Unassuming authenticity
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Harry Carey (1878 to 1947), often called Harry Carey Sr. to
distinguish him from his son Harry Carey Jr., was an actor, writer, director
and producer and was one of the pioneers of the Western movie. He ranks up
there with early luminaries such as Thomas H Ince, DW Griffith, Francis Ford
and William S Hart as one of the great figures of the genre. His first
involvement with the Western film came as an actor in Griffith’s short Bill Sharkey’s Last Game in 1910 and his
career was still going after World War II: his last Western was Howard Hawks’s Red River, released, posthumously for
Carey, in 1948. In between, much of his career was closely entwined with that
of John Ford, and though the two had a falling-out in 1921 and never made a Western together again, Ford’s relationship
with the Carey family remained very close.
In 1919
Though Carey did not have a very high opinion
of motion pictures (“He never gave them much credence,” his son later said) he
was nevertheless a great influence on the genre. For example, John Wayne grew
up watching Universal's ‘Cheyenne Harry’ silent Westerns, idolizing Carey (he
said Carey was "the greatest Western actor
of all time") and attempting to imitate him when he started his own
career. Carey avoided the flashiness associated with the likes of Tom Mix and
adopted a more sober, lower-key approach similar to that of Hart. In an age
when actors were often (to our modern eyes) completely over the top in their
thespian antics, he was restrained, and this gave him an authority as a tough
Westerner.
A start in
the business
However, like Hart, Carey was not a Westerner
by birth. He was born in 1878 in New York, the son of a Supreme Court judge. As
a boy he was enraptured by the lurid dime novels that told derring-do tales of
the Old West. He attended a military academy before going on to study law at
New York University (though he was expelled for running female underwear up the
flagpole, and always referred to himself as a “premature alumnus” of the
college). He grew up to be, says John Ford biographer Scott Eyman, “a tough but
warm man.”
A boating accident when he was 21 led to a bout of pneumonia,
and while recovering he wrote a Western play, Montana, about the
frontier, and toured the country performing in it himself, for three years. It
was a big hit (audiences especially liked the part where he brought his horse
on stage) and it made him a lot of money, but he lost it all when his next play,
a Klondike yarn entitled Heart of Alaska,
was a failure. That one had dog-teams on stage but the Chicago Tribune said that the dogs were the only convincing thing
about the whole play. Harry did, though, get something out of it: he married the
play’s leading lady, Fern Foster.
It was then, financially wiped out but severely
bitten by the acting bug, that he was introduced to the great DW Griffith,
still at that time based in the East (Biograph’s studios were in the Bronx). Carey’s
first film for Griffith was a sea story but it wasn’t long before he started
featuring in Westerns, then a key part of silent movie output. Friends in 1912, a gold mining tale, was
directed and produced by Griffith and starred future Hollywood royalty, Mary
Pickford and Lionel Barrymore, as well as Carey and Henry B Walthall, the
friend who had introduced Carey to Griffith in the first place. The first time
Carey topped the billing in a Western was in the 1913 Biograph picture The Abandoned Well, directed by Oliver L
Sellers.
That year Carey followed Griffith in his migration
to California and it is said that he appeared (though he is uncredited) in The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, the
famous Western written, produced and directed by Griffith and starring Lillian
Gish and Mae Marsh, with Walthall as an Indian.
At Universal
In 1915
Carey signed with 'Uncle' Carl Laemmle’s Universal Film Manufacturing Co. at $150 a
week, a very healthy salary for the time. Universal had been founded in New
Jersey in 1912 but moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1915. Laemmle was given
to hiring his close family as execs (Ogden Nash wrote Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle) but had a keen eye for
the latest thing and the up-and-coming coming stars, and he reckoned, rightly,
that Harry Carey Westerns were just the ticket.
Carl Laemmle in 1918
In June 1916 Universal released a rarity, a
big-budget six-reel feature Western which was something of a landmark in the
genre because it was the first version of The
Three Godfathers. Directed by Edward
LeSaint, it starred Carey, billed second after leading lady Stella Razeto. (In 1919
John Ford would use Carey in Marked Men,
a version of the same plot, and in 1926 Ford would make yet another version, 3 Bad Men, but without Carey).
Rather fine poster
Most of
Carey’s Westerns for Laemmle, however, were one- and two-reelers, especially
the long series of two-reel Westerns starring
Carey as the character Cheyenne Harry. Cheyenne Harry was more of a shambling saddle-tramp
type rather than a bold gunfighter, and he was usually the already classic ‘good
badman’ character. Many of the pictures had teenage Olive Golden as the love
interest and a young Hoot Gibson as Harry’s sidekick. Olive became Harry’s agent/manager
and would then become his second wife in 1921, when Harry’s divorce became final, though
they were (rather daringly) living together a year before that.
Harry and Olive in 1919
The Fords
Many of these early Universal films were ‘supervised’
by Francis Ford, then a leading light in the genre, and Carey developed a
liking for Frank’s younger brother Jack, soon to be much better known as John
Ford. He asked Laemmle to hire Jack, and the studio boss consented.
Francis Ford, pioneer of the Western
The first Harry Carey/Jack Ford collaboration
was one that has survived (tragically, many have not), Straight Shooting (1917), John Ford’s first feature, and still a fascinating watch
today. Scott Eyman says, “It looks more like a film from 1922 or 1923 than one
from 1917, and, in an art form that moved as torrentially as the movies did in
their infancy, that is no small statement.”
Classic Carey gesture
Straight
Shooting is a 57-minute feature that Ford and Carey made despite rather
than on Laemmle’s instructions. Like most studio bosses at the time, Laemmle wanted
shorts, in rapid succession, as they were more cost-effective and profitable,
but Ford and Carey made a feature anyway (they pretended their film stock had
been ruined so they could get more) and Laemmle accepted it, saying, “If I
order a suit of clothes and the fellow gives me an extra pair of pants free,
what am I going to do? Throw them back in his face?” Straight Shooting was a watershed for
Ford, and he knew it. He kept the edition of the Universal Weekly which called
it “The most wonderful Western picture ever made”. It cemented Carey’s position
in the genre and made Ford a man to be watched.
Jack Ford in 1915
The only other Carey/Ford Cheyenne Harry to have survived from that year is
the entertaining Bucking Broadway
(1917) which for a long time was thought lost but
happily in 1970 a copy was discovered in the archives of the Centre national de la cinématographie in France, and a
restored print was the result.
Very entertaining
In 1918 Carey and Ford
did Hell Bent with a story by both of them and some clever and creative visual
touches, such as when at the start a Frederic Remington painting comes to life
and the action begins. This too has survived and been restored and I will be reviewing it separately soon.
In Hell Bent
Another 'godfathers' remake
In 1919 there were two important John Ford/Harry Carey Westerns (among the
many) which were the five-reel Marked Men, as
mentioned above yet another remake of the three godfathers plot, and the first
film version of the Bret Harte story The
Outcasts of Poker Flat, a six-reeler, with Carey as John Oakhurst.
Carey as Oakhurst
Some of the lost Carey/Ford Westerns do exist in script form. Other directors on these
Cheyenne Harry movies were Fred Kelsey and a young George Marshall. In all the Westerns Carey collaborated on stories, scripts,
production and directing. He was no mere hack actor but a key part of the
studio’s output.
The
1920s
Desperate
Trails, a 50-minute picture, released in 1921 but shot in 1920, was the last Carey
Western to be directed by John Ford. There was a breach between the two.
Both men were reluctant to speak publicly of it afterwards and we do not know the ins and outs
but Eyman says that Ford’s grandson Dan believed there was a financial element to
the conflict between the director and actor. Carey was the nearest Universal
got to a big star and was earning $1250 a week by this time, while Ford, who believed he was at least as talented and deserving as the star, was
pulling in about $300. Carey lived an extravagant lifestyle that Ford simply
could not afford. Furthermore, Ford was a complex, even strange man and he
seemed inexplicably to resent those who had contributed to his early success.
Both Carey and Ford’s brother Francis had basically launched John Ford’s
career, and he never forgave either of them for it. An odd man. Harry Carey’s
son wrote that that his father would sometimes “launch into his usual twenty-five
year old tirade about John Ford and his faults and egomania” and he told his
son that he never appeared in a Ford Western after 1921 simply because “He won’t ask
me.”

The last Carey/Ford Western
Ford moved to Fox, where he would make a hit right
away with a Buck Jones picture, Just Pals,
and go on to do some big pictures, notably The Iron Horse in 1924. Carey too left Universal when Laemmle decided to
promote co-star Hoot Gibson as the studio's principal screen cowboy. Gibson would do the
flashier Tom Mix/Ken Maynard style of Western and also work for considerably
less.
1921 was the year that Harry and Olive’s son was
born, Harry Carey Jr., and his father nicknamed the child Dobe because the
infant’s red hair reminded him of the color of the adobe buildings on their ranch
in the San Francisquito Canyon.
Harry looks a bit nonplussed with Dobe but you'd think he would have got the hang of babies after all those three godfathers pictures
Harry Carey Jr. would of course go
on to become a fine Western actor like his father, and would become a key
member of Ford’s stock company of actors. Ford made Dobe one of the three ‘godfathers’
when in 1948 he remade the movie as a talkie after Harry Carey Sr.’s death. The
picture opens with the image of a lone rider atop a
hill silhouetted against the setting sun, leaning in Carey’s signature
semi-slouch on the saddle horn, and in the on-screen dedication Ford sentimentally
eulogized Carey (who was, the cynical might say, now safely deceased) as the
"Bright Star of the early western sky."
One of Ford's 1948 Westerns
Dobe as the Abilene Kid in 3 Godfathers
Carey Sr., though, went on making silent Westerns
all through the 1920s. Many were directed by Val Paul, Scott R Dunlap or B Reeves
‘Breezy’ Eason. He signed with Joseph P Kennedy's FBO Pictures and continued to
make his brand of realistic Western before moving to Hunt Stromberg's
Producer's Distributing Corporation (PDC). In 1926 Carey left PDC for Pathe
Pictures, a studio that, despite low budgets, had a reputation for turning out some of the finest of
the silent Westerns. Satan Town, for
example, a six-reel silent directed by Edmund Mortimer, was said to be a serious movie with
atmosphere and quality.
1926
The
Talkies
The arrival of sound pictures at the end of the
decade was a crisis for Harry Carey, as it was for many other actors. He had a
good voice, a solid reputation and was a proper actor, but he was much more in
the William S Hart mold of screen cowboy, sober, even dour, with what has been
described as an “unassuming authenticity”, and far from style of the highly-paid sagebrush
superstars of the silver screen who were all the rage. Considering Carey passé, Pathe declined to renew
his contract. Harry and Olive turned to vaudeville, but their act wasn't very
successful and the couple disliked the incessant traveling. While they were
away, their ranch was completely destroyed when the San Francisquito Dam burst
and flooded the Santa Clarita Valley, a disaster in which hundreds of people
died. It was a bad time.
Harry needed to work, and returned to motion
pictures, accepting supporting parts as a character actor. But in 1931 he got a
lead role in MGM’s ‘African white hunter’ picture Trader
Horn, in which he overpowered his rather green second lead, Duncan Renaldo,
later to be the Cisco Kid. Olive was in it too, fifth-billed as Olive Golden. It
was a box-office hit, and the Careys earned enough from the movie to rebuild
and re-stock their ranch, though shortly after it was destroyed again, this
time by fire, and again rebuilt.
And then the following year, '32, he landed a fine
part back in a Western in the splendid Law and Order, directed by Edward L Cahn, in which he was the silk-hatted Doc
Hollidayesque gambler Ed Brandt to Walter Huston’s Earpish Frame ‘Saint’
Johnson. This is still to this day one of the best ever treatments of the Earp/Holliday
Tombstone saga and Carey was superb.
The Doc Holliday figure in Law and Order, 1932
In the early 30s Harry landed parts in Paramount’s
Zane Grey talkie remakes directed by Henry Hathaway and starring a young
Randolph Scott, such as The Thundering Herd and Man of the Forest.
With Randy on the set of Man of the Forest
In 1935 he got a smallish but still significant part in Samuel
Goldwyn’s Barbary Coast with Edward G
Robinson, Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea, directed by Howard Hawks (and William
Wyler, uncredited). He also that year topped the billing in an RKO ‘cowboy
superstar’ picture, Powdersmoke Range,
which featured Hoot Gibson, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams, Bob Steele and Tom Tyler.
RKO teamed Carey with Gibson again in The
Last Outlaw in 1936, a picture co-written by John Ford. And there seemed to
be a rapprochement when John Ford cast both Harry Carey and Francis Ford in his
(non-Western) The Prisoner of Shark
Island that same year.
Powdersmoke Range: Bob Steele, Big Boy Williams, Hoot Gibson, Harry Carey, and a wounded Tom Tyler
All through the 1930s, even while landing supporting
parts in big major-studio pictures, Carey was also heading up the cast for some
lesser outfits. Nat Levine, the boss of Mascot Pictures, one of the champions of the low-budget horse
opera, starred him in serials such as The Vanishing
Legion (1931), The Last of the Mohicans
(1932), in which Harry was Hawkeye, and The
Devil Horse (1932).
Harry as Hawkeye
You could also try the
1935 Berke picture Wagon Trail. At
Commodore Pictures Carey brought Cheyenne Harry back to life in Aces Wild in 1936. Carey last topped the
billing in a program oater in RKO’s The
Law West of Tombstone in 1938, with a young Tim Holt.
Motion
Picture Herald and Boxoffice conducted
popularity polls from the md-30s on. Carey was past his prime as a cowboy star
by the time they started yet he still managed to rank eighth in 1937 and ninth
in ’38.
The last
Westerns
Harry Carey's Western career wasn’t over yet, though. In
1941, when he was well into his sixties, he co-starred with John Wayne, the
first time they had appeared in a movie together, in the Western melodrama The Shepherd of the Hills, for
Paramount, directed again by Henry Hathaway. Rather poignantly perhaps he played
Wayne’s father. It was not a great film and the source novel (1907) was
archaic, sentimental and implausibly plotted, but it was great to see Wayne and
Carey together and it must be said that Carey’s performance was very fine.
Harry and Duke on the set of The Shepherd of the Hills. Good photo!
In 1942 Carey returned alongside Duke with a
part in that year’s remake of The Spoilers, playing Wayne’s partner Dextry. This is a big, noisy
Western, the best of the many versions of that story that were made, and once again Carey is
memorable, even in a small part.
Harry was Duke's pard in The Spoilers
And talking of big, Harry was cast by
David O Selznick as the tough railroad detective in the rather lurid blockbuster Duel in the Sun in 1946.
Railroad man in Lust in the Dust
That same year
he took part with Wayne in the shooting of Red
River, under Howard Hawks (though it would not be released till 1948) and
this was the only time in which he and Dobe, who got his role thanks to Wayne, appeared
in the same film (though they had no scene together and Harry Sr. had completed
his location work before Dobe was invited to do his part). Once again Carey Sr.’s
part as Mr. Melville was not a huge one but once again it was memorable.
With Monty Clift in Red River
In
1947 Wayne started producing as well as starring and he cast Carey as the
sympathetic marshal in Republic’s rather charming Angel and the Badman. So The
Shepherd of the Hills had started a little flurry of Carey appearances in
Wayne Westerns.
Classic Carey pose in Angel and the Badman
In ’47 Harry also took the part of the doctor
in MGM’s rather overblown melodrama but major A-picture The Sea of Grass, directed by Elia Kazan. But by this time Harry
was not well. A lifelong smoker, he developed emphysema and then lung cancer,
and he died in Brentwood, California on September 21 that year. When he was
interred in the Carey family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New
York, clad in a cowboy outfit, over 1,000 admirers turned out for the funeral.
Olive, by the way, died in 1988 aged 92.
Let’s finish with John Wayne’s homage to
Harry. Carey was well known for his signature gestures, in particular holding
his left forearm with his right hand, which in the semiotics of stage melodrama
and the early silent movies signaled thoughtfulness, but which Carey made
uniquely his own. Duke paid a tribute to the Western actor he admired so much
by doing this at the end of John Ford's classic The Searchers, nine years after Harry’s death, when he walks away
from Mrs. Jorgensen (Olive) and is framed by the doorway in the final scene.
It was for Wayne a gesture of respect and farewell.

I am
grateful to the
bio by Jon C Hopwood on IMDb, to Bill Russell writing on Carey on The Old Corral and to Scott Eyman for his
mentions of Carey in his books John Wayne: The Life and Legend and Print the Legend: The Life and Times
of John Ford. Another important source is
Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company by Harry Carey Jr., published in 1994, which I shall soon be reviewing
separately.