Silent film director, actor from Lansing

Buck Road crosses Townley Creek a little less than 1 mile from Brickyard Road. Next to the bridge, there is an undistinguished farmhouse and an old barn sitting on about 11 acres of land.

Somewhere in the woods and pastures of what used to be the Smith Dairy Farm, a young Anna Beckwith found Robin Townley’s initials carved into a tree.

Robin Townley was born in Lansing on January 10, 1887, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). As a young man, he informed his parents, Fred and Agnes Townley, that he would be attending the Williams School of Expression and Dramatic Art, formed in 1897 at the nascent Ithaca College.

George C. Williams arrived in Ithaca that year to begin teaching courses in elocution and rhetoric. A preacher turned acting teacher, Williams inaugurated IC’s theater arts program (he took the lead in most productions).

In the fall of 1912, Theodore Wharton came to town to film a Cornell University football game and visit family in Ludlowville. Wharton and his brother Leopold had gone from stage managing to movie directing after visiting Edison Studios in New Jersey in 1907. Wharton was fresh from directing the seven-reel film “The Late Indian Wars” for the U.S. government.

Wharton wanted to make college films and chose Ithaca for Cornell’s buildings and the area’s scenery. Matinee idols Francis Bushman and Beverly Bayne accompanied him.

Their first film completed locally was “The Whip Hand,” in which a woman unwittingly sets off a dynamite blast, killing her husband, thereby leaving the path clear for her whip-yielding suitor. A blast at the Portland Cement Company provided the special effects.

About this time, it was announced that Townley would be returning to Lansing from Canada, where he had been touring with a stock company. Once in town, he was cast in “The Right of Way” as a chauffeur who was replaced by a dummy in the climactic shot of a railcar plunging 150 feet into the Taughannock Gorge.

Between 1913 and 1920, Townley played 19 more, mostly minor, roles in Wharton’s silent films and became part of the crowd of actors, directors and hangers-on who rented rooms in the Ithaca Hotel, houses along the lake and roadsters to drive around town.

In “The Love Lute of Romany,” Townley took the part of Raoul, a Romany poet and troubadour, with affections toward the fiery daughter of the head of the clan. A fight cascaded from Beebe Lake down the gorge where a tree fell on to the combatants.
In 1917, he made the jump to directing, beginning with “The Crusher,” where he co-directed the six-reel film with F.W. Stewart and acted in the role of Eli Brown. He followed this with the film “The Candidates.”

Townley left Ithaca in 1919 as part of Leopold Wharton’s movement toward more consistent (and warmer) weather in San Antonio, Texas. There, he became manager and head director of the new San Antonio Picture Company.

His next film played off his new situation. “Honeymoon Ranch” told the story of a New Yorker on his first trip out West who falls in love with a beautiful woman he sees as he steps off the train. An hour later, he finds himself forced at gunpoint to marry the very same woman and then is forced to fight the girl’s family and friends to keep her, according to the IMDB.

“On the High Side” (1921), “West of the Rio Grande” (1921), “Welcome to Our City” (1922), “Partners of the Sunset” (1922) and “Squire Phin” (1922) followed. Townley began listing himself as Robert in 1921, leading to some confusion about his credits.

He was also credited as writer for “West of the Rio Grande,” Honeymoon Ranch,” “Marriage a la Mode” (1918) and “The Candidates”; as cinematographer for “Mission of the War Chest” (1918) and “The Romance of Elaine” (1915); and as assistant director for “Beatrice Fairfax” (1916).

Most of these films are now lost. Many were destroyed when hundreds of nitrate-based film reels spontaneously combusted in Leopold and Theodore Wharton’s lawyer’s storage shed in 1929.

“The Partners of the Sunset” survives on the Turner Classic Movie website — a tale of oil wealth won and lost, kidnapping and rescue and tables turned.

“Two impoverished sisters — one in love with nature, the other enamored of high society — inherit a ranch in Texas and decide to claim it. When a greedy local landowner tries to force them out, the rugged Patricia joins forces with a windmill engineer to face down the baddies and defend her new home,” wrote old film expert “The Nitrate Diva” in 2014.

“Oh, 2014, you think you’re so cutting-edge,” they wrote. “When a woman proposes to a man in the movies nowadays, critics and fans alike lavish praise on the clever gender inversion. Well, then, how are we to respond to a movie that did the same thing almost 100 years ago?”

Townley would have been 35 years old when he made “The Partners of the Sunset.” IMDB lists his date of death as May 1969. There is little or no information about the 47 other years of his life.