This feature was published in conjunction with Chicago at ADoS 2025
NEW FAMILY VALUES
The silent era was a time of the New Woman, suffragettes, flappers, and vampires. Alice Guy-Blaché envisions a world of sexually aggressive ladies-about-town openly harassing timid house-husbands in the satirical comedy The Consequences of Feminism (1906), but movies also tackled the new family values in a more serious manner.
In Miss Lulu Bett (1921), Lois Wilson portrays a double whammy of Victorian social holdovers: she is both a spinster and a poor relation. She jumps at an old-school solution: marry the first man to come along. When he confesses that he might have another wife somewhere, she must leave him and is worse off than before until she embraces modernity, gets a job, tells off her horrible family, and sets out in pursuit of life, liberty, and Milton Sills.
Silent films about divorce sometimes treat reconciliation as the ultimate desirable outcome. Louis Feuillade’s Custody of the Child (1909) opens with a father winning guardianship of his son but after the little boy runs back to his mother, the family reunites. Are Parents People? (1925) follows a similar chain of events with a teenage Betty Bronson horrified by her parents’ childish divorce antics, but they come together when the stroppy teen goes missing.
A romantic reunion wasn’t always the Hollywood ending, however. In Dancing Mothers (1926), Alice Joyce cannot take the ongoing selfishness and manipulation of her husband and teenage daughter, Clara Bow. After time away, she returns to find that neither have changed. “You’ve given me my freedom. My duty now is to myself.” No amount of Parent Trap escapades can bring her back. Children of Divorce (1927) sees a far darker vision for broken marriages, with death in the cards.
FAME AND MISFORTUNE
Movies captured the turn of the 20th century with actualities and street scenes that featured bystanders staring into the camera and thus becoming part of the story. Charlie Chaplin introduces his Tramp in The Kid Auto Races at Venice Beach (1914) by aggressively trying to hijack—and make himself the star of—an actuality film being shot by an increasingly infuriated camera crew. An obsession with stardom backfires in A Kiss from Mary Pickford (1927), when the star’s lipstick stain makes Igor Ilyinsky the object of fixation, forcing him and his girlfriend to fight off his fans as they invade his flat until he publicly scrubs off the kiss.
In the new media saturated world, celebrity, or at least infamy, was easier to achieve than ever. Phyllis Haver’s Roxie Hart fills Eugene Pallette full of lead then basks in full-page newspaper coverage of her crime and its sensational trial in 1927’s sassy movie version of Chicago. A tabloid-glamorized murderess is made sympathetic in director Dorothy Davenport’s tragedy The Red Kimona (1925), with Priscilla Bonner treated as a novelty by the smart set before being discarded for the news cycle’s next darling.
Unseen Forces (1920) portrays a genuine clairvoyant who becomes a New York celebrity, her fame leading to an attempted debunking, which culminates in her summoning the dead child of her chief accuser. Celebrity quackery is a theme in the lost 1919 film The Miracle Man, in which a gang of crooks that includes Lon Chaney presumes that a faith healer is crooked, too, and hopes to use his celebrity for profit—but the tables turn when he proves to have real powers. The 1927 Mexican film Iron Fist offers a more pessimistic portrayal of celebrity do-gooders and features a charismatic antidrug crusader who happens to be the secret leader of a narcotics syndicate.
THE SPEED OF LIFE
Flying machines of all kinds, from real airships to space vehicles, always filled the cinematic skies but heavier-than-air flight is science fiction in the earliest movies. In 1903, fantasy becomes reality, courtesy of the Wright Brothers, and the movies quickly follow them up, up, and away. Barney Oldfield’s automobile vies with a train to save Mabel Normand in Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life (1913), but Normand had already taken the rescuing into her own hands in A Dash Through the Clouds (1912) with aerial pioneer Phil Parmelee, accompanying the pilot for a series of flights and buzzing the villains into submission.
Even with the newfangled competition, trains share in this rage for action and speed in the silent era. There are epic crashes, such as an entire full-size passenger train derailing into a river and sinking in The Juggernaut (1915). Anthony Asquith modernizes rail travel in Underground (1928) with a bold, unchained camera, rapid editing, and a dose of violent sexual jealousy. In The Arizona Express (1924) villains pursue the heroine alternately by train, horse, and automobile, complete with crashes and cliffhangers.
Automobiles predated the movies by only a few years and they roar energetically across the silent screen. Cross-country comedies like Rubber Tires (1927) and California Straight Ahead (1925) showcase the era’s new velocity, with road trips a chance for humor and romance, no conductor or porter needed. Racing pictures like The Lucky Devil (1925) and Fast and Furious (1927) deliver laughs and thrills, while the changes wrought by the shift from horse to car are mused over between contests in The First Auto (1927).