Morning Man Classic: Richard Arlen!

I had never heard of Richard Arlen until a clip of a scene from the 1927 Best Picture winner Wings surfaced on YouTube.

It’s a silent film there’s a very tender scene between Arlen and Buddy Rogers and they sure look to be madly in love.

Too bad one of them dies!

Before he started in movies, Arlen attended the University of Pennsylvania then served as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I.

Then he went to the oilfields of Texas and Oklahoma and then found work as a tool boy, a messenger and sporting editor of a newspaper before going to LA to try and break into movies.

He had no success initially but caught a break in an unusual way: He was working as a delivery boy for a film laboratory when the motorcycle he was riding landed him a broken leg outside the Paramount Pictures lot. A sympathetic film director gave him his start as an extra.

He successfully made the transition from silent films to talkies appearing in nearly 150 films between 1921 and 1977. He died  in 1976 which his final film, A Whale of a Tale, coming out after his death.