This historical reprint was published in conjunction with the screening of Forgotten Faces at A Day of Silents 2023 Except where cuts are used to increase tempo, there should be as few of them in a picture as possible. That is something so obvious that it always should have been part of the … [Read more...] about Schertzinger Trots Out a Few New Ideas in Shots
Forgotten Faces
Whatever became of the gentleman thief? The silk-hatted crook, who brought such debonair gallantry to his work that it would be a pleasure to be relieved of your jewelry by him, was once common on the silver screen—Raymond Griffith in Paths to Paradise(1925), HerbertMarshall in Trouble in Paradise … [Read more...] about Forgotten Faces
Height-Defying Thrills
This feature was published in conjunction with the centennial celebration of Safety Last! at A Day of Silents 2023 During the early 20th century, as fresh skyscrapers carved vertical skylines into America’s cities and more and more airplanes were flying overhead, there was a palpable sense of … [Read more...] about Height-Defying Thrills
Safety Last!
Harold Lloyd will forever be associated with Safety Last! because of a single image. Even people who have never seen a Lloyd film are familiar with the iconography of a bespectacled man hanging off the hands of a collapsing clock on the side of a skyscraper high above teeming city streets. It is one … [Read more...] about Safety Last!
Pavement Butterfly
Born into the steam and starch of her father’s Chinese laundry in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong gained a toehold in Hollywood after her debut as an uncredited extra in the 1919 silent film, The Red Lantern, starring Alla Nazimova. Wong’s striking beauty and talent immediately drew the attentionof the … [Read more...] about Pavement Butterfly
Valentino’s Last Words
This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Eagle at A Day of Silents 2023. A bodice-breaching lover from a torrid romance novel come to life, Valentino tangoed his way to matinee idol status in that Buenos Aires dive in 1921’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. When … [Read more...] about Valentino’s Last Words
The Eagle
In Silent Stars, Jeanine Basinger notes that for modern audiences Rudolph Valentino has “become an image frozen in time, a still photograph emblematic of the world of the 1920s, that crazy outmoded world of sheiks and flappers.” This static—even fossilized—image robs us of the very elements that … [Read more...] about The Eagle
The Wildcat
A few years ago Bob Dylan released an album entitledRough and Rowdy Ways, a title that reminded me of Ernst Lubitsch. (Apologies—it’s the way my mind works.) To be specific, it reminded me of Ernst Lubitsch’s German comedies. Case in point: Die Bergkatze (The Wildcat). The Wildcat isbasically a … [Read more...] about The Wildcat