General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

When the Clouds Roll By

When the Clouds Roll By is a 1919 American silent comedy directed by Victor Fleming, starring Douglas Fairbanks as a superstitious New Yorker driven toward madness by a mad-scientist neighbor, and released through United Artists on 29 December 1919.¹ It was Fleming's first film as a director and one of the last of Fairbanks's modern-dress comedies before he turned to swashbuckling costume pictures such as The Mark of Zorro (1920).²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	29 December 1919; copyright 21 December 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corp., LP14595¹
Director	Victor Fleming, his directorial debut; assistant director Theodore Reed²
Writing	Scenario by Thomas J. Geraghty from a screen story by Douglas Fairbanks²
Format	Silent, black and white, six reels, standard 35mm 1.33:1; working title Cheer Up²
Distribution	United Artists Corporation; the second Fairbanks film released through the company²^•³
Flood spectacle	A reservoir holding two million gallons of water and a city two miles long were built in the Cascade Mountains foothills of Northern California for the climax¹
Survival	The film is extant; a 35mm print is held by Cohen Media Group (Raymond Rohauer collection), and the film is in the public domain in the USA²

Spoilers

Plot

In the film, Daniel Boone Brown, a fun-loving young New Yorker employed at his uncle's brokerage firm, becomes an unknowing participant in the hypnotic experiments of Dr. Ulrich Metz, a psychiatrist in his neighborhood who tries to determine how far circumstance and mental state alone can drive a man toward death.¹^•⁴ Convinced his bad luck comes from an opal ring, Daniel throws it away in a park, where Lucette Bancroft picks it up and he promptly falls in love with her.¹ Metz exploits a love triangle to attack Daniel's sanity, and the former suitor Mark Drake schemes to seize Oklahoma oil interests owned by Lucette's father.⁵^•¹ The climax shifts from New York to the countryside: Daniel and Lucette are on a train swept away by a massive flood, and after taking refuge on a drifting roof they are married by a minister who floats past.¹^•⁶

The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, formerly chief film critic of the Chicago Reader, describes the film as nominally a satire of 1919 American fads, from Ouija boards and superstitions to crackpot psychological experiments, but chiefly a free-form adventure built around Fairbanks's athletic stunts and playful breaches of the ordinary rules of space and time.⁶

Production

Fairbanks's search for a new direction. Through 1918 and 1919 Douglas Fairbanks, then the biggest male star in the film industry, was hunting for good scripts after a spate of negative reviews of his recent films, which he pasted into his personal scrapbook and studied.³ When the Clouds Roll By was the second film he released through United Artists, the distribution company he co-founded, after His Majesty, the American; it was one of the last of his "Coat and Tie" comedies before his transformation into the screen's most popular swashbuckler.³

The disputed credit. Many contemporary reviews and trade articles credited Louis Weadock (misspelled "Louis Weadon" in the reviews) as co-author of the story and scenario with Fairbanks and Thomas Geraghty, but the Fairbanks organization issued a statement in early 1920 that Weadock had contributed to neither.¹ According to Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance, the star paid Weadock $500 to settle a claim of libel.³

Style and craft. Fleming, Fairbanks's former cinematographer, kept the action moving with brisk editing and let Fairbanks display the acrobatic abilities that soon redirected his career; Fairbanks insisted that his stunts were never performed for their own sake but served his interpretation of youth.⁶^•⁷ The film also shows the flexibility of silent-era art titles: it contains few long shots of buildings or exteriors, conveying a sense of various parts of New York City through painted titles, such as a view of the Washington Square arch followed by a shot of Fairbanks walking in a park that could be almost anywhere.⁸ The title-card backgrounds were painted by the popular illustrator Henry Clive, and the opening credits show Fleming filming scenarist Geraghty, the cameramen, and Fairbanks with the actor's Alaskan malamute, Rex.⁸^•³

The nightmare sequence

The film's most famous passage, a surreal nightmare in the first reel in which Fairbanks walks on walls and the ceiling, was not Fleming's work. It had been directed by Joseph Henabery for Fairbanks's previous film, His Majesty, the American, cut from that film's first edit, and worked into this release instead.³ Film historians long credited the fledgling Fleming for the witty sequence without knowing its origin; the press book for His Majesty had referenced the "wild and delirious nightmare," and a correction slip had to be included with each press kit urging exhibitors to drop any mention of it.³ The wall-walking effect anticipated a famous Fred Astaire sequence by more than 30 years and has since been reproduced, without attribution, in Royal Wedding (1951) and in certain shots of the thriller Inception (2010).⁷^•³

The flood

Fairbanks pulled out all stops in the last reel. For the film's climax, four huge electric pumps lifted over a million gallons of Sacramento River water up to a reservoir in the Cascade mountains; when the water was let go, the resulting flood swept away a town that convincingly mixed miniature structures with full-scale buildings.³ The AFI Catalog records the production's own figures as a reservoir holding two million gallons and a city two miles in length at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Northern California.¹ For the post-flood sequence, a flooded plain near Seal Beach was dressed with trees, houses, and even a floating church, which conveniently supplied the minister for the film's happy ending.³

Reception and survival

The film was a success, earning the second highest returns of any of Fairbanks's productions to date, and it was well received by critics; Photoplay wrote that if he had begun his United Artists career with it, the film would have given the new connection a boost that His Majesty the American failed to impart.³ The Museum of Modern Art screened it in October 1960, and its first film curator, Iris Barry, wrote that the picture parodied with no discernible time-lag the pattern of a new social scene, skewering the dubious profession of "psychoanalyst," a new word in 1919 that in the public mind covered more naive and lurid cures than Freud or Adler had ever proposed.⁹

The film survives. The Library of Congress American Silent Feature Film Survival Database lists it as extant, a 35mm print was screened at the Kansas Silent Film Festival in Topeka in February 2005, and a 35mm positive is held in the Cohen Media Group's Raymond Rohauer collection.¹^•² A restoration has drawn on a black-and-white nitrate print with French intertitles from the Cinémathèque Royale, an eight-reel safety negative with German intertitles from Gosfilmofond, and incomplete Czech-titled prints and negatives from the Berlin Bundesarchiv and Prague archive.¹⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent genre and exploitation features

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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