Word: barthelmess
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...theatrical tradition of white actors in "yellowface" precedes movies, and the innate realism of films didn't discourage early actors. In 1919, the year Richard Barthelmess played the sensitive "chink" in Broken Blossoms, the Danish actor Warner Oland played his first Chinese in The Lightning Raider. Oland looked no more Chinese than, say, Bob Keeshan, yet he was cast "yellow" dozens of times, including in four films with Wong, and culminating in 16 Charlie Chan movies. When Oland died, in 1938, Missouri-born Sidney Toler was tabbed to replace him; he played the sleuth in 22 films, until his death...
...desperate times, desperate titles. Heroes for Sale, in which Richard Barthelmess endures war injuries, morphine addiction and betrayal by every military, judicial and corporate authority, was joined on marquees by Beauty for Sale, Girls for Sale, Scandal for Sale. The films painted, in brisk, garish strokes, America's can-do optimism twisted into gotta-have greed. "What could I do?" asks Stanwyck about an office liaison in Baby Face. "He's my boss, and I had to earn my living." She's bad, but the Depression made...
Died. Richard Barthelmess, 68, square-jawed movie idol of the '20s and '30s, best remembered as the country-boy hero of Tol'able David and the rescuer of distraught D. W. Griffith heroines in Broken Blossoms and Way Down East, a canny New Yorker who invested his savings well, lived out a comfortable retirement (since 1942) with a Long Island mansion and a yacht; of cancer; in Southampton...
...Griffith's greatest errors came during the shooting of a comedy in Mexico around 1920. Miss Gish and Richard Barthelmess were starred, and the part of a domestic was played by a minor actor. The domestic's part was done so well that Miss Gish approached Griffith with the suggestion that the unknown be put on a contract for future films. The director refused: "The fellow can act, but he looks too foreign, too Latin. I couldn't sell him to the American Public." The actor, on the verge of his part in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was Rudolph...
...recent years Colman led a squirely life in the Santa Barbara hills. With his actress wife Benita Hume he did a radio-and-TV comedy series (The Halls of Ivy), also played host to such career-long friends as Richard Barthelmess and William Powell. It fell to Barthelmess and Powell last week to escort Benita Hume Colman and the Colmans' only child, Juliet, to the funeral of Ronald Colman, dead of a lung infection...