the forgotten superstar: Alla Nazimova

Readers of this blog may notice a preference for the 1940s RKO horror films produced by Val Lewton, who happened to be the nephew of theater and silent film sensation Alla Nazimova. It seems some of the diva’s subversive theatricality and artsy sensibilities found their way into the Lewton-produced films (his novels too), but that, as they say, is another story. In any case as an old movie buff I’d heard of Nazimova and only later learned of her connection to Lewton. In my mind’s eye I envisioned her as a dominating, Amazonian sort physically. Little did I suspect she was a wispy, even dainty figure of a woman. This is certainly the impression one gets in her most famous film role Salomé, in which a 42 year-old Nazimova convincingly impersonates a girl half her age, and even that might be an understatement. How old was Salomé anyway when she performed the most famous striptease in history? Sixteen-ish?

   Anyhow the great Nazimova had the artistic world at her feet for a time in the 1910s and early 1920s [1], until a gradual decline in fortunes both financial and aesthetic [2], largely if unintentionally self-inflicted, rendered her more or less a cultural irrelevance upon her death in 1945 at the relatively youthful (by today’s standards) age of 66. But perhaps there is a happy ending after all, a posthumous comeback, if you like. But more on this later.

   Nazimova was unabashed and unrepentant in her lesbian lifestyle in an age when doing so engendered much risk. But no matter. Her inclinations crept into some of the films she produced, directed and/or starred in, none more so than her aforementioned, ill-fated Art Nouveau magnum opus Salomé [3]. This project has been hailed as a masterpiece by some, scoffed at as an eccentric relic by others, but is possibly most notorious today for being comprised of all gay or bisexual actors, a claim not universally accepted. Artistically the film is most notable for its design qualities, a synthesis of Nouveau, surreal and Deco elements that are still impressive even today a century later. Moreover, the film combines ballet, cinema, grand opera, and, not least of all, melodrama with what might be charitably called less-than-subtle acting.  

   Salomé may indeed be the first art movie ever. Be that as it may, the silent film it most resembles, for me anyway, and mostly for the design features, is Metropolis [4]. Of course there’s also that wild dance by the evil replicant woman in Metropolis that would not be out of place in Nazimova’s epic. Salomé may also be the first camp film ever, but whether Nazimova set out to create a work of camp is debatable at best, the presence of the predominantly gay cast notwithstanding. Did the concept of camp as a legitimate form of artistic expression even exist in the early 1920s?

   At any rate the conspicuous commercial failure of Salomé brought to an end Nazimova’s status as a major player in the increasingly corporate controlled (and not so coincidentally, male dominated) film industry in the Twenties. But she wasn’t quite finished yet. She made a few more films and even continued acting well into the sound era, although by this time she was confined to bit parts. Alas many of the early films of “the founding mother of Sapphic Hollywood” and “the most notorious Hollywood lesbian actress of all” are lost to history [5].

   However . . . and in quintessentially theatrical, Nazimova-esque style, the great woman has staged something of a comeback, even though it took nearly seven decades after her death for it to come to fruition. Today there is a Nazimova society, and Nazimova tributes pepper the Internet. The film Salomé, for all its excesses – perhaps because of its excesses – has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2006, Salomé became available on DVD as a double feature with the avant-garde film Lot in Sodom (1933) by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber. In 2013 Salomé was screened at the Ojai Music Festival with the Bad Plus performing a live improvised soundtrack. In 2018 Haley Fohr’s experimental score for Salomé was commissioned by Opera North for the Leeds International Festival, and there are even rumblings that it’s time for a mainstream biopic, though Nazimova and mainstream in the same sentence seems a bit of an oxymoron.

[1] For an idea of Nazimova’s cultural and commercial cachet at the time, in 1917 Metro Studios offered Nazimova a 5-year, $13,000 a week contract, an unheard of sum and $3,000 more than Mary Pickford, the world’s biggest movie star, was making. The contract also allowed her director, script, and leading man approval.

[2] In 1918, she moved to Hollywood, where she bought a large Spanish-style house that would later become the Garden of Allah, a hotel and apartment house where a number of Hollywood luminaries would live and where she allegedly hosted wild parties. But Nazimova had little head for business and the hotel quickly lost money. She sold the Garden of Allah in 1930 and concentrated mostly on theater work. When Nazimova moved back to Hollywood in 1938, she rented Villa 24 at the hotel and lived there until she died in 1945, destitute, in poor health, and largely forgotten.

[3] For better or worse, for better I think, Salomé is now available in public domain.

[4] There’s more than a hint of myth-invoking rapture, eminently Germanic, in Nazimova’s opus, and like Lang’s Metropolis, Salomé's production elements have a retro-futuristic vibe. Ergo, Nazimova’s Salome looks not unlike a cyborg and first cousin to the mechanical Maria of Metropolis.

[5] “founding mother…”: Diana McLellan, The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood, LA Weekly Books, 2000, p. xxiii; “the most notorious lesbian…”: Patricia White, “Nazimova's Veils: Salomé at the Intersection of Film Histories,” in: A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, editors, Jennifer Bean and Diane Negri, Duke University Press, 2002, p. 87

Further reading:

William Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969, Viking, 2001, pp. 59-62.

Teresa Theophano, Film Actors: Lesbian, 2015. Glbtq archive.