(Wealthy shoe manufacturer John Reeves (George Arliss) rel...)
Wealthy shoe manufacturer John Reeves (George Arliss) relishes a challenge, whether it's beating his competitors in business or helping a couple of spoiled rich kids find purpose in life. Years ago, Reeves lost the girl he loved to a manufacturing rival. Now, after both the girl and the rival have died, he runs into their daughter (Bette Davis) and son and realizes the wild-living youngsters are headed for trouble. Incognito, he joins the failing business they've inherited and soon becomes indispensible as both a canny manager and a substitute father. A year after their success in The Man Who Played God, veteran stage and film star Arliss and talented tyro Davis reteamed for the comedy The Working Man. Davis was happy to share the screen again with the man she regarded as a mentor. And Arliss was delighted to see Davis succeed; "My little bird has flown, hasn't she?" he told the grateful actress during filming.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(Just one moment of courage is all it takes. Distraught af...)
Just one moment of courage is all it takes. Distraught after losing his hearing, renowned pianist Montgomery Royle teeters on his window ledge, high above Central Park. His manservant saves him, then hands him binoculars to view the world he nearly left. Royle reads the lips of a troubled young couple and realizes other people suffer - and that he has the resources to help them. As Royle, George Arliss reprises one of his best- known silent roles. He personally selected Bette Davis, whose career was stalled, to play his fiancee, more in awe of the older man than in love with him - and thus began her legendary career at Warner Bros. Forever grateful to Arliss, Davis was delighted to reteam with him the next year in The Working Man. Two more cast members also went on to Hollywood fame: a fresh-faced, uncredited Ray Milland as one of the people Royle aids, and soon-to~be gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as a Santa Barbara socialite.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(More than a decade after wowing audiences on the Great Wh...)
More than a decade after wowing audiences on the Great White Way with his portrayal of the nation’s original Treasury secretary in the eponymous play he coauthored with Mary Hamlin, Mr. George Arliss reprised the role for his home studio, Warner Bros. Much like its much-lauded latter-day stage sensation, Hamlin and Arliss’ Hamilton does not skimp on sophistication. Adding spark and spice to the proceedings is a generous dollop of seduction and scandal as Hamilton’s fierce desire to place the nation on sound financial footing lands him in the crosshairs of a conspiracy that threatens his marriage and his honor. Arliss artfully keeps heart and soul at the center despite his added years, while Doris Kenyon and June Collyer complete the triangle as Hamilton’s beloved Betsy and the tempting Mrs. Reynolds.
When sold by Amazon.com, this product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(Banker Georges Robin and his fiancé Marie meet the myster...)
Banker Georges Robin and his fiancé Marie meet the mysterious Dr. Muller, who introduces himself as ""a friend to all"". During a philosophical conversation, Marie comments that Evil can never conquer Truth, but the doctor sets about to prove her wrong. Muller manipulates Georges' best friend, Paul de Veaux, into confessing his unrequited love for Marie. This revelation brings the couple's impending marriage to a halt and throws Georges into a suicidal depression. When Marie discovers that Muller is behind a plot to disrupt their lives, she begins to suspect that not-so good doctor may be the Devil himself. The Devil is the first motion picture for acclaimed English actor George Arliss. Arliss had made his name with the stage version in 1908, so a film adaptation of his first success was a natural for his screen debut. He would have his greatest success after the advent of sound, starring in films such as The Man Who Played God (1932), The Working Man (1933) and The House of Rothschild (1934), as well as becoming the first British actor to win the Oscar (for Disraeli, 1929). Born in 1868, Arliss was one of the oldest actors to continue to find success in the Hollywood of the 1920s and 30s. Co-star Edmund Lowe, here at the beginning of his career, would go on to roles in classics like What Price Glory? (1926) and Dinner at Eight (1933), and in the 1950s would star in his own TV series, Front Page Detective (1951-1952). Also making one of his earliest film appearances is future Academy Award winner Fredric March, who can be seen as an extra during the masquerade ball scene.
(The intrigues and counter-intrigues that swirled around 1...)
The intrigues and counter-intrigues that swirled around 17th century statesman Cardinal Richelieu and his attempt to thwart the insidious passion behind King Louis XIII of France. Starring George Arliss, Maureen O'Sullivan, Edward Arnold and Cesar Romero. Shown in 4:3 full frame presentation.
George Arliss was an English actor, author, playwright and filmmaker who found success in the United States.
Background
George Arliss was born on April 10, 1868 in London, England. He was the youngest of three boys and a girl born to William Arliss-Andrews. His mother's name is not known.
Young Arliss, however, seemed condemned to work in his father's business while surreptitiously presenting entertainments and recitations at workingmen's clubs.
The elder Andrews, a printer and publisher, was known for his liberality toward his drinking companions, a group of eccentrics and literati who frequented the British Museum nearby the Andrews home in middle-class Bloomsbury.
This coterie of gentlemen served George Arliss well in later life when he searched for details to round out his many elegantly fashioned stage characterizations. Stage-struck from the age of twelve, when at a children's Christmas party he was rushed into a part vacated by a sick friend, Arliss threw himself into the frequent dramatic impromptus given by Joseph and Henry Soutar (both of whom later became actors) on a makeshift stage in their cellar.
Even in these juvenile experiments, Arliss was the character actor, that indispensable member of the nineteenth-century stock company who would "get up" the old men, the professors, the villains and fops. Several years later, in a provincial company, he realized that these parts best utilized his particular theatrical gifts and devoted the remainder of his long career to refining the craft of the character man into a fine art.
Young Arliss, however, seemed condemned to work in his father's business while surreptitiously presenting entertainments and recitations at workingmen's clubs. Fortunately, he ultimately won his family's support for an attack on his true vocation, the theater. Actor relatives of the brothers Soutar convinced J. A. Cave, manager of the old-fashioned Elephant and Castle stock company, to take on the two boys and Arliss, who was then eighteen years old, as extra gentlemen, nonspeaking walk-ons who filled out the crowd scenes.
Education
Arliss was educated at Harrow.
Career
The traditional route for an English actor who aspired to reach the West End of London led first to the provinces, and within a year, George Arliss joined a second-rate "Irish Repertory Company" that toured through the north of England. In his first week with the company, he played sizable parts in six different plays in as many nights. He received invaluable instruction in all facets of the stage, from tricks of makeup to bits of business, and he never ceased to praise the experience of playing stock in repertory.
Following this engagement, Arliss spent several years in and out of agents' offices, where he was occasionally hired for pickup touring companies of such melodramas as The Vicar of Wakefield and The Captain of the Vulture. A season at the Theatre Royal, Margate, a better grade of stock company, gave him an opportunity to play the great character parts in such classic old comedies as The School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer.
By this point able to secure steady employment in provinicial theaters, he played a musical comedy judge in a touring company of The Gaiety Girl and, as a significant step forward, took over the part of the Duke of St. Olpherts in the touring company of Sir Arthur Pinero's acclaimed The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. On this tour, Arliss wrote a farce entitled There and Back, which was presented successfully in England and the United States for many years.
Though he had appeared in the West End as early as 1890, Arliss first became a West End actor in 1898, when he took the small part of Brumaire in On and Off at the Vaudeville Theatre. Having reached this pinnacle of his ambition, he married Florence Montgomery on September 16, 1899.
After two years in On and Off, he joined Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who managed her own company at the Royalty Theatre. He appeared in a translation of Edmond Rostand's Les Romanesques and supported Mrs. Campbell in her notable productions of The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, in which Arliss again played the duke, and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (also by Pinero), in which he played Cayley Drummle.
In 1901 Arliss and his wife accompanied the Campbell company to the United States. Arliss was somewhat skeptical of leaving London so soon after achieving recognition in the West End, but his greatest successes lay before him in America. Reviewers in Chicago and New York soon hailed his performances in the two Pinero roles. These notices led David Belasco, the eccentric genius of the American theater, to sign Arliss to play the minister of war in Belasco's exotic Japanese play The Darling of the Gods (1902; on tour, 1903), starring Blanche Bates, in which he was again warmly received. Then began a pattern for the Arlisses that was to continue with slight variation throughout the remainder of his stage career: acting in America autumn to spring, summer vacations in England.
In 1904, Arliss entered the company of Mrs. Fiske, the artistic and moral leader of the American stage; once again he played important supporting roles. His perfectly villainous Marquis of Steyne in Becky Sharp (1904) and his amoral Judge Brack in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1904) won a place in American theatrical memory.
Arliss also appeared with Mrs. Fiske in Leah Kleschna (1904, 1907), The New York Idea (1906), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1907), as Ulric Brendel in Ibsen's Rosmersholm (1907), and on tour (1907-1908). Since Mrs. Fiske was at this time battling the theatrical monopoly of the producers Klaw and Erlanger, such a tour meant the hardships of playing ill-fitted theaters and lodge halls in small towns throughout America.
Arliss greatly admired Mrs. Fiske as an actress and co-worker, and he adopted her strong antivivisectionist sentiments. Arliss now had the impetus to become a star in his own right, but his leading performances as the sinister title character in Ferenc Moln r's The Devil (1908) and as an absentminded inventor in the dramatization of W. J. Locke's novel Septimus (1909) did not produce the overwhelming public response he sought. George Tyler, who had brought Mrs. Campbell to America, acted on Arliss' suggestion for a play about the diplomatic triumphs of Benjamin Disraeli, Victoria's prime minister, and persuaded English dramatist Louis Parker to write it.
Disraeli opened in Montreal on January 23, 1911, and soon moved to Chicago. Although the play barely survived the first few months, it slowly grew in popularity, and by its September 18, 1911, opening at Wallack's Theatre in New York, "George Arliss in Disraeli" was fast becoming a catch phrase. As the New York World rhapsodized, "Not since the curtain was drawn on the careers of Henry Irving and Richard Mansfield has a New York audience witnessed a performance that could approach it. "
Disraeli made Arliss a true celebrity and linked his name with the play as inextricably as that of Otis Skinner with Kismet or James O'Neill with The Count of Monte Cristo. The dapper Arliss, with his long, narrow face, pointed nose, patent leather hair stretched over a bony head, and a monocle habitually placed in his right eye, added in makeup curls, a small goatee, and a high, bald forehead to achieve a picture-book resemblance to Disraeli.
After five seasons of Disraeli, Arliss played title roles in Edward Knoblock's Paganini (Chicago, 1915; New York, 1916), James Barrie's The Professor's Love Story (1917), and in Hamilton (1917; on tour, 1918), which he wrote with Mary Hamlin. In 1918 he joined such stage luminaries as George M. Cohan, Laurette Taylor, and Mrs. Fiske in Out There, which toured abroad to entertain American servicemen.
His more notable stage performances after the war were as a French scientist in Jacques Duval (1920), a Russian in Booth Tarkington's Poldikin (1920), a rajah in William Archer's The Green Goddess (New York, 1921-1923; London, 1924, his first appearance there in more than twenty years), and the old curmudgeon Sylvanus Heythorp in John Galsworthy's comedy Old English (1924; on tour, 1925-1927).
The latter two plays provided Arliss with two of his most popular roles, both of which he later re-created in films of the same names. Arliss' last formal stage appearance came as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1928; on tour, 1928-1929), with Peggy Wood as Portia. As opposed to his sympathetic portrayal of a real Jew in Disraeli, Arliss managed to convey chilling hatred and cunning in an old-fashioned depiction of Shakespeare's Jew.
Arliss' film career officially began in 1920, and there was a silent version of Disraeli in 1921, but it was the 1929 talking version of his most famous vehicle that transformed him into a major motion picture star and earned him that year's Photoplay Gold Medal for the outstanding performance by an actor. He now began a second career, making over twenty films during the following decade.
His best films divide themselves between portraits of characters, frequently wise old men: The Millionaire (1931); The Working Man (1933); The Last Gentleman (1934); Mister Hobo (1936); The Green Goddess (1923, silent; 1930, talking); and Old English (1931) and portraits of famous men of history, in addition to Disraeli: Voltaire (1933); The House of Rothschild (1934), playing both Meyer and Nathan Rothschild; The Iron Duke (1935), playing Wellington; and Cardinal Richelieu (1935).
In The House of Rothschild, perhaps his finest film, Arliss drew on his wit and dignity as well as his Semitic features to offer a stirring likeness of Jews who conquered religious prejudice through their intelligence; at least one critic found the film powerful propaganda against the Nazis.
His last picture was Dr. Syn (1937). George Arliss was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1934 and awarded an honorary M. A. by Columbia University, the first actor so honored. He lived in England during his final years and died in London of a bronchial ailment when he was seventy-seven.
For more than forty years, George Arliss created villains, charming old men, and great historical leaders with a subtlety and effortlessness which masked his painstaking devotion to the techniques of the traditional actor's art.
Arliss was also a prominent anti-vivisectionist who founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society of Chicago, and president of the Episcopal Actors' Guild of America (1921-1938).
Quotations:
"The regular audience that has paid for its seat is, in my opinion, the great teacher and the almost infallible critic. "
Membership
Member of the American Theater Hall of Fame, fellow member of the Royal Society of Arts (1934).
Interests
Music & Bands
Though he had appeared in the West End as early as 1890, Arliss first became a West End actor in 1898, when he took the small part of Brumaire in On and Off at the Vaudeville Theatre.
Connections
While at Margate, he met his future wife and leading lady, Florence Montgomery.