Category Archives: silence = golden

Son of a steamboat captain = granddaddy of big laughs.

Posted on by under announcements, contributed post, hahas, silence = golden

My fourth contribution to the ongoing Comedy Countdown at Wonders in the Dark is now posted: at number 37, it’s Buster Keaton’s silent comedy masterpiece Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)!

Check out my thoughts on this truly hilarious film over at WitD today, and please feel free to contribute your views on the movie in the comments!

The countdown is still going strong as we move through the top forty films. Did your favorite comedies make the list? Keep checking Wonders in the Dark every week to find out!

A smile and a tear: The Kid (1921)

Posted on by under blogathon, silence = golden

A young, unmarried woman (Edna Purviance) gives birth in a charity hospital. Distraught and abandoned by the baby’s father, she leaves the child in the back of an expensive automobile along with a note imploring the owner of the car to care for the new orphan. Later, she reconsiders her rash action and returns to collect her son, only to discover that the car is gone–it has been stolen by two inept thieves.

After discovering the child in the back of the car, the thieves leave it sitting in an alley in a poor section of town. The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) stumbles upon the child and, after various attempts to pawn the crying baby off on other people, finds the woman’s note and decides to raise the boy as his own.

Five years later, little John (Jackie Coogan) and his adoptive father live happily in their tiny apartment. The woman has, by this time, become a famous, rich opera star, and travels to the poor neighborhood to donate toys to the children. On one such trip the woman unknowingly encounters her own son. She soon discovers that the boy is sick and implores The Tramp to call a doctor, which he does. But when the doctor finds out that The Tramp is not the boy’s biological father, he calls the orphanage to come and retrieve the child, setting off a chain of events that threatens to disband the tiny, self-made family.

The Kid marks the first time Chaplin stepped behind the camera to direct himself in a feature-length film. But the prolific performer did not limit himself to merely directing and acting in the film; he also wrote the screenplay, produced it, and edited it (and even then he wasn’t quite done, for when The Kid was re-released for its fiftieth anniversary in 1971, Chaplin composed a brand-new musical score to accompany it). Chaplin had a hand in virtually every aspect of this film’s production, from scouting out the filming locations in Los Angeles to casting the other roles.

It is in The Kid that Chaplin finally brings all of the elements of his Little Tramp persona together into full, breathing life. Here, we see the fullest portrait yet of the character, complete with the co-mingled heart and pathos that define Chaplin’s most legendary role. His Tramp is both a clown and a tragic figure, filled with simple dignity and subject to the whims of a fast-paced world. Yet he is savvy enough to scheme and manipulate circumstances to make a (dubious) living for himself and the foundling, with whom he bonds almost immediately. This easy, close relationship with the kid is not surprising, considering The Tramp is, in a sense, much the child himself. He demonstrates a sometimes childlike wonder about the world, and is genuinely (and frequently) perplexed by the situations in which he inadvertently finds himself, like the street brawl with a musclebound Irish combatant. The character’s innate combination of worldliness and innocence is a big part of the reason why The Tramp has remained an iconic figure well past the heyday of the silent film era.

The movie’s storyline was born out of two traumatic, real-life events that, whether intentionally on his part or not, permeate Chaplin’s performance in the film. When Chaplin was seven years old, he was sent to a workhouse; his mother suffered from mental illness and could not support the family, and would eventually be committed to an asylum due to burgeoning psychosis. Being torn from his mother at such a young age wounded young Chaplin deeply. More than two decades later, in 1919, Chaplin’s teenage wife, Mildred Harris, gave birth to a disfigured child, who sadly died three days later. Considering these experiences, it’s little wonder that The Kid stands as Chaplin’s most personal film. Looking at the movie through the lens of Chaplin’s real life, scenes such as the one in which The Tramp is reunited with John after the social workers try to take him away are made even more poignant.

The idea for The Kid emerged in the midst of Chaplin’s grief for his deceased son, as he began to wonder: what would happen if The Tramp were to be forced into a paternal role, caring for an orphaned child? Chaplin found his muse for the story (originally titled The Waif) in young vaudevillian Jackie Coogan, a precocious performer who had been pushed on stage by his father, also an actor, practically from infancy. Coogan demonstrated a talent for mimicry and a marked naturalness in front of the camera, and Chaplin immediately formed a bond with the child. When he was forced to shut down production of The Kid for a while to make an impromptu short subject, A Day’s Pleasure (1919), to appease his distributors, Chaplin cast Coogan as his son in that film, too. The Kid reveals the depths of the child’s talent; Coogan’s John is a heart-breaker, a wide-eyed, mischievous, and utterly adorable moppet who manages to be more endearing than annoying (something his child-actor successors like Shirley Temple were not always as adept at doing).

For the role of The Woman, Chaplin turned to frequent costar Purviance. Purviance had starred in more than two dozen short films with Chaplin since her debut opposite him in 1915′s A Night Out. The Kid marked her first appearance in a feature-length film, and she would appear opposite Chaplin in one more film, 1923′s A Woman of Paris, before retiring from the screen in 1927. Purviance was a wise choice for the role; The Woman (having abandoned her child at the start of the film) runs the risk of being an unlikable figure, but Purviance’s emotion shines through in a very appealing way that invites the audience’s sympathy for her plight.

The Kid is nothing short of a delight to watch. It is filled with priceless scenes: The Tramp rigging baby gear out of the things around his apartment, including a watering can that doubles as a bottle; The Tramp unknowingly flirting with the wife of his beat-cop nemesis; the kid making pancakes with the confidence of a cook at a greasy spoon; the multiple chase scenes involving police, angry Irishmen, and The Tramp’s frantic, emotional hunt to reclaim “his” boy. The one odd step in the film is the strange “Dreamland” sequence that is tacked on to the last ten minutes of the film, which is a somewhat awkward diversion from an otherwise solidly-grounded story. To a lesser extent, this move away from reality also presents an issue with the film’s conclusion; while there is a gritty realism to the scenes of The Tramp’s poverty-stricken neighborhood, the ending belies the authentically challenging world set up by the first half of the movie for the sake of an obligatory happy ending. Still, on the whole, this is a minor quibble; that ending is, for all its unrealistic expectations, nonetheless a welcome one. Seeing The Tramp find his happiness is a joyful thing, indeed, for who can begrudge our hero?

Ultimately, The Kid succeeds because of its beautiful, highly effective melding of slapstick and melodrama. As the opening title card claims, this one is “a picture with a smile and–perhaps, a tear,” and true, the act of watching the film is a kind of metaphorical tightrope walk between gales of laughter and crying jags. Despite this, remarkably, the movie never delves into the overtly maudlin, and it is ultimately the sweet sentimentality at the heart of The Kid that makes this one of Chaplin’s greatest screen efforts.

 

This post is part of a “stealth blogathon” (so to speak) being hosted today by another “kid,” The Kid in the Front Row. You can find more information and read his thoughts on this film at his site.

Bringing The Scarlet Letter to (silent) life.

Posted on by under lit adaptations, silence = golden

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter has apparently long stymied filmmakers, because there has yet to be a cinematic version that fully adapts the material without changing the tone or intent of the author’s original novel.

Not to be overly sarcastic about it or anything.

It’s a damn shame, too, because Letter is truly a masterwork of American literature. The story of Hester Prynne, whose clandestine affair with retiring and troubled minister Arthur Dimmesdale leads to her giving birth to a daughter, Pearl, out of wedlock (and thus being forced to bear the titular “A” on her chest as a symbol of her sin), has been studied, analyzing, critiqued, and otherwise extensively examined in the 160+ years since its initial publication. It’s a book that I first encountered in high school, one that I liked but never fully appreciated until graduate school (in fact–humblebrag alert!–my very first conference presentation was drawn from a paper I had written about Letter). Hawthorne’s novel is nothing less than a literary marvel–an intricate patchwork of transcendentalist-type musings on human nature, questions about the true nature of morality, and the psychological repercussions of religious persecution. This has (rather unfairly) gained the novel a reputation as being something of a dense and depressing wasteland of a book (when that description is really more appropriate for something like the GAWD-awful soul-sucking mess that is Robinson Crusoe).

Nonetheless, this is heady stuff, to be sure, and, admittedly, incredibly difficult to translate to the screen. Though the subject matter itself is enthralling–Sex! Adultery! False identities! Strange, bastard children!–it somehow remains tempting for filmmakers to alter the book’s storyline to suit their own desires. Changing important elements of the plot, however–whether to escape the wrath of censors or to give audiences a somewhat jarring “happy ending”–ultimately devalues the complexity of Hawthorne’s carefully-crafted narrative. The Scarlet Letter does not aim to titillate (despite what those behind the 1995 “let’s find an excuse to show Demi Moore’s tits” version might have thought), but rather to elucidate the dangers of blind adherence to the strictures of Puritan society (granted, this in itself is just the nutshell version of Hawthorne’s ultimate point, but I’ll spare you my full treatise on the novel).

In the early days of Hollywood, literary adaptations were something of a no-brainer: taking a popular piece of American culture and acting it out for the screen was an easy way to entice people into theaters, to give them something with which they were (at least somewhat) familiar. Within the nearly two-decade period between 1908 and 1926, seven silent screen versions of The Scarlet Letter were reportedly produced, many of which no longer seem to exist. But through the combined efforts of Swedish director Victor Seastrom and leading lady Lillian Gish, the final silent adaptation, released in theaters in 1926, comes closer than any existing version in capturing the spirit of Hawthorne’s novel.

In 1922, the Hollywood “powers that be” established the MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America), a self-imposed watchdog group intended to alleviate concerns that the film industry was a disreputable hotbed of sin and immorality. The head of MPPDA, former United States Postmaster General Will Hays, would eventually give his name to the Production Code, the set of rules, regulations, and strictly-enforced moral guidelines that would dictate film content for more than three decades. In the years leading up to the Code’s formalization, Hays promoted an outline of what he called the “Don’ts” and the “Be Carefuls” for film content. This included a list of books that were deemed “inappropriate” for film adaptation–and The Scarlet Letter was near the top of that banned-book list. But Gish had her heart set on playing Hester, and eventually persuaded Hayes–and the religious organizations whose beck-and-call he was subject to–that the film would adhere to Hayes’ moral strictures.

The resulting movie is lyrical and resonant; though it is undeniably more the love story of Hester and Dimmesdale as opposed to a stinging critique of Puritan morality, it remains more faithful to Hawthorne’s intent than any other existing film version of the novel, at least in my estimation. Part of the reason for this may be due to the efforts of screenwriter Frances Marion, who neatly manages to avoid overt melodramatic flourishes in favor of genuine human emotion. But much of the credit belongs to Gish, for the movie truly belongs to her and her alone.

Not for nothing was Gish considered the “First Lady” of American film; the camera positively adores the woman, focusing on her almost lovingly in certain scenes, highlighting her gorgeous features and the emotional tide bubbling beneath her appropriately-puritanical facade. Gish makes for a luminous Hester–she’s perhaps a little too innocent and girlish at times for such a knowing character, but there is a beautiful and compelling forthrightness about her portrayal that is quite effective. To put it bluntly, Gish’s Hester is a take-no-bullshit type of woman–ferocious in defending her child, and more concerned with Dimmesdale’s fate than her own, for she instinctively knows that she has the stronger backbone of the two.

Playing opposite Gish is Lars Hanson, a Swedish actor perhaps best known as one of fellow Swede Greta Garbo’s paramours in the deliciously naughty 1927 silent film Flesh and the Devil. The wide-eyed Hanson is a good choice for weak-willed Dimmesdale; though there are moments in which he nearly delves into hand-wringing caricature, it’s still somehow strangely befitting. And when the character does have moments in which his concern for Hester (and his “devil child”) outweigh his infirmity, Hanson’s Dimmesdale is fully capable of growing a pair (so to speak), throwing one hell of a dirty look at some of his more judgmental peers. Interestingly, Hanson spoke no English (still, he could obviously take direction from countryman Seastrom well enough), and thus performed his scenes in Swedish while Gish responded in English, making for what was likely a very unusual shoot.

The Scarlet Letter was not wholly successful upon its initial release, though it is recognized now as a silent film classic, marked by one of the best performances of Gish’s career. It’s worth noting that The Scarlet Letter was one of the last films Gish made in the silent era, and one of the last she made as a full-fledged leading lady. After her final silent, 1928′s The Wind (also directed by Seastrom), failed critically and commercially at the box office, Gish took a break from movie-making. She made her “talkie” debut in 1930′s One Romantic Night, and starred opposite Roland Young in 1933′s His Double Life. Most of her performances in the 1930s were on the stage; Gish did not make another film for nearly a decade, only returning to the screen in the early 1940s. Her later career was marked by notable character roles in a number of films, among them Duel in the Sun (1946)–for which she received an Academy Award nomination–Portrait of Jennie (1948), and Night of the Hunter (1955). Though she never won a competitive Oscar, Gish received an honorary Academy Award in 1971. But Gish was not content to rest on her laurels–she continued acting well into her 90s, both on television and in film, and made her final onscreen appearance at the age of 93, in the 1987 film The Whales of August (opposite fellow Hollywood icon Bette Davis). By the time Gish passed away in 1993–eight months shy of her one hundredth birthday–her career had extended into its eighth remarkable decade, with nary a sign of any decline in the great actress’ talents.

 

Note: This post is an entry in the ongoing 2012 TCM SUTS blogathon hosted by Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence and ScribeHard on Film. I was originally going to write about the 1919 film Broken Blossoms, which is airing on TCM at 6AM EST tomorrow morning and is, far and away, my favorite Gish film. However, the Mythical Monkey has posted an utterly phenomenal treatise on that film that blows away whatever I was planning to write (and you should all definitely go read his thoughts right now!). 

The Scarlet Letter will air later in the day, at 12:15PM EST.

The Silent-Puff Girls

Posted on by under animation, brandie's faves, saturday morning cartoons, silence = golden

One of the most entertaining cartoons to come out of the 1990s features a trio of sweet little girls named Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup … and despite their cutesy names, they just happen to be some seriously ass-whoopin’ superheroes. Those girls–originally called The Whoopass Girls before being renamed as the more family-friendly Powerpuff Girls–were created by Craig McCracken, a familiar presence behind-the-scenes at Cartoon Network in the 90s as an animator for shows like 2 Stupid Dogs and Dexter’s Laboratory. The show was produced by Cartoon Network (after a brief stint under the Hanna-Barbera banner) and was a monster hit almost immediately out of the gate, spanning seven years, seventy-eight episodes, and a 2002 feature film. The cartoon is much in the same vein as the 90s Dreamworks cartoon Animaniacs in that its humor appeals not only to its target “kid” audience, but also to adults (witness, for instance, the third-season episode “Meet the Beat-Alls,” which is a hilarious tribute to The Beatles featuring dozens of puns centered around Beatles’ song titles–and even a simian character based on Yoko Ono).

PPG has long been a favorite of mine (seriously–my 21st birthday cake was Powerpuff-themed), and because Boomerang shows two episodes back-to-back every evening, I get to catch up on some of the best episodes every now and again. And last night featured one of my very favorites … so what better time than now to shine the spotlight on the girls for our Saturday Morning Cartoons series?

The episode is called “Silent Treatment,” and the bulk of this cartoon is a fond parody of silent films. While the other children in the city of Townsville attend the latest Hollywood movie at the giganto multiplex, the girls are forced to see a silent picture at a rundown theater across the street with Professor Utonium (their guardian/creator), who wants to teach them about the origins of film. The Professor leaves for a moment, and the girls loudly poke fun at the film, complaining about the lack of color and sound, and protesting the speed of the title cards. The film’s villain and star, Max Von Nitrate (of course), can hear their “commentary” and grows increasingly frustrated. He reveals that he has kidnapped the Professor and intends to steal his melodious voice for his own! The girls must enter the movie and get their Professor back before he finds himself (dun dun DUN) … VOICELESS!

Naturally, inserting the superheroes into the film leads to all sorts of complications–and some delightful cameos from figures representing silent movie stalwarts such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd (dangling from a clock a la the great 1923 comedy Safety Last!), and some Keystone-esque coppers. The “silent film” sections of the cartoon are beautifully done–the zany spirit of early comedy shorts is captured pretty well, and the scratches and dings added to the black-and-white film are a nice touch. All in all, “Silent Treatment” really is a delightful short, one that classic movie fans will likely find particularly appealing.

Can the girls save the day and escape the silent film? Will they ever learn to appreciate old movies? To find out, you’ll just have to watch the cartoon for yourself!

The Poor Little Rich Girl: Mary Pickford and her wordsmith.

Posted on by under blogathon, girls of summer, silence = golden

One of the most prolific partnerships to emerge in the silent film era was the one between movie star Mary Pickford and screenwriter Frances Marion. Director Clarence Brown once referred to their working relationship as “spontaneous combustion,” an apt description of the women’s uncanny ability to play off one another in developing new material. For more than two decades, Marion wrote scripts for some of Pickford’s most popular films, from 1912′s The New York Hat to Pickford’s final screen appearance in Secrets (1933). Their most prolific period of collaboration–spanning the years 1917 and 1918–produced eight of Pickford’s best-loved films, among them The Little Princess, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (both 1917), and Stella Maris (1918).

Their most important collaboration may have been the 1917 film The Poor Little Rich Girl, which Marion adapted from the same-named 1913 play by Eleanor Gates. The movie became the biggest hit of Pickford’s career up to that point, and with its release, Marion became the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, while Pickford further secured control of her own career in a way that few actors–male or female–had been able to do.

The Poor Little Rich Girl admittedly does not boast an overly complicated plot. Pickford is Gwendolyn, the child of a self-absorbed rich couple. Gwendolyn’s care is given over to the household’s servants, who find the lonely, sometimes mischievous child to be a bother. One evening, Gwendolyn’s nanny, Jane, essentially dopes the child so that the servants can slip away for an evening out. Gwendolyn has a bad reaction to the drug and teeters on the edge of death (reflected in a series of dreams marked by strange imagery), but her illness finally frightens her parents into realizing the error of their selfish ways.

Marion was hired to write the film at Pickford’s insistence, and the two of them conspired to add elements of comedy (a mud fight, playful antics in the girl’s bathroom) to lighten the relatively dark source material–much to the disgust of the film’s director, Maurice Tourneur. Tourneur had the reputation of being a gruff, sometimes combative director, and he clashed frequently with the seasoned star of the film. He wanted the film to adhere more closely to the original play; Pickford, supported by Marion, felt the play was too dreary and needed moments of laughter so as not to weigh down the final product. In the end, of course, Pickford won.

This was the first film in which Pickford portrayed a child for the entire length of the movie–a bit of a daunting task for the actress. At twenty-five years old, Pickford was playing an eleven-year-old girl, and though her waifish frame and famed golden curls helped her portrayal (as did Tourneur’s set design, which used larger-than-normal furniture to make the actress appear even smaller), Pickford was under no illusions about her age, and thus was intent on doing whatever she could to enhance her on-screen childish image. According to an anecdote related in Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1998):

“As Mary was putting on her makeup early one morning, she noticed that when one of the mirrors caught the morning sunlight, its reflection on her face made her look much younger. When she told Tourneur about her accidental discovery, she assumed he would be as thrilled as she was, but he was not interested in experimenting.”

Despite the director’s reluctance, Mary insisted that Tourneur shoot the scene two ways–once with the traditional lighting, and again using her suggestion of shining a small spotlight, propped up on a box, directed at her face from below–to see which one was more effective. In the end, Mary’s ingenuous idea won out, and this “baby spotlight” became a signature device on all of her subsequent films.

When the film was complete, the executives at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount (including studio heads Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky) disliked the final result so much that they considered not releasing the movie at all. Pickford and Marion were devastated by the news–Marion especially was worried that her involvement had somehow “ruined” Mary’s career. But when the film was finally screened in New York, it was an instant hit with audiences, and Marion was contracted (for a large salary) to write future films for Pickford. And because of the success of The Poor Little Rich Girl, the conceit of Pickford playing a child for the length of the film was repeated in their next two collaborations, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, released six months later, and The Little Princess, released a mere two months after that.

Mary Pickford and Frances Marion were quite the formidable team, even after their professional partnership came to an end. By 1940, Pickford had retired from the screen, and Marion wrote her final screenplay, for 1940′s Green Hell, though both would remain active in Hollywood in the ensuing years (Pickford as a producer, and Marion as a contract writer for MGM, playwright, and novelist). The two women remained friends all their lives, until Marion’s death in 1973 at the age of 84. Pickford passed away several years later, in 1979, at the age of 87. Their collaboration, built on creativity, talent, and mutual trust and admiration, remains one of the most successful to ever emerge from Hollywood, then or now.

This is our contribution to the Mary Pickford Blogathon, hosted by KC of A Classic Movie Blog. Head on over to check out the other entries about “the girl with the golden curls.”

Perils, Pitfalls, and Predicaments Galore: The Silent Serial Queens

Posted on by under celebrating women in classic film, serial queens, silence = golden

The serial film has deep roots in cinema. These short subjects–the features before the features, as it were–told an extended, continuous story, shown in weekly or monthly “episodes” that were stretched out over a period of time. Over the years, many of these serials gained their own rabid fan bases, as moviegoers returned to the cinema regularly in order to find out what happened next.

The heyday of the serial film was undoubtedly the silent era, in which serials were an immensely popular and important part of the movie-going experience. Though the serials encompassed a wide variety of genres, the plots of many of these series were, by and large, quite similar–a lovely girl is imperiled, and a dashing hero must defeat the bad guy and rescue the fair maiden from certain doom. Over the years, a veritable fount of cliches have risen from the serial genre: the helpless female victim (the “damsel in distress”) tied to the railroad tracks, the mustache-twirling villain, the determined hero who vaults multiple obstacles to save his lady love. And the notion of a cliffhanger ending–which has become increasingly vital to the success of certain dramatic television series–has its roots in these early short pictures. If you want to see the hallmarks of the silent film serial, just watch any number of episodes of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle–the characters of Dudley Do-Right, Nell Fenwick, and Snidely Whiplash are pitch-perfect caricatures of the genre.

Women were the undisputed stars of the silent serial. And though the “damsel in distress” motif is now inextricably intertwined with the genre, in its earliest days, the serial heroine was proactive, independent, and adventurous, able to slip out of predicaments based on her own tenacity and wit. Oftentimes, the heroine was even the one who stepped in to rescue the hero from danger.

The film that is considered by many film scholars to be the first serial, 1912′s What Happened to Mary, centers around a female protagonist. Mary (played by Mary Fuller) is a teenage girl who escapes an arranged marriage by hopping a train and undertaking a quest to find her own mate. Filmed by the Thomas Edison studio, the series–twelve reels released into theaters over the course of a year–was accompanied by a monthly feature in The Ladies’ World magazine which also related Mary’s story. The next year, the series was followed by a sequel serial, Who Will Marry Mary?, which has sadly been lost over the years.

These serials made Mary Fuller a huge star, one whose popularity reached the level of that other famous silent Mary, Ms. Pickford. She had starred in other films before becoming the first “serial queen;” most notably, Fuller appeared in the first film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1910. She was also a screenwriter, and several of her scripts were made into films during the height of her popularity. Sadly, Fuller’s career was short-lived; only four years after the release of the Mary serials, she was a Hollywood has-been. Her final film appearance came in 1917, and attempts to restart her career in subsequent years were unsuccessful.

In the wake of the immense popularity of the Mary films, other studios began to quickly churn out their own serials featuring similarly adventurous heroines. The most successful of these was 1913′s The Adventures of Kathlyn, produced by the Selig studios and accompanied by concurrent written features in the Chicago Tribune. Comprised of thirteen episodes released biweekly over the course of six months, the serial starred Kathlyn Williams as the titular heroine, a young American girl who goes to India upon inheriting a royal title and must grapple with wild animals and even wilder “natives.” Kathlyn, unlike its predecessor Mary, employed the use of the cliffhanger ending, and was by most accounts the first serial to utilize this trick to entice audience attention. Unfortunately, the Kathlyn series has been lost, but in 1916, the serials were revisited in feature-length form (a film also called The Adventures of Kathlyn), with most of the original cast returning to reprise their roles.

An interesting side note: according to some sources, the first-ever movie trailer was created to promote the Kathlyn serial!

Kathlyn Williams had been making films for Selig for more than five years when she was tapped to star in the serial. Promoted as the “Selig Girl,” Williams co-starred with Tom Mix in a number of silent Westerns, and after her foray into serials, would go on to appear in several early films directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Though she reached the height of her popularity as an actress in the silent era, Williams was ultimately able to maintain a successful career well into the days of sound, filming her last project, Rendezvous at Midnight, in 1935.

In 1914, Mary and Kathlyn made way for perhaps the most notable female-starring silent serial, The Perils of Pauline. Released in 1914 by French distributor Pathé, the series was immensely successful from the start. Initially comprised of thirteen episodes exhibited in theaters every two weeks, Pauline was expanded to twenty installments based on its popularity. Today, the original reels are considered lost, and only nine severely-edited chapters of Pauline exist.

Here, most of the tropes that would eventually define the serial genre are present in full force. Pauline is an innocent young woman whose guardian dies, leaving her a great fortune that she can only access once she marries her guardian’s son, Harry. But Pauline wants to be a writer and explore the world before tying herself down. Her guardian’s secretary, Raymond Owen, plots to kill Pauline before she marries so that he can get his hands on her money. What follows is a series of adventures in which Pauline finds herself in near-constant trouble, only to be rescued by Harry or to find a way out of the scrape herself.

Pearl White had found success starring in a number of short films prior to taking on the role of Pauline, but nothing could have prepared her for the popularity she would find as “the” serial queen of the 1910s. White did many of her own stunts while filming Pauline: whether it was swimming across a rushing river or flying an airplane, the actress enthusiastically jumped at the chance to get involved in the action. The popularity of Pauline made the young actress exceedingly wealthy, and she followed its success with another popular serial, The Exploits of Elaine, in 1914. White eventually retired from the screen in 1924. But injuries from years of stunt work drove her to alcoholism and drug use, and she died relatively young, at the age of 49, from cirrhosis of the liver.

These serial queens were, at least briefly, able to exercise a great deal of control over their own careers, but in the end, the need to leash their independence, both on-screen and off, led to the eventual demise of the woman-centric serial as a box-office draw. The stories were, in many cases, undeniably lurid, and the idea of placing “vulnerable” women in harm’s way was distasteful to some members of the public. Furthermore, the studios expressed concern that the athletic serial stars could be seen as overly masculine in the eyes of the public, so publicity about the stars focused on their feminine charms, highlighting their supposed love of beautiful clothes and graceful manners. Still, regardless of attempts to feminize the serial queen in the papers, her mere existence on-screen challenged the notion of what a “proper” woman should be. Ultimately, the genre could not sustain itself beyond those relatively few early successes, and within five years of the explosive debut of What Happened to Mary, the female-lead serial became a rarity rather than the rule.

As silence gave way to sound in theaters, so too did female serial stars give way to their male counterparts. In the 1930s, comic-strip favorites Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, and Buck Rogers became immensely popular, followed in the next decade by superheroes such as Batman and Superman. The adventures of virile male leads and their feats of derring-do were greatly appealing to audiences of the time, and with the exception of minor successes such as Brenda Starr, the serial became a largely male-dominated genre until its overall popularity ceased in the 1950s.

Remembering Barbara Kent.

Posted on by under remembering, silence = golden

Early Hollywood actress Barbara Kent, one of the last living stars from the silent era, has passed away.

Though not as well-known today as many of her contemporaries, Kent starred with some of the stalwarts of the silver screen in her all-too-brief career (she only made about three dozen movies between 1926 and 1935). In 1926, at the age of eighteen, she made her film debut in two silent features, the western Prowlers of the Night and Flesh and the Devil. The latter would arguably provide Kent with her best-known role as Greta Garbo’s somewhat pallid romantic rival for John Gilbert’s affections.

Kent (left) with Gilbert, Garbo, and Lars Hanson

Though Flesh and the Devil marked her as a solid dramatic actress, Kent really excelled in a string of comedies. She was named a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1927, which brought her a great deal of media attention and served to raise her stature in Hollywood. That same year, Kent rather scandalously simulated a nude swimming scene in the silent comedy No Man’s Law with Oliver Hardy (she reportedly wore a skintight beige suit to give the appearance of nudity). Two years later, she appeared as legendary comedian Harold Lloyd’s love interest in his first talkie, Welcome Danger, and again in 1930 in Feet First. And in 1931, she played Gloria Swanson’s sister in the romantic comedy Indiscreet, under the auspices of director Leo McCarey.

Other high-profile film roles came in the adaptations of two popular nineteenth-century novels: 1932′s Vanity Fair (opposite Myrna Loy as Becky Sharpe) and 1933′s Oliver Twist (opposite Dickie Moore as the title character). A year later, Kent got married and by 1935, she had essentially retired from acting altogether after appearing in her final film, Guard That Girl.

There is some debate about whether Barbara Kent was born in 1906 or 1907, but most media sources report the latter date, which means the former actress was 103 when she died last week. Ultimately, her exact age doesn’t really matter. It’s just sad to see another star from yesteryear leave us. Kent outlived most of the other silent-screen icons of her day, and though she allegedly spent her later years declining to talk about her early career, the films she left behind show that she was a talented, capable, and all-around lovely performer.

C’mon, give us a smile.

Posted on by under silence = golden

Tuesday, October 4th, marks silent screen icon Buster Keaton’s 116th birthday. TCM has already named Buster their “Star of the Month” and will be featuring a number of his beloved films and shorts on Sunday nights, beginning this evening with a showing of one of the actor’s most popular (and best) movies, The General (1926).

In honor of the legendary “Great Stone Face,” the Kitty Packard Pictorial is hosting a month-long tribute and salute to Buster Keaton. Allow KPP to explain:

“Project Keaton will be a month long open forum in which writers, artists, everyday Joes and everyday Janes (like me) from all over the world are being invited to tip their pork pie to Buster. The goal is to foster a month of creative exchange, with Buster as muse, and to celebrate one of cinema’s few, true geniuses.

There are no rules as to content: essays, reviews, art, critiques, tributes, prose, poetry, all are welcome. And, since this is a month long project, there are no pressing deadlines: participants may contribute as little or as much as they wish any time at all during the course of October.”

To that end, we’ll be presenting a couple of posts about Buster and his comedic legacy here at True Classics throughout the month, so keep an eye open for those. And make sure to check in with the Kitty Packard gang all month to join in the discussion and share your appreciation for one of the greatest comedians to ever grace the silver screen.