Agata Frymus - Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood

In 1992, a short article in the New York Times announced the death of a former silent movie star, Hungarian-born Vilma Bnky. What was remarkable was the timing of the obituary, which appeared over a year after the actresss demise. This was a result of an arrangement made by Bnky herself before her death; apparently disillusioned by the lack of interest from friends and press alike, the nonagenarian instructed her spokesman not to publish a notice of her death for at least a year. It was a bitter reflection of the feelings of a woman who nearly seventy years earlier had reigned as one of the most beloved stars of the Jazz Age, nicknamed the Hungarian Rhapsody. Indeed, her decline from global fame was as swift as her climb to it.

Figure 1. Orientalism abounds. German postcard for Sumurun (1920), released in the United States as One Arabian Night. Source: Ross Verlag, Berlin. Photo: Union Film.

The verdict of posterity was not as generous to Bnky as it was to other silent stars, to her colleagues and friends, the likes of Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, and Norma Talmadge. The latter figures have earned secure places within the domains of popular culture and academia, whereas Bnky remains virtually absent from scholarly analysis or historical memory. In a bid to readdress this scholarly bias, my task here is to analyze the star discourse of the 1920s as it pertained to Bnky and two other Hollywood performers of European origin, Pola Negri () and Jetta Goudal. Their respective careers may have taken different turns, but what they have in common is that they all hailed from the Continent, and all offered useful case studies for the interrogation of ethnicity, nationality, and femininity in the climate of interwar America. Through the interrogation of their star personaeas depicted and informed by their on-screen presence, film magazines, fan letters, popular press, and promotional materialI aim to demonstrate some of the ideological tensions and instabilities of the culture that produced them. How was Europeanness constructed in their respective, studio-sanctioned images? What was the impact of whiteness and ethnicity on those constructions?

Every age has its heroines, and they reveal a lot about prevailing attitudes toward women in their respective eras. According to Jane Gaines, an influential commentator on stars in film history, movie players who achieve recognition have prominence in the social realm and their significance cannot be limited solely to the film industry. The construction of female stars is especially important, given their ability to illustrate the inner workings of patriarchy; what we say about famous screen actors is often a displaced form of the prevailing cultural ideology at large. This dialectical relationship between star images and the dominant values, in which stars play a dual role in both reflecting and reinforcing certain societal norms, forms the basis of this project. In drawing on historical evaluations of the ideological changes of the 1920s, I aim to unpack and deepen our understanding of the notions of ethnicity, femininity, and class that underpinned the public narratives of the three actresses analyzed in my case studies.

Pola Negri, the subject of my first case study, came to prominence by playing roles of seductive, passionate women in German film productions; that typecasting continued after she embarked on her career in the United States in the early 1920s. The commercial success of the features she produced for Famous Players-Lasky, including Bella Donna (1923) and The Spanish Dancer (1923), helped Negri secure her position in the upper echelons of the acting profession. The focus of the case study is the intersections between the images emerging from Negris professional activity and the life that she led off-screen. I show how her star narrative was linked to a fear of uncultured immigrants and miscegenation, especially in relation to her highly visible romantic dalliances. In turn, and following Diane Negras rationale, this established Negri as both a thrilling, exotic commodity on one level and a hazardous phenomenon on another.

In the wake of cultural anxieties related to uncultured immigrants corrupting America, Negri became a figure of powerful political resonance; her romantic liaisons functioned to move her away from the revered ideals of assimilation. Beyond shining a light on the ideological climate of her era, the issues raised by Negris celebrity status find uncomfortable resonance in the contemporary American landscape, in a country that wasto quote Tom Ricegripped by the corrosive forces of modernity, burdened by a fear of outsiders, and beset by a media-panic toward