The Aryan
A Mysterious White Nationalist Silent Film

2,994 words

I think the most disagreeable part I ever had was in The Aryan. It was hard for me to really feel it, being that of a white man, forswearing his race, makes outlaw Mexicans his comrades and allows white women to be attacked by them. It is difficult to put all one’s decent instincts aside and live and think as such a despicable character must have done. But by allowing myself only to think of the terrible wrong that the white race had done me — pure imagery — I settled into it, and I am sure Bessie Love at the time believed I was the typical brute. — William S. Hart, “Living Your Character,” in Motion Picture Magazine, May 1917

The Aryan is a mostly lost film from 1916 which was released in the wake of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of Nation, the unprecedented success of which the previous year broke all sales records by an order of magnitude. That film had an explicitly pro-white message, but what specifically the film said is something of a mystery.

Here’s what we do know: The Aryan is about a cowboy named Steve Denton was spends three years mining in the desert before setting out for home to see his sick mother. He makes a stop at a town called Yellow Ridge, where some local saloon owners see that he has a large bag of gold nuggets. They get the vampish dance hall girl, Trixie, to flirt with Steve and persuade him to stay in town, even though he had only intended to stay for a few hours. Trixie gets Steve drinking and gambling. He receives a telegram informing him that his mother’s condition has worsened and that he should hurry back, but Trixie intercepts it. Wanting him to stay in town and keep spending, she tells Steve that the message says that his mother is getting better.

One morning Steve wakes up with a huge hangover, and his bag of gold nuggets is now empty. He then receives a telegram informing him that his mother has died. He finds and reads the previous telegram and realizes that Trixie has deceived him. He then goes to Trixie’s place and kills her lover, then kidnaps her and takes her out to the desert, where he forces her to be his slave for the next few years.

For whatever reason, his experience in Yellow Ridge leaves Steve with a smoldering hatred of “white civilization” and white women in particular. He sets up a new mining operation in the desert and become the leader of a gang of Mexican bandits and half-breed rapscallions. He becomes rich again, but it brings him no joy.

Louise Glaum as Trixie, who is now forced into slavery to Steve Denton (William S. Hart).

A caravan of white prospectors from Mississippi stop by Steve’s house. They are without food or water and will die without assistance, but Steve coldly refuses. He will not help them, not even the women — especially not the women. One of the girls from the caravan, sweet Mary Jane Garth, is undeterred, and pleads with Steve in front of all his Mexican bandit buddies. She does the whole Luke Skywalker-Darth Vader bit where she tells him, “I know there’s good in you” — but to no avail.

Bessie Love as Mary Jane Garth.

Later, Steve’s Mexican bandit friends decide that they are going to attack the white caravan, rob them, and rape their women. Mary Jane then confronts Steve again and makes a speech telling him that he has a duty as a white man to protect his race. This touches something in Steve and he runs out to stop the attack. Steve confronts the Mexican bandits and tells them that he will not allow them to harm the white women because they are of his people. He then comes to an agreement with the bandits: Steve hands over his mine to their second-in-command, Pete, and in return the caravan is allowed to shelter there unmolested.

The movie ends with Steve at the head of the caravan, having resumed his place among his race. We see that he has even granted Trixie her freedom. At some point, he must leave the caravan, but before he goes he tells Mary Jane that meeting someone so innocent as her helped him overcome his anger.

That’s what we know about The Aryan. But apart from this, things get sketchy.

For many decades, The Aryan was considered to have been lost apart from a few clips, but then a complete copy turned up in Argentina, in the same archive where a complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — previously considered as one of the holy grails of lost films — was found in 2008. But here’s where the problems start.

La fiera domada (The Aryan – 1916) – Bazofi Online 2020

This newly-discovered version of The Aryan was from a 1923 Spanish-language re-release called La Fiera Domada (The Tamed Beast). The first problem with it is that the film omits large portions of the original. There were apparently long speeches that were cut, including Mary Jane’s climactic pro-white speech. Not only are the Spanish intertitles not direct translations of the English-language intertitles, which were praised in contemporary reviews (the film magazine Motography described them as “beautiful”), but they significantly altered the story. Trixie’s name is changed to Aurora, which I guess sounds slutty to Spanish speakers. But more importantly, much of the pro-white messaging was removed. In the Spanish version, Denton being swindled causes him to become misanthropic and misogynistic, whereas in the original, he becomes antagonistic toward the white race. Thus, we have the film, but not its intertitles.

Worse yet, the restoration team chose not to restore the film to its full English-language, White Nationalist glory, but rather restored the watered-down Spanish version. As Dan Streible of New York University explained in 2018:

Questions faced by the team preparing this presentation are what to reconstruct? and how to frame this first public presentation? Will this be a composite of the incomplete La Fiera Domada with new English subtitles or intertitles? Or a reconstruction of The Aryan using available footage and photographs, anchored by La Fiera Domada? The current goal is to present La Fiera Domada, a version of the original American film highly modified in the early 1920s for distribution in Argentina, while utilizing material from Aryan fragments to fill in missing pieces. In any case, before anything is screened for our 2018 audience, the undeniable racism of the story and the charged word in it title require proper framing and discussion, such as is the case when screening problematic works such as The Birth of a Nation (released only a year before Hart’s movie) or Gone with the Wind in any context today.

The restoration merely describes the dramatic pro-white speech thusly: “Mary Jane explains to Steve his duty as a white man. She convinces him and Steve agrees to help the settlers.”

A review in the Albuquerque Morning Journal (June 20, 1916) describes Bessie Love’s character as follows: “The girl, with an unsullied love in her heart for everyone, goes to the man believing that because he is of the white race, he will protect white women against his riff-raff crew of reds and browns. Her utter fearlessness and trust in him, despite all his attempts to terrorize her slowly breaks down the power of his hate.”

You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.

It thus looks like I have to roll up my sleeves and do some research to find out just how racist The Aryan really was. We can’t count on the respectable film historians to do it, so I’ll have to do it myself. But before we do, we need to know some of the film’s background.

The Aryan was released by Triangle Films, a studio whose name was a reference to the three titans of the industry who ran it: Mack Sennet, Thomas Ince, and D. W. Griffith. Mack Sennet was the king of comedy who launched the careers of Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, and produced the Keystone Kops series. Griffith did not intend for The Birth of Nation to be interpreted as a racist film, and after it was, he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it. By 1916 Griffith was working on his magnus opus against prejudice, Intolerance.

The Aryan was producer Thomas Ince’s baby. Ince was a pioneering movie producer, but is best remembered today for dying under mysterious circumstances during a 1924 yacht party that was attended by an assortment of Hollywood A-listers. While the official story is that Ince died of a heart attack, there has been a persistent legend that he was killed by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst — who the titular character in Citizen Kane was based on — because he mistook him for Charlie Chaplin, who was banging Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, at the time.

From The Atlanta Georgian, April 02, 1916.

The film’s screenwriter was C. Gardner Sullivan, who was one of the most in-demand screenwriters of the day. In 1916 he also wrote Civilization, an anti-war film that some credit with helping to reelect Woodrow Wilson, who was running on an anti-war platform. Sullivan’s career would continue into the sound era, most notably writing the screenplay for the winner of the 1930 Best Picture prize, the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front.

The Aryan stars William S. Hart as Steve Denton. You could say that Hart was the John Wayne of his day. Born in New York state, Hart spent most of his life as a Shakespearean actor until he began acting in films in 1914, at age 50. He quickly found success and became the first Western movie star. His films were noted for their grim realism and period accuracy, especially in terms of their costumes. Hart would fall out of favor in the 1920s as a new kind of flashier and sexier type of Western emerged, but in 1916 Hart was at the height of his fame.

Trixie is played by Louise Glaum, who specialized in playing Theda Bara-type vamp characters. In fact, a direct comparison to Theda Bara is made in The Aryan. When Trixie first gets Steve Denton to start drinking and gambling, a intertitle comes up which reads “A fool there was” — a reference to Theda Bara’s hit movie of the same name, where Bera seduces and then drives an upstanding businessman to ruin.

Bessie Love 13 years after The Aryan in The Broadway Melody.

Mary Jane Gart is played by 18-year-old Bessie Love. While she was a major star of the silent era, Love would find her greatest success in the late 1920s by playing flappers in the early talkies. In 1929 she starred in The Broadway Melody, the first sound movie to win Best Picture, and received a Best Actress nomination for the role. Future megastar John Gilbert also has an uncredited part in The Aryan. Hart would later give John Gilbert his big break when he cast Gilbert as his younger brother in The Apostle of Vengeance.

What can we glean from this about The Aryan’s original intent?

William S. Hart’s biography

First, let’s look at William S. Hart’s autobiography, My Life East and West, where he says on page 220:

Sullivan wrote a story for me which I considered great. It was The Aryan. The star role was one of those hard-as-flint characters that Sullivan could write so well, but this man had no motive for his hardness. I wrote a beginning for the story and talked it over with Tom and Sullivan. Sullivan gave me a great battle; his argument was that he wanted to create a character that was bad without reason. I finally convinced him that it would be stronger my way and better for the picture, and he allowed me to do it. It proved to be a gripping story, I regard it as the best story Sullivan ever wrote and one of the best Westerns ever made.

As there were three large studios under the Triangle banner, I got in the habit of borrowing actors. There was a part in The Aryan that I wanted Mae Marsh for. She was tied up in a picture, but Mr. Griffith told me he had a young girl he thought very well of and was just waiting for an opportunity to cast her. When I saw her I grabbed her, she didn’t have a chance of escaping . . . Bessie Love made her first hit in The Aryan.

Dear Bessie was a child and she was afraid of me. While the camera was grinding, her little mouth would quiver as she struggled not to cry and gamely fought for the rights of her people. It was just what the part required. It was one of the very finest performances I have ever seen on the screen. Louise Glaum was also excellent in this picture.

That is some nice background information, but doesn’t really tell us much about what the movie was actually about. So let’s take a look at another source.

Motion Picture News, April 1916

“It is simple justice to say that the story itself is one of the best ever seen on the screen,” reviewer Oscar Cooper writes, “and to its major possibilities Hart does full and ample justice.”

This review is helpful because it contains a direct quote from one of the English intertitles, which gives us a taste of the film’s original tone:

“Oft written in letters of blood, deep” carved in the face of destiny, that all men may read, runs the code of the Aryan race: “Our women shall be guarded”; and a man of the white race may forget much — friends, duty, honor, but this he will not, he cannot forget.

Manosphere types might say this movie is white-knighting, but it sounds cool to me.

The review also describes the climax of the movie. After Steve speaks with Mary Jane, “He is finally forced to realize, by the perfect trust she places in him, that after all, he is a white man and cannot refuse help to his own people.”

Cooper concludes his review as follows: “We can recommend The Aryan to exhibitors, without reservation, as a Class A picture.”

Motography (April 1916)

Motograph reviewer Genevieve Harris gave another rave review of this White Nationalist film:

You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel The New Austerities here.

A play as good as this is sometimes puzzling to review. One wonders just which phase of its building contributed most to the total excellence. In The Aryan, although the story is unusual and the characters exceptionally strong, perhaps it is the effective way the material is presented which deserves particular attention.

Harris likewise gives us some insight into what the film’s message was:

The picture takes its name from the girl’s belief that a man of the Aryan race will protect a woman. And at last, when she learns that this man will not help, she tells him the he is not a member of the white race. In the end, the man justifies her faith and sacrifices his interest in the mine to save the voyagers. There are a number of very stirring speeches, setting forth the girl’s belief in her race, but these are scarcely in character for the little waif.

Harris has a point. It would be understandable for little Mary Jane to appeal to religion, but it is unusual for a little girl to make appeals to white solidarity. Harris continues, “However, the success of her plea is convincing, for a white man could not betray a faith like hers.”

This reviews gives some idea as to the contents of Mary Jane’s pro-white speech and what causes William S Hart to change his mind. According to Harris, Mary Jane tells Steve that “If you don’t save those women, you ain’t white,” and that this does the trick. Steve thought he was immunized against all empathy. You could call him cruel, fiendish, or blackhearted, and it would just bounce off of him. But call him “un-white,” and he recoils.

Picture Play (May 1916)

The May 1916 issue of Picture Play adapted The Aryan into a short story. You would think this would help to clarify things but I do not know how much of the story is taken from the original film and how much is the result of creative liberties taken by the author. For example, the short story ends with Steve and Mary Jane getting married and having a child: “There are two Steve Dentons now; one of them a chubby, sober-eyed youngster who will some day understand why his father is so persistent in making the boy proud of the fact that he is an Aryan.” This definitely does not happen in the film.

Nor does the short story give us much of a clue as to what Mary Jane said in her climactic pro-white speech. The story describes the final confrontation as follows:

“Coward!” she cried, and, reaching under his arm, plucked out his gun.

He dropped back from her, his hands by his sides.

“Shoot!” he said bitterly “I deserve it.”

What she said to him in response, Steve has no clear remembrance. It seemed to him she was driving home the word “Aryan” with emphatic repetition.

Within the next hour came the miracle — the resurrection of the soul of Steve Denton. He heard screams and laughter, and, looking out, saw the nesters of the valley being herded up the trail.

Suddenly he turned to the girl, a strange light flaming in his eyes. “You call me an Aryan, and I’ll show that you’re right!” he exclaimed, and, grasping the revolver for her, sprang out in defense of his race.

Alas, all we can do is hope that one day a complete version of the original English-language version of The Aryan resurfaces, as it sounds as if it was an important piece of White Nationalist history. In the meantime, we can take pride in the fact that, as recently as 1916, Hollywood was still capable of producing explicitly pro-white films that were both popular and critically acclaimed.