The Coward (1915)

The Coward was intended to be shown as the first Thomas H. Ince release for Harry Aitken’s new Triangle Film Corporation alongside Broadway star Douglas Fairbanks’ first movie,The Lamb, and Mack Sennett’s two-reel comedy, My Valet. This triple premiere at the Knickerbocker Theatre on 23rd September 1915 ushered in what Harry Aitken, Triangle’s founder, hoped would be a new presentation format: each film shown as part of a program that would run for at least a week instead of just a few days, as was the common practice. At the last minute, however, the studio replaced it with The Iron Stain, a western starring Dustin Farnum. Triangle’s executives felt that Farnum’s picture was more forceful than The Coward and would therefore make more of an impact.

The film was to introduce moviegoers to Frank Keenan, one of many stars of the Broadway stage Aitken signed for the new studio. Most of these high-profile signings failed on the screen, Fairbanks being the one notable exception. Keenan would appear in movies up to 1926, but as a character actor rather than a star. Keenan conducted extensive research on his characters, a practice that helped make him a major star of the stage. In his autobiography, Ed Wynn’s Son, his grandson, the actor Keenan Wynn, recalled him saying, “I read everything I can find on the period: the characters, the performances of other actors, and I make notes as I read. Then I assemble and build up the character.” But Keenan was also an alcoholic, and what those in the profession called a furniture actor. “With a bottle of liquor in him,” , “he could still breeze impressively through a performance, so long as he had a piece of furniture to clutch with one hand and another actor to cling to if he had to make any move around the stage. But he had to stay on his feet. If he sat down, nobody could get him on his legs again while the curtain was up.”

Although Keenan was the nominal star, the title character – and the actor who would forge a career from his performance in the movie – was twenty-four-year-old newcomer Charles Ray. A forgotten name today, Ray was a major star of the early silent screen. He had worked at Thomas Ince’s Inceville studio since 12th December 1912. On that day, hearing the studio was hiring actors, he set his alarm for 6am. He recalled, “I changed cars three times, walked a lot, and suddenly landed on what I’ve ever since thought of as the most inspiring sight I’ve ever seen. About a hundred cowboys were riding around on ponies, and forty to fifty Indians, and there were sixty teepees. A most beautiful California morning brightened the scene, the shimmer of the Pacific Ocean, the liveliness, busy-ness of it all thrilled and charmed me. In all my life I never wanted to do anything so much as to get into the movies right then and there.”

After appearing as an extra in several movies, Ince cast him in a juvenile role in a two-reel Civil War movie called The Favorite Son. Impressed by his performance, Ince offered the young actor a contract, agreeing to pay him $35 per week. Ray appeared in over 60 shorts in the following two years – many of them Civil War pictures – and, in 1915, appeared opposite Ince’s biggest star, William S. Hart, in The Conversion of Frosty Blake and The Grudge. Few actors wanted Ray’s role in The Coward; they considered it an unsympathetic part, but Ray begged to play Frank Winslow. “I worked so hard over that coward that he just couldn’t help being real,” Ray recalled. “I dreamed him and lived him and for the time being, I was not Charles Ray—I was that boy.”

The Coward also marked the start of the career of one of silent cinema’s biggest stars. In early 1915, seventeen-year-old John Gilbert was working as stage manager for the Baker Stock Company in Spokane, Washington. When the company closed down in March 1915, a disconsolate Gilbert travelled to Portland, Oregon, where his father, Walter Gilbert, was directing a stock company. Having learned that his old friend Herschel Mayall had made a career for himself in the movies, Gilbert decided he would do the same. His father wrote to Walter Edwards, a director working for Ince at the Triangle Film Corporation, enclosing a couple of headshots of his son. Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, Edwards responded, saying, “Mr. Ince says he can give the boy fifteen dollars a week if he cares to come down.”

Gilbert arrived in Los Angeles with no idea how to get to Inceville. He journeyed by train and streetcar, until, far beyond Santa Monica, “There lay the studio of my dreams, under two feet of dust… Inceville resembled nothing more than a sleepy, dirty Western town—scattered buildings, of plain boards, and rut-worn roads leading up into the hills. Barring the entrance was a high swinging gate with a “No Admittance” sign barely legible through a mixture of caked mud and manure, and guarded by a crumby, grisled old desert rat.”