Happy Friday, Silent-ology readers! As promised, I conducted the drawing for the hard copy of this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival program book (which also contains an article by yours truly!). These drawings are always conducted with the utmost rigor, otherwise known as me pulling a strip of paper from my 1920s-style cloche hat. And the winner is:
Congrats, Wally B.! Feel free to contact me on my “About” page so we can email each other. For my other readers, if you missed out on the hard copy, fear not–the SFSFF does have a free pdf on their website here.
Of the sensitive young actor Robert Harron, Lillian Gish remembered: “Something about him caught the heart.” As a fan of both Harron and great performances in general, I couldn’t agree more. His story of having risen to stardom after starting out as a simple errand boy for Biograph is certainly inspirational all by itself, seemingly “meant to be.” It’s harder to understand why his sudden death in 1920, from a purportedly accidental gunshot wound, was similarly “meant to be.” And yet, it occurred. And thus Harron remains an eternal star of the 1910s, his voice unrecorded, known primarily to fans of silent film…and the folks with a grim interest in Hollywood tragedies.
Personally, I always think about his talent above all, and especially his remarkable charisma with the camera. Recently I saw him in a supporting role in a Biograph two-reeler The School Teacher and the Waif (1912), starring Mary Pickford. Harron plays a schoolboy who teases Pickford, and since he’s quite a bit taller than the other young actors he does stand out. But I don’t think his height is the only reason he catches our eye. Even when the undeniably charismatic Pickford herself is onscreen, somehow my eye keeps wandering to Harron.
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