Released 7th November 1915
The Lamb (1915)
In June 1915, John Freuler replaced Harry Aitken as Mutual’s president after persuading its stockholders that Aitken’s expansionist philosophy threatened the studio’s future. Aitken remained with Mutual for a short while, but much to Freuler’s vexation, also formed the Epoch Producing Corporation to distribute The Birth of a Nation (despite ousting Aitken from his position, Freuler had expected that Mutual would distribute D. W. Griffith’s civil war epic). Aitken’s move destroyed their relationship, and Freuler retaliated by slowing the distribution of Aitken properties to eat into their profits.
Aitken responded by forming a new combined production and distribution outfit on 20th July 1915, called the Triangle Film Corporation. On the Board of Directors were Adam and Charles Kessel, and Charles Bauman. However, what stunned the moviemaking community and added instant prestige to the new organisation’s reputation was its production vice presidents: D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Thomas Ince - arguably the foremost filmmakers at the time. Aitken had awarded all three generous amounts of free stock in Triangle, as well as their own production unit each: Master Pictures for Griffith, Keystone Comedies for Sennett, and Fine Arts for Ince.
Douglas Fairbanks was already an established Broadway actor when he became friendly with the Aitken brothers over hot chocolate drinks at the Algonquin Hotel. However, Fairbanks’ prejudice against movies irked them so much they drove him to a theatre in Roy Aitken’s yellow Leon Bollée roadster to watch a few. Fairbanks enjoyed the journey, but the movies he saw did nothing to alter his opinion. Even the mammoth Italian epic Cabiria failed to impress him; it showed nothing that people couldn’t see onstage, he argued, and audiences could hear actors talk in the theatre.
He resisted Harry Aitken’s first offer of a movie contract, worried that appearing in pictures would damage his reputation on the stage and make it difficult for him to find theatrical work if he wasn’t successful in the movies. But Aitken persisted, offering Fairbanks a ten-week trial at $2,000 a week (with a $500 increase every six months) working on properties commensurate with Fairbanks’ “talents and professional standing.” He even agreed Griffith would direct him, and that he could take his wife, Beth, and their young son, Douglas Jr. He would pay for first-class transportation and ensure that the return trip was via San Francisco so that Fairbanks and his family could visit the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The only request Roy Aitken refused was to sell Fairbanks the Leon Bollée, explaining that the war in Europe meant he wouldn’t be able to replace it.
Fairbanks’ friend Frank Case, the owner of the Algonquin Hotel, recalled, “Fairbanks told me he had an offer of $2,000 a week to go to Hollywood but did not know whether to accept or not. Two thousand dollars was very much more than he could possibly hope for in the theater; moreover, the employment and salary were to be continuous, fifty-two weeks in the year, not for an indefinite season in the theater. When I pointed out to him that $104,000 was a handsome amount of money, he said, “I know, but the movies!”
It was Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation that won Fairbanks over. He had attended the opening and returned several times since. The Aitkens often took the director to the Algonquin when he was in New York, and there he met Fairbanks. The men shared a mutual admiration for each other’s work, and Fairbanks told friends he might consider appearing in pictures if he could work with Griffith. When asked why he was so persistent in obtaining Fairbanks’s services, Harry Aitken told Alistair Cooke, “We picked Douglas Fairbanks as a likely film star not on account of his stunts, as the majority think, but because of the splendid humanness that fairly oozed out of him.”
Fairbanks’ introduction to the film industry in late July 1915 did not go smoothly, however. Griffith was not there to greet him, having decided, like the studio’s new star, that he wished to visit the San Francisco Exposition. Fairbanks stayed at the Alexandria Hotel until he found a suitable two-storey apartment on North Highland Avenue.
He reported for work at Griffith’s studio on Sunset Boulevard to find nothing had been prepared for him. Griffith was busy defending The Birth of a Nation against accusations of racism and preparing another epic that he believed would not only surpass that film but serve as a refutation of the charges of racism that he found so offensive. He had asked a secretary, Mary O’Connor, to find a property for Fairbanks, but she had done nothing.
Fairbanks spent nine days waiting for work. He befriended the cowboys who always hung around the lot, winning their admiration by gamely staying on a bucking bronco. Other actors were less welcoming. The actress Miriam Cooper, a member of Griffith’s stock company, said, “I remember seeing him just hanging around, watching Griffith direct and getting in the way. He looked so silly. None of us had anything to do with him.” The actors who had been with Griffith since the early years resented the newcomers recruited from the Broadway stage for wages many times greater than their own. Especially as Aitken could only afford to pay their exorbitant wages because of the profits he had made from The Birth of a Nation - a film they helped make.
Fairbanks, however, had a different recollection of his first days, recalling in 1916 that, “I swear that during my first week here I signed over a hundred photographs. Every one in the place from the office boy’s assistant to the chief mixer of scenery paint has given me the old, old story of me being their favorite actor and all that tommyrot, and ended up with the old plea for a picture – signed… I sprained my right hand in the first scene of The Lamb and it’ll never get well if I don’t steer clear of the pen and ink.”
At last, the studio found a project for him: a story loosely inspired by one of his Broadway productions, The New Henrietta. Fine Arts encouraged the misconception that their film was based on Winchell Smith’s stage play by publicising photographs of Fairbanks and the film’s director entertaining the author on the lot. D. W. Griffith was not that director, however. By then, he was too involved with Intolerance to direct his newest star. He handed the job to W. Christy Cabanne, a dependable journeyman director who had learned his craft at Griffith’s side, although he lacked the Master’s painstaking attention to detail. Joseph Henabery, another of Griffith’s assistants, later described Cabanné as “a good, fast director; the type that would be in demand by anyone that had to make ‘em quick and cheap.”
Cabanne did little to rein in Fairbanks’ natural exuberance on the screen, resulting in a whirlwind of exaggerated gestures and expressions that irked Griffith, who, although not directing, supervised all the Fine Arts pictures. “He’s got a head like a cantaloupe and can’t act,” the director said of the studio’s new star. Fairbanks recalled: “D. W. didn’t like my athletic tendencies. Or my spontaneous habit of jumping a fence or scaling a church at unexpected moments which were not in the script. Griffith told me to go to Keystone comedies.”
Fairbanks played Gerald, a character similar to one named Bertie he played in The New Henrietta. Gerald, the pampered son of a wealthy New York family, is engaged to Mary (Seena Owen). He earns a reputation as a lamb after standing by while Bill Cactus (Alfred Paget), ‘Mary’s Model Type of Man’ rescues a swimmer from drowning. Ashamed of her fiancé‘s perceived ‘yellow streak’, Mary breaks off their engagement and travels west with Bill to visit friends.
Determined to prove himself, Gerald follows them. Along the way crooks rob him, and he is abandoned in the desert, but reaches Arizona just as a Yaqui uprising spills across the border. Gerald is taken prisoner by the Indians, as are Bill and Mary. In the ensuing adventure, both men will show their true colours…
For years, many believed an enduring myth that Fairbanks made a poor impression on his debut. Historians claimed that both Harry Aitken and D. W. Griffith, who supervised the production and wrote the scenario under the pseudonym Granville Warwick, considered The Lamb to be a failure, and Fairbanks’ performance a disappointment. The film only saw the light of day because a new theatre, the Knickerbocker, requested a Griffith film for its opening presentation, and the studio had nothing else they could offer. To their astonishment, so the story goes, the movie was a massive hit.
Anita Loos provided a variation on this tale, claiming that Aitken and Griffith had already given up on Fairbanks when her future husband, the writer-director John Emerson, came across a scenario she had written and proposed that he direct Fairbanks in it. Despite Griffith’s dislike of the script and his belief Fairbanks couldn’t act, Emerson obtained permission to film it. Upon viewing the completed film, Griffith ordered it shelved, complaining it contained too many intertitles. According to Loos, someone accidentally issued the film to Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel, manager of the Roxy Theater. Rothafel showed it while a messenger raced to the Exchange to get the film he should have received. By the time the messenger returned, however, the audience was enjoying The Lamb so much that Rothafel continued showing it, and it became an enormous hit.
Both stories were untrue.
Upon screening the film, Harry Aitken knew he had a major new star on his hands and negotiated an extended contract with Fairbanks. During its three-week filming schedule, he earmarked the film for the grand opening of the Triangle program at the Knickerbocker Theatre on Broadway and Thirty-eighth Street. The two other films selected to show alongside The Lamb were Ince’s The Iron Strain and Sennett’s two-reel comedy, My Valet. Aitken ordered private boxes to be constructed on the theatre’s balcony which would seat four people for a record-breaking ticket price of $3.00 per person (the top price for entry to The Birth of a Nation, the first film that charged inflated prices, was only $2.00). Celebrities attending the premiere on 23rd September 1915 included William Randolph Hearst and his wife, Daniel Frohman, Raymond Hitchcock and his wife, George Beban, and John Emerson.
The Lamb – and Fairbanks’s performance – met with near-universal acclaim. Reporting on the premiere, The New York Times said, “For Mr. Fairbanks last evening was in the nature of a triumph… For some mysterious reason he succeeds where others fail. His engaging personality easily and undeniably “registers” – as the film folks say. He is amusing, grapphic (sic), individual, effortless.” Moving Picture World announced that, “a new star has appeared in the motion picture constellation, a comedian who wins through interesting personality and delightful characterization, a decided relief from the raw crudities of acrobatic clowns… There is nothing that could be called startling about “The Lamb” but it has a quiet strength all its own, a certain humanness that warms one to the story and to its leading character. It belongs to a class of moving pictures that firmly established the new art in popular favor, a story to charm all who watch it unfold on the screen.”
The Lamb’s success with both audiences and critics persuaded Fairbanks to build a career in movies, and the film established a formula – the timid youth emerging triumphant after unforeseen and seemingly insuperable challenges turn him into a hero – to which he would largely adhere until transforming himself into an action hero in the 1920s.
Sources: A Silent Siren Song: the Aitken Brothers’ Hollywood Odyssey, 1905-1926, Al P. Nelson; The Kindergarten of the Movies: a History of the Fine Arts Company, Anthony Slide; Douglas Fairbanks, Jeffrey Vance; Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks: the Most Popular Couple the World Has Ever Known, Booton Herndon.