In her youth, actress Elsie Ferguson (1883-1961) was the toast of Broadway and known internationally as one of the greatest beauties of the American stage. Though offers of film work flooded in almost from the birth of the medium, Ferguson demurred, preferring the Great White Way to Hollywood - until the deaths of her Broadway benefactors Henry B. Harris and Charles Frohman in the sinkings of the Titanic in 1912 and the Lusitania in 1915 gave the actress cause to reconsider. Signing an exclusive contract with Adolph Zukor at Paramount, Ferguson made her film debut for Maurice Tourneur in Barbary Sheep (1917). Often cast as socialites, she was known as "the Aristocrat of the Silent Screen." She alternated films with stage plays for another ten years and in 1929 took the lead in Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer's Scarlet Pages, as an attorney who takes on the case of a showgirl accused of murdering her father. Ferguson reprised her role in the play in First National's 1930 film adaptation and Scarlet Pages remains her only sound film and one of only two of her films still in existence. A former film editor and gag writer for Mack Sennett, director Ray Enright was a reliable Hollywood helmsman often trucked in to make sequels to popular films, among them The Angels Wash Their Faces (1939) and Brother Rat and a Baby; he remains best known for his many westerns, most memorably The Spoilers (1942), starring John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Marlene Dietrich.

By Richard Harland Smith