How many screen adaptations of “Peter Pan” can you name?
Just last year Disney+ released “Peter Pan & Wendy.” Mary Martin starred in the 1960 telecast of the Broadway musical version, and Allison Williams in a 2014 remake, “Peter Pan Live!” An adult Robin Williams took on the role in the unusual 1991 sequel “Hook.” And perhaps the most famous of all was the Disney animated feature from 1953.
But another version predates all of those: “Peter Pan,” a silent film released 100 years ago this month, becoming a blockbuster in its day.
The 1924 film, which The New York Times called “a pictorial masterpiece,” was considered a pioneer in selling movie-related merchandise. But it fell out of sight after talkies replaced silent films and Walt Disney bought the film rights to make his own “Peter Pan.” Many feared it lost until it was rediscovered in the 1940s by a film preservationist who found a copy at a theater in upstate New York that had trained organists to play along with silent movies.
Its centenary has been celebrated with screenings in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and in England.
One of the people finding joy in the revival of interest in the 1924 “Peter Pan” is Theresa Wiegmann, whose grandmother, Betty Bronson, played the title role.
Bronson was a 17-year-old ingénue originally from Trenton, N.J., when she was handpicked to play the role by J.M. Barrie, the creator of “Peter Pan.” Her casting was big news. The Times reported that Barrie was “said to have come to his conclusion after having viewed more than 100 tests of film actresses.” When Bronson visited New York 100 years ago this week to promote the film, photographers thronged her as she arrived in Grand Central on the Twentieth Century Limited.
“It’s always fun for me to share with someone else the fact that my grandmother was in silent pictures and most notably the first Peter Pan in movies,” Wiegmann, 59, a retired lawyer, said in a phone interview from Washington. “I didn’t get to have her around in my life as long as I would have liked to. I love that I have her movies to remember her by.”
Wiegmann first saw “Peter Pan” when she was around 6 and lived in Los Angeles. “I think the story is timeless and so beloved,” she said, adding that her own children thought the silent film was “fun.” “And then the production of it is wonderful, too. The acting, the direction, you know, the special effects were fun.”
Some elements of the film would have been familiar to people who had seen the play written by Barrie and first performed in 1904. The Darling children fly with the help of wires, and their canine nurse, Nana, is played by a man in a dog suit (George Ali, reprising his stage role). But its director, Herbert Brenon, also sprinkled cinematic pixie dust on the story: Captain Hook’s ship flies out of the water, Peter Pan sweeps away tiny fairies with a broom and there are close-ups of a minuscule Tinker Bell, who is usually depicted on stage as a light.
Today it is also considered notable as an early outing for Anna May Wong, the trailblazing Chinese American movie star who was cast as Tiger Lily, and for the work of James Wong Howe, the pioneering Chinese American cinematographer who filmed it. He would go on to shoot dozens of classics, including “The Thin Man,” “Sweet Smell of Success” and “Hud,” which won him one of his two Oscars.
A Times review of the 1924 “Peter Pan” noted that it appealed to both children and adults. (One mother read the title cards that the silent film used for dialogue out loud to “her tiny son,” the review observed.) Bronson was praised as a “graceful, vivacious and alert Peter Pan” but the critic questioned the “marcel wave” in her hair.
David Pierce, a retired archivist from the Library of Congress who developed an attachment to the silent “Peter Pan” film and eventually helped distribute it, said it opened in about 250 theaters across the United States, including two in Manhattan. “This was one of the first films that had an extensive merchandising campaign for clothing and books, and all sorts of other things to cross-promote the film,” Pierce said.
What happens next to the film can only be described as murky, at best.
Shortly after Barrie’s death in 1937, Paramount sold the film rights to Walt Disney, who, after a number of delays, made it into his 1953 feature-length animated film.
The silent version was widely considered lost until the 1940s, when it was rediscovered by James Card, a film preservationist at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y., who had fond memories of it from his youth.
“For years I longed with desperate nostalgia to see it again,” Card wrote in an essay published in 1994. “It would be a quarter of a century before so intense a pleasure was granted — and then under unimaginably odd circumstances.”
He unexpectedly found a copy at the Eastman Theater, which is also in Rochester. The theater had a collection of silent films that it had used to train student organists to play alongside movies, which was once a lucrative gig. With the dawn of sound, those jobs dried up and the films were left in cans in a vault.
Card recalled the deep joy he felt when he finally saw the film he had been searching for. “The picture sparkled on the screen with its amber toning” and blue tint for nighttime in Kensington Gardens, Card wrote. “I was ecstatic.”
Now that it has been preserved, some of that same magic is still felt whenever “Peter Pan” graces a screen, whether it is on television, in a theater or now on YouTube.
Dr. Susan Ohmer, an emeritus professor at the University of Notre Dame who taught the film for a decade, said the silent film had spoken to viewers in different time periods and was currently finding a new, younger audience. “We have more of a film culture now,” Ohmer said. “People want to appreciate films, they want to understand film. They want to have a broader understanding of the art of film history.”
She said its subject matter, the innocence of childhood, was something that audiences still respond to. “We still want to protect children, we’re still very concerned about their safety, about preserving the beautiful imaginations and creativity that they have,” she said.
Wiegmann has seen the film starring her grandmother several times over the years, including at screenings accompanied by live orchestras. “I watched it on more than one occasion with my father, who was her only child and her biggest fan, probably,” Wiegmann said.
Most of the family’s “Peter Pan” memorabilia was donated to the University of California, Los Angeles, where her father, Ludwig Lauerhass Jr., worked. But they kept a few items, including a photograph of Bronson as Peter Pan that now hangs in her dining room.
“There’s a lot going for the movie,” Wiegmann said. “It’s a fun and a touching story, and so I hope that people are drawn to that.”
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