Her icy blonde allure (she rarely appeared on camera without her wig) anticipates Grace Kelly in the Hitchcock films of the 50s. Meanwhile, his presentation of Alice Terry moved beyond the sentimental Victorian view of womanhood that prevailed before the 20s. While Ingram may not have been gay, his camera undeniably was. Watching Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1920) or Ramon Novarro in Scaramouche (1923), we see flashes of Jean Marais in Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950), Helmut Berger in La caduta degli dei ( The Damned, Luchino Visconti, 1969), Antonio Banderas in La ley del deseo ( The Law of Desire, Pedro Almodóvar, 1987) – all films by overtly gay auteurs. Unfailingly, Ingram infused his camera with sex, most often of a highly ambiguous kind. Married for 30 years to his pleasant but underwhelming leading lady Alice Terry, he was plagued by rumours that he was keener on his exotically handsome leading men. Stylistically, Rex Ingram was the man who shocked Hollywood into the 20 th century. The patron saint of sheer visual obsession, Ingram made images so primal they are a world in themselves. If we look closely, whole sequences by Ingram shine through in films by Orson Welles, Josef von Sternberg, Luchino Visconti, James Whale and Stanley Kubrick. Yet Ingram and his lush pictorial style are visible in both. In everything he did the camerawork was impeccable.” 2 Michael Powell, who began as his assistant in the late ’20s, wrote: “For me, he was an inspiration, an ideal.” 3 It is hard to imagine more radically different directors than Lean and Powell. David Lean said: “The man who really got me going was Rex Ingram. Yet Ingram, of all the silent directors, had the greatest impact on the sound era. Of his 27 films, less than half survive and only a few are available on DVD or Blu-Ray. His myth weighs little against the fact that most of his work is downright hard to see. As a romantic rebel who walked out on MGM to work in Europe and North Africa and run his own studio in Nice. As a sexually ambivalent Svengali who discovered Valentino and other stars. We may know him as the key Hollywood filmmaker of the 1920s.
We are aware of him, these days, less as a director than as a fantasy of what a director might be.
Rex Ingram may be the best-known enigma in film history. Issue 76 January 15, 1893, Dublin, Ireland.
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