A few years ago, I was sent a catalogue by the photographic agency, Corbis. Among its many images denoting emotions, there was one of a portly, middle-aged man with bright beaming face, categorised under something like ‘surprise’ or ‘happiness’. The person had no further identification. The photograph was of John Bunny, once arguably the most popular and recognised person worldwide, now reduced to complete anonymity.

I can’t find the photograph now on the Corbis web site (which does have one picture of Bunny identified as him). So maybe someone discovered the injustice. I hope so. For John Bunny really was the most popular of silent stars in his day, and the way in which his popularity has so dramatically faded ought to be a lesson to anyone whose head gets turned by the notion of celebrity.

John Bunny (1863?-1915) was the son of a British naval officer who settled in New York, where his son ran away from home to join a minstrel show and then became a stage actor and director. In 1910 he turned to the movies, joining the Vitagraph Company, and almost instantly became a star. He portrayed a rotund, merry, earthy figure, whose genial manner and aptitude for comic characterisation, sometimes touched with pathos, endeared him to millions. He appeared in over 200 shorts between 1910-1914, with such titles as Bunny Buys a Harem, And His Wife Came Back and Bunny’s Honeymoon. He was often teamed with the comically angular Flora Finch. He made some films in Britain in 1913, including Pickwick Papers (he was a natural Mr Pickwick), scenes from which were filmed just around the corner from where I am typing this now. His death in 1915 made headlines around the world.

Why mention Bunny now? Simply because of yesterday’s post with the Vachel Lindsay poems, for there is one last poem by Lindsay on the film stars of the early cinema period which I haven’t given you as yet. It’s the second part of a two-part sequence, the first of which commememorates the actor Edwin Booth, renowned for his performance as Hamlet. For the second part, Lindsay laments the death of John Bunny as if he were Yorick, Hamlet’s fool:

John Bunny, Motion Picture Comedian

In which he is remembered in similitude, by reference to Yorick, the king’s jester, who died when Hamlet and Ophelia were children

Yorick is dead. Boy Hamlet walks forlorn
Beneath the battlements of Elsinore.
Where are those oddities and capers now
That used to “set the table on a roar”?

And do his bauble-bells beyond the clouds
Ring out, and shake with mirth the planets bright?
No doubt he brings the blessed dead good cheer,
But silence broods on Elsinore tonight.

That little elf, Ophelia, eight years old,
Upon her battered doll’s staunch bosom weeps.
(“O best of men, that wove glad fairy-tales.”)
With tear-burned face, at last the darling sleeps.

Hamlet himself could not give cheer or help,
Though firm and brave, with his boy-face controlled.
For every game they started out to play
Yorick invented, in the days of old.

The times are out of joint! O cursed spite!
The noble jester Yorick comes no more.
And Hamlet hides his tears in boyish pride
By some lone turret-stair of Elsinore.

Bunny died of liver failure on 26 April 1915. Today, only a handful of his films survive: A Cure for Pokeritis, Bunny at the Derby, The Pickwick Papers, Bunny all at Sea, Her Crowning Glory, The Wooing of Winifred, and a few more. In truth, his real comic appeal died with him, and it is worth seeing Bunny at Sea for its scenes taken on board a ship where real life passengers laugh delightedly at Bunny’s antics, giving us some indications of the roots of his popular appeal.

Vachel Lindsay wrote evocatively of the first Bunny picture that he saw:

It is a story of high life below stairs. The hero is the butler at a governor’s reception. John Bunny’s work as this man is a delightful piece of acting. The servants are growing tipsier downstairs, but the more afraid of the chief functionary every time he appears, frozen into sobriety by his glance. At the last moment this god of the basement catches them at their worst and gives them a condescending but forgiving smile. The lid comes off completely. He himself has been imbibing. His surviving dignity in waiting on the governor’s guests is worthy of Goldsmith and Sheridan. The film should be reissued in time as a Bunny memoiral.

Whichever title it might be, it’s a lost film now…

It’s been a while since we had poetry on The Bioscope. So, to make up, here are three poems by Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), who if not quite the poet laureate of the silent cinema was undoubtedly the poet at the time most drawn to the medium. For film historians, he may be best known as the author of The Art of the Motion Picture, a somewhat high-flown early stab at film theory, published in 1915 and still in print.

But Lindsay is best known for his poetry, with its jazz-inflected rhythms and contemporary themes. He wrote three poems on actresses who appeared in Biograph films before the First World War: Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh and Mary Pickford. “I am the one poet”, he wrote, “who wrote them songs when they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put on the screen, or the name of their director”. That’s probably not strictly true, since he had to know their names to be able to put them in the titles of the poems, but nevertheless the poems are at one with his treatment of the moving picture as an art form.

Anyway, here they are: one interesting, one quite good, and one a little nauseating.

Blanche Sweet: Moving-Picture Actress
(After seeing the reel called “Oil and Water”)

Beauty has a throne-room
In our humorous town,
Spoiling its hob-goblins,
Laughing shadows down.
Rank musicians torture
Ragtime ballads vile,
But we walk serenely
Down the odorous aisle.
We forgive the squalor
And the boom and squeal
For the Great Queen flashes
From the moving reel.

Just a prim blonde stranger
In her early day,
Hiding brilliant weapons,
Too averse to play,
Then she burst upon us
Dancing through the night.
Oh, her maiden radiance,
Veils and roses white.
With new powers, yet cautious,
Not too smart or skilled,
That first flash of dancing
Wrought the thing she willed:-
Mobs of us made noble
By her strong desire,
By her white, uplifting,
Royal romance-fire.

Though the tin piano
Snarls its tango rude,
Though the chairs are shaky
And the dramas crude,
Solemn are her motions,
Stately are her wiles,
Filling oafs with wisdom,
Saving souls with smiles;
‘Mid the restless actors
She is rich and slow.
She will stand like marble,
She will pause and glow,
Though the film is twitching,
Keep a peaceful reign,
Ruler of her passion,
Ruler of our pain!

Mae Marsh, Motion Picture Actress

I

The arts are old, old as the stones
From which man carved the sphinx austere.
Deep are the days the old arts bring:
Ten thousand years of yesteryear.

II

She is madonna in an art
As wild and young as her sweet eyes:
A frail dew flower from this hot lamp
That is today’s divine surprise.

Despite raw lights and gloating mobs
She is not seared: a picture still:
Rare silk the fine director’s hand
May weave for magic if he will.

When ancient films have crumbled like
Papyrus rolls of Egypt’s day,
Let the dust speak: “Her pride was high,
All but the artist hid away:

“Kin to the myriad artist clan
Since time began, whose work is dear.”
The deep new ages come with her,
Tomorrow’s years of yesteryear.

To Mary Pickford: Moving-Picture Actress
(On hearing she was leaving the moving-pictures for the stage)

Mary Pickford, doll divine,
Year by year, and every day
At the moving-picture play,
You have been my valentine.

Once a free-limbed page in hose,
Baby-Rosalind in flower,
Cloakless, shrinking, in that hour
How our reverent passion rose,
How our fine desire you won.
Kitchen-wench another day,
Shapeless, wooden every way.
Next, a fairy from the sun.

Once you walked a grown-up strand
Fish-wife siren, full of lure,
Snaring with devices sure
Lads who murdered on the sand.
But on most days just a child
Dimpled as no grown-folk are,
Cold of kiss as some north star,
Violet from the valleys wild.
Snared as innocence must be,
Fleeing, prisoned, chained, half-dead –
At the end of tortures dread
Roaring Cowboys set you free.

Fly, O song, to her to-day,
Like a cowboy cross the land.
Snatch her from Belasco’s hand
And that prison called Broadway.

All the village swains await
One dear lily-girl demure,
Saucy, dancing, cold and pure,
Elf who must return in state.

To Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet were first published in The Congo and Other Poems (1914). Mae Marsh was first published in The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems (1917). The film Oil and Water was made in 1913. David Belasco was the theatre impresario who discovered Gladys Smith and gave her the stage name Mary Pickford.