The Captive (1915)
released 22nd April 1915
Cast:
Blanche Sweet
House Peters
Gerald Ward
Page Peters
Jeanie Macpherson
Theodore Roberts
The Captive (1915)
Drama, Romance, War
50m
Famous Players Film Company
Director:
Cecil B. DeMille
Writer:
Cecil B. DeMille, Jeanie Macpherson
"A picturization of the extraordinary dramatic success."
A year after filming The Squaw Man, Cecil B. DeMille once again drew on a tale of love between people of two warring nations: this time, instead of the white settler and Native American, the love story focused on the growing relationship between a Montenegrin woman and the Turkish prisoner of war despatched to help farm her land following the death of her brother in combat.
It marked the first time DeMille had directed a feature based on an original story – and also his first screenwriting collaboration with Jeanie Macpherson, with whom he would write most of his silent pictures and his first two talkies. She would also become the director’s long-term lover, remaining close to him until her death in 1946. DeMille’s wife, Constance, was aware of their intimate relationship, having agreed that DeMille could pursue extramarital affairs after she nearly died giving birth to their daughter Cecilia and learned that another pregnancy could prove fatal.
Various sources give Macpherson’s birth year as anywhere between 1878 and as late as 1897, with somewhere around 1884 considered the most likely. Born in Boston, she was partly educated at Madame DeJacque’s school in Paris and at the Kenwood Institute in Chicago. She began her career as a dancer and stage performer before making her film debut in 1908, acting under D. W. Griffith at Biograph, before moving on to Universal. There, she wrote and directed, as well as graduating to lead actress. However, Universal fired her after she ran over budget on a short, so she found work with Lasky studios, where DeMille originally put her to work as an actress. Despite enjoying a long and fruitful writing partnership with the ambitious Macpherson, DeMille said in a 1957 interview, “She was not a good writer. She would bring in wonderful ideas, but she could not carry a story all the way through in writing. Her name is on many things because she wrote with me. I carried the story and she would bring me many, many ideas.”
Whether DeMille’s comments – made long after Macpherson’s death – are true or simply the revisionist recollections of a man with a healthy ego, we shall never know. Their successful writing partnership did overcome both DeMille’s atrocious spelling and Macpherson’s complete ignorance of punctuation. Evelyn F. Scott, the daughter of Beulah Marie Dix, another DeMille collaborator, recalled, “Mother respected Jeanie, except in one area. Jeanie couldn’t punctuate. Bertram Millhauser, with whom Mother was teamed in writing some de Mille pictures, claimed that after the titles for a picture had been worked out, Jeanie stood across the room and threw periods and commas at them as if at dart boards.”
Blanche Sweet plays Sonya, a Montenegrin farm girl who is allotted a Turkish prisoner of war to farm her land when her brother is killed in the Balkan War. The prisoner she receives, Muhamud Hassan (House Peters), was a nobleman in his native land. Although he is an easy-going man who quickly makes friends with Sonya’s little brother, Milos (Gerald Ward), she is wary of her new lodger. Over time, however, her stance softens. Then, the tide of war turns, and the Turks invade her village…
The Captive, which takes place in a decidedly unglamorous Eastern Europe of 1913, might surprise those familiar with the social comedies and Biblical epics for which DeMille is famous. Of course, neither Sweet or Peters look like peasants or war prisoners – but they were never really supposed to. The film is all about building a romance out of a scenario which practically forces the film’s two protagonists together. The presence of little Milos, who bonds instantly with Muhamud and clearly needs a father figure following the death of his older brother, also makes it impossible for them not to eventually fall into each other’s arms. It’s a shame that DeMille and Macpherson didn’t allow more time for their characters to develop; the 50-minute running time leaves room for each to have only the briefest of backstories.
The Captive was the second of two features Blanche Sweet made for DeMille after leaving D. W. Griffith, and it reunited many of the cast from that first film, The Warrens of Virginia. She had expected to be awarded the role of Elsie Stoneman in The Birth of a Nation, but it went to Lillian Gish. Sixty years later, she told Anthony Slide, “I was supposed to be in The Clansman – The Birth of a Nation. But then the DeMille faction came after me and offered me a lot of money. I went to Griffith and expected him to say ‘No, I need you. He didn’t. He told me to go, go, go. I was disappointed and very hurt. I was scared. Mary Pickford said somewhere that when she said she was going, he just blessed her and said I’ll miss you. He certainly didn’t bless me.”
Sweet went on to tell Slide how much she disliked working with DeMille. “I had a terrible time. I was terrified of him. Here I was, going out on my own, whatever I did had to be me and nobody else. I was with a strange director that I didn’t know anything about. His version of the story was that he was terrified of me! He was working with a Griffith player who was supposed to have quite a reputation, and he didn’t know much about films.”
Cecil B. DeMille
House Peters and Blanche Sweet in Cecil B. DeMille's The Captive (1915)
Filming of The Captive was only briefly disrupted by the tragic death of an extra on the set on 27th February 1915. DeMille was filming a scene in which soldiers stormed a locked door. The plan was for them to splinter the door with live rounds of ammunition before breaking it down with their rifle butts. By then, the rifles should have been loaded with blanks, but, to everyone’s horror, an extra named Charles Chandler slumped to the floor with a bullet hole in his forehead. One of the rifles had still been loaded with live bullets. In his autobiography, DeMille said it was impossible to identify which of the weapons had fired the live bullet but recalled that one of the soldiers failed to show up for work the following day and was never seen again in Hollywood. The studio kept Chandler’s widow on its payroll for many years after the tragic incident.
Sweet’s recollection of the incident differed slightly. Interviewed for William M. Drew’s Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen, she recalled, “Cecil was known for what he thought was realism. Well, he got it in The Captive when a man was actually killed. In the film, there was supposed to be a war between Monrovia (sic) and Turkey. The soldiers were pounding on my house in one scene. Cecil had real live ammunition in the rifles, not blanks. When pounding the door, the gun of the fellow playing a Monrovian soldier went off and blew out the brains of the man in back of him. Of course, at the time, I was quite young and wanted to learn about life and everything. They said, “Don’t come over, don’t come over, it’s terrible.” But I went over. I had to see for myself, and there was this gray matter all on the ground. I’ve never forgiven Cecil for that. But I liked him. I like some of his work.”
DeMille suspended filming for the day but was reluctant to halt the shoot for Chandler’s funeral. According to the leading man, House Peters, it was only when he insisted that he would attend that DeMille allowed the rest of the crew to attend. He had no choice, as Peters’ were the only scenes left to film.
It was a stressful time for all concerned. One day, Sweet found Jeanie Macpherson, who also appeared in the film, collapsed by a pile of lumber. DeMille recalled the incident in a tape he recorded with the writer Art Arthur for his memoirs: ““I found her . . . I don’t know. It might have been Blanche. It was when I was at the old studio on Vine Street. Jeanie and I had been working and I said good night to her. She went out to leave and I worked till about—I guess another hour or hour and a half. . . . I picked her up and carried her in—either to my office or hers, I don’t remember, or Gladys’, and put her in my car and drove her home, carried her upstairs and gave her to her mother. But she was not well then.”
Macpherson later recalled coming to in hospital: “I was vaguely conscious that Cecil was sitting beside my bed, crying. I heard him say, and it seemed to come from a million miles away, ‘I can’t do anything to save my little pal.’ That’s the way he is about his ‘pals.’ Friendship means more to him than love to most men.”
Page Peters, the 26-year-old actor who played Blanche Sweet’s war-casualty brother in the film, is often mistakenly believed to be leading man House Peters’ brother, but the two men were not related. Page Peters’ promising career was cut short a year after he completed filming The Captive. He died at Hermosa Beach in California, early on the morning of 22nd June 1916. Caught by a riptide while swimming with friends who failed to notice him carried out to sea, his body was found about one hundred feet from shore by searchers in a motorboat. Newspapers reported that rescuers tried to revive Peters for two hours using a pulmotor, an early mechanical respiration device. While most reports stated the actor died from drowning, the Hermosa Beach Review reported that less than one pint of water was found in his lungs, suggesting some other cause of death.
Reviews of the film were generally favourable, with Lynde Denig of The Moving Picture World stating, “The atmosphere of the production is out of the ordinary and of a fine artistic quality, due to a wise choice of locations, care in the furnishing of interiors and painstaking direction.” Motography also praised the film’s atmosphere, adding that, “a splendid selection of battle scenes adds much to the film.” Variety noted that, “the playing of Miss Sweet and Peter is worthy of comment,” while pointing out that the film’s ending features a “rather unnatural meeting”.
The Captive was lost for many years. DeMille kept copies of most of his films in his own vault, but The Captive wasn’t among them for some reason. Perhaps considering the fatal accident and Macpherson’s collapse, it held too many unpleasant memories for the director. Fortunately, a complete 35mm copy was discovered in Paramount’s vaults in 1970 and subsequently donated to the Library of Congress for preservation.
Sources: Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art, Simon Louvish; Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, Robert S. Birchard; moviessilently.com; Silent Players, Anthony Slide; Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Silver Screen, William M. Drew; The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, Cecil B. DeMille; Hollywood, When Silents Were Golden, Evelyn F. Scott; Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, Scott Eyman.