Background
Rex Ingram was born on 20 October 1893 in Dublin, Ireland. He was the son of a clergyman who brought him to America in 1911.
Rex Ingram was born on 20 October 1893 in Dublin, Ireland. He was the son of a clergyman who brought him to America in 1911.
At the Yale School of Fine Arts, he studied sculpture.
He worked for Edison, Vitagraph, Fox, and joined Universal in 1916, but he was “discovered" bv June Mathis and assigned to direct Valentino in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Conquering Power, both of which also starred Ingrams wife, Alice Terry. He was known as a director of swashbuckling spectacles and of supernatural or horror movies. Trifling Women, based on one of Ingram's own stories, has Barbara La Marr as a femme fatale. That film, Scaramouche, Where the Pavement Ends, and The Arab all starred Ramon Novarro. Ingram had hoped to be allowed to direct Ben- Hur: when disappointed he threatened to retire, and von Stroheim and Dmitri Buchowetzld insisted on his return, calling him the worlds greatest director. Von Stroheim and Ingram were friends—itself a sign of Ingrams imaginative reach—and when Creed was beset by problems, it was Ingram who cut it from twenty-four to eighteen reels.
In fact, Ingram and Alice Terry left America after Ben-Hur, complaining of studio ineptness, but allowed MGM to help them set up their own studio, Victorine, in Nice. There they made The Magician, from a Somerset Maugham novel, photographed by John Seitz, starring Paul Wegener as an Aleister Crowley-like evil genius. Stills suggest that it is, at the least, an ornate fantasy with erotic undertones. Mare Nostrum was made in the Mediterranean and for Garden of Allah Ingram took his company to North Africa. He made only one talking picture, Baroud, also in Morocco, in which he acted.
One of Ingrams apprentices in the south of France was Michael Powell, who has testified to Ingrams charisma, knowledge, taste, and capacity for being easily bored. Ingram became fascinated by Islam, but neither he nor Alice Terrv enjoyed sound. The Three Passions and Baroud were failures, and Ingram and Tern- went back to live in Los Angeles where he worked as painter, sculptor, and novelist, rarely tempted bv the name scene. Alice Tern; maybe, was never quite wild enough for his visions.
There is a useful biography of Ingram, by Liam O’Leary, that stresses the Irishness and the unusual interest Ingram felt for so many things beyond film. But Powell’s tribute, and that of David Lean, suggest that for the 1920s, in the English-speaking film world, Ingram personified artistic ambition and a visual sty le that made one think of painting. Of course, his life was also a bold gesture meant to show the hopeless vulgarity of Hollwyood.
Few careers are as mysteriously romantic as Ingrams. He was obviously an independent and unusually imaginative man; those few of his films that survive suggest that he is an important director with a rapturous visual style.