Life
1893-1950 [pseud. of Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock], son of Donnellan
lecturer (TCD), and rector of Kinnity, Co. Offaly; ed. St. Columba’s;
emig. USA at 18; ed. Yale School of Fine Arts; his Four Horsemen of the
Apoocalypse (Metro, 1920) introduced Rudolph Valentino and Alice Terry,
whom he married; other films by which his reputation as a romantic impressario of the screen was confirmed incl. The Prisoner of Zenda (1922)
and Scaramouche (1923); also two novels, Legion Advances (1934),
and Mars in the House of Death (1939) on bullfighting in Spain and Mexico; d. in Hollywood. DIB DIW
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Commentary
Liam O’Leary, Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema (Le
Giornate de Cinema Muto/British Film Institute 1993), ill.
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Notes
Mare Nostrum, dir Rex Ingram (USA 1925), 100 mins; based
on Vincente Blasco Ibanez’s novel of love and espionage in World
War I, dir. Dublin-born emigré; shows him as a silent pictorialist
with a taste for mystical and exotic; voluptuous visions often featured
actress wife Alice Terry, with Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse and Antonio Moreno in Mare Nostrum; here
she is Freya helping German spy who seduces her lover Ulysses into helping
her country’s cause with tragic consequences for both of them. [Programme
of Walter Reade Theatre, 1994.]
James Joyce: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) contains an allusion to Rex Ingram: ‘his scaffold is there set up, as to edify, by Rex Ingram, pageant-master’ (FW568.35), combine the office of pageant master - and therewith perhaps holder of the Theatrical Patent in Dublin - with and movie director and also something more ominous.
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