Silent Films Speak Loudly for Hughes

'Two Arabian Knights," a crisp World War I adventure farce, was vaunted and then vaulted.

The first and only movie to win an Academy Award in the short-lived best comedy direction category, it has rarely been seen since its release in 1927.

That will change this week, when Turner Classic Movies will air the hit picture and two other misbegotten silent films produced by Howard Hughes -- the gangster melodrama "The Racket" (1928) and the Rex Beach potboiler "The Mating Call" (1928).

"Two Arabian Knights" established 21-year-old producer Hughes as a filmmaking force in Hollywood. But it spent the musty years, along with Hughes's other silent works, beyond public reach, housed in an archive that had never before given permission to restore and show what Hughes accomplished so early in his career.

TCM resurrected and digitally restored these films to coincide with the theatrical release of "The Aviator," Martin Scorsese's film biography of Hughes. The cable channel is showing 14 Hughes films this month.

Today, the late billionaire industrialist is perhaps better known for his grandiose aviation experiments and unsavory eccentricities. But he also did seminal work in Hollywood, bringing Jane Russell to raunchy stardom ("The Outlaw," 1943); owning RKO Studios; and making epic aerial war stories ("Hell's Angels," 1930) and tough gangster movies (the original "Scarface," 1932).

The son of a Texas oilman, Hughes (1905-1976) always had obsessions and the money to explore them. He settled in Hollywood in 1925 and already had connections through his uncle Rupert Hughes, an established novelist and screenwriter.

To distinguish himself from his father, Hughes tried film and used his wealth to assure the finest production values. After a few false starts, he became famous with his third picture, "Two Arabian Knights."

The film seemed a sure-fire venture. One of its screenwriters was James T. O'Donohoe, who had worked a year earlier on "What Price Glory," the popular World War I buddy film based on a successful stage play.

"Two Arabian Knights" relied on a similar formula, putting a plug-ugly sergeant (Louis Wolheim) and a quick-witted pretty-boy (William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd) through a series of fun blunders that seal their friendship. But the film also diverged from its predecessor. The two hapless doughboys escape from a German POW camp in bathrobes that resemble sheik garb. Mistaken for Arab prisoners, they are transported to the Middle East, where they again flee and spend their time trying to help a captive beauty, played by a young Mary Astor.

Director Lewis Milestone beautifully balanced scenes of comic absurdity with moments of wartime savagery, prescient of his work on the Oscar-winning "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930).

Wolheim seems to have been a favorite of Milestone, who featured him in "All Quiet" as well as the Al Capone stand-in in "The Racket," often cited as one of the most important gangster pictures of the silent period.

Based on a stage play by a Chicago reporter, "The Racket" explored how a corrupt city government and a complacent press allowed men such as Capone to flourish.

The film's chief allure is Wolheim's character, an urban gangster trying to protect his beer routes during Prohibition and shield his younger, educated brother from the crime trade.