Romantic's Return

Romatic's Return MARS IN THE HOUSE OF DEATH-- Rex Ingram--Knopf ($2.50).

Once upon a time--as who over 21 doesn't remember?--there was a movie director named Rex Ingram. A very romantic director he was. Himself as handsome as a movie star, he was born in Dublin, had been a New Haven dockworker, graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, protege of famed Sculptor Lee Lawrie, ex-War pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. And he turned out such successes as Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Scaramouche, The Prisoner of Zenda, Mare Nostrum. His name was linked so closely with Sabatini, Ibanez, Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro that it was sometimes uncertain whether he was director, author, actor, or all three. After a ten-year career in Hollywood, Rex Ingram, then only 35, dropped out of sight.

Last week he popped up again with a novel, Mars in the House of Death, and an account of where he has been all this time. He quit Hollywood because: 1) doctors told him the pace would kill him shortly, 2) he felt he was getting in a rut. Well-heeled (he got about $125,000 a picture, plus 25% of profits), he bought Cine studios in Nice, decided to travel. Until two years ago, when he settled in Mexico, he had lived in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Spain, Egypt, learned Arabic, got 20 pieces of his own sculpture bought by the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo, and picked up the true story of a bullfighter, which he turned into Mars in the House of Death.

Meanwhile Rex Ingram turned down many a good job in Hollywood, determined not to go back until he finds a story "I know, understand, believe in." His own novel is out of the question, he declares: the censors would make mincemeat of it. Evidently influenced by Hemingway (Rex Ingram's favorite author), Mars in the House of Death traces the short life of a famed bullfighter named Chuchito, illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a gypsy dancer, who grows up among Andalusian fighting bulls and Barcelona harlots, falls in love (innocently) with his half-sister while having a passionate affair with the U. S. wife of a Mexican general, is fatally gored in time to prevent a worse tragedy. A colorful, realistic, badly constructed tale, Mars in the House of Death will add more to Ingram's reputation for versatility than to literature.

Still handsome at 45, tall, black-haired, brogueish, magnetic Rex Ingram prefers tequila to Scotch, smokes pipes and cigars, hates to ride in airplanes, says he needs very little money to get along on. To people who ask him if he doesn't get bored with so little work to do, Rex Ingram replies that he only started to work when he quit his job in Hollywood.

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