September 29th | 9 Movies
To commemorate National Silent Movie Day (yes, it’s a real thing), TCM casts its klieg lights on an era when, to quote Norma Desmond, “this business had the eyes of the whole world.”
The silent movie era is one of the richest in film history. It was a time of invention and innovation, a “make-it-up-as-we-go” camaraderie. Director King Vidor, in an appearance at the American Film Institute’s series of conversations with Hollywood professionals (the Harold Lloyd Master Seminars), shared, “The important thing to realize is that we were all trying out things, figuring out how cameras worked, how to create effects. It was just more informal then, no hierarchy. Easy to get permissions and to go ahead with ideas, I could tell the head guy an idea, and he could say, ‘Yes, go ahead’… He didn’t say, ‘What stars are you going to have?’ I didn’t have stars. I had unknowns. He just said, ‘It sounds good, why don’t you just go ahead with it?’ That’s the way the best pictures were made. Just by saying, ‘Okay, go ahead.’”
Every film artist who came after owes the industry’s pioneers a tremendous debt. Not for nothing did Martin Scorsese end Goodfellas (1990) with Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito firing a gun at the camera, an homage to the iconic final shot of Justus D. Barnes firing his pistol directly at the audience at the end of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903).
For the first audiences, the experience of seeing projected moving images was, like love, exciting and new. Auguste and Louis Lumière’s aptly-titled Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) reportedly thrilled moviegoers as much as Tom Cruise riding his motorcycle off a cliff in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023).
To paraphrase Kevin Brownlow in his essential book, The Parade’s Gone By, the silent era is far too rich and complex to be covered in just 24 hours, but TCM’s silents-palooza is a celebration of—Brownlow again—the artists who “in less than ten years, had developed a craft and perfected an art,” as well as nurtured America’s movie-going habit. Between 1915-20, the movies grew to be a multi-million-dollar business. By the mid-1920s, 50 million people a week went to the movies.
Silent movies, of course, were not completely silent. They featured musical accompaniment. But as Gloria Swanson’s tragically deluded Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) noted, “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” And they spoke volumes.
One of the most famous faces of that (or any) era was Charlie Chaplin, a proto-auteur, who, following a formative stint with slapstick maestro Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios, wrote, produced, directed, scored and starred in his own shorts and feature films. Such was his stardom that theater owners did not have to display the title of his latest attraction on a marquee; just an image of Chaplin’s signature indomitable Tramp character was enough to lure audiences into the theater.
He is represented here with two of his lesser-known films, The Pilgrim (1923), a short, and A Woman of Paris (1923), a feature that he directed but did not star in. “You can learn a lot from watching Chaplin,” Alfred Hitchcock once said of The Pilgrim. “The opening shot was the outside of a prison gate. A guard comes out and pastes up a WANTED notice with a picture of Chaplin in prison stripes. Next, cut to a very tall, thin man, coming out of a river, having had a swim, and he finds that his clothes are missing and all he can pick up is a convict’s uniform. Next, cut to a railroad station, and walking toward the camera is Charlie Chaplin dressed as a parson and his pants are too long. Three pieces of film, and look at the amount of story they told.”
Like Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) decades later, A Woman of Paris was a dramatic departure for Chaplin. It is a vehicle for Edna Purviance, his most frequent leading lady (they appeared together in more than 30 films), who stars as a country girl for whom fate brings to Paris where she becomes a fabulously kept woman. Chaplin himself only cameos as a station porter. The film was a commercial failure and kept out of circulation for more than five decades until the mid-70s. “Since then, the film has had the reputation of a lost masterpiece, and it more than lives up to its renown,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1978.
A Woman in Paris figures briefly in Rupert Hughes’ Souls for Sale (1923), in which a runaway bride (Eleanor Boardman) stumbles onto a movie set and becomes determined to make it in the movies. Chaplin cameos as himself, directing the aspiring actress supposedly for a scene in Paris. Also appearing are directors Erich von Stroheim and King Vidor as themselves, along with Richard Dix, Zasu Pitts and Mae Busch, best known for her films with Laurel and Hardy.
Souls for Sale is more buried treasure than lost masterpiece. Roger Ebert discovered it in 2009 and gave it his coveted Great Movies designation (giving Turner Classic Movies a shout out for its role in restoring the long-missing film and making it accessible to viewers). “This is a prime example of the mid-range entertainment Hollywood was producing so skillfully at the time,” he wrote. “Filled with actors who were then stars, fast-moving, entertaining, with a spectacular circus action sequence at the climax, it is drama, melodrama, romance and satire all at once -- wrapped up in a behind-the-scenes look at how a desperate young woman fell into the movie business by accident and became a star.”
There is nothing “mid-level” about Rex Ingram’s Scaramouche (1923), an epic swashbuckler with the proverbial cast of thousands and fabulous faces of which Norma Desmond so rhapsodized. Ramon Novarro stars as André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer-turned-avenger following the murder of his best friend at the hands of Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr (Lewis Stone), who “uses his rank and power to inflict unspeakable horror on those beneath him.”
1939 has generally been cited as Hollywood’s greatest year, but 1923 deserves consideration. Along with Scaramouche (have you resisted the urge to sing “can you do the fandango?”), audiences also thrilled to The Covered Wagon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the above-mentioned Chaplins and two classic comedies starring Harold Lloyd, Safety Last! and Why Worry?, both included in TCM’s silent movie commemoration.
Lloyd, along with Chaplin, Keaton and Harry Langdon, comprised silent comedy’s Mount Rushmore. His comic persona was uniquely American, an energetic optimistic go-getter. Safety Last! contains one of the most indelible sequences in film history, sound or silent: his character’s ascent up a skyscraper. Here’s James Agee on the sequence in his rapturous ode to silent comedy, “Comedy’s Greatest Era”:
“He is forced to substitute for a human fly and to climb a medium-sized skyscraper… Each new floor is like a new’ stanza in a poem; and the higher and more horrifying it gets, the funnier it gets.
Lloyd demonstrates beautifully his ability to do more than merely milk a gag, but to top it. Lloyd is driven out to the dirty end of a flagpole by a furious dog; the pole breaks and he falls, just managing to grab the minute hand of a huge clock. His weight promptly pulls the hand down from IX to VI. That would be more than enough for any ordinary comedian, but there is further logic in the situation. Now, hideously, the whole clockface pulls loose and slants from its trembling springs above the street.”
TCM’s commemoration of National Silent Movie Day also features an artist who is perhaps less known outside the TCM community, Oscar Micheaux. If John Cassavetes is the father of American independent films, Micheaux is the grandfather. Micheaux, an African-American, became a director because he wanted creative control over a screen adaptation of one of his novels, The Homesteader. He would go on to write, produce and direct make more than 40 films between 1919 and 1948. They were created for Black audiences to play in Black theaters.
Micheaux worked primarily in Chicago, and what his films lacked in Hollywood stars (he promoted actor Lorenzo Tucker as “the Black Valentino”), technical proficiency and budgets (he worked on the very definition of a shoestring), they made up for in race-based stories, themes and characters Hollywood ignored. In The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), for example, the Ku Klux Klan are portrayed as villains, five years after D.W. Griffith glorified the racist organization in The Birth of a Nation. TCM’s Jacqueline Stewart calls Micheaux “the most important black filmmaker who ever lived” in Francesco Zippel’s documentary Oscar Micheaux—The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (2021), a revelatory primer for a man whose gravestone reads, “A Man Ahead of His Time.”
But then came The Jazz Singer (1927). Al Jolson singing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” sounded the death knell of the silent era. Some continued to go quietly into that good night. Charlie Chaplin released his silent masterpieces City Lights and Modern Times in 1931 and 1936, respectively. TCM closes out its programming day of silent movies with Yasujirô Ozu’s I was Born, But… which was released in 1932.
Today, according to the Library of Congress: “There are 14 percent surviving as the complete domestic-release version in 35mm. Another 11 percent are complete, but not the original —they are either a foreign-release version in 35mm or in a 28 or 16mm small-gauge print with less than 35mm image quality. Another 5 percent are incomplete. The remaining 70 percent are believed to be completely lost.”
Reflecting on the dawn of the sound era, King Vidor said, “Most of my friends were just horrified with the idea of being able to use words, not musical accompaniment, not sound effects, but words. It was just a terrible idea…We had developed a sort of language of pantomime and gestures and so forth. When sound hit, everything went static. It meant the end of movement, of pantomime, of ballet.”
Mary Pickford is quoted as saying it would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.
But perhaps Charlie Chaplin put it most elegiacally, when he said, “Just when we were getting it right, it was over.”
