Next month Turner Classic Movies is presenting a whole slew of movies that have to do with race in film. Specifically Latinos, and how they are depicted. Looking through the films offered there are indeed some that are pretty hard hitting on the subject of race. Others, like Mexican Spitfire, are not. But one thing is missing: where are the Ramon Novarro movies?
Novarro is probably best known for two things: his role as 1925’s Ben Hur, and his horribly violent death. This is rather tragic, as Novarro was a much better entertainer than either of these facts of his life will show.
One could argue (and yes, I think I will) that Ramon made one of the smoothest transitions from silent to talking pictures, especially when you throw in the fact that he spoke with an accent. Ramon Novarro (nee Samaniegos) was born in Durango, Mexico and began to act in films in the late teens. He caught his big break working with Rex Ingram in both Prisoner of Zenda (as the villain) and Scaramouche (cast as the hero this time). This led to him obtaining the role in Ben-Hur.
After Ben-Hur, Novarro was a bona-fide MGM star. His handsome good looks made it easy to cast him as the romantic hero. Most of his silents after Ben-Hur are programmers, but one stands out:The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and co-starring Norma Shearer.
When the microphone was introduced to film, many good actors with thick accents either retired or went back to their native countries. Ramon studied voice and acting with Broadway veteran Ruth Chatterton and it paid off. While his co-stars in the early talkie films struggle with their dialog, Novarro breezes through almost every scene. It also didn’t hurt that he had a beautiful singing voice.
But MGM didn’t seem to know what to do with him. He was horribly miscast in several pictures (they even made him wear “yellow face” as a Chinese gentleman in The Son-Daughter with Helen Hayes). I guess the MGM front office thought that one accent sounded like any other. Why else would they cast him as Frenchmen, a Pole, East Indian, Egyptian and the afore mentioned Chinese? It has been suggested that perhaps Louis B. Mayer was trying to get rid of Novarro because he didn’t like the fact that the handsome star was gay. Personally, I don’t think that was the case, and neither do the authors of two Novarro biographies (info to come later). I do think the accent scared them, however, and they could no longer cast him as the All-American boy because of it. There were only so many stories about European royalty they could do, so Novarro’s option was not picked up in 1935.
But that wasn’t the end of Ramon. He did concert tours and continued to act in films, and then television. until he was murdered in 1968. So with this extreme body of work (over 45 years) before them, why has TCM not included Ramon Novarro in their Latino Images series?
One possibility is that he did not play a Latino in his major films. A couple were set in Spain, but that doesn’t fit the series, which is about Latino images in film, not Latino actors. Hopefully Ramon Novarro will at least get a mention if a documentary accompanies the films. It would be nice if they would throw one in, say, The Son-Daughter, to illustrate how badly Latino actors were sometimes cast. This is not the first time he’s been passed up for accolades by TCM. While other stars get all day salutes on their birthdays, Ramon does not. Turner owns all Novarro’s MGM films, but only a few ever get aired on the network.
Poor Ramon does not have many films out on DVD (Ben-Hur is included on the same disc with the 1959 version; Mata Hari is the only other). Many clips from his films are available on Youtube. And there are two very good biographies that I mentioned before: Ramon Novarro by Allan Ellenberger; and Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by Andre Soares. Both of these are out of print and are quite pricey, but you can probably get them through interlibrary loan if your library does not carry a copy.
Now here is a clip of Ramon and Jeannette MacDonald from Cat and the Fiddle:
