James Vincent | Stolen Moments / 1920

the intruders

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. Thompson Rich and Richard Hall (screenplay), James Vincent (director) Stolen Moments / 1920

 

James Vincent’s Stolen Moments (1920) has got to be one the strangest “who-done-its” ever made. Superficially, however, it’s all rather pat and absolutely straight, if quite convoluted.

      Rudolph Valentino, playing a villain. José Dalmarez, in a secondary grade B movie for the last time, is a handsome womanizer who romances naïve young woman, wowing them through his charm and his fame: he is a popular Brazilian novelist whose works are read, apparently, even in the US. Encountering a wealthy woman Vera Blaine (Marguerite Namara) who lives in the neighborhood of his Florida mansion, he approaches her and lures her into his home where he gives her a photograph in which he’s a written a testimony to his love on the back. Vera, no true beauty, is completely taken back by his attentions and, although she pleads that she must rush back home, promises to meet him the very next day, clearly already having fallen in love with the charming writer. Evidently this romance has been going on for some time since there appear also be love letters she has previously written still in his possession.

      Meanwhile, the curtailed plot—it was originally a six reel film, winnowed down to three reels, shot and cut quickly so that Valentino might return to Hollywood from this film’s St. Augustine, Florida and Savannah, Georgia locations in time for him to star in his first major role, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—inexplicably cuts to the mansion of Vera’s lawyer guardian, Hugh Conway (Albert L. Barrett) where we meet his mother and his long time “college chum” and “partner” (presumably his law partner, Walter Chapin) whom he greets with great joy and zest, putting his arm around his shoulder as the two go off to sit together alone in the palatial living room of his house. As they settle into a small couch, the intertitle appears across the screen: “Love speeds the hours — and a new day comes.”

      Momentarily we are confused until we quickly realize that the words are referring to Vera and José Dalmarez’s relationship, which is continued in the next scene.

      We later discover that he has been courting Vera, but she has turned him down, surely, in part, because the next day she meets up with Dalmarez again, bringing him a book in which she has, in the manner of his gush of emotions swears eternal love to him. It is all rather innocent and girlish, but for the moment sincerely meant. Indeed, he reports that something has come up and he must return to Brazil, but suddenly asks if she will join him.

        Vera asks for a night to contemplate the startling offer. But in the very next she shows up, with her mother’s ring in hand, prepared for the marriage before their trip. Of course, Dalamarez has not planned on marriage whatsoever, declaiming that their love is beyond the mere institution of marriage, etc.—the standard declarations of a man who wants sex with no strings or rings attached.

        The 1920, well brought up girl, however, is crestfallen, refusing his advances and returns home chastened. We have seen Dalmarez hide her gift away, but make little of it since it appears he may now be out of the plot.

         In fact, the camera follows him to Brazil where we see him once again active in his favorite pastime, on this occasion wooing a young woman Inez Salles (Aileen Pringle) of a very noted family, the father of whom (Alex K. Shannon) seems perfectly charmed by his daughter’s romancer. Not so very happy with the situation is her brother (Alvarez Salles) who meets up with her father, perhaps to express his reservations about the relationship, while also keeping a close eye on Dalmarez’ actions. As he leaves her father, he sees the two in an embrace and challenges Dalamarez. The two fight, Dalmarez throwing him to ground and kicking him, a situation which forces him, obviously, to immediately leave not only the house but the relationship.

       Dalmarez returns to the US, this time seeking out a good specialist in criminal law since, he claims, his current novel is about that subject. That is precisely Conway’s specialty, and the two are brought together and have an enjoyable meeting. As he is about to leave the offices, Vera shows up, having in the years since married her former guardian with whom she now has a young daughter.

 

       Almost immediately Dalamarez, inviting himself to a dinner party they giving that night, beings to remind her of her past with him and his possession of the book and letters. She declares that she was young and naïve at the time and they were written in innocence, to which he responds that they may not seem that way, however, to her husband.

      At the dinner party the conversation turns to his new subject of his new book; Hugh—evidently knowing that it concerns an unfaithful wife, wonders whether readers will actually believe the events. Looking at Vera as he speaks, Dalmarez responds: "I knew a girl who gave herself to a man in just the way I describe, and I could show you the letters and a book of poems to prove it."

      Vera drops her glass, and the dinner party breaks up, she demanding in a whisper, as Dalamarez prepares to leave, that he return her book and letters. He demurs.

       When Dalmarez returns home he surprises his butler in the act of taking a nip from the liquor cabinet. The two begin to struggle, and the butler grabs a dagger Dalmarez has hanging on the wall. Dalmarez overpowers the older man and sends him away without his final wages.

        Vera, still convinced that he might return her letters, arrives at his home soon after, he pulling out the book from its secret hiding place before he returns it, suggesting it and the letters might be hers if only she complies with his sexual demands. Lunging to the spot to where all is concealed, he grabs and attempts to kiss her. She struggles picks up the dagger left by the butler and strikes him in the face. He falls to the floor, apparently dead, as she escapes convinced that she has killed him.

       The next morning Dick Huntley telephones his partner Hugh to tell him that Dalamarez has been found dead, information which Hugh immediately passes on to his wife. Another strange intertitle appears soon after, stating apparently to one particular, “It looks like a woman’s work. If it is — we are certain to get her — women always leave clues.”

        We might well ask, who represents the “we” in this case, and why other than advising Dalmarez are “we”--presumably Hugh and his partner--even involved in this case which the police detectives are already attempting to solve? They have already captured the Butler and discovered that he had returned to steal money; they have only to explain his denial of the murder and the scratch marks on the dead man’s face.

        Yet we don’t think to ask that question since our attention is focused on Vera and her fears. We are not surprised, in fact, when in the very next scene, we see Vera breaking and entering through a patio window determined to at least retrieve her book.

        Within the dark room we see another man sitting in a chair obviously awaiting something. Is he a night guard? Another intruder? We can’t be sure. But he soon hears Vera’s movements and taking up a flashlight discovers her in Dalamarez’s office with her book in hand. Wrestling with her for a moment, they both finally discover that they are friends: he is Dick, her husband Hugh’s partner. She quickly explains her presence and the situation, she pleading with him, “Dick for God’s sake save me.” 

        By this time, they have moved back to the French window, where Dick sees in the distance a car approaching. He quickly opens the book and reads the long-ago inscription, handing the book back to her and sending her off into the night, apparently afraid that the new arrival might discover her presence.

        As Dick returns to the central room, he hears another noise and soon after discovers yet another intruder with whom he struggles before the arriving guest pushes open the door to discover, when it turns on the lights, Dick standing over the other man, Alvarez Salles, the brother of the Brazilian Inez, whose letters, he explains, were being held by Dalamarez. He had come for them the previous night, he explains, but Dalamarez had tried to prevent him, he taking up the nearby weapon on the desk and providing the fatal blow.

 

     It reminds one a bit of corpse in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 masterpiece The Trouble with Harry, who everyone seems to have presumed they killed.

      The other man who has just entered happens to be Hugh, who now returns to his wife to announce that they have found the killer, freeing her from suspicion, she assured in her conviction that Dick will not reveal her past to his best friend, her husband.

      This murder mystery ends quite happily, accordingly, with the real-life Valentino headed off the Hollywood to become famous.

      I viewed this film only because I found it on one of the several Letterboxd lists of minor gay films. I was so puzzled by its appearance on that list after seeing it, that I completely forgot about it, and checking that list one final time, again came across the film and dutifully rewatched it. My conclusion and puzzlement was the same: this is not a film with LGBTQ content, so why is it on this basically reliable list I asked myself (I have since also found the Letterboxd lists of gay films to be quite unreliable).

      Over the years, I prided myself for puzzling through coded movies, being able to see events by looking into the corners of the film or at the peripheries, reading the language of the film somewhat aslant, or picking up on subtle puns, etc. In short, spotting the wink that would clue me in to the forbidden content. But this time, following the mystery so intensely, I missed it at least twice.

     The one question I should have asked myself was why are Hugh and Dick meeting up in mansion in the middle of the night? Even if we imagine they are amateur sleuths who do this kind thing as a hobby, why work in the dark when clues are not very easy to spot? Perhaps these two “college chums” and “partners” whose “love” for one another “speeds the hours” as the intertitles are “winked,” have far more to hide than Vera might ever have had to explain about herself. No wonder Dick looked so intense at the approaching auto and sped Vera off with his promise to say nothing of finding her there. All the clues at the real “crime,” perhaps a homosexual affair, have been missed even by a suspicious gay reader such as myself. Clearly the “moments” noted by the title were “stolen” by these two men, not by Vera in her youthful adulation of the Brazilian.

      I was going to suggest that perhaps even the screenwriter didn’t quite know what the film itself suggested—that is until I checked out screenwriter H. Thompson Rich’s background. Rich was a Greenwich Village poet who published several poems in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry Magazine, Parisienne and other avant-garde journals, along with two chapbooks, Lumps of Clay: 16 rhythms (1915) and The Red Shame: War poems (1916) published by Guido Bruno, who also published Oscar Wilde, Djuna Barnes, Alfred Kreymborg, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Later Rich published notable science fiction works such as Spawn of the Comet edited several anthologies of ghost tales and science fiction works. This was not a naïve Hollywood beginner, but a sophisticated writer who obviously knew absolutely what he was about.*

 

*I suspect, given his involvement with the group Bruno published that H. Thompson Rich may have also have been gay. I have not read many of his poems, but one in particular, “Desire,” published in Poetry Magazine in June 1916 certainly hints of a man wishing he were either more manly or something closer to a woman to be able to share his love of the figure of whom he writes in the poem, which sounds like a highly closeted gay man:

 

I would send these dreams of yours and mine re-borning:

I would send out love out to seek noble flight—

Over the interminable mountains in the morning,

Over the endless oceans of the night.

I would put the lightness of it into laughter,

I would put the sorrow of it into song—

That should go echoing on for ages after,

That should make glad the world whole aeons long.

I would tell in deathless paint the glory of it;

I would tell in immutable stone its majesty—

To hao it and old a light above it,

To temper it with immortality.

     I would spin it to the heavens, span on span…

     Were I but—oh, a little more than man!

 

     The director of this film, James Vincent, appears to be the same man who was silent film star William Kerrigan’s long time lover as fully described in William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen. Mann suggests that Kerrigan was able to get some small roles for his handsome lover in various films. But if it is the same James Vincent, he had already appeared in several stage roles in New York, and played in at least 23 films during his lifetime. Later he was stage manager for Catherine Cornell and served as dialogue coach for George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet (1936). Mann had wondered aloud in his book whether, in fact, the two appearances of Vincent represented the same man, but according to Wikipedia’s listings, it does indeed seem that they are one and the same, even though Wikipedia makes no mention of his relationship with Kerrigan.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).