Elmer Booth and His Electric Close-up in The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)
Pictures That Move #10
Prelude to a gunfight…
The leader of a street gang with the beady eyes of a shithouse rat appears and moves cautiously around the corner of a brick-walled alleyway.
He is suspicious, steady, alert, quick, as if waiting for something to kick off. He sticks to the wall, slinking along. Following behind, his two henchmen. They too mimic their boss’s careful movements. There is a brief cut. We see what they are seeing: a rival crew passing up ahead through a gate.
Then comes what is arguably the first truly great close-up in American movies and an example from those early days of the American cinema was getting bolder; experimenting with blocking, movement, space, composition, depth and framing. Here we see the dramatic use of the camera in action.
As the gangster gets closer and closer to the camera’s fixed position, he disappears momentarily, half his face is literally cut off the screen, therefore existing in and outside the frame itself. It looks clumsy but it is anything but. The effect dazzles. When his whole face re-appears again, he is closer to the camera than ever before, his eyes darting from right to left. Behind him, lined up perfectly, his second-in-command, the side of his face providing a centre focus point to the frame. The leader walks off, disappearing out of view, the second-in-command swiftly follows, then the third man behind those two, whose back is momentarily turned to us, showing he was keeping his eye on the entrance from which they’d originally emerged. It is excellent staging. End of sequence.
This singular moment in D.W. Griffith’s proto-gangster film, The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), isn’t just a favourite of mine in the silent era. It’s a favourite in the whole of cinema history. It is the American screen’s first electric moment (and Griffith would provide more than a few more in subsequent years and films).
To quote Roland Barthes’ short essay in Mythologies (1956), the French writer discussing Greta Garbo’s visage, the scene where Elmer Booth walks towards the camera and into close-up is, “when one literally lost oneself in a human image.”1 We are witness to the movies exploring new ways of seeing, showing, staging. I’m not claiming its the first of anything. Griffith refined technique, he rarely created it, though his innovations helped cement the syntax of the cinema, and The Birth of a Nation (1915) revolutionised movies in numerous ways, including advertising and scoring arrangements. Still, who would argue with Griffith being the cinema’s first master of the close-up?
For me, Barthes’ quote might be the single best description of the power of the cinematic close-up I’ve ever read. It is applicable to any close-up. Not just the faces of enigmatic movie stars such as Garbo.
I also like this quote from Allan Dwan, speaking to Peter Bogdanovich in 1971:
“What were you photographing? What was there? You’d bring some kid in who just blazed off the screen - a girl or a fellow would hit you instantly. Just astonishing people. That’s what we looked for - some photographic quality, some mysterious hidden thing certain people have.”2
Another good reason I love this one-reeler, Griffith was a man of the people and made socialist-leaning pictures about the plight and lives of the American working class, and with a potent sense of photographic realism which exposed conditions and quotidian realities. The street scenes, the locations selected in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, it was filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, exemplify this striking approach. Griffith’s personal politics, as per his views on race, were all over the place, but he had the common touch.
Now, about that face…
Elmer Booth (1882-1915) had previously appeared for Griffith in several one-reelers. Word has it, he’d been cast in an important role in Intolerance (1916), Griffith’s fugue-like opus. Booth also reminds me of Dwight Frye (1899-1943), in look, the latter would go on to appear in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), as Renfield. I’m not saying there’s anything going on there, just that Booth and Frye looked similar and both had a Browning connection. It might just all be in my head … but look:
Dwight Frye:
Elmer Booth:
Then, tragedy struck…
The details of Elmer Booth’s demise:
On June 16th 1915, a car actor Booth was travelling in returned from the Vernon Country Club. Outside downtown Los Angeles, the vehicle hit the back of a freight train. The car was driven by writer and director Tod Browning (1880-1962), a fellow Kentuckian like Griffith, who in the 1920s and early 1930s play his part in the creation of the American horror film. Also in the car, another Griffith acolyte, George Siegmann (1882-1928).
Next day, the Los Angeles Times detailed the gory incident:
“Elmer Booth was killed instantly. The motor car in which he was speeding towards Los Angeles with his two companions rammed the rear part of a flat car loaded with steel rails at Santa Fe Avenue and the Salt Lake tracks early yesterday morning. The conductor of the train, Harry Jones, approaching, waved his lantern as a danger signal, and then had come the crash that sent Elmer Booth, who was just realising his dramatic ambitions in recent successes, headforemost into the rails. The impresses on his skull were as even and as regular as the design of a waffle off the gridle.”3
One here wishes to quote JG Ballard’s Crash (1973). In the novel about car crash enthusiasts, the character Vaughn (played in David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation by Elias Korteas) recreates James Dean’s infamous 1955 roadside smash. He says: “James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal.”4
Thanks to DW Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley, Elmer Booth approaching the camera from the background into close-up before slinking off again, has remained a benchmark moment in American cinema. Elmer Booth died and became immortal.
You can watch The Musketeers of Pig Alley here on YouTube.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957
Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer, 1971, Peter Bogdanovich
Los Angeles Times, 17th June, 1915, digitised in newspapers.com
Crash, JG Ballard, 1973