September 28 & 29 | 18 Movies
"We didn't need dialogue. We had faces." – Norma Desmond, Sunset Blvd. (1950)
To the casual viewers, silent movies may seem old fashioned or corny at first glance. And yes, some are, but this reputation developed in part because of neglect. For decades, schools and museums and early home video showed scratchy, poorly preserved prints at wrong projection speeds that made everything look sped up and absurd.
Nothing could be farther from the experiences of moviegoers. In the 1920s, at the peak of Hollywood's Golden Age of filmmaking, movie theaters were dream palaces that showcased the high level of craft at the studios and the richly visual approach to storytelling. At the height of the silent movie era, the cinema delivered glamor, spectacle and comedy with high style.
Thanks to the efforts of film archivists and preservationists and new digital tools available to film restoration, contemporary audiences are getting a chance to experience the glamor and splendor that original audiences saw when they went out to the movies in the 1920s. And as the old adage goes, silent films were never silent. Music accompanied the movies, whether it was a full orchestra playing a score composed for its debut or a solo piano improvising along. The past few decades has seen a renewed interest in silent movie music, from the revival of vintage compositions to brand new scores by contemporary composers paying tribute to the art, and this music helps bring the images alive.
There is a universe of films, genres, moods, sensibilities and styles to be discovered in the thirty-plus years of cinema before the introduction of sound changed the way films were made and experienced, and the 24 hours of programming selected to celebrate National Silent Movie Day embraces a whole world of moviemaking. The line-up encompasses features and short films, comedy and drama, documentary and fiction, live action and animation. There are films from America and Europe, lavish studio productions and scrappy independent films, revered masterpieces of world cinema and newly rediscovered and restored films.
The program opens with a romantic swashbuckler headlined by one of the most celebrated actors of the 1920s. John Barrymore stars as hard-drinking poet, pickpocket and "Vagabond King" François Villon in The Beloved Rogue (1927), a costume spectacle that sends the famed Shakespearean stage dramatist leaping across the roofs of 15th century Paris (recreated on magnificent sets by William Cameron Menzies) and wooing the lovely ward of the King between flagons of wine. This lavish production is the kind of film that made Hollywood's reputation around the world and would be lost, at least for a few years, when sound recording changed the way movies were made.
In her day, Marion Davies was one of the top box-office stars in Hollywood, but her legacy was often overshadowed by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who plucked her from the chorus of the Ziegfeld Follies and made her a big screen leading lady. In fact she was a fine actress with a bright screen presence and a talent for screen comedy, as she shows in Beverly of Graustark (1926), a costume picture that has Davies playing a maiden who impersonates a prince. The film, which features a finale shot in two-strip Technicolor (a sequence that was restored in 2019), was produced for MGM, which became Hollywood's most glamorous studio under the direction of Irving Thalberg, the studio's young head of production. You can learn more about both MGM and its "boy wonder" in the documentary Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood (2005).
According to a study by the Library of Congress from 2013, 75% of the films made before the sound era are presumed lost. That statistic is slowly being chipped away. Along with strides made in preservation and restoration over the decades, films long thought lost are discovered every year, thanks in part to increased communication and collaboration between film archives around the world. Two recent rediscoveries are showcased in this tribute. Ramona (1928), a romantic tragedy that dramatizes the prejudice against and hardships of Native Americans in early Twentieth Century America, stars Mexican-born Dolores Del Rio in the title role. The film was presumed lost for decades until export print was discovered in Europe. After more than eighty years, the film was screened for audiences in 2014 in a restoration created through the collaboration between the Czechoslovak National Film Archive and the Library of Congress.
More recently, The First Degree (1923), a dramatic, dynamic murder mystery from Edward Sedgwick, was considered a lost film when an unmarked print was found in a basement in Peoria, Illinois and donated to Chicago Film Archives. When the archivists identified the print as a lost film, the elements were preserved and film restored and shown at the Chicago Film Archives nearly 100 years after it first screened for American audiences. It makes its broadcast debut on TCM.
Olive Thomas, another former Ziegfeld Follies beauty, was known as "the baby vamp" for her roles as a seductive young thing and for playing Hollywood's first big-screen flapper. Out Yonder (1919) presents Thomas in a different kind of role, playing a lighthouse keeper's daughter who saves the life of a vacationing society matron and falls in love with her son. Thomas was on a path to movie superstardom before her death at the age of 25 from an accidental poisoning. This feature was preserved by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and digitally restored by a silent film enthusiast who raised funds through Kickstarter. It makes its broadcast debut in this series.
If Hollywood was the home of glamor and spectacle and the highest levels of craftsmanship in the 1920s, Europe became known for expressionist adventurism and artistic ambition. A mix of folk tale, tragedy and redemptive melodrama, The Phantom Carriage (1921) is one of the masterpieces of Swedish cinema. Filmmaker Victor Sjöström sculpts haunting images in light and shadow and directs his actors to intimated and nuanced performances. Those qualities impressed the heads of the American film studios, who had a habit of luring talented filmmakers and actors to Hollywood, Sjöström among them. He embraces the possibilities inherent in silent cinema in He Who Gets Slapped (1924), a circus melodrama starring Lon Chaney as a clown who channels his greatest trauma into an absurdist, nightmarish comedy of horrors played out in the center ring to the delight of roaring crowds. Norma Shearer and John Gilbert costar in the film's romantic subplot but they can't compete with Chaney's gift for psychological expressionism or with Sjöström's imagery and visual imagination.
Hollywood was, like most of America, a highly segregated industry and its films rarely featured people of color. But films produced for black audiences, featuring African-American performers and stories and often directed by black directors, were made outside of the Hollywood studios on limited budgets. Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926), the first screen adaptation of the popular temperance novel and play featuring a black cast, stars Charles Gilpin as a husband and father whose life is ruined by drink. Gilpin created the role of Brutus Jones in the original stage production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" and was considered by many as the preeminent African-American actor of the 1920s, yet this is the only feature to showcase his work.
Robert Flaherty has been proclaimed the godfather of documentary filmmaking and Nanook of the North (1922) the first great nonfiction film, even if it is not a true documentary by contemporary standards. Flaherty had every intention of documenting traditional life among the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle but the culture he wanted to show no longer existed. So he undertook the mission of recreating the lost Eskimo culture in scenes staged on location in collaboration with Nanook and his friends and family and filmed with a mix of formal beauty and documentary immediacy. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1989, the first year of the ongoing project, and it screens in honor of its centenary.
Also celebrating its 100th birthday is a very different type of nonfiction filmmaking. Swedish director Benjamin Christensen mixes documentary, horror and fantasy in the visually inventive and thoughtful Haxan (1922), an exploration of mysticism and witchcraft through the ages. One of the most beautiful and visually sophisticated films of its era, it is both playful in its fantasy recreations and harrowing in its exploration of the persecution, sadism and cycle of death created by the hysteria of the age and the hypocrisy of witchfinders who wield their power as a form of oppression and control. Christensen himself plays the Devil with a lascivious, tongue-wagging glee.
Long before Alfred Hitchcock became "the master of suspense," celebrated for such classics as Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960) he learned his craft as a title writer, art director and finally director in the silent film industry of England. Though it's not his first feature, Hitchcock preferred to think of The Lodger (1927), a masterful thriller inspired by the legacy of Jack the Ripper, as the first "Alfred Hitchcock movie." It is here that he first engages with themes he would further explore in his later masterpieces, and applies lessons he learned from German Expressionist cinema to create a heightened reality. Hitch plunges us into the atmosphere of terror in the opening shots, carries us through a studio-created London of eerily lonely streets engulfed in a perpetual nocturnal mist, and builds suspicion around the titular lodger (played by British cabaret superstar Ivor Novello), a mysterious, brooding figure who emerges from the London fog and takes a room in a middle-class home while a serial killer preys upon the neighborhood.
The first exposure for many silent film fans came from the comedy greats, in particular Charlie Chaplin, whose films were beloved around the globe. His short comedies were the most popular films of their time and the Little Tramp was known and loved around the world. Pay Day (1922), featuring Chaplin as a construction laborer who escapes his wife for a night of drinking, is the final two-reel short he made before devoting himself exclusively to features, and it showcases his innovative use of reverse motion photography as well as the distinctive physical slapstick and perfectly-timed visual gags that made him a superstar.
Consider it the short subject before the feature comedy: Grandma’s Boy (1922) featuring Harold Lloyd, the man silent film historian Kevin Brownlow called "the third genius" of American silent comedy. Lloyd specialized in playing both the urban wise guy and the all-American boy but he is much more vulnerable in the sweet, gentle comedy Grandma’s Boy, which he proclaimed decades later was his personal favorite. Completing the program are two shorts featuring Hal Roach's Rascals, the first incarnation of the kids comedy troupe later known as The Little Rascals or Our Gang: The Big Show (1923) and Dogs of War (1923). This series of innocent comedies has the distinction of boasting the rare racially integrated cast in American movies.
Finally, animation is represented with the documentary Before Mickey Mouse: A History of American Animation (1982), which features generous clips from the earliest animated films ever screened for audiences, and the anthology presentations Century of Animation Showcase: 1922 (2022), a snapshot of the state of animated filmmaking 100 years ago.
It's a magnificent introduction to a world of bygone cinema.
