Preferred Citation: Pearson, Roberta E. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5t1nb3jp/


 
6— Henry B. Walthall

6—
Henry B. Walthall

Despite Griffith's public disdain for stage actors and his much-publicized Pygmalion-like sculpting of young, inexperienced actresses, most of his performers in fact had a theatrical background, bringing a variety of performance styles to the Biograph studio. Indeed, some had achieved greater success in the theatre than Griffith himself and may also have had more experience acting in companies that used the theatrical verisimilar code. Griffith may have been inclined to defer (albeit, quietly) to those whom he thought had superior training.

Because discounting the actor's role in the transition in Biograph performance style would be no more appropriate than discounting Griffith's, this chapter examines the Biograph career of Henry B. Walthall. But why single Walthall out from all the Biograph company to test the hypothesis of actor as "auteur"? Several factors make a focus on Walthall logical: his gender, his career pattern, his reputation among both his colleagues and the public as a fine actor who may well have influenced other actors, his statements about his craft, and, finally, his reputation even today.

The "Griffith actresses" (with the notable exception of Blanche Sweet) have already received much attention. And as mentioned in the previous chapter, the experience of Gish and the other female actors may reflect the context in which the case is strongest for Griffith as total auteur of performance style. Hence, it makes sense here to look at a male actor whom the literature has almost totally neglected but about whom there is some evidence in the historical record.[1]

Walthall's theatrical career had exposed him to a variety of acting styles. On his arrival in New York City, he was first engaged as an extra at the Murray


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Hill Stock Company, a lower-priced repertory theatre that often performed public-domain material such as Shakespeare. He did more stock work with a company in Providence, Rhode Island, and on the road and then returned to New York. On Broadway, he was Captain Clay Randolph in the Civil War drama, Winchester and then went on to play Steve Danbury in Under Southern Skies . His stage career reached its height with his long-term engagement in The Great Divide , a Broadway play produced by prominent actor-manager and strong proponent of theatrical realism, Henry Miller.[2]

One day at the Players Club a producer approached Walthall with a job offer for him and his friend James Kirkwood, who was by then working at Biograph. Walthall went to 11 East 14th Street and discovered his friend in convict's stripes:

Kirkwood introduced me to Griffith. I had never heard of him but he had seen me in Under Southern Skies and The Great Divide . "You are just the man I want," said Griffith. "Get on these old clothes, take this shovel and come on out in the street. There's a nice little sewer trench out there that will just fit you and bye and bye your sweet little daughter will bring papa his lunch." Well, I did it, or rather Griffith did it. My debut made in a sewer trench: A Convict's Sacrifice . . . . It wasn't very hard work and after that first experience I came to the conclusion that I might as well be knocking down five a day that way as loafing about.[3]

A Convict's Sacrifice was made in June 1909. Walthall appeared in seventeen Biographs before rejoining Henry Miller's company in August for a ten-week London production of The Great Divide . Upon his return to the States, he went to Biograph again, his first role this time as the wheat king's henchman in A Corner in Wheat . He remained with Biograph until September 1910, this time making forty-seven films, the last of which was The Banker's Daughters . For almost two years after this, he shuttled back and forth between the Pathé and Reliance studios, coming back to Biograph in June 1912 to play the lead in A Change of Spirit and remaining with Griffith through The Birth of a Nation , in which he played the lead role of "the little colonel."

Between 1909 and 1913, Walthall appeared in 102 Biographs. Walthall in his time played many parts, not only the soldier "seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth" but society swells, discontented laborers, drunks, madmen, Mexicans, Indians, Italians, French revolutionaries, and medieval troubadours, among others.

Whether using the histrionic or verisimilar code, Walthall's work led to his being unanimously perceived as one of the best, if not the best, of the male actors at Biograph. Edwin August flatly stated that Walthall was "the best actor at Biograph."[4] Blanche Sweet concurred: "Henry Walthall was one of the best in both film and stage."[5] Linda Arvidson's praise was only slightly more guarded: "Wally's acting proved to be the most convincing of its type so far."[6] Arvidson probably was referring to Walthall's romantic costume dra-


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mas in which he employed the histrionic code, but Bitzer hinted that Walthall was seen as one of the primary exponents of the verisimilar code: "His performances were well ahead of his time."[7] George Blaisdell of The Moving Picture World lauded Walthall for his verisimilar performance style. "His work is so natural, so lifelike, that illusion is established on his original appearance in a picture."[8] Reviewing one of Walthall's Reliance films, Clouds and Sunshine (1911), the World identified what made Walthall's work "natural" and "lifelike." Walthall "shows his intelligence by his carefulness all through the picture for the little unnoticeable things, the hand to the hat, the slight gesture."[9]

After The Birth of a Nation , the critics became positively adulatory: "Walthall is a rare creation of God, that mankind should appreciate and respect. Henry Walthall, as a photoplayer, is inimitable."[10] Two years later a Photoplay writer was ready to award him the highest accolade of all: " . . . Henry B. Walthall, the greatest of all screen emotional stars of the sterner sex—and some think, of either sex."[11] Fans, too, appreciated Walthall's "splendid acting."[12] A piano player in a California theatre wrote to Frank Woods about Walthall, calling him "the most wonderful actor in the moving picture age." She went on to assert that Walthall was a "perfect actor. He portrays every thought, and each and every movement to perfection."[13]

Griffith, in common with everybody else, had only public praise for the actor, claiming in the 1940s that Walthall's Little Colonel was "the greatest male performance in the history of film."[14] After Walthall's death in 1936, Griffith said, "I don't know whether you could call him a great actor, but of this I am certain—he had a great soul. . . . It is given to only a few to be able to express a [great] soul to the entire world by means of an expressive face and body."[15]

It is not unreasonable to assume that the success of The Birth of a Nation , coupled with the extensive publicity that the male lead received, may have elevated Walthall to a preeminent position among his peers, a position that inspired both established and aspiring actors to learn from and perhaps emulate his style. Though arguing this point would require another chapter and perhaps another book, one can safely assert that close analysis of Walthall's performance may illuminate not only his acting style but that of his contemporaries and successors as well. The Biograph Company was perceived as the leading exemplar of good acting among the film studios, and Walthall occupied a similar place of esteem amongst actors.

Walthall's ideas about his craft owe more to Griffith's actual practice than to the director's on-the-record advice and opinions. Griffith, you will remember, claimed to value "real emotions" over technique, believing that if actors "felt" their parts, their inner feelings would produce the appropriate external manifestations. As Griffith told Mae Marsh, "Now feel it. Don't act." But as we have seen, Griffith devoted countless rehearsal hours to constructing char-


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acters through "bits of business," a process that certainly required his actors to act.

Walthall, adding a third step to Griffith's instructions, once summed up his acting philosophy as "Think it, feel it, do it."[16] In interviews, Walthall placed far greater stress on preparation and technique than did Griffith but professed to follow the latter's methods.

That's what I call Lillian [Gish]—the most skilled technician the screen has ever had. I don't place much confidence in actors who rely on feeling and emotion for expression. Inspiration is undependable. Our way, Lillian's and mine, is Griffith's method: to build systematically and tediously a structure complete in every detail that the mind can conceive and that tiresome repetition can perfect. Thoughtful analysis of a character and concentration on minute ways of expressing it produce a more logical and sustained interpretation. . . . We don't depend on inspiration but we build. And the more carefully your foundation is laid, the more conscientious your attention to every detail, the more solid will be your edifice.[17]

Walthall, not given to Griffith's mystical musings about "soul," presents a more articulate summation of the verisimilar code than the director ever did. "Thoughtful analysis of character and concentration on minute ways of expressing it" developed through Griffith's endless rehearsals enabled the actors to bring to the screen the complex, individuated characters of the psychologized narrative.

Walthall was equally articulate on the matter of character, expressing in almost every interview a strong preference for the psychologized individual over the melodramatic stock figure. Recalling the Biograph years, the actor said: "I was everything good and bad together, brave and a coward, a dreamer and a bit of a cad, which is to say that I played my hero as a human being."[18] Rejecting a conventional approach to his interpretations, he preferred playing the villain: "I liked the villains best of all. . . . He has originality. He is not bound by the conventions which put a fence around the juveniles and heroes."[19] In Walthall's view, playing the villain was infinitely preferable to "the mushy, matinée idol roles, always trying to keep some villain from stealing your sweetheart and getting plotted against, etc. I'd rather play the villain, especially when he turns out to be alright in the end."[20]

Even today among devotees of the early silent cinema, Walthall retains a reputation as one of the preeminent stars of the period, whose performances seem, to those convinced of the teleological inevitability of the verisimilar code, "ahead of his time." Kalton C. Lahue, in his book about male stars of the silent cinema, Gentlemen to the Rescue: The Heroes of the Silent Screen , states that "few actors on the silent screen possessed the capabilities of Henry B. Walthall" and goes on to speak of his "restrained and sensitive portrayals" and of his enactment of the Little Colonel as "one of the outstanding perfor-


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mances in the history of the screen."[21] A few years earlier, Joe Franklin, in a book ghosted by William K. Everson, had used much the same language to describe Walthall, "one of the finest . . . of silent screen stars," who had an acting style memorable "in those early years when there was so much broad pantomime on the screen, for its restraint and sensitive underplaying."[22] Among an earlier generation of silent film "historians," then, Walthall may have been the male star whose performances provided evidence for crediting Griffith with the development of a new and better acting style.

How much of the creation of Walthall's Biograph characters should we attribute to the actor and how much to the director? We do know that Griffith directed the majority of Walthall's Biographs. Although by 1913 Biograph had six production units in addition to the one headed by Griffith, Walthall (along with Sweet, Pickford, and Wilfred Lucas) was usually not available to any other director.[23] Unfortunately, we know very little about on-the-set interactions between director and actor. Walthall's own recollections, related in a 1926 interview, credited the director with absolute control over his performers and concurred with Griffith's image of the great artist: "That shy child of sixteen [Lillian Gish] wouldn't have dared talk back to Griffith. It wouldn't have occurred to any of us for that matter, for he was the master instructing us. . . . The Griffith tradition . . . makes of his actors mere automatons reflecting his masterly genius."[24] Yet Walthall's thoughtful articulation of the technique of the verisimilar code makes it doubtful that he would have functioned as a mere automaton.

An interview with Blanche Sweet confirms this: "He [Griffith] loved Wally. He thought he was a fine actor, and he never really had much to say about Wally's acting. He showed him very little. He just said, 'Well, here's the situation' . . . or 'a little less, Wally,' or 'a little more, Wally.' He respected and depended on Wally as an actor."[25]

An anecdote related by Bitzer perhaps best conveys the tone of the Griffith-Walthall relationship. On one occasion, Griffith, losing patience with the actor's repeated tardiness, fined Walthall fifty dollars.

He [Walthall] enacted his rehearsal so well that the director came over to him and said, "That's a great touch you put in. Now could you work up the transition into an even higher climax." Wally . . . said, "If I do it lots better will you take a few dollars off that fine? I can't get into the part much thinking of that fifty." After the final take the director went to Wally and threw his arms around him, something he seldom did. (He would generally say after a good bit anyone would do well, "We'll see what it looks like on the screen.") The director said there can be no fine in the face of such splendid acting.[26]

Here we see that the actor put in a "great touch" of his own and that the director's instructions were limited to "could you work up the transition into


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an even higher climax?" This, together with the other scattered evidence, indicates that Griffith respected Walthall, who may well have been one of those actors whom Griffith felt no great need to instruct.

The above constitutes the scanty extratextual evidence about Griffith and Walthall, though, given evidence about the Biograph rehearsal process, it seems reasonable to assume that the two may have collaborated in the construction of the actor's characters. The primary evidence for the actor as collaborator must, however, come from close textual analysis. Knowledge of Walthall's theatrical career encourages us to look for signs of his theatrical training in his early Biographs. His relatively long Biograph employment permits comparing the largely histrionically coded films of his earlier period with the largely verisimilarly coded films of his later period, while also accounting for the deployment of other signifying practices. His wide range of Biograph roles permits further comparisons among the different character types and genres which his performances encompass.

Walthall arrived at Biograph with broader theatrical experience than Griffith. He had played with second-rate stock companies but also with Miller on Broadway, and he had most likely mastered both the histrionic and verisimilar codes before appearing in film. Walthall's earliest Biographs show that his theatrical experiences had indeed trained him in a wide range of performance styles.

In his first film, A Convict's Sacrifice , the neophyte film player uses few of the conventional gestures of the histrionic code, and his performance, by 1909 standards, is more verisimilarly than histrionically coded. Walthall plays a laborer who befriends an ex-convict (James Kirkwood), whom he persuades his employer to hire. Later, Walthall gets laid off and is unable to find work, while Kirkwood has escaped from the prison to which he has been unjustly returned.

Two examples will suffice to show Walthall's style in this film. In the first, he returns home having found no employment. He walks up to the shack that is his home, head bowed, shoulders slumped, and pauses at the foot of the stairs to smell the flowers that he carries. In the next shot, in the interior, his wife holds out her hand to him palm up, and he slowly shakes his head "no." He kneels at the bed and shows his little girl the flowers. Getting up, he turns in a semi-circle away from his wife and stops with his back to the camera, clutching the back of his neck in frustration. He then sits motionless in a chair next to a table, left hand on left knee, right elbow on right knee, head bowed. His wife gives him a piece of bread, which he picks up and looks at, then stops with the bread halfway to his mouth. His wife touches his arm, and he makes a slight gesture to the child as if to say, "Give it to her." Walthall's gestural economy, the use of a few simple movements such as clutching the back of the neck, embodies the father's quiet desperation at being unable to provide for his family.


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figure

Left:  The Convict's Sacrifice:  Walthall smells the flowers. 
Right: The Convict's Sacrifice:  Walthall prays.

During this shot, Kirkwood arrives. Seeing his friend's family so badly off, he determines to surrender and allow Walthall to obtain the reward for his capture. After his apprehension, presumably on the assumption that Walthall has already gotten the reward, he tries to escape from the prison guards and is shot down outside the shack. Walthall kneels by his side, puts an arm around his shoulders and a hand on his chest and raises him slightly. Kirkwood collapses and dies, and Walthall leans forward, staring at his face. His daughter stands by him, and he takes the flowers gently from her hand. Holding the flowers in front of him, he tilts his head back, eyes closed, and mutters a prayer. He then folds the convict's hands around the flowers, encloses Kirkwood's hands in his own and slumps forward, his head on his raised forearm, the only conventional gesture in the scene.

Walthall's performance in this film shows that his stage training had prepared him to give a relatively verisimilar performance. Though there is a moment in the first scene in which he looks briefly at the camera (and Griffith?) as if seeking direction, Walthall's style required little modification to suit him to the fully developed verisimilar code of 1912 and 1913. His next film, The Sealed Room , in which he played one of the three principals, shows that he also had command of the histrionic code. The film is a costume melodrama set in an unspecified medieval country. Arthur Johnson is the king, Marion Leonard the queen, and Walthall the court musician and the queen's illicit lover. The king, whose suspicions are aroused, pretends to leave his castle but actually remains to catch his wife and lover in flagrante delicto. Understandably annoyed, he orders that they be walled up in the chamber where Walthall sits at Leonard's feet playing the lute. When the lovers finally notice their entombment, they portray their panic and horror with the fully extended, heavily stressed, and repeated conventional gestures of the histrionic code. Walthall falls to his knees and begins flailing wildly at the wall. Standing


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figure

The Sealed Room:  The doomed lovers react 
histrionically.

again, he extends his arm to the queen, finger pointed as if accusing her of something (carelessness, complicity?). Next, he raises both arms, bent at the elbow, to either side of his head before slumping over the back of a chair, which he clutches. For a few moments, he staggers around, hand at his throat, and then both sink to their knees, as Walthall fans Leonard with the lute and then collapses.

Despite his initial capacity for both verisimilarly and histrionically coded performance, there is an overall movement in Walthall's work toward the fully developed verisimilar code, which a comparison of his enactment of similar roles from his first and second Biograph periods illustrates. In A Summer Idyl, Thou Shalt Not (both 1910), Love in an Apartment Hotel (1912), and Death's Marathon (1913), Walthall plays a middle- to upper-middle-class gentleman who proposes (or in Love has just proposed) to his beloved. In the earlier films, setting and costume primarily establish his character, while in the later films Walthall employs the byplay of the verisimilar code to convey the easy self-confidence of the society gentleman.

In the first shot of A Summer Idyl , set at a society soirée, Walthall, dressed in evening clothes, proposes to Stephanie Longfellow. He leans close to her, hand on chest, then extends his hand to her palm up, then holds her hand in both of his. She says no, and he pleads with right hand extended and other hand on his chest. She remains adamant, and after she leaves, his hands sink slowly to his sides in despair. He then raises a hand and brings it down across his chest in a gesture of resolve. In the second shot of the film, Walthall, at home, decides to go for a country walking tour. He brushes the hair back from his forehead, his hand lingering in his hair while he thinks. He looks down at his clothes and moves his hands downward from his neck to his sides indicating the discarding of the evening dress that symbolizes his present life. He then makes a sweeping gesture of rejection with his left arm, which moves


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figure

A Summer Idyl:  Walthall rejects his current life-
style in a sweeping, downward gesture.

from close to his side out perpendicular to his body. In these two shots, costume and setting construct character, while Walthall's histrionically coded gestures serve to advance the narrative but contribute little to his character's individuation. So much do "clothes make the man" in this instance that the evening dress embodies a whole way of life, which Walthall rejects in his gestural soliloquy.

In the first shot of Thou Shalt Not , Walthall relies less on histrionically coded gestures but still does not individuate his character to any significant degree. Meeting his beloved at a garden party (setting once again indicating social class), he holds hands with her and gestures toward the garden. As they walk, she stops to pick a flower and hands it to Walthall, who kisses it. He then takes a ring from his pocket and hands it to her, while gesturing to his chest and to her. She accepts, and after she exits, he walks off looking at the flower. The props (flower and ring) make histrionically coded gestures superfluous by conveying the narrative information, but as general symbols they lack any emotional resonance that might psychologize the characters.

In Love in an Apartment Hotel and Death's Marathon , Walthall's characters also handle props, but rather than serving as general symbols of a man in love they aid the actor in the construction of a particular character in a particular situation. In Death's Marathon , Walthall is a successful and self-assured businessman. An intertitle, "Each in Turn Seeks Her Hand" precedes a seven-shot sequence in which Walthall and his partner (Walter Miller) both propose to Blanche Sweet. In the first shot of the sequence, Walthall and Miller sit on a park bench, Walthall smoking a cigar, one hand resting casually in his lap. Miller gestures in Sweet's direction as if asking, "Can I go first?" Walthall smiles and points at his cigar, as if saying, "Go ahead. I want to finish this." The film intercuts shots of Miller proposing and being rejected with shots of a perfectly composed Walthall awaiting his turn. In the first, he


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figure

Death's Marathon:  Walthall awaits his turn to 
propose, brushing the ash from his cigar.

brushes the ash off his cigar with his fingers, and in the second, he stands, throws away the cigar and straightens his jacket and waistcoat. Walthall's complacency, revealed through the byplay with the cigar, almost borders on arrogance, an impression that his minimal wooing of Sweet strengthens. In his proposal, Walthall uses neither histrionic gestures nor props, for his character does not deem it necessary to make a grand declaration. He simply removes his hat and leans over Sweet until she notices him, then sits next to her. He points to her in a small, throwaway gesture, takes her hand and puts his other arm around her. She acquiesces immediately, burying her head in his shoulder.

In Love in an Apartment Hotel , Walthall portrays a sophisticated man-about-town engaged (once more) to Blanche Sweet. The intertitle before his first appearance states "The Morning After the Proposal." Just awakened, he walks into the frame yawning, his hand on the back of his head. He tightens the belt of his robe and shakes his head at his valet who asks him a question. He moistens his lips and picks up a pitcher of water but notices his tailcoat hanging over the back of a chair and puts the pitcher down. Picking the coat up, he flicks some (invisible) dust off the sleeve, showing the character's fastidiousness, then sniffs the coat's shoulder, enjoying the lingering perfume where she had rested her head, and extends his right palm out toward Sweet's picture on a nearby table. He picks up the picture, smiles at it, carries it to the phone with him, and calls his beloved.

In this shot, and throughout the film, Walthall's gestures and use of props combine to create the picture of an elegant "toff" in a romantic daze. Before leaving "for the club," he pauses before Sweet's picture, takes his hat off, bends down, and smiles at it. He walks into the next shot blowing the (again invisible) dust off the crown of his topper. Before leaving his apartment, he


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figure

Left:  Love in an Apartment Hotel:  Walthall as debonair man-about-town. 
Right: Love in an Apartment Hotel:  Walthall thinks of "her," tapping his cane on his hand.

adjusts his tie and straightens his scarf. Outside in the hall, he pauses by his door and swings his cane in two or three very short arcs. Halfway down the hall to the elevator, he pauses, turns profile to camera, and smacks the handle of the cane lightly into his other hand as he thinks of her . While waiting for the elevator, he stands with feet slightly apart, holding the cane in both hands perpendicular to the floor. Though top hat and cane are standard accessories for this character type, Walthall uses the props to show his character's fastidious habits and elegant affectation interrupted by contemplation of his new-found love and happiness. In A Summer Idyl , the evening dress was a stereotypical indicator of station, and in Thou Shalt Not , the ring and flowers were stereotypical indicators of love, but in Love in an Apartment Hotel Walthall uses tailcoat, top hat, and cane for psychological individuation, rendering them expressions of his character's personality and particular situation.

Of the characters in all four films, the "toff" in Love in an Apartment Hotel is perhaps the most clearly individuated through verisimilar byplay. Given Walthall's penchant, often expressed in interviews, for portraying those "perplex'd in the extreme," however, he may have found greater satisfaction playing the doomed heroes of Thou Shalt Not and Death's Marathon . In both films the main character's comfortable bourgeois existence is shattered, in the earlier film by tuberculosis and in the later, in keeping with the trend toward increasing psychologization, by moral weakness leading to dissolution and suicide. Walthall's performance style in these films exhibits both continuities and differences.

In Thou Shalt Not , as his character deals with the emotional consequences of his illness, Walthall selects from a characteristic repertoire of gestures he habitually used when portraying his "hero as a human being." Often, when showing a character in emotional crisis, Walthall puts his hand to his mouth,


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figure

Thou Shalt Not:  Walthall learns of his 
illness, nervously fingering his jacket.

rubs or fingers his clothing, interlaces his fingers, clenches and unclenches his hands, and runs a hand through his hair, all these gestures unemphasized and integrated into the overall flow of his movements.

At the moment of the revelation of his illness, Walthall clenches his right hand slightly and raises his left slowly in the air, before putting a hand on the doctor's arm. He turns his head from the doctor, and his right hand plays with the skirt of his jacket. Later, when his fiancée pleads with him to damn the consequences and marry her, he shows his distress through clenched hands and raises the back of his hand to his mouth in indecision. After he has, against his better judgment, promised to marry her, the doctor sees them together. The fiancée leaves and Walthall coughs, puts a hand to his chest, and fingers his tie while glancing uneasily at the doctor. Walthall mixes these little "realistic" details with histrionically coded gestures, such as outward and downward movements of rejection, but the verisimilar code predominates.

In Death's Marathon , Walthall's character, a gambler and a wastrel, loses the money he has "borrowed" from his company and commits suicide. Again, the actor uses his characteristic gestures of emotional turmoil, putting his hand to his mouth when his partner almost discovers him taking the money, raising a hand to his chin when he encounters his partner after the theft, and rubbing his hands on his jacket after losing at poker. At the film's climax, Walthall, contemplating suicide, talks to his wife on the phone as his partner drives madly to the rescue. Walthall talks on the phone and toys with his gun for fourteen shots, all but the first in medium, externalizing the character's changing emotions largely through props and facial expression rather than through his characteristic little gestures. Phone in one hand, he gestures upward with the gun, smiling as if to say, "That's where I'm going." Refusing to be dissuaded, he shakes his head, and in the next shot smiles again, looking closely at the gun. Putting phone and gun down, he takes out paper


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figure

Death's Marathon:  Walthall indicates his 
suicidal intentions, pointing the gun to his 
presumed destination.

and pen, then looks almost directly at the camera as if thinking. As he writes, his mouth tightens slightly, and his eyes narrow. Holding the phone again, he toys with the gun, letting it fall slowly from his hand so that it points almost at the camera. He looks at the camera with a slight smile. After further talk and byplay with the gun, Walthall smiles, says goodbye, looks down at the gun, and raises it to his temple.

The fact that Walthall, though portraying emotionally distressed characters in both films, mixed the histrionic and verisimilar codes in Thou Shalt Not and used the histrionic code not at all in the climax of Death's Marathon may tempt us to conclude that chronology is the best predictor of Walthall's acting, that he "progressed" in linear fashion toward an increasingly verisimilar style. But such a conclusion ignores the interaction of the closer camera, editing, and props with the performance of the suicide sequence in the later film. In Chapter 4, we investigated the relationship between the deployment of other signifying practices and performance style, and hypothesized a complicated and dialectical process relating the shift from the histrionic to the verisimilar codes, the transition to the psychological narrative, and the use of character-centered signifiers. The differences between Thou Shalt Not and Death's Marathon confirm this hypothesis.

The Griffith feature The Avenging Conscience (1914) shows that, even within the same film, Walthall varied his style with regard to the deployment of signifying practices. In this film, Walthall's character dreams that he has killed his uncle and is pursued by hallucinatory phantoms and a flesh-and-blood justice-seeking detective. His performance style ranges from the unchecked histrionic code to the fully developed verisimilar code, with its emphasis on byplay, props, and facial expression.

The main hallucination sequence occurs primarily in long shot, with inter-


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figure

Above left:  The Avenging Conscience:  Walthall reacts to a vision. 
Above right: The Avenging Conscience:  Close-up of Walthall's hand stilling the detective's. 
Lower left: The Avenging Conscience:  Walthall expresses nervousness by twiddling his thumbs.

cutting between Walthall and his "visions." Walthall spends eleven of his fourteen shots in this sequence on his knees, in a praying attitude, clasping his hands, stretching his arms out wide, and making gestures of rejection. In two shots, he lies full length on the ground writhing and shaking. The other three shots are close-ups, as Walthall either smiles or shakes his head.

Contrast this with the detective's breaking down of the suspected murderer. In this sixty-one shot sequence, the film cuts between the detective's interrogation and police activities outside the nephew's home. The interior scene is broken down into long shots of the two characters together, medium shots of each character, and close-ups of faces, hands, and other telling details. Walthall's performance is constructed through his characteristic little details and facial expressions. His hands tug at his collar, rub his knees, thrust themselves into his pockets, unsteadily reach out to still the detective's tapping pencil, or slap the edge of the table. His thumbs repeatedly twiddle nervously. Anxious glances at the detective and at a clock convey his increasing stress, which his facial expressions reinforce. He grimaces, smiles, licks and purses his lips, and narrows his eyes.

Walthall's performance style and the nature of the other signifying practices differ vastly between the vision scene and the interrogation scene. The un-


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figure

The Oath and the Man:  Walthall vows vengeance.

checked histrionically coded acting of the former might almost be from a 1908 Biograph, while the latter scene represents the culmination of the verisimilar code that Griffith and his actors developed throughout the Biograph years.

Close analysis of Walthall's films has shown that both chronology and the deployment of other signifying practices significantly affect the actor's performance style. Now let us consider the variations in Walthall's acting in relationship to genre and character type.[27] We have seen that Walthall employed elements of the verisimilar code in his first film, A Convict's Sacrifice, while in the costume drama The Sealed Room he used the unchecked histrionic code. Overall, the Biograph costume dramas feature the most histrionically coded acting, as we would expect, given this genre's reliance on the external motivation and unmediated causality of the "pure" melodrama. Walthall's performances conform to this general rule, though he was one of the few actors equally adept at both codes. A film set during the French Revolution, The Oath and the Man, tells the story of a petit bourgeois perfumer (Walthall), his wife (Florence Barker), and their noble landlord (Francis Grandon). The landlord exercises his droit du seigneur, and the wife willingly consents, much to Walthall's distress. Come the revolution, Walthall leads the uprising of the tenantry, while wife and nobleman seek refuge in Walthall's shop. True to his religious convictions, he shields them from the mob and engineers their escape.

The film was made in September 1910, six months after Thou Shalt Not, in which Walthall had already employed many of those characteristic little touches with which he created psychologized and individuated characters. In this later film, however, Walthall employs the histrionic code almost exclusively. In the shot in which he confronts the wife and nobleman in the latter's palace, he points at the lord, grabs his own lapel, holds both hands out to his wife, and then puts one hand on his heart and raises the other in the air. Upon returning home, he grabs his chest with his hands, then spreads his hands out


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figure

The Face at the Window:  Histrionic 
intoxication with a verisimilar touch.

in front of him, palms up. Taking a knife, he raises it above his head in a stabbing gesture, which he repeats. Lowering the knife, he points offscreen, shakes his first, and turns around, hiding the knife in his jacket. A priest enters and shows him a crucifix. After looking from knife to crucifix, he drops to his knees before the priest. Like the consumptive in Thou Shalt Not, this character experiences great emotional distress, but in this film Walthall externalizes the emotional turmoil through heavily stressed, fully extended gestures instead of little individualizing details.

The difference in performance style in the costume melodrama and the contemporary drama of internal motivation and mediated causality becomes clear by contrasting Walthall's portrayal of drunks in two genres and three films: the contemporary melodrama The Face at the Window (1910); another contemporary melodrama from two years later, The Burglar's Dilemma (1912); and the Civil War costume melodrama The House with Closed Shutters (1910).

In The Face at the Window, Walthall portrays a college graduate whose father disowns him after he marries an artist's model. Falling into drunken dissolution, he abandons wife and child. The wife dies, and the grandfather adopts the child. Years later the son is initiated into his father's and grandfather's fraternity. Walthall appears (at the window), and the fraternity boys, as a lark, take him in and give him a drink. He meets his son, reconciles with his father, and, of course, dies. Walthall plays his drunk scenes with much staggering and arm-waving, and the climactic scene with much shrinking back in his chair and many appeals to heaven, but he also injects verisimilar touches, clutching his jacket lapel, putting hand to mouth, and wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

In The Burglar's Dilemma, Walthall plays Lionel Barrymore's "weakling brother." During an argument, Walthall hits Barrymore and, in his drunken


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figure

The Burglar's Dilemma:  Verisimilar intoxication: 
holding onto the chair for support.

confusion, believes he has killed him. In this film, Walthall substitutes a controlled drunkenness for his earlier arm-waving and staggering, indicating his character's intoxication through his inability to remain vertical, as he wavers slightly, clutching at a chair back for support. His gestures become looser and bigger, but he retains the byplay of the verisimilar code, playing with his drinking glass, for example, fingering it and lifting it slightly from the table while talking to his brother. When the police arrive to arrest the burglar whom Walthall has accused of the "murder," he uses his typical gestures of agitation, rubbing the knees of his trousers, putting his hand to his mouth, clasping his hands at the back of his head, etc.

In The House with Closed Shutters (1910), Walthall is a "drink mad coward" whom Robert E. Lee entrusts with the delivery of important papers. Terrified by being shot at, Walthall flees to his home and drinks himself into a stupor. His sister dons his uniform and delivers the papers in his stead but is killed, leading everyone to assume that Walthall has died a hero's death. His mother does not correct the assumption but rather forces her son to spend the rest of his life behind "closed shutters," giving out that the recluse is actually the sister, mad with grief over her brother's death.

When Walthall first bursts into his house seeking refuge, he leans against the door with a crazed smile, his hands raised over his head. He puts both hands to his head, sees his sister, pushes her aside, and grabs the bottle. Staggering, he drinks from the bottle and collapses in a chair, laughing wildly before passing out. When his mother informs him that his sister has taken the papers, he puts both hands on top of his head and again collapses. Years later, he opens the shutters, starts back with arms spread wide, reaches out to the window, then puts his hands to his head. In portraying this character, Walthall uses none of his usual little details, maintaining the unchecked histrionic code almost throughout the film.


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figure

The House with Closed Shutters:  Histrionic
intoxication.

In the costume melodrama, Walthall generally employed the histrionic code. In the contemporary melodrama, as we have seen, the deployment of other signifying practices, including the narrative structure, seems to have crucially inflected performance style. But close analysis also reveals that, in these films, Walthall altered his performance style to establish the identity of characters with respect to such factors as nationality and social class.

Often cast as a middle- or upper-middle-class gentleman, he occasionally played one of the "lower orders." In The Iconoclast (1910), Walthall is a surly workman with a penchant for the bottle. Fired by his employer for insubordination, the workman plans to kill his boss, but relents after seeing the boss's crippled child. The film ends happily as Walthall renounces the bottle (and radical politics) and is rehired.

In the first scene, Walthall establishes his character's roughness and truculence as he sits at a table drinking with a friend. Left arm resting on table, he passes the bottle to his friend and hits the table with his first. His wife approaches, and he shakes his head, waving her away. At work, his employer's friends tour the plant, and he glares at a society woman, one hand on his hip as he looks her up and down. When the visitors reenter, he has one thumb tucked in his waistband as he gestures with the other hand and eavesdrops on their conversation. After he is fired, his wife asks him to go back to work. He responds with a graceful, mocking salute, sweeping his hand down from his head and bowing slightly in a parody of refined, "upper-class" manners.

Playing an Italian laborer in the 1909 film In Little Italy, Walthall's gestures signify stereotypical "Italianicity," to borrow Roland Barthes's term.[28] Drinking wine with his sweetheart, he looks at the glass and kisses his bunched fingertips to indicate approval. In conversation, he moves his right hand in circular motions and opens and closes his fingers while holding his palm up, gestures that derive from the stereotype of the Italian immigrant.


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figure

Above left:  The Iconoclast:  Walthall as surly workman, hitting the table. 
Above right: In Little Italy:  Walthall as an Italian, kissing his fingers. 
Lower left: Ramona:  Walthall as an "Indian," head bowed and immobile.

In Ramona (1910), playing a Native American, Walthall spends much of the film with arms folded across his chest in the stereotypical pose of "Indian" impassivity. This containment becomes a hallmark of the performance, as even in moments of intense emotion he eschews the fully extended movements of the unchecked histrionic code, instead modifying the conventional gestures to suit his character's stoicism. Watching the whites burn his village, he turns his back to the camera, folds his arms, raises his hands high above his head, fists clenched, but in a slow and weighty gesture, then puts his fist on top of his head but with both elbows close to his chest. After the whites throw him and his wife (Mary Pickford) out of their house, he stands with one arm around Pickford, his face buried in her hair and his hand at his side, unmoving in silent resignation. Only when the character goes mad does he use the unchecked histrionic code.

Does the above close analysis of Henry Walthall's Biographs shed any light on the issue of the actor as collaborator in the move to the verisimilar code? The answer is a qualified yes. First-time viewers of Walthall's Biographs, surprised by the fact that he could be so "subtly effective" in some films and yet so "hammy" and "over the top" in others, conclude that Walthall was a "good" actor subject to bad days and bad performances. Accustomed to the


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dominance of the verisimilar code and unaware that earlier actors had available a wider range of stylistic options, these naive viewers tend to characterize any departure from verisimilitude as "bad." In the terms established in this book, however, Walthall's performances range from the unchecked histrionic code to the smallest nuances of the verisimilar. These extreme variations in style depended, I believe, neither on happenstance nor inspiration, but on a range of factors, some more susceptible than others to the actor's control.

As we have seen, Walthall arrived at the Biograph studio well versed in both the histrionic and the verisimilar codes. We can reasonably conclude that Griffith did not entirely mold Walthall as he may have his inexperienced young female actors. Walthall's Biograph performances exhibit an overall movement toward the verisimilar code, a movement common to the rest of the Biograph Company and the other film studios. One may infer that Walthall's work with Griffith and the Biograph Company encouraged the further development of a performance style that he had already learned. One might also speculate that Walthall may have influenced both Griffith and his fellow actors in their adoption of the verisimilar code.

Though no hard data illuminate the matter, it can be assumed that Griffith and his actors made conscious decisions about performance style in relation to the deployment of other signifying practices. Consider The Avenging Conscience again. Since Griffith and Walthall had available the options of both codes, they may well have decided that the unchecked histrionic code could better express the character's intense anguish in the vision scene and that the verisimilar code would add to the suspense of the character's breakdown in the interrogation scene. At the same time, Griffith must have felt, as we know from his recorded comments on the matter, that the unedited long shot better suited the histrionic acting of the former, while the closer camera and analytical editing worked better with the verisimilar acting of the latter. Hence, Walthall may have tailored his performance to the deployment of signifying practices, or Griffith may have tailored the deployment of signifying practices to Walthall's performance.

Walthall may have experienced the most freedom in constructing characters across genres and in establishing characters' class and nationality. Perhaps conforming to contemporary perceptions of the "correct" performance style, Walthall used the histrionic code in the costume melodrama. In the contemporary melodrama, he seems to have been more adept than many other Biograph actors at the crafting of the individuated characters linked to the emerging dominance of psychological narratives. His skillful use of props, combined with the byplay of his characteristic gestures (hand to mouth, rubbing his knee, etc.), sets Walthall's performances apart from those actors who used the verisimilar code less successfully. Moreover, his use of distinct postures, movement patterns, and "national" gestures distinguished his various characters from one another.


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Close analysis of Walthall's performances provides more evidence to dispute the teleological inevitability and "naturalness" of the emergence of the verisimilar code. Here we have an actor of preeminent reputation among his contemporaries who clearly thought about his craft and yet who, nonetheless, exhibits no clear "progression" toward the verisimilar code. Rather, Walthall alternates between the old style and the new according to the film's narrative structure and other signifying practices, as well as according to his character type. Examination of Walthall's films permits us to see in microcosm the residual traces of the early cinema and the emerging conventions of the classical Hollywood cinema in the transitional period during which the Biographs were made.

The historical record will probably never yield enough hard data to determine conclusively the exact contribution that Henry B. Walthall or any other actor made to the emergence of the verisimilar code. Even were more evidence available, however, the complexity of the transformation from the histrionic to the verisimilar codes prevents easy generalizations about the contributions of individual actors or directors. Both Walthall and Griffith should be seen as strands in a complex web of determinants.


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6— Henry B. Walthall
 

Preferred Citation: Pearson, Roberta E. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5t1nb3jp/