34.9 degrees. This mean temperature is very important and should be remembered carefully. For it is closely allied with the final, and most important fact concerning Umea, which is that this chilly town was the birthplace of Warner Oland. Recall, now, that the mean temperature of this Swedish metropolis is just 2.9 degrees above freezing — or in other words, if you poured the entire year’s climate into a tub and dipped it out a cupful at a time, you would hardly be able to drink it. I venture the assertion that this is decidedly mean temperature. And since Mr. Oland lived in it for the first ten years of his life, is it any wonder he treats Irene Castle and Pearl White so mean in the Pathé serials? He had a running start in cold-bloodedness. But while this tells everything we will ever need to know about Umea, I wonder if Umea knows about all the things that have happened to this wandering son of the Vikings. (I suppose everyone who comes from the Scandinavian peninsula should be so designated.) The word “happen,” however, hardly fits. Things don’t happen to men like Oland. He has played many parts in the drama of life, worked his way from poor circumstances to something very like affluence, but always he has been what Henley called “master of his fate.” This is the reason why the villain in the play is almost always a more interesting person than the men who play the heroes. The hero must be handsome, tall, attractive in a romantic way. So if a young man happens to be built along such lines, the chances are that one day he will be snapped up by a theatrical or picture producer, and told that he will marry the girl in the last reel.

No such luck for the villain. He has to fight his way through life as through the drama. So with Warner Oland:

“When I was ten years old,” he says, “my father apparently decided that he had had enough of the frozen north, and brought his family to America. Even at that age, my ambitions were definitely formed — I decided to be an operatic star. But, contrary to the general reports circulated in Sweden concerning the Western Hemisphere, gold was not to be picked up on the streets. As I approached manhood, I realized that I would have to earn the money for my musical education, and reading about the big prizes offered in those days for bicycle races, I decided I would win a few of them. I didn’t.

“Next I decided to go to Boston. That was the musical center. I arrived in that city with nine dollars in my pocket, no prospects of getting any more, and immediately spent three dollars on a preliminary music lesson. It was not long, however, before I had discovered that art must be sacrificed to appetite. I knew it would take years to fit myself for opera, under the most favorable conditions, so I dropped the dream, and accepted the next best opportunity — the dramatic stage. My first engagement was as a super in ‘The Christian,’ and while I had given up all hope of singing, it was singing that took me out of the super class. The stage manager, Oscar Eagle, asked us, one evening, who could sing Jesus of Nazareth, the Gounod Christmas song. I could, and I did, and I’ve never been a super since. That was luck.”

“Luck nothing!” I objected. “If you hadn’t won out that way you would have in some other way.”

“Well, perhaps — but that eighteen dollars a week they paid me looked too big to be actually earned by my own efforts.”

The opportunity was all young Oland needed. Slipping casually over the intermediate events — his engagement with Viola Allen’s productions for four years, with Sothern and Marlowe, with Nazimova, with Helen Ware, in “Madame X” and “The Yellow Ticket” — we reach a unique revelation concerning this many-sided individual.

Mr. Oland has achieved the highest recognition in two branches of dramatic art as far removed from each other as the poles and as antagonistic — in the most intellectual phases of modern drama, and in serial photo melodrama. And to make it complete, he has linked the two together with success in the purely commercial drama.

It was Warner Oland who first translated the dramas of Strindberg into English, and it was Warner Oland who played the devilish Japanese in “Patria” with such diabolical cleverness that it brought a protest from the Mikado’s state department. It was Warner Oland who originated the now general “little theater” movement, and it is Warner Oland who nearly kills Pearl White every few minutes in “The Fatal Ring.” It was Warner Oland who introduced the idea of simplified stage settings to the American theater, and it is Warner Oland who pursues virtue and treasure through unnumbered “episodes” in every imaginable transportation device from a high-wheel bicycle to the latest design in aeroplanes. He has played everything from Shakespeare to the very devil, including Peer Gynt, and the invariably accurate mimeographing machine of the International Film Service has recorded the fact that “his drowning success on the speaking stage was his daring interpretation of The Father in which he gained distinction by introducing Strindberg’s works to American audiences.”

“Gained distinction,” certainly, but nothing else. It was decidedly a “drowning success.” And by the way, I had almost forgotten —

Ladies and gentlemen — meet Mrs. Warner Oland, known to the art world as Edith Shearn Oland, portrait painter, sister of Clarence J. Shearn of the New York Supreme Court, lady of letters. This happened thus:

Miss Shearn, one day, laid aside her pallette a few minutes, and dashed off a one-act play. With remarkable luck, she sold it at once, and it was staged as a curtain raiser at the theater where Mr. Oland was then playing. This is the one occasion when luck appears to have had any large part in Mr. Oland’s career. Miss Shearn came to rehearsals — and they have lived happily ever since. Mrs. Oland immediately became interested in the translations Mr. Oland was doing, and their names appear together on their published books. Then came their venture into the field of production of high-brow drama in a little theater with simplified stage settings.

“The most tragically humorous thing that ever happened to me, was a certain criticism of The Father,” said Mr. Oland. “We had worked out our scenes with the utmost care, spent weeks in studying just the exact color schemes to get the proper effects, used all the ingenuity at our command in reducing everything to its simplest form, and then an eminent critic remarked, sympathetically, that the performance was so good it was a shame we did not have a Belasco production. It reminds me of that line from Kipling’s poem, The Pioneer, which says “I remember going crazy.” Such failure to understand what we were trying to do almost drove us insane. Only our sense of humor saved us. But we have a certain satisfaction, these days, in watching the more advanced theatrical producers doing exactly what we were doing then, and being highly commended for it.”

Here is something for the intellectuals to ponder gravely. Mr. Oland and his wife gave to the modern drama several years of sincere labor, with absolutely no financial return, although their artistry and the literary quality of their translations were generally recognized. In other words, there are thousands of people who want to be considered high-brow, but only a few who are willing to support a truly intellectual movement in the theatre. So Warner Oland is playing villains in Pathé serials, and enjoying life from the viewpoint of one who can afford a chauffeur.

But the most interesting thing about it all, is that this proponent of modern drama does not hold moving pictures in contempt. From the moment he made his first scene — his debut was under Herbert Brenon’s direction in “Sin” — he has brought to the camera all the art he knows, that can be injected into the rather violent incidents in which he participates. He achieves the most remarkable changes of personality with virtually no make-up. He thinks himself into the mental condition of the role he is playing. In Patria, a fraction of an inch painted off the outer points of his eyebrows, shoulders stiffened and slightly hunched, and he was the plotting baron, a Japanese so real as almost to deceive a Californian. It was because, for the time, he was thinking in terms of his part, that his features naturally assumed the required aspect.

“If they don’t kill me off pretty soon in The Fatal Ring, I think I shall do a little solo villainy, and make a close-up of myself committing suicide,” said Mr. Oland, anent his future plans. “I have no quarrel with serials — they have been very kind to me — but I am anxious to do something in which there is more opportunity for real characterization. I’m a bit tired of all this killing. Miss White’s remarkable vitality has saved her in everything from boiling oil to starvation, and I think some one else should have a chance at murdering her. I’ve done my best. And it has been good experience. I have accumulated some valuable knowledge. The other day I tried to kill Miss White with a pile driver, and I got the hang of the machinery so easily that the foreman told me he’d give me a job any time. And there would be more money in it than going back to modern drama.

But with all his desire to get into a somewhat more artistic form of cinematic expression, I don’t believe Mr. Oland has such a bad time of it at that. Between murders, he and Pearl White get along quite well, and the business of producing serials is not without its lighter moments.

But the question remains, do they know about it in Umea?