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30 Chapter 2 “The Leap to Greatness” The Years at Triangle, Artcraft, United Artists, 1916–1919 . . . and thus we shall be quack-ridden and folly-ridden until mobocracy comes to its inescapable debacle, and the common people are relieved of their present oppressive duty of deciding what is wrong with their tummies, and what doctor is safest for them to consult, and which of his pills is most apt to cure them. —H. L. Mencken From 1916–1919, Douglas Fairbanks rose from the ranks of tyro film actor to a major player in the American film industry. Only Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin rivaled him in power and popularity. Among his other contemporaries in screen comedy in the mid-teens, only Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mabel Normand rivaled him in physicality and clownish sweetness. The other great physical clowns, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chase, did not reach maturity until the late teens and early twenties. By all accounts it was an especially happy and vigorous time for Fairbanks. “During my career, I worked with many fine people [D. W. Griffith, Valentino, Thomas Ince, Roscoe Arbuckle],” wrote director Joseph Henabery in his autobiography, “but Doug topped them all. He was the kind of fellow who ‘came across strong,’ both on the screen and in his everyday life. . . .” I found that most of those who first met him off the screen expected to meet a much larger and taller man. He was only about five feet, nine inches, but very strong and muscular. He was dynamic in real life and on the screen. Like most big stars, he had great determination and will power. . . . He was a capable, experienced actor.”1 The Years at Triangle, Artcraft, United Artists 31 Unfortunately, many of the films Fairbanks made during this period have remained relatively unseen over the years, due to a combination of obscurity, neglect, and scarcity of available materials. A handful that are “lost,” including a few of the reputably finest westerns and comedies released by the Artcraft Pictures Corporation in 1917–1919, remain only in the form of stills and a few faded pressbooks. But recent restorations in video and digital formats of surviving titles are bringing to new generations of viewers and scholars the action, charm, and, at times wickedly satiric humor that attracted enthusiastic audiences in their day.2 Indeed, they need not shrink in the shadow of their bigger brothers, the costume films of the 1920s. They can stand on their own and deserve special consideration and appreciation. Having already examined Fairbanks’s first two films, The Lamb and Double Trouble, we now turn here to the later titles from Triangle-Fine Arts, Artcraft Pictures Corporation, and finally, the first year of United Artists. Four writers and directors, so crucial to the Fairbanks brand at this time—scenarist Anita Loos, director John Emerson, writer-director Allan Dwan, and writer-director Joseph Henabery—are singled out for particular mention. The Popular Philosopher (drawing courtesy John C. Tibbetts). Odyssey of a Spring Lamb 32 Topical Satires: His Picture in the Papers, In Again—Out Again, The Matrimaniac The light, topical satires examined here skewed the new American century ’s optimistic mania for speed, publicity, patriotism, “bean-can” nobility , and vegetarian fads; juggled the geographical referents of “East” and “West”; and straddled with energetic masculinity class and economic differences in “Old World” traditions and “New World” opportunities. Recent material gains in electrical energy and automatic machinery, coupled with industrial growth and social reform, were grist for these films. Just two decades earlier, historian Henry Adams had noted, “The period from 1900 to 1930 is in full swing, and, gee-whacky! How it is going! It will break its damned neck long before it gets through, if it tries to keep up the speed.”3 How prescient that prophecy would turn out to be! Personally choreographing it all was the bounding Fairbanks himself, ”a vigorous young man as uncompromising as his splendid physique,” wrote Alistair Cooke, “unfazed by tricky problems of taste and class behavior, gallant to women, with an affection for the American scene tempered by a wink.”4 As commentator Gaylyn Studlar writes, this was “an optimistic , performative masculinity that promoted “character-building ideals” in the “revitalization of American masculinity.”5 No one exemplified this more—and influenced Fairbanks more—than those transformative figures of the American century, Fairbanks’s great heroes, Theodore Roosevelt and Billy Sunday. The team of scenarist Anita Loos and director John Emerson either wrote...

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