John J. McGowan,
J. P. McGowan: Biography of a Hollywood Pioneer.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005.
ISBN: 0 7864 1994 6
220pp
$US39.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by McFarland & Company)
Early filmmaker J.P. McGowan – the “Railroad Man” – became famous for making thrilling, silent-era serials involving trains, usually starring his wife Helen Holmes as the plucky heroine inevitably called Helen. According to his biographer, he was an imposing figure, “over six feet tall. . . broad-shouldered and strongly built”, his square-jawed face able “to command the attention of an audience” (12). A “romantic. . . a man’s man” (1), he was also “a man of creativity, perseverance, courage and compassion” (124).
Clearly, television journalist John J. McGowan – possibly a distant relative – has chosen a fascinating subject. In fact, the details of J.P. McGowan’s life suggest a 1970s Robert Altman film, full of theatrical situations, colourful details, and larger-than-life characters. McGowan was a Boer War hero, a member of Montmorency’s Scouts, whose slouch hats had a black ostrich feather tucked into a “black hatband featuring . . . white skull and crossbones” (15). When making serials for the Signal Film Company – set up for him in 1915 – he and Helen were accommodated on location in a customised Pullman car that was also used for shooting interiors. And behind their house in Pasadena was a siding on a working line; McGowan had permission to stop trains at will to shoot footage he needed (81).
John Paterson McGowan, the third generation in a family of railroad men, was born in the railway town of Terowie, South Australia in 1880. (Helen Holmes also came from a railroad family, based in Chicago [63].) His 1952 death, at home and in his sleep, peacefully ended a life of sometimes dangerous adventures. A Boer War dispatch rider, he almost died when his horse went over a cliff (16). Later, film stunts nearly killed him. In 1914, for instance, he fell from the top of a telegraph pole and spent six months in hospital, but continued “directing” from his hospital bed, with help from his wife (72).
He lived and worked at an alarming pace: in his three-decade career as a filmmaker, he was responsible for over six hundred productions. To meet deadlines, he once did fifty-four set-ups in one day, and regularly grabbed a couple of hours sleep on the floor of the editing room before getting up and starting again (85).
During 1929-1930, he ran his own company, J.P. McGowan Productions, but the coming of sound and the Depression, combined with his own lack of financial savvy, effectively closed the company (105). He took small acting roles but, at the age of sixty, left the screen to take on the high-profile advocacy position as executive secretary of the newly established Screen Directors Guild, for which he still worked at the time of his death (112).
Not only does McGowan himself make a fascinating subject, but his filmmaking activities offer glimpses into lesser known aspects of early cinema, when films were just as likely to be made in New York or Florida as in Hollywood. After joining Kalem in 1909, McGowan went to California in 1913, probably becoming “the first Australian person to begin a lifelong career in Hollywood” (57). He also made several trips with a Kalem company to film in Ireland, and in 1912 spent a year in Egypt, Italy and Palestine, making – among other productions – From the Manager to the Cross. This feature-length film, depicting the story of Jesus and filmed on Holy Land locations, was successful around the world (45). The book’s account of these travels, and the manner in which the company constantly wrote and produced stories to take advantage of locations they found, reveals the ad-hoc, versatile and energetic way silent-era location companies worked.
Other insights are given into serials, and “lost” genres. Although he also had successes with westerns, McGowan declared in a 1917 interview that “the one type of film I had produced with anything like consistent success was railroad melodrama” (58). In fact, the cinematic image of a woman tied to the railroad tracks may well have originated with McGowan’s long-running The Hazards of Helen (1). (I suspect, however, its forerunners were stage melodramas.)
Stylistically, the book plainly presents facts, telling rather than showing, with the result that, at times, the man at the book’s core seems elusive. While there is material about productions in which he took part, often there is no sense of McGowan’s powerful physical presence or personality.
Although the book’s author has accessed many US archives, he is not a film scholar, and in spite of his valiant efforts to place McGowan “within the context of the times in which he lived and worked” (2), the film industry context is thin. It is not established, for instance, that there were other railroad serials, for instance Kalem’s 1913 The Open Switch, as well as others by different companies. Nor is there acknowledgement of the great 1924 feature The Iron Horse. The lack of context also leads to claims that are too simplistic. For example, the author writes: “The Hale’s Tours became the Silent Era’s nickelodeons, and the motion picture industry was off and running” (21). In fact, as is obvious in Fielding’s article on Hale’s Tours, they co-existed with nickelodeons, and their relationship was not a linear replacement of one by the other.
Several comments dismiss the audiences for serials as “relatively unsophisticated” because they apparently swallowed whole the inconsistencies in which today’s audiences find “a deal of amusement” (87). Singer’s Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts, in which McGowan’s The Hazards of Helen is discussed, offers insights to correct the assumed primitiveness of audiences for serials, as well as exploring the conjunction of serials, sensation, cinema, spectacle, heroines, and manifestations of the modern world – such as trains. Another useful reference would have been Kirby’s Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Cinema.
However, the book did not set out to be academic, and has undeniable value in bringing to light one more Australian film pioneer. John J. McGowan is to be thanked for his painstaking archival efforts, as well as for providing a fun read and a detailed filmography.
Jeannette Delamoir
Central Queensland University, Australia.
References
Fielding, Raymond. “Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture.” In Film before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Kirby, Lyn. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Cinema. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
Created on: Friday, 24 November 2006 | Last Updated: 24-Nov-06