A movie shot 75 years ago starred a Knoxville teenager. Many thought she was bound for stardom. What happened to her?
by Jack Neely
Stark Love looked like a hit. Released in early 1927, it premiered for a white-tie crowd at New York's Cameo Theater on 42nd Street. Variety gave it a banner headline: STARK LOVE BRIGHT SPOT ON BROADWAY. It got a rave in Photoplay ("despite its garish box-office title, a picture of genuine merit"), another from the New York Times. The Times would later call it one of the 10 best films of 1927.
The director was Karl Brown. He was well-known in the business for his camera work, but had never directed his own movie before Stark Love. It seemed an auspicious debut.
But it wasn't your usual jazz-age thriller. Times critic Mordaunt Hall called it "an engrossing and trenchant pictorial transcript of those slothful mountaineers of North Carolina and Tennessee.... Mr. Brown deftly portrays the ignorance of these people and their primitive ways of doing things...."
The 1920s was not a time of political correctness. Even in sophisticated newspapers, all minority groups, including white Southern Appalachians, were stereotyped without apology.
By most accounts, the female lead stole the show. "Helen Munday, who is an excellent type for the leading female character, was found in a Knoxville drug store," Hall wrote. "She was the only member of the cast who had ever seen a motion picture."
Many who saw the film believed the magnetic actress had a future in film, on the cusp of the sound era. Paramount reportedly signed her to another movie. But after the sensation faded, what became of Helen Munday—or Mundy, or Monday, as she's variously known—is a mystery about which scholars of early film have speculated for years.
When he was here 75 years ago this summer, the director had big, boyish eyes, a round face, an overbite, and perpetually tousled hair; he probably looked even younger than 29. Originally from the Pittsburgh suburb of McKeesport, Pa., Karl Brown was a camera prodigy. When he was only 17, he was working as a camera assistant for the great D.W. Griffith just as that director was inventing the feature film. Brown had worked closely on Griffith's movies Birth Of a Nation and Intolerance; after the war, he became a well-known name in jazz-age Hollywood, working with the stars of that silent era: Alan Hale, Mary Astor, Wallace Beery, George Bancroft, Will Rogers, Fatty Arbuckle in the original Brewster's Millions.
He built a reputation as one of the finest cinematographers in Hollywood, serving as chief cameraman for the landmark 1923 film The Covered Wagon, a classic remembered as the first great Western, and noted for camera work that transcended Griffith's best.
Though he'd been born in the foothills of the Appalachians himself, Brown became intrigued about Southern mountaineers while in Utah. During an on-location shooting of The Covered Wagon, he read an Atlantic Monthly story about the strange, eccentric people of eastern Kentucky. Right away, he wanted to do a film about them.
It took some persuading, but Brown got Jesse Lasky, patriarch of Paramount Studios, to finance a movie about a different kind of pioneers: the contemporary pioneers of the Southern mountains.
A realist, Brown had insisted on shooting it on location. In his day, and for a half-century into the future, most movies with Appalachian subjects were shot in the hills of Southern California. Brown was looking for absolute realism, along the lines of Nanook Of the North and the Polynesian epic, Moana. Like those popular and critical successes, this would be a documentary, of sorts, about an exotic and little-known people, undercut with a stylish commentary on the oppression of women in the presumably male-dominant mountain culture, and wrapped around a melodrama as lurid as any latter-day movie: A mountain boy leaves his family and girlfriend to attend Berea College, but returns home to find his father has married his girlfriend. Implied was a sexual horror: sharing a bedroom with your father as he makes love to your girlfriend.
When Brown brought his script and a small camera crew to the Smokies, he didn't bring any of Paramount's stars with him. To Brown, shooting on location meant hiring actors who lived on location.
The setting was eastern Kentucky, and Brown went there first. But he learned that in the Southern Appalachians, a movie depicting hillbillies was a hot potato. In Berea, when they learned he wanted to make a hillbilly picture, they told him they were fresh out of hillbillies. They suggested he go to Nashville. In Nashville they suggested he go to Knoxville. In Knoxville they suggested he go back to Nashville. Or Asheville.
Asheville didn't go for the idea, either, but while he was there he picked up a book by Horace Kephart, and learned the esteemed author lived in the area. Brown thought Kephart would make a valuable consultant. (The involvement of this seminal Appalachian scholar and author in a movie that many believe stereotypes Appalachians is surprising; some scholars believe Brown exaggerated Kephart's contribution to Stark Love.)
Brown finally chose to shoot near there, in the hills of western North Carolina. There he found a girl who he thought would be perfect for the role. Then her father stepped in and declared, "I'd see her dead an' in her coffin before I see her play-actin' for nobody."
Desperate for a leading actress, Brown sent his business manager, Paul Wing, a balding young veteran known as Captain Wing, back across the mountains to Knoxville. It was here that they had found their young male lead, a football player named Forrest James, carousing with friends in a Knoxville restaurant. Maybe Knoxville had one more actor to cough up.
It was more than a decade before Lana Turner was allegedly discovered in a Los Angeles drugstore, but something similar happened to a Knoxville girl in a Knoxville drugstore.
At an unnamed downtown pharmacy soda fountain, Wing asked the girl behind the counter if she knew anyone who'd like to be in the pictures. Yes, she said, a friend of hers, who already had some acting experience, might be very interested. And in walked Helen Monday, 16-year-old student at Knoxville High.
Diminutive in stature, with large, expressive eyes, Monday was modern, independent, and high-tempered, a bobbed-hair flapper. Her father, a sometime fireman, had left the family years before; she grew up mostly with her single mother, Isabelle, and two older sisters. Helen had some token experience in show biz; she'd done some singing and dancing at the Kiwanis Club on Gay Street. Once she even subbed for an injured dancer in the popular vaudeville revue, "George White's Scandals."
In the drugstore, Monday thought Wing was kidding; she kidded back. But Monday had reasons of her own to take him seriously: ugly rumors had been chasing her around town since the accident. Her boyfriend's car had spun and crashed. She was thrown free, but found her boyfriend crushed to death. The dead boy had earned a bad reputation which Monday somehow inherited. In the wake of the accident, gossips had been spreading stories about the two. Monday was eager to get out of town.
Wing was so impressed with her he called Brown, who came to Knoxville and met Helen, escorted by her older sister Janet, in a downtown hotel. Monday wasn't Brown's original ideal for the character. She was "flat as a board," he lamented, and "she had bobbed her hair to keep up with the city folks' fashions....
"But she did have eyes, and what eyes they were: large, clear, and radiant of every passing mood. Here was a somebody...."
After some persuasion, her mother agreed to let her go. She rode back with Wing, without chaperone, which startled Brown, who was worried about the fine print in the Mann Act.
Though happily married to a Hollywood starlet himself, Brown seemed to fall for Helen: "No one could have been more astonished than I by the wistful beauty of her face or by the flowing grace of her every movement," he later recalled. "The girl wasn't merely good. She was wonderful, with greatness to come...."
He took some rushes of her and sent them hopefully to his New York producer. The reply came to Robbinsville in a telegram: "GIRL WONDERFUL. SIGN HER IMMEDIATELY."
Brown hired Monday and her co-star, Forrest James, for $30 a week: not Hollywood rates, but a good living wage.
Brown later recalled, "Helen Mundy was the most difficult person I ever had anything to do with." The hyperactive teenager enjoyed chaos, and wreaked it whenever she could. She enjoyed spoiling Wing's long calculations by sticking her finger in his adding machine.
Knowing that Helen was a troublemaker and a bit of a flirt, her sister, Janet, accompanied her occasionally. On a horseback ride through the mountains, she observed with some alarm that Helen's fellow cast members were passing her jars of moonshine, expecting her to take a drink. On horseback, the teenager held the jar up to her mouth, and appeared to take a swig. But she showed her sister that she was just blowing bubbles. Janet admired the trick, and imitated it when the jar came around to her.
Bored and frustrated while she and the crew waited for a rainy spell to end, Mundy left the camp alone. Brown, still fretting about the Mann Act and possible kidnapping charges, didn't pursue her. "She learned very early in the game that she was the only girl in the picture, that without her the picture could not be made," Brown recalled. "It was virtually a case of blackmail."
Just when Brown was convinced she'd gone for good, she returned and finished the movie.
The few who've seen it to write about it agree that there's never been another movie like it. Its artistic success, heralded in all the film reviews of the day, seemed to bode well for everyone involved. But in the decade after its 1927 release, the leading actress, the director, and the movie itself disappeared from public view. Later in the century, Helen Monday's fate was a mystery that baffled scholars, Karl Brown was believed dead, and all copies of the movie were believed to be destroyed, lost without a trace.
Their fates are much better known today.
[To be continued....]
August 23, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 34
© 2001 Metro Pulse
| 
