Hobart Bosworth’s Edgy Strong Silent Type Clings to Life

What remains of Hobart Bosworth’s edgy strong silent type characters and his directing achievements cling to life in the few silent-era Hollywood films left to us.

Behind the Door / Below the Surface Irvin V. Willat Fllicker Alley 4 March 2025

Seafaring tales of gruesome revenge and underwater redemption mark a double feature of silent melodramas on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley. Behind the Door / Below the Surface combines two silent films directed by the forgotten Irvin V. Willat and starring Hobart Bosworth, an actor-producer of tremendous importance in the development of the Hollywood industry.

Although he maintained a career in character roles until he died in 1943, Hobart Bosworth is today an overlooked name. His career is as fascinating and important as those of D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, or any others who created Hollywood as a movie capital. Born in 1867, Bosworth established himself as a respected actor on stage during the 19th Century until tuberculosis forced him to less strenuous work and temporarily affected his voice. That was when he noticed that the fledgling silent film industry could use a boost from his star power, and the benefits could be mutual.

In 1908, Hobart Bosworth joined San Diego’s Selig Polyscope Company and would be instrumental in persuading the company to relocate to Los Angeles. Silent films at that time only ran one reel in length, but he walked in as the star in title roles for 1908 productions like The Count of Monte Cristo, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Rip Van Winkle, and 1910 titles like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Davy Crockett. Not only was the versatile and burly Bosworth known for playing any kind of hero, he also wrote scenarios for his projects and others, and sometimes directed. Eventually, he made over 80 Selig pictures and wrote over 100 scenarios.

So popular was he that he founded his own company in 1913, which produced many movies in the burgeoning market for longer features. He made a deal with Jack London to adapt and star in several silent films based on London’s works. Hobart Bosworth made seven London projects, and all we have left is half of Martin Eden (1914), as historian Scott Simmon explains in the Blu-ray’s liner notes. The fact that most of Bosworth’s films have evaporated with time and nitrate largely accounts for modern cluelessness about his achievement.

Hobart Bosworth didn’t only promote his career. Lois Weber, the pioneering woman filmmaker who for a time became the highest-paid director in the world when she signed a contract with Universal, cemented her career with films produced for Bosworth. These included the scandalous, sensational Hypocrites! (1914), featuring nudity and criticism of censorship.

By the time he hooked up with director Irvin V. Willat and master producer Thomas Ince, Griffith’s most serious rival, Bosworth was clearly not afraid of controversy. They made Behind the Door (1919), another sensational and controversial hit. Even though World War I was over, it counts as anti-German war propaganda because it’s based on a gruesome 1917 story of the same name by Gouverneur Morris.

Hobart Bosworth Appears Behind the Door

Hobart Bosworth is introduced as Oscar Krug, a former sailor who now makes a living by taxidermy. He sits dejectedly down at his table and recalls the rest of the story in flashbacks. Be warned now that Behind the Door is probably the first silent film to use taxidermy for the purpose of horror, an idea explored more fully in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Indeed, Behind the Door uses suggestion and implication rather than blunt presentation of the taxidermist’s trade, but it can make your skin crawl.

If Behind the Door contains a positive social message, it’s to caution audiences against scapegoating German-Americans. Because of his German name and origin, Krug is subject to hostility from his neighbors when the US enters the war, but he proves his patriotism in the Navy.

Wallace Beery plays the villain in one of his most important early roles. He became a star in silent films and a bigger one in talkies. Beery applied his gravelly voice and jovial working-class persona, the kind who spits tobacco before knocking back a mug of beer, to many larger-than-life figures. One highlight is his Oscar-winning title role in King Vidor’s The Champ (1931), which remains a tear-jerking knockout, pun intended.

In Behind the Door, Beery’s German U-boat captain does something so heinous that viewers are properly flabbergasted, and we’re ready for Krug to wreak his revenge. That the flashbacking Krug appears as something of a broken man might be the cautionary tale about vengeance and violence not paying off in karma, but it paid off in spades at the box office.

We now have Behind the Door because the San Francisco Silent Film Festival combined a Library of Congress print with one from Moscow’s Gosfilmofond to restore the most complete version in the 21st century. Flicker Alley released that restoration as a Blu-ray/DVD combo in 2017, along with the extras retained in this reissue. PopMatters reviewed that release in “Do You Really Want to Know What’s ‘Behind the Door’?” and there’s nothing we can add to that article’s sparkling intelligence and serendipitous style.

If you missed the 2017 release, the new Blu-ray is reason enough to correct that error. If you already own it, there’s a terrific added value in the presence of Below the Surface (1920), the follow-up from the same production team.

Hobart Bosworth Elevates Below the Surface

This time, the plot isn’t so harrowing, just emotional and exciting thanks to father-son tensions and nice underwater photography. Below the Surface was also restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for its 2022 incarnation, and PopMatters reviewed it then.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, we observed that “this beautifully tinted melodrama in terrific shape” stars Bosworth as Martin Flint, whom the onscreen titles call “a staunch bulwark of honesty and respectability”. It occurs to us now that the name combines two famous literary figures: Captain Flint in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and London’s above-mentioned Martin Eden (1909). It’s sobering to realize that Hobart Bosworth not only played characters by both authors but was alive when their works first came out.

With his son Paul (Lloyd Hughes), Flint runs a deep-sea diving business on Dorcas Island, “a little haven of peace off the New England coast” where “the inhabitants eat breakfast at 6, dinner at 12, and supper at 6:30.” Such details typify the poetic forthrightness of silent film exposition at its best.

Shady city types, including the vamping Edna (Grace Diamond), try to hire the Flints and end up coming between father and son. As we wrote, “silent stories were ‘simple’ but the emotions subtle and complex, even when played to the rafters, and here’s a gripping example with exciting underwater scenes.” We stand by that.

As a director, Irvin V. Willat has become an unknown quantity, and that’s another by-product of having most of your work lost or unavailable. On the strength of these two films, he was good, and having the serious money of Ince and Paramount behind him partly accounts for that. Therefore, if you missed Behind the Door in its previous issue and Below the Surface at its 2022 festival premiere, here’s your chance to have two Blu Hobart Bosworths on one handy disc, as scored by Stephen Horne, the better to re-evaluate a major force in silent films and Hollywood’s early history.