The name Priscilla Dean (1896-1987) is forgotten. If a select few silent movie star names have endured to this day as icons of the silver screen - Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, Laurel and Hardy; their pictures still seen, their careers written about or celebrated at festivals - many others of that era faded away like stars in the heavens above. For a time they glow and blaze, then they shimmer and fade. Screen immortality is not guaranteed. The legends of yesterday can produce a shrug in cinephiles today.
I fell upon Dean’s name years ago, when I was getting seriously interested in Tod Browning, that most mysterious of Hollywood director (I wrote this guide to his films for the BFI 6 years ago, link here) and I’ve written other pieces on his fascinating career since.
Browning, somewhat ironically given his association with Lon Chaney, began making movies with several actresses whose names, like Dean, might as well have been - to quote the sour-noted message on John Keats’ grave in Rome - “writ in water”. Mary McLaren and Edith Storey are even more obscure than Dean.
Before Lon Chaney and Tod Browning, there was Priscilla Dean and Tod Browning. They made 9 films together in 5 years. Chaney made 10 overall with Browning, between 1919 and 1929, the films at M-G-M between 1925 to 1929 helping pave the way to the American horror movie, which Browning himself launched in 1931 with Dracula, the first supernatural-themed talkie. But the Dean-Browning era holds its own set of interests as screen melodramas with an often criminal flavour.
When Dean died in late December 1987, the Los Angeles Times report referred to her as “one of the best of the silent screen actresses”1 and that she supposedly got her start in Hollywood (at Universal) after “winning a car race after she had moved to Los Angeles”2.
Like many in early Hollywood, her career was done and dusted pretty much before the advent of sound and talking pictures transformed the industry, just as 12 years earlier DW Griffith’s paradigm-shifting blockbuster The Birth of a Nation had done so. To quote Warner Bros exec Harry Warner (1881-1958): “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Everyone did, it turned out.
I see Priscilla Dean as something of a transitionary figure between styles of American film and the roles the studio gave her repeated a cycle: the dime store novel romantic anti-heroine, the damsel in distress.
Dean had the air of the late Victorian about her and, as the 20th century settled into post-WW1 life and drifted further away from the 19th century, and away from its fashions, as American cinema forged itself an identity away from the type of Victorian yarns established by the likes of DW Griffith, many who entered the industry early doors were going to find themselves out of the loop and their brand reduced. We can see this especially in the emergence of somebody like Gloria Swanson and the rise of the slender-figured Jazz Age gal, full of vitality and moxie and sex appeal of a new modern variety.
Still, for a time, Universal spent what was for them top dollar on Dean films.
In an August 1920 issue of Photoplay magazine, in what today would be called an advertorial, theatre owners across America give their opinion of Tod Browning’s Dean-headlining production, The Virgin of Stamboul (1920), in printed quotes. Here’s several:
“Just closed four-day run of the biggest picture ever shown in Beloit, ‘The Virgin of Stamboul’. Elaborate settings and musical score. All say it is the best picture they ever saw.”
- Frank McCarthy, Manager, Rex and Strand Theatre, Beloit, Wisconsin
“Accept my congratulations on your wonderful picture. ‘The Virgin of Stamboul’ opened to most tremendous business Sunday and has continued wonderfully all thru the week. Have been unable to handle the crowds at evening performances.”
- McDonald, Manager, WM. Fox Theatre, Washington D.C.
A review written in the May 1919 issue of Photoplay said this about Dean in The Wicked Darling. Although disparaging about the overall picture, Dean and other cast members were praised:
“Were it not for the extraordinarily vibrant and vital personality of Priscilla Dean, the unique and excellent detail work of the cameraman, and good character portraits of Lon Chaney and Spottiswoode Aitken, this would be the commonest and dullest of movie melos.”3
For Browning, Dean often played versions of the same character: the working-class girl with street smarts, a rose from the gutter, a perfumed flower in the dung heap called the big city (The Wicked Darling, 1919; Outside the Law, 1920). Other times, she appeared as a thief in elegant clothing (Which Woman?, 1918; The Exquisite Thief, 1919; White Tiger, 1923). But her characters tended to be from the wrong side of the tracks, raised in the school of hard knocks, associated or involved in a life of crime. In 1923’s exotic drama, Drifting, she played an opium dealer living in China.
As I said, Dean in Browning pictures was cast as the tough dame with a heart, sometimes she was the leader of a gang of jewel thieves. By the third act, she was either redeemed or did the right thing. This is consistent with Browning’s later, admittedly more macabre works with Chaney, where the villain was always punished, sometimes cooked and eaten by cannibals (West of Zanzibar, 1927), or Chaney’s character could illicit audience sympathy with a third act awakening of conscience.
Movie studios, while giving audiences their weekly taste of escapist, exotic and oftentimes sensationalist stories, always ensured a moral lesson had been imparted by the end credits. In God-fearing and God-loving America, patrons could go home from a night at the pictures as if they’d heard a sermon in a church. Wrongs were righted, decency restored, amen.
Several Browning-Dean collaborations are lost, just as several Browning-Chaney collaborations are lost (1927’s London After Midnight; 1928’s The Big City, plus 1926’s The Road to Mandalay exists only in a truncated 36-minute long version). But there’s enough that has survived to get a sense of what made her popular for a time and to see for yourself her talent and leading actress appeal.
And funnily enough, Dean and Chaney did co-star in several pictures, and guess who was on bullhorn duties? Correctamundo, give yourself a prize: Mr Tod Browning. They shared the screen in The Wicked Darling and Outside the Law (the latter released under Universal’s Universal Super-Jewel banner, which lent it a huge amount of prestige, what with it being their highest tier of production).
Outside the Law, an excitingly paced gangster melodrama, was thought lost until a print turned up in the 1970s. The success and popularity of the film helped Browning’s career immensely and took a part in further establishing Lon Chaney’s march towards becoming the ground-breaking character actor he is remembered for; the proto-Method man willing to contort his features and body for hours on end, all for the sake of his art!
So successful was Outside the Law, it was re-released and trimmed a wee bit (the version that exists today is the re-edited 1926 release). When Browning returned to Universal after his M-G-M contract expired in 1929, Universal had him remake Outside the Law, this time starring Edward G. Robinson in the Lon Chaney role, joining Owen Moore (1886-1939), who’d previously starred in several Browning pictures (The Road to Mandalay; The Blackbird, 1926).
Browning helped establish the horror genre, as noted, but he also did his bit paving the way for the gangster genre proper during the years of the Great Depression. Robinson would star in one of his most legendary roles in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931).
For sure, Hollywood had the dope on gangsters and gangsterism way before Washington suits and J. Edgar Hoover decided to do something about it. Economic issues in post-WW1 America (the era of the “forgotten man”) and the Volstead Act of 1920 banning the sale of booze, it enabled the rise of the gangster figure as a societal antihero and new kind of 20th century celebrity. This was the time of the iconic crime wave which dominated American newspapers and entered national mythology, turning crims like Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson and John Dillinger into heavily romanticised Robin Hood figures (I’d highly recommend Bryan Burroughs’ Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934 (2004), which is frankly one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read).
In Outside the Law, re-released not too long ago by Eureka Entertainment here in the UK, Dean plays Molly Madden aka Silky Moll. A reviewer in Photoplay magazine, April 1921, four months from the film’s premiere in December 1920, wrote this:
“Priscilla Dean is a convincingly human sort of crook, and she is splendidly assisted by Lon Chaney and Wheeler Oakman.”4
Molly is framed for murder by Lon Chaney’s “Black Mike” Silva, a San Francisco hoodlum. She in turn swindles him over a set of jewels, leading to her becoming holed up in an apartment with her boyfriend. Molly, tough as nails, softens over the course of the picture, allowing Dean to deliver an excellent performance, mixing hardened and cynical criminal with a soft centre.
As with later Browning pictures starring Chaney, the element of psychology in the storytelling makes it intriguing and entertaining 104 years on. The latter part of the film, which hinges on cabin fever stirring, the feeling of being trapped and the potential to go bonkers starts to rear its head, it contains frissons of Poe (and Browning would in a few years time start to be referred to as cinema’s Poe).
1923’s White Tiger and Drifting, her penultimate and final movies for Browning, are also well worth checking out, and Kino Lorber released them as a pair the other year. Slowly but surely, this pre-M-G-M period for Browning is getting more noticed and given the films star Dean, her name might get a bit of recognition now … at least one hopes.
Priscilla Dean - Tod Browning pictures:
Which Woman? (1918)*
The Brazen Beauty (1918)*
The Wicked Darling (1919)
The Exquisite Thief (1919)**
The Virgin of Stamboul (1920)
Outside the Law (1920)
Under Two Flags (1922)
Drifting (1923)
White Tiger (1923)
*Lost
**One reel survives, discovered in the Dawson City find in 1978.
Los Angeles Times, February 1988
Ibid
Photoplay magazine, May 1919
Photoplay magazine, April 1921