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Give it Your Best William Tell: The Crossbow through History
Obscure origins: Like so many things pertaining to the dark realms of antiquity it can’t be said definitively when the crossbow came into existence…at some point between the 7th to 5th centuries BC, the consensus of opinion says. What is pretty much settled is that it first appeared as a combat weapon in China. The Chinese employed it to good effect during the Warring States period (c.475 – 221 BC). Crossbowmen of this period comprised between 30 to 50 per cent of standing Chinese armies. The weapon was still popular during the Han Dynasty (late 3rd century BC to AD 220) but it’s popularity diminished after the Hans lost power, possibly due to the introduction of more resilient heavy cavalry under the succeeding Six Dynasties.
The crossbow in Europe, decline and reemergence: From ancient China the crossbow spread to Europe’s early civilisations. Its use was recorded in a battle at Syracuse (Sicily) as early as 397BC. The ancient Greeks were responsible for several early iterations of the crossbow namely the gastraphetes, a hand-held crossbow invented before 400BC, and the ballista, a small assault weapon capable of firing both stones and bolts, which the Romans copied and modified as a composite catapult-crossbow called a scorpio. The scorpio was lethally effective, offering marksman-like precision of its projectiles. The cheiroballistra or maniballista was another Roman variant on the crossbow with specific application as a siege engine. After the fall of Rome the crossbow fell out of use in the West until the 10th to 11th centuries AD when it was revived. The French used crossbows in siege warfare and they were in use during the epochal Battle of Hastings in England in 1066. France’s iconic heroine Joan of Arc was wounded by an English crossbowman in an attempted siege and the famous Plantagenet warrior-king of England, Richard the Lionheart, was killed by a bolt from a crossbow. The crossbow attached considerable prestige especially in England, so much so that only knights were permitted to own and use the weapon in war.
Crossbow or siege engine? As iron-based crossbows were improved and made more powerful and elaborate, the concept of the crossbow starts to merge with that of the torsion-powered siege engine (the former requiring only one man to work it while the latter needed several men). Certainly medieval sources seem to have conflated the two…different authors writing on the Crusader wars for instance have described the ballista alternately as a crossbow or a siege engine [Stuart Ellis-Gorman, The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King (2022)].
Evolution of medieval crossbows: In the Middle Ages the arbalest was popular in Europe. This was a decided technical advance in crossbows, improved by having a special mechanism for drawing back and releasing the string. Arbalests were larger and heavier weapons with metal-tipped bolts replacing the earlier wood-bolted crossbows, thus achieving devastating impact against the armour of the enemy. By the 13th century further technological improvements in the use of crossbows came with the advent of winches and various spanning mechanisms such as winch pulleys, cord pulleys, gaffles, cranequins, and screws [‘Medieval Crossbow’, Medieval Britain, http://medievalbritain.com]. The crossbow increasingly evolved into a defensive weapon, a composite crossbow–catapult of sorts, used to defend castles during sieges and favoured for its longer range capacity.
Crossbow versus longbow? Which weapon was more effective in medieval warfare situations? There is not a straightforward answer to this question because the two lethal projectiles had different strengths and advantages over each other. The (English) longbow had a flexibility and portability edge over the more clunky crossbow which need time (and sometimes assistance) to load. The crossbow however was more accurate including at distances in honing in on the intended target (with a range of up to 300m). The longbow having simpler parts was cheaper to manufacture and where it had clear advantage over the crossbow was in its frequency of shots. In the time it took the crossbowman to launch two or at most three bolts at the enemy, the longbowman could propel 10 to 12 arrows. The crossbow though perceptibly slower to load and much heavier to carry, required appreciably less strength to operate…it’s locking mechanism allowed the crossbowman to handle stronger draw weight so able to hold the bolt for longer with significantly less physical strain, which translated into better precision (‘Medieval Crossbow’). Another plus for the crossbow was ease of use, it required minimal training cf. the traditional bow which took years of training to master. The downside for the longbow in battle was that it couldn’t penetrate medieval armour as the heavier bolts could do. This didn’t seem to be a problem in the two most famous battles of the 100 Years War—Crecy and Agincourt—where the English bowmen triumphed completely over the numerically superior French and mercenary crossbowmen (and cavalry) [‘A quick history of the English longbow’, Notes from the U.K., 17-Jan-2025, www.notesfromtheuk.com].
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The crossbow reaches its obsolescence point: By the 16th century the crossbow had seen its best days and was being supplanted by gunpowder weaponry – muskets, cannons, guns. Firearms had greater range, faster reload times and an overall firepower that crossbows could not begin to match. The final fling for the crossbow as a weapon of choice in war occurred in 1644 at the Battle of Tippermuir in Scotland (English Civil War).
Endnote: Crossbow sellers’ greatest marketeer: Hovering at the intersection of history, myth and popular culture is the heroic legendary figure most popularly associated with deadeye expertise in the crossbow caper and a talent for shooting apples off his own son’s head, William Tell. Elevated by Swiss folklore as a symbol of the struggle for liberation from the tyrannical Austrians, baby boomers—opera buffs aside—will associate the mythical hero William Tell with the 1958–59 British television series The Adventures of William Tell in which Tell (played by Conrad Phillips) is portrayed as a sort of Robin Hood clone but with a different kind of bow and the Swiss Alps rather than Sherwood Forest for backdrop𖤓.
𖤓 a nexus not coincidental, ‘William Tell’ was created to exploit the success of another highly popular ITV show of the Fifties The Adventures of Robin Hood. ‘Tell’ followed the earlier series’ familiar formula: a brave citizen turned outsider valiantly leading the resistance on behalf of the oppressed masses against a unredeemable evil tyrant
Lost Medieval Cities on the Caspian Sea Littoral
The Caspian “Sea”—geographically more correctly an inland saltwater lake, the biggest of its kind in the world—is bordered by five modern nations, Kazakhstan and Russia (to the north), Azerbaijan (west), Turkmenistan (east) and Iran (south). With a melting pot of ethnicities in the region, below we will meet some medieval cities situated on the Caspian littoral that prospered for a time during the Middle Ages before vanishing entirely from history.
Lost city of Aktobe–Laeti: Archaeologists whose fieldwork focuses on the Caspian Sea and Caucasus regions have had much to occupy themselves with in recent decades. Systematic excavations started in the 1970s and have unearthed hitherto-disappeared sites like Aktobe–Laeti, a buried urban settlement on the Great Silk Road route that thrived in the 14th and 15th centuries. Atkobi–Laeti is located in the Atyrau (western) region of Kazakhstan. Archaeologists discovered that the settlement contains three cultural layers on top of each other (cf. Troy). Furnaces and fragments found among the debris point to the erstwhile city having skilled artisans in metalwork and pottery crafts. Many of the newly unearthed artefacts are now on display at the local history museum [‘Ancient Land of the Caspian Sea Holds Secrets of the Past’, Aruzhan Ualikhanova, The Astana Times, 15-July-2023, www.astanatimes.com].
Reconstructing a Golden Horde settlement: It’s estimated that at its peak Aktobe–Laeti housed around 10,000 inhabitants who traded their goods and wares with travelling foreign merchants. It’s key position on the Silk Road linking Central Asia and the lower Volga and evidence of the minting of coins suggest that the city was a prosperous one during these times. Traces of a substantial urban settlement in Aktobe–Laeti having existed, contradicts the established view that the peoples of the Caspian Sea led exclusively nomadic lives (Ualikhanova).
In the 14th century this important city of commerce could be identified on maps of Italian travellers but by the 16th century Aktobe-Laeti had vanished without a trace. There are two theories put forward that account for it’s sudden disappearance – it was submerged under the rising waters of the Caspian, or the city was destroyed by Timur of Samarkand in his vast empire-extending, take-no-prisoners rampage across central and western Asia (Ualikhanova).
Sabayil castle, Atlantis for real: Climate change, the damming of some 100 rivers which flow into the sea including the Volga and the flow-on effects of the Aral Sea disaster, have all resulted in a shrinking of the Caspian and an on-going drop in the sea-level. The singular upside of this ominous ecological change, perhaps for archaeologists alone, is the surfacing of the upper sections of the long-disappeared Sabayil (or Bayil) Castle. The structure, built by Shirvanshah Faribirz III in 1232–1235 as an off-shore watchtower 350m from the shoreline to give the citizens of Baku advanced notice of impending attacks on the city. In 1306 the castle sank under water due to a mega-earthquake. The now visible tops of the towers reveals huge stone tablets engraved in both Arabic and Farsi script and decorations depicting imaginary animals and human faces [‘As the Caspian Sea Disappears, Life Goes on for Those Living by Its Shores’, Felix Light, Moscow Times, 27-Apr-2021,
www.themoscowtimes.com; ‘Sabayil Castle, vicinity of Baku’, OrexCA, www.orexca.com].
Caspian cities of the Khazar Khanate: Lost cities were also a feature of the medieval Khazaria Kingdom (a large area mainly to the north and northwest of the Caspian Sea). Prominent among these were Ithill (sometimes written “Atil”) and Balanjar. Ithill’s precise location is unknown, however Russian archeologists claim to have discovered the site of Ithill (near Astrakhan in Northern Dagestan), having unearthed a fortress, flamed bricks (a speciality of the Khazars) and yurt-shaped dwellings. The claim has not been substantiated. On the Silk Road route, Ithill, the Khazaria capital at one stage, at its zenith was a major centre of trade, including the Khazaria slave trade. Ithill’s road to ruin and downfall began in the 10th century after the city was sacked by Kievan Rus led by Prince Sviatoslav I. It may have been rebuilt afterwards but it was again decimated in the 11th century and wiped off the map for keeps. Balanjar was also a capital of Khazaria for a time and a city of considerable importance. It suffered the same fate as Ithill, decimated by nomadic conquerors (in the Arab-Khazar wars), rebuilt but went into terminal decline and was no more heard of after ca.1100𖤓.
Abuskūn: Medieval Persia was the site of a lost city on the southwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, the port of Abuskūn. It’s location is uncertain but most scholars place it in within the Gorgān region. Abuskūn was a prosperous trading hub for its merchants who traded as far away as the land of the Khazars on the Volga trade route. The city’s wealth and vulnerable location made it a sought-after prize for the Rus and their Caspian expeditions. After 1220 Abuskūn is not mentioned in the documents, although in the 14th century a Persian geographer wrote that it had been an island in the Caspian which was submerged due to the sea’s rise in level.
Abandoned Dekhistan in the desert: Modern Turkmenistan is host to one or two lost cities of its own. The most significant was Dekhistan, aka Dekhistan-Misrian (S.W. Turkmenistan), near the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea…a ruined Silk Road city but at its peak (11th century) a major economic centre and the foremost medieval oasis in the region. It managed to survive the Mongol invasion albeit weakened, limped on till the 15th century but was ultimately undone by large scale deforestation precipitating an ecological disaster (failed irrigation system), turning the city into a ghost town. All that remains are mud-brick foundations, the outlines of a few caravanserais and what’s left of several minarets in varying degrees of decay [‘Ancient settlement of Dekhistan’, Silk Road Adventures, www.silkadv.com].
Derbent continuity: Derbent in the Dagestan region of Russia differs from the impermanence of these other medieval Caspian cities in it having achieved a continuity of existence right through to the present day. Archeological diggings reveal that the city has clocked up nearly 2,000 years of continuous urban settlement. The existence of Derbent (romanised as “Derbend”, from a Farsi word meaning “gateway”) as a fortified settlement, was known by Greek and Roman authors as early as the 3rd century BC [‘Citadel, Ancient City and Fortress Buildings of Derbent’, UNESCO, www.whc.unesco.org]. Derbent’s strategic location, nestled tightly between natural barriers—the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains—has seen control of it pass from empire to empire – Persian, Arab, Mongol, Timurid, Shirvan and finally Russian§. Under the Persians it formed part of the northern lines of the Sasanian Empire.
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𖤓 another Khazar city, Samandar—thought to be situated on the western shore of the Caspian roughly midway between Atil and Derbent—was also lost to history during this period
§ so prized because it allowed rulers of Derbent to control land traffic between the Eurasian Steppe and the Middle East [‘Derbent’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
What happened to ‘Peking’ and ‘Bombay’?: The Politics and Standardisation of Geographical Renaming
Some time towards the tail-end of last century China and India changed the standard exonym by which its respective principal city is known to outsiders. Thus, Peking became Beijing and Bombay became Mumbai. Other cities within each country followed suit. At the time this caused some pointed comments and a degree of puzzlement among onlookers and even governments around the world. After being called “Peking” and “Bombay” for what seemed like forever (it wasn’t!), why did the Chinese and Indian governments all of a sudden make such a fundamental switch in nomenclature?
The reasons why governments up and change the names of their cities and even occasionally the name by which the sovereign state itself is known※※, varies. Quite frequently, it’s about politics or ethnic/cultural identity. Often, it’s a matter of transliteration of writing systems to keep up with the state of contemporary realities – which dovetails neatly into the need for recognition of ethnic identities within the country. In some instances the change of name may be about both the political and the phonetic. Let’s look at a few specific cases from different countries.
Politics of decolonisation: Let’s start with India and Mumbai. “Bombay” was the first to be (officially) cancelled. In 1995 the Shiv Sena—a right-wing Hindu nationalist party—took power in the Maharashtra region (includes Bombay/Mumbai). Shiv Sena changed the city name because it wanted to rid it of a name with the connotation of the British colonial legacy (“Bombay” apparently being a tainted “Raj” name to Hindu nationalists)1⃞. In its place, the regional authority seeking a name which reflected Maratha heritage and identity chose “Mumbai” to honour the Koli goddess Mumbadevi2⃞.
Standardisation of spelling: From 1996 other Indian cities similarly underwent a name change, the most significant of which are Kolkata, replacing the former name “Calcutta”, Chennai, replacing “Madras”, Kozhikode, replacing “Calicut”, and Bengaluru, formally called “Bangalore”. While post-British decolonisation was at the heart of the desire to change names, many of the new names were the result of spelling changes to align with the prevailing local languages/ethnic communities (eg, Kolkata is a Bengali word for a city nearly two-thirds populated by Bengalis)3⃞.
Transliteration: China has quite a track record of changing the name of its cities, during the imperial era it was a regular occurrence. The question most are curious about is how “Peking” got traded in for “Beijing” (which translates as “northern capital”). Well for a start, Beijing is not a new name for the city. Back in 1403, during the Ming Dynasty, it was thus named…hence the wheel has gone full circle. In-between Beijing 1.0 and Beijing 2.0 the city was known variously as Beiping, Peiping and Peking (prior to Beijing 1.0 it was called Dadu when ruled by the Mongols). Which brings us back to the question of why Peking became Beijing. Basically, it was the (delayed) outcome of a change in the Chinese writing system/script, requiring the conversion of text to tally with the new Pinyin romanisation system introduced by the communist authorities. As part of the process the phonetic changes necessitated new spellings of many city names. And as the new system involved replacing Cantonese with Mandarin, this led to “Canton”, the old English name for the great southern Chinese city, being transliterated as “Guangzhou”4⃞. For the same reason “Pusan” in South Korea became “Busan” in 2000.
More politically motivated name swaps: The communist era of the USSR occasioned name changes of some cities to honour Bolshevik supreme leaders – “Tsaritsyn”, the Tsarist era name became “Stalingrad” (after Joseph Stalin), only to change again to “Volgograd”); “St Petersburg” became “Petrograd” before the Bolsheviks renamed it “Leningrad” (after VI Lenin), only for it to revert to St Petersburg after the dissolution of Soviet communism. Turkey’s preeminent city and capital, Istanbul, too has a history of different names, the changes occasioned by the succeeding waves of rulers who in turn conquered the city. Founded as “Byzantium” by the ancient Greeks, later it was renamed “Constantinople” when absorbed into the (eastern) Roman Empire (unofficially also known as “New Rome”), and finally, under the Ottoman conquerors it became and remains “Istanbul”5⃞.
Endnote: The capital of the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan is arguably the world record-holder for most changes of its name. While it was part of Russia it was originally called Akmoly, this changed to Akmelinsk and then Tselingrad. Since independence the capital has regularly changed autonyms (and at least one change of location and therefore its name as well) – going from Akmola (= “white tomb”, perhaps not the most uplifting name for a city!), to Astana (which simply means “capital”) to Nursultan (named after Kazakhstan’s autocratic first president) back to Astana.
※※ Re country name changes see this site’s August 2024 blog Bharat, Türkiye, etc. What’s in a Name?: The Politics of Country Rebranding
𖣴𖣴𖣴 𖣴 𖣴𖣴𖣴
1⃞ “Bombay” (meaning “good bay”) was the name the English adopted during the British Raj which derived from Bombaim, the name the Portuguese chose for the city during their occupation
2⃞ the new name, Mumbai, didn’t trigger a change in the name of the city’s famous film-making complex which remains “Bollywood”
3⃞ Goa, a Portuguese colony for 450 years interestingly has not changed its name…possibly something to do with “Goa” deriving from a South Asian Sanskrit word Gomantak (= “cow’s horn”)
4⃞ Shànghâi already conformed to the Pinyin system and so didn’t require a change of name
5⃞ if we turn our eyes to Europe other politically-motivated changes in the city name include “Danzig” (when a German city), changed to “Gdańsk” (when it came under Polish jurisdiction), and “Königsberg” (historic Prussian name) ➜ “Kaliningrad” (after the USSR took control of it from Germany). The spoils of war also accounts for the change in name of the Vietnamese city “Saigon” to “Ho Chi Minh City” after the North Vietnamese were victorious in the civil war
Aaron Burr, Reputed Black Sheep of the Founding Fathers: From Patriotic War Hero to Self-Serving Schemer and Conspirator
Aside from a handful of dissenting voices, no one in America disputes the ignominious role assigned Benedict Arnold in the annals of American history. Arnold, a general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, switched sides and took British money to divulge American military intelligence, even offering to trade West Point to the invading British. Benedict Arnold is a name synonymous with treason in the hearts of Americans…needless to say there are no “Benedict Arnold High Schools” in the US! Aaron Burr’s career on the other hand is more complicated. Though also considered a traitor by many, Burr is not as black-and-white a candidate for the US historic hall of infamy. Burr started out, like Arnold, somewhat of a hero during the revolution, then quit the fighting to practice as a lawyer and then enter politics. Burr was successful enough to (twice) run for president of the United States, on the second occasion managing to tie with Thomas Jefferson in the electoral college vote. As vice-president under an increasingly distrustful Jefferson, he found himself on the outer, excluded from involvement in White House politics.
Plagued by a sequence of political reversals𝕒 and heavily in debt, Burr turned his back on mainstream US politics and changed course to pursue other ambitions of an extra-political and illicit nature. The former vice-president left Washington DC and headed west, this is where the narrative of his controversial activities takes on a nebulous complexion.
Burr’s grand scheme X?: No one knows definitively what Burr’s intentions were after 1804, but allegations of nefarious machinations orchestrated by him were legend. Some of his accusers claimed that Burr’s plan was to annex Texas for himself or to incite the southern states and territories (Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana) to secede from the United States, creating a new independent country with the former VP at the helm. Another allegation spoke of a grander plan to conquer Mexico by triggering a secessionist movement and establishing an empire for himself. Some opponents speculated that Burr wanted to attack New Orleans or seize the Florida peninsula from Spain𝕓. Burr’s own version of his post-politics plans was that he was heading south-west to farm 40,000 acres in the Spanish colony of Texas which had been supposedly leased to him by the Spanish Crown.
What is known is that Burr sensed the opportunity for wealth and glory in the west, embarking on an “expedition” of sorts with the recruitment of a fighting force𝕔, rather than farming, on his mind. He also sought money for a great “enterprise” from prominent people (Southern planters, sympathetic politicians). Burr engaged a co-conspirator, bringing General James Wilkinson𝕕, a US Army senior officer, on board to give weight to his planned illegal operations. At the same time Burr established international connexions with British officials, Spanish ministers and even Mexican revolutionaries. The British ambassador’s account of their conversation revealed Burr’s offer to the British to wrest control of the Southwest and Louisiana from the US and hand it Britain. The price? A hefty sum of money and an armed force supplied by Britain. The ambassador’s masters in London however showed no interest in Burr’s scheme, nor did the Spanish government in Madrid. Burr also met with a group of criollos whose objective was to capture Mexico from the Spanish, but again nothing tangible came of this.
A question of definitions: Before Burr could launch any part of his grand and ambitious masterplan he was undone by his co-conspirator. General Wilkinson having lost faith in Burr’s wild scheme sent President Jefferson a confidential, coded letter incriminating Burr. Burr was hunted down and eventually captured by US authorities in Louisiana. A Virginian federal court trial was arraigned in 1807 with the charge against Burr treason. Jefferson was hell-bent on prosecuting Burr and unconcerned about breaking the law to do it, however presiding Supreme Court Justice John Marshall had his own ideas of how things should proceed. Marshall applied the strictest definition of treason in accordance with the Constitution’s treason clause—interpreting it as the accused needing to be guilty of “the act of actually levying war” for treason to be proven —and accordingly found Burr not guilty (‘Aaron Burr’s trial and the Constitution’s treason clause’, Scott Bomboy, National Constitution Center, 01-Sep-2023, http://consitutioncenter.org).
Coda: Having escaped the treason charge Burr was soon to discover he had been convicted in the court of public opinion…across America effigies of him were burned and additional charges were brought by individual states. Faced with such threats and his dreams of”glory and fortune” in tatters, persona non grata Burr, fled this time to Europe where he tried unsuccessfully to convince the English and French to back his new plots to invade North America. By 1812 he had returned to New York and recommenced practicing law in relative obscurity under a different name – “Aaron Edwards” (‘The Burr Conspiracy, PBS, www.pbs.org).
Endnote: Rehabilitating Burr?: Writers and historians since Burr’s time have tended to depict Burr as an unprincipled villain and a betrayer of the Republic. Swimming resolutely against this tsunami-like tide is Nancy Isenberg’s revisionist take on the least admired founding father, she states that “Burr was no less a patriot…and a principled thinker than those who debased him”. She also challenges the popular view that he ever planned a grand conspiracy or intended to instal himself as emperor of Mexico. Isenberg adds that rather than being a womaniser as his enemies claim, Burr was something of a proto-feminist (although this begs a glaring question: how does this assessment square with the flagrant mismanagement of his wealthy second wife’s fortune?). That he has been so comprehensively vilified by historians, Isenberg contends, owes to the usefulness of (a morally flawed) Burr as a foil, making the other founding fathers𝕖 (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc.) look virtuous by comparison (N Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, (2007)).
𝕒 his loss in the 1804 New York gubernatorial election and the notoriety and odium heaped on him after his tragic duel with Alexander Hamilton sealed his political demise
𝕓 at one point Burr told Spanish officials that his plan was not just western secession but that he wanted to capture Washington DC itself
𝕔 in which he was only modestly successful
𝕕 himself a double agent for Spain
𝕖 a theme previously pursued in Gore Vidal’s 1973 historical novel Burr…Vidal skewers the founding fathers’ traditionalist, mythical iconography, portraying Washington and his ilk as all too humanly fallible
“Hollywood” in Chicago: The Essanay Studios, Motion Picture Pioneers Before Hollywood
When the average American movie-going punter thinks of motion pictures he or she thinks naturally of Hollywood. If they know a little bit of US cinema history though, they might stretch themselves to mention New York as well. New York City was the centre of the early film industry (production and distribution)❇︎ – where the whole movie caper started in the very early days before it shifted to sunny California. The place they probably won’t tend to associate with movie-making is Chicago. Yet Chicago did have a thriving film studio in the very early days of motion pictures. Essanay Studios, Chicago, made its first silent movie back in 1907, when Hollywood was still known as a place for growing exotic fruits and vegetables. ,
Essanay got its name from the initial of the surnames of its two founders, George K Spoor and Gilbert M Anderson (“S–and–A”), the latter a specialist western movie actor acting on the screen under the name “Broncho Billy” Anderson. The first star at Essanay was cross-eyed Ben Turpin (formerly Essanay’s janitor), who specialised in vigorous physical comedy (An Awful Skate, a 1907 short exploiting the roller skate craze).
Many future Hollywood stars got their early screen exposure with Essanay, including Francis X Bushman, Wallace Beery, Gloria Swanson and Lewis Stone (and director Alan Dwan behind the camera). Bronco Bill Anderson’s westerns, regularly turned out by Essanay, proved a very popular earner for the studio. In a change of style from the customary westerns and comedies Essanay is credited with the first Sherlock Holmes film made in the US. Because of Chicago’s seasonal weather patterns Anderson moved an arm of the studios west, first to Colorado and later to California, based in Niles in San Francisco.
The studio had many of the top silent draws in the 1910s but no one was a bigger star at Essanay Motion Picture Company than Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin who joined the studio in 1915 was poached by Essanay from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios with the lure of much more money and his own production unit. While at Essanay Chaplin made 14 or 15 shorts (one or two-reelers), the crowning gem of which is The Tramp (1915), which received saturation publicity from Essanay. In this two-reeler Chaplin immortalised his most famous character, the vagabond “tramp”, conveying the right mix of melodramatics and wild slapstick [Neibaur, J. L. (2000). Chaplin at Essanay: Artist in Transition. Film Quarterly, 54(1), 23–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213798]. The studio’s star performer however wasn’t happy at Essanay’s locations in either Chicago or Niles and after just one year he departed the studios, moving to LA and Mutual and First National corporations for even more mega-money (his first $1M movie paycheck) and more creative control§.
Chaplin was far and away Essanay’s biggest money-spinner…with him no longer front-lining for the studio it started a downward spiral. Less than three years after the star draw card defected to Hollywood the Essanay Studios in both Chicago and Niles folded for good. Film historians contend that Essanay could have stayed successful had it been prepared to move with the times. The new trend was towards feature films (five or more reels), which were supplanting the short film as the popular form. Essanay Studio head GK Spoor lacked the necessary prescience to grasp this trend, preferring to stick with the old short film mode [Smith, M. G., & Selzer, A. (2015). Essanay Signs Charlie Chaplin. In Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (pp. 120–130). Columbia University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/smit17448.16]. Selig Polyscope, William Selig’s rival film studio in Chicago, was more attuned to the future of cinema, producing The Spoilers in 1914, an early full-length feature film starring William Farnum. Selig Polyscope however was also forced to shut down its productions in 1918, bringing Chicago’s role as a hub of American cinema production to a close, leaving Hollywood firmly and permanently in the movie-making ascendency.
❇︎ New Jersey was often used to shoot the outdoor scenes, especially for westerns!
§ the other reason Chaplin and other east coast film-makers moved to the west coast and LA was to evade the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents on motion pictures [‘A Brief History of Hollywood Before It Was Hollywood’, Silent–ology, (2015), www.silentology.wordpress.com]
‘Queen Kelly’, a Jinxed 1920s Hollywood Silent Film Destined Never to be Finished
❦❦🎥 🎬 🎞🎞🎞🎞🎞 🎬 🎥
Queen Kelly is one of early Hollywood’s most controversial movies…its story is a cinematic journey of a production burdened by recurring misfortune and internal conflicts which is doomed to become the incomplete expression of a would-be silent classic. It’s excruciatingly long drawn-out saga starts in 1928, as a United Artists feature intended as a star vehicle for top silent screen actress of the day Gloria Swanson who had defected from Paramount to go independent. Joe Kennedy Sr, patriarch of the tragedy-soaked, almost self-destructive Kennedy family of jinked and fated politicians, comes into the film’s story at this juncture. In the late 1920s Kennedy shrewdly acquired a string of small movie studios which he consolidated into RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) in 1928.
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Kennedy’s foray into the movie biz led to a meeting with Swanson and a three-year affair between the two. Joe was hoping to launch a successful career as a Hollywood film tycoon and agreed to finance Swanson’s Queen Kelly. Controversial auteur director Erich von Stroheim was brought in to write the original story and to direct, this was the start of everything going pear-shaped. Let loose with a big budget, Stroheim, an autocratic perfectionist by nature, dragged out the filming of what he intended to his personal masterpiece with constant reshoots and delays – amassing enough footage for a five-and-a-half hour epic, but having shot only just over one-third of the film’s scenario (‘Queen Kelly’, Silent Era, www.silentera.com).
With the movie still not finished and the Austrian-American director having drained more than $800,000 from the production budget, Stroheim was finally sacked. Filming done, this is where the machinations started getting really interesting. Swanson discovered that Kennedy has deceived her, instead of being an investor in the project Joe had actually loaned Gloria the capital, leaving Swanson wholly responsible for the loss! To try to recoup her money, Swanson tried to finish the disaster of a movie❇︎. After a savage round of editing, a sound version directed by Richard Bokeslawski with an alternate ending was released by Swanson’s own production company in Europe and South America in 1932. Stroheim, still holding the US rights to the production, had vetoed an American release (‘Erich von Stroheim’s Damned Queen: Queen Kelly’, Michael Koller, Senses of Cinema, August 2007, www.sensesofcinema.com).
Sunset Boulevard: American audiences finally got their first screen glimpse of Queen Kelly in a curious, twisted fashion some 20 years later. The film Sunset Boulevard (1950) reunited two of the original forces behind Queen Kelly, Swanson and Stroheim (as actor). Stroheim cheekily talked director Billy Wilder into using an excerpt from Queen Kelly in Sunset Boulevard, in which Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a forgotten silent film star. In a delicious irony the interspersed old footage from the doomed 1928 “classic” is presented as one of Desmond’s great silent films! The ensuing interest generated by Sunset Boulevard resulted eventually in a very belated second release of Queen Kelly in 1957.
In 1985 Kino International brought to the screen a third release of the much maligned and butchered Queen Kelly. The 1985 version—hyped as a “restored masterpiece” and “lost masterwork”—was based on Stroheim’s original script (IMDb, www.imdb.com), but of course remains incomplete as intended. Over the course of the production’s extended lifespan, four cinematographers, five directors (in addition to Stroheim) and three other writers worked on the uncompleted feature.
❇︎ timing also contributed to Queen Kelly’s failure…it was in production at the same time as ‘’talkie” movies were starting to make their inexorable rise ultimately to unparalleled popularity. Also, the Hays Code, recently introduced, insisted Stroheim make cuts to the movie’s raunchy content, which Stroheim defiantly and characteristically refused to do