A Too-Brief Career: The Screen Debut And Last Hurrah Of Robert Harron

This post is especially for the Classic Movie Blog Association’s spring blogathon, “Screen Debuts & Last Hurrahs.” It’s also not a bad companion piece to the Harron interview I shared earlier this month. Please visit this link to see the many great posts my fellow members have written this week!

When we think of stars that have “gone too soon,” the folks who usually come to mind are icons like Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, or perhaps Golden Age stars like Jean Harlow or Thelma Todd. But if we go even farther back we can find stars who were gone far too soon, in some cases just when they were making impacts on film history. Interestingly, examining their first and last films can enlighten us not just about their careers, but about the impressive cinematic advancements they witnessed in short spans of time.

One such star who was gone far too soon is Robert Harron, a dark-haired lad from a big Irish Catholic family who entered films when cinema itself was very young. Harron was born and raised in New York City and soon had to hustle for work to help support his family. When he was 14 one of the Catholic Brothers at his school helped him get a job at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Studio, not far from his home. For $5 a week he was kept busy as an all-purpose errand boy, helping clean, build sets, pick up lunches–and in time, gamely jump in as an extra in Biograph’s many one- and two-reel films.

Harron happened to have a natural talent for acting, completely free of any stage-bound habits that many trained actors had at the time. Bit parts eventually lead to larger parts, his skills being given a chance to grow just as cinema itself was rapidly evolving. Once D.W. Griffith joined Biograph in 1908 and became their top director, he also took a liking to Harron. He would direct Harron in dozens of films, from shorts like The Burglar’s Dilemma (1912) to the multi-hour epic Intolerance (1916).

Shy and modest in real life, Harron was frequently paired with Mae Marsh and Lillian and Dorothy Gish and seemed content to let them have the spotlight. He was a lead in several WWI films like Hearts of the World (1918) and The Great Love (1918), and also starred in rural-themed melodramas like True Heart Susie (1919). He often played bashful country boys but was also surprisingly adept at portraying hardboiled gangsters and dashing soldiers. Sadly, his versatile career was cut short by his sudden death in 1920 after sustaining an accidental (as was consistently reported) gunshot wound.

While Harron’s very first film is unavailable and his very last film is lost–not unusual for a filmography older than a century–trade papers can help us piece together what they were like. We can also examine his first starring film and final surviving film, giving us a clearer glimpse into his career’s trajectory.

Harron’s First Film: Dr. Skinum (1907)
Status: Lost

This sounds like a very surreal short–especially for Biograph! It was directed by the early director Wallace McCutcheon, who got his start way back in 1899. The plot concerns the gruesomely-named Dr. Skinum, who makes bold claims about being able to cure “any error of nature, be it ever so anomalous.” Accordingly, a number of anomalous errors of nature show up to his office, including an eight-foot girl, a woman with “a marcel wave on her nose,” and so on. A Moving Picture World gave a quaintly florid synopsis–here’s a sample:

But watch the professor! While he is engaged with this patient the Gargantuan form of a woman comes waddling in. She looks like a balloon and moves along with the grace of the car of Juggernaut. She echoes Hamlet’s plea, “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!” But Doc Skinum’s the boy who knows what to do, and placing her on a stretcher, with a block and fall he lifts her onto the reducing table. He then turns on the current and through the pellucid vapor that arises we see the rapidly evanescent form of Elephantine Lizzie. 

14-year-old Harron apparently had a little part as “boy at door,” and whether he only showed up for a few seconds or a couple scenes is hard to say. You can imagine he must’ve gotten a kick out of watching the filming of such an odd comedic short!

Harron’s First Starring Film: Bobby’s Kodak (1908)
Status: Survives, one known copy at the Library of Congress

McCutcheon must’ve appreciated the hardworking Bobby, because a couple films after Dr. Skinum he decided to make the boy the star of another little comedy short, Bobby’s Kodak. Bobby’s mischievous character is given a Kodak camera as a present (simple cameras for children had been available since 1900), and in Harron’s own words from a 1920 interview:

I was the infant terrible, and I snapped my father kissing the maid, mother flirting with the butler, the nurse maid having an affair with the cop. Later, I showed all the pictures; and, the pandemonium that followed has some of our best slapstick comedies looking lifeless. There was a chase–Edward Dillon played my father, and it was from his irate grasp I had to escape.

This simple, amusing situation comedy has been presumed lost until a copy was found at the Library of Congress. Surviving stills seem to show Harron’s natural charisma with the camera even at this early stage.

Harron’s Next-To-Last Film: The Greatest Question (1919)
Status: Survives

Harron’s life had transformed in the twelve years since the casual days of Dr. Skinum and Bobby’s Kodak. He had played bit parts, supporting roles and leads in dozens of films, transitioning from shorts to features by the mid-1910s. He did a bit of everything, from playing young gangsters to riding horses in Western pictures, and soon found his own “bashful country boy” niche. The films themselves grew more complex, playing with special effects, closeups and other editing tricks. Action scenes grew more ambitious and took on a grander scale, as seen in The Massacre (1912) and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913).

After Biograph balked at the price of Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914), the director left and the Biograph cast followed him, including Harron, who practically considered Griffith to be a second father. He was often paired with young Mae Marsh, who matched his boyishness with her own bubbly, girlish energy. And he also appeared in Griffith’s ambitious, super-sized features The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). In the latter he played the important role of the Boy in the modern story of the film, arguably one of the emotional hearts of Griffith’s grand experiment. He had come an awfully long way since Dr. Skinum.

By now more self-assured and definitely considered a star, Harron proved himself more than equal to the task of playing a dashing hero in Hearts of the World (1918), a romantic melodrama about World War I filmed close to the actual battlefields themselves. He convincingly portrayed both a youthful schoolboy and a composed minister in True Heart Susie (1919), and also showed a distinct flair for comedy playing “the Oily Peril” in The Girl Who Stayed At Home (1919). The Greatest Question (1919) was one of the several rural-themed dramas Griffith turned to after his big epics, all starring Lillian Gish and Harron. The emphasis is more on Gish’s persecuted character, although she and Harron shared some lovely onscreen moments.

Harron’s Final Film: Coincidence (1920)
Status: Lost

What a pity this one has disappeared, for it marked a distinct turning point in Harron’s career. Griffith had brought sensitive actor Richard Barthelmess into the fold, starring him in Broken Blossoms (1919) opposite Gish and also casting him as the lead in Way Down East (1920). Whether Griffith was actually favoring Barthelmess or simply bringing on new talent is hard to say, but Harron was given a deal with Metro to make four starring pictures, the first being the quick-paced light comedy Coincidence (1920). Much of it was filmed on location in Harron’s native New York City. Film Daily provided a synopsis in their review:

Billy Jenks is a “live young bank clerk in a dead town.” Billy comes to New York to work. He becomes a cashier in a department store. Billy’s life becomes a series of coincidences, and through one instance he becomes acquainted with Phoebe Howard, a stenographer. Billy and Phoebe both “fall” so hard that they neglect their work and finally lose their jobs. Fortunately Billy has an aunt who dies and leaves him a large fortune. When he tells Phoebe about the inheritance, Harry Brent overhears the conversation and plans to relieve Billy of the money. He introduces himself and agrees to invest hero’s money for him next day, but before the meeting Billy has the money stolen from him by a man who needs money to meet some notes. Billy recovers the fortune after a long chase, and in the meantime Phoebe has learned the real purpose of Brent’s friendliness. Billy and Phoebe are married.

The review also added, “Robert Harron does good work as Billy Jenks. He makes the most of all the opportunities which the role affords.”

Harron’s sudden death put Metro in the awkward position of releasing the film posthumously, a new conundrum for the industry at the time. It seems to have been released fairly quietly, making little splash at the box office and being sunk in obscurity ever since. What a pity we can’t see Harron flexing his comedy skills in a picture of his very own–even if it was a littler picture than Way Down East or Intolerance. Perhaps it would’ve provided some clues as to what the 1920s could’ve had in store for such a hardworking, talented young actor, who left us at only 27 years old.

—