Hollywood producer Howard Hughes made his money the old-fashioned way. He inherited it.
In his late teens, he obtained control of his late father’s Hughes Tool Company in Houston, Texas, which made a fortune by building a better drill bit. On his way to becoming a famous aviator, and long before his later life as an eccentric recluse that further contributed to his legend, Hughes stopped off in Hollywood and tried his hand at producing films through his Caddo Company. He was surprisingly successful.
Howard Hughes struck up a friendship with director Lewis Milestone, a Russian immigrant and fellow aviation enthusiast who’d been working his way in Hollywood throughout the 1920s. With Hughes’s blessing and financing, Milestone directed two major hits of the late silent era: Two Arabian Knights (1927) and The Racket (1928). After being presumed lost for decades, prints were found in the Hughes Archives and restored this century. You can now see these remarkable films on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley, Howard Hughes in Hollywood, Vol. 1.
Two Arabian Knights Have Fun in World War One
Whatever you think a film called Two Arabian Knights would be about, you’re likely wrong. It’s a buddy comedy about two American doughboys in the trenches of WWI, and it initially bears a strong resemblance to Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory (1926), restored in 2026 by the Museum of Modern Art. Like that film, Two Arabian Knights features one handsome soldier and one rather plug-ugly brute who are rivals for the same pretty heroine. They begin literally at each other’s throats and end as pals practically joined at the hip.
Tall, blond, and handsome William Boyd, later known as cowboy star Hopalong Cassidy, plays W. Dangerfield Phelps III of the Philadelphia Phelpses. His hated sergeant is a Brooklyn cabbie and con artist named Peter O’Gaffney (Louis Wolheim), whose face could stop a tank and looks like it already has.
In the opening moments of Two Arabian Knights, both soldiers fall into a large round hole while Germans are strafing the area amid many flashing lights. Feeling they’re about to die, the duo decide to settle it once and for all. Their personal battle attracts the attention of German soldiers who line the rim of the pit as though watching a dogfight. Here we have the first of the film’s eye-catching, even amazing overhead and high-angle shots, as directed by Milestone, photographed by Tony Gaudio, and designed by legendary art director William Cameron Menzies. The whole film is dotted with such visual treats.
Two Arabian Knights – Howard Hughes in Hollywood (clip)
In its startling way, this early section of Two Arabian Knights is a blueprint for Milestone’s famous and serious WWI drama of 1930, All Quiet on the Western Front, in which Wolheim again plays a tough sergeant. Milestone would receive an Oscar for directing that Best Picture winner, and it was his second Oscar. At the very first Oscar ceremony in 1929, Milestone received the only Oscar ever given specifically in the category of directing a comedy, and it was for Two Arabian Knights.
You’re starting to see why this film’s absence from viewing for almost a century has been a missing jigsaw piece in cinema history. Film historians haven’t thought of Two Arabian Knights as one of the major WWI epics of the late silent era, yet here it is. True, it quickly leaves its war theatre for other settings, but it’s still a crucial link in the chain of war films and buddy comedies.
Phelps and O’Gaffney are taken to a snow-covered German POW camp, as shot outdoors in real snow; it helps when you’ve got money to spend. The prisoners are sent for delousing in one of Menzies’ typically outsized sets, where the viewer is treated to a parade of naked men getting dipped and showered. Yes, we see lots of nude extras, presented teasingly but obviously, and one fascinating detail is the unusual percentage of Black extras in what’s presented as an international crew of prisoners. Since they’re in the background while O’Gaffney and Phelps are cutting up in the foreground, I strongly suspect the same handful of extras are going around several times.
The action swiftly builds to a prison escape that gets our heroes transported to Turkey, an ally of Germany. On a boat to Constantinople, they make the acquaintance of Mirza, whose sheer veil over her lipsticked mouth doesn’t conceal her gorgeous beauty and sophistication, nor the fact that this allegedly Arab woman is played by Mary Astor, the biggest star in the cast. Allah be praised that the makeup department makes no attempt to pretend she’s an Arab aside from what she’s wearing, for her makeup is exactly the same as in all her other glamour roles.
Despite the last act in Turkey with a supposed Arab sheik as Mirza’s father, who wants her to marry some dashing snake, Two Arabian Knights focuses on the “frenemy” antics of its two escaped soldiers and their mostly cartoonish adventures. In fact, Phelps draws several cartoons throughout the story. One spectacular minor bonus is a handsome young Boris Karloff as the ship’s purser, whom O’Gaffney relieves of some cash to pay for Mirza’s passage.
As Milestone biographer Harlow Robinson states in his commentary, the film’s not exactly progressive attitudes toward its non-American characters reflect the superior, dismissive, isolationist stance of a Coolidge-era America that thought it had to clean up the mess foreigners had gotten themselves into during the war. Nobody’s openly mocked, but nobody’s respected either. Foreigners are depicted as pesky obstacles to the Yanks’ good time. At several points, Muslim customs are cited for comic effect. For example, when Phelps and O’Gaffney are surrounded, a muezzin conveniently emerges on high with a call to prayer, and everyone drops to the ground as our boys hotfoot it out of there. Visually, it’s an impressive gag.
The semi-discreet nudity indicates the rather fast and loose nature of Hollywood’s silent films. Two Arabian Knights is full of saucy hints and gags, including dialogue about what a eunuch is. Phelps whispers in O’Gaffney’s ear, and O’Gaffney’s eyes go wide as his jaw drops. The moment epitomizes his mystification at foreigners. During Phelps’ rather hot wooing of Mirza, which culminates in removing her veil to the astonished arousal of onlookers, Phelps is moved to say “Oh, hell!” It’s right there on the title card.
Robert Israel’s new orchestral score is terrific. The march to the POW camp strings together “Deutschland Uber Alles”, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, and “Tramp Tramp Tramp”. When our soldiers begin to go soft on each other, we get the exquisite strains of “My Buddy”.
For the most part, the Academy Film Archive’s restoration of Two Arabian Knights is excellent. Some stray moments are blurred, and the faint palimpsest of deterioration flickers in the back of the image at times. A few frames seem to be missing here and there, like the moment when Phelps pushes O’Gaffney into a tub. The bonus still presentation gives a clearer image of that, including shots from a few scenes not in the film. They were probably left on the cutting room floor as unnecessary. Overall, the photography of Gaudio and his assistant, the also important Joseph H. August, comes across in all its beauty on the Blu-ray.
The Racket Makes a Big Noise in Chicago and New York
While Two Arabian Knights got an Oscar for Lewis Milestone at the inaugural awards ceremony, his The Racket was nominated for Outstanding Picture, losing to William Wellman’s Wings (1927). The Racket is a milestone of the gangster genre and a red-hot, ripped-from-the-headlines Prohibition tale fashioned by journalist Bartlett Cormack into a 1927 Broadway hit. Paramount contracted with Howard Hughes’s Caddo Company to distribute the film version. The resulting bonanza sparked censorship controversy for its proto-noir portrayal of big city graft and police corruption. Now, here it is, looking both swell and spiffy.
The opening shot, in more than one sense, is through a window. Milestone loved windows, doors and other frames within frames, not to mention his high angles. The Racket opens with streetlights through louvered slats that gently open outward, for we’re inside the dark room above street level. We’re observing a lone overcoated man on the sidewalk as a gun follows him. Immediately, the viewer tenses, thrilled with anticipation and dread. A window is shattered. Is it a near miss? No, a warning, for another man who’d been directing the action (like Milestone) emerges from a door and casts a spotlight on his own face as he lights a cigarette.
The man who was missed is Mac, or Captain James McQuigg, big and square-jawed as a brick wall and just as tough and thick. The other fellow, smaller but just as broad, is Nick Scarsi, a thinly disguised reference to Al Capone. He tells Mac he’d better look for “another racket.” Smirking, Mac says he hasn’t taken his own shot — yet. They’re established right away as having a toe-to-toe, profile-to-profile relationship, like puffed-up fighting cocks taking the other’s measure.
Mac is played by Thomas Meighan, a popular leading hero of the silent era. According to a bonus by film historian David Pierce, Paramount was just filling out his contract with this film, and felt he was on the wane. Little could they suspect they’d have a hit on their hands. Scarsi is played by one of Milestone’s favorites, the flat-nosed Louis Wolheim, in between Two Arabian Knights and All Quiet on the Western Front.
On Broadway, Scarsi was the breakthrough for Edward G. Robinson, who came to Hollywood and starred in Mervyn LeRoy‘s Little Caesar (1931), yet another crypto-Capone who, like Scarsi, deplores women as “poison”. That aversion leads to pronounced homo-erotic vibes in Little Caesar, while The Racket is content to have Scarsi warn his weasel-faced kid brother Joe (George E. Stone) against floozies. The warning doesn’t take.
As part of the gangster talkies, Hughes would produce Howard Hawks’ controversial Scarface (1932), yet another transposition of Capone, this time attached to his kid sister. You can see bits of that film already in The Racket. In other words, The Racket anticipates the genre to come, even unto items like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). When Mac tears up a writ and declares “I’m sick of the law!” he anticipates the Dirty Harry films and other projects where cops are celebrated for violent tactics and breaking rules.
In The Racket‘s opening confrontation, Scarsi invites Mac to a party for the kid brother. That leads to a speakeasy full of movement, noise, and danger. The fact that Mac is prepared to sip illegal champagne forecasts his later willingness to stretch or flout the law for a broader sense of justice. We also meet mask-wearing blonde tootsie Helen (Marie Prevost), a brash and fearless presence who makes a play for Joe. In her commentary, critic Farran Smith Nehme calls her a brazen hussy with plenty of moxie. The busy sequence has many shifts in tone as Gaudio’s camera glides and pans with abandon.
Milestone shows the same delirium in a huge street scene with dozens of extras, as Gaudio is directed to swing about with joy at this busy night space. The idea that rival criminal gangs explicitly represent rival political parties comes to the fore as the upcoming election looms. Scarsi’s ward peddlers back the incumbent, Kublacek, whose signs are on posters and trucks. A rival truck extols Pryzlabicz, “the 100 per cent American” of the reform party. A street sign names Grand Street, so many viewers will make the connection to Chicago. The trucks carry rival kegs of hooch; Scarsi’s were made in a real brewery where he’s seen strutting.
The fact that gangsters have pull in City Hall, and that the DA is dispatched to get them out of trouble and consign Mac to a precinct in the boondocks, is part of what got the film banned from exhibition in Chicago. New York permitted it only with cuts, and Hughes proved willing to make a ruckus and fight such decisions in court, though not always with success.
In the commentary with Nehme and critic Glenn Kenny, Nehme quotes an interview in which Hughes declares, “I won’t tone anything down. I believe the screen is a powerful influence on the thoughts of the average citizen. It’s a powerful instrument. It bores through opinions like my father’s bits through rock. I’m not going to use the screen to penetrate mountains of mush.”
Kenny identifies Bartlett Cormack’s inspirations as Capone and Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson. Chicago’s reputation as a town loose in legality was well-established, with another sign being the 1926 play Chicago by another journalist, Maurine Dallas Watkins. Cecil B. DeMille produced it as a 1927 film. Chicago was taking a beating in pop culture, but the city fathers refused The Racket a showing. Such decisions crimped its box office, although perhaps it got inflated elsewhere. It’s not one of those things the bigwigs wanted discussed but, to quote Leonard Cohen, everybody knows.
The presence of journalists in these films and their cynical function is a reflection of their writers. Within a few years, Lewis Milestone would direct a seminal example of newspaper comedy by Chicago authors Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (1931). Wolheim just missed playing it due to his untimely death from illness. The Racket has a fresh-faced cub reporter, Ames (John Darrow), to contrast with the jaded, muck-stirring Miller (Skeets Gallagher) and Pratt (Lee Moran). When Pratt tells the swaying, sipping Miller that he’d better cut the booze, Miller replies, “It’s cut plenty before I get it.”
Despite a few moments of scratchy deterioration, the Academy Film Archive’s restoration of The Racket looks great and makes us constantly admire the composition and lighting as well as the more obvious elements of story and performance. As with Two Arabian Knights, The Racket has a new score by Robert Israel, plus an alternate score by Neil Brand. We get 44 minutes of outtakes, mostly various angles of the street sequence. Extras discuss the preservations, the Academy Awards, and Hughes’ Hollywood career. Such is Howard Hughes in Hollywood, Vol. 1, and we must assume more of the millionaire’s cinematic adventures are in store from Flicker Alley.