In Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays a washed up actress living as a recluse. When a stranger stumbles into her mansion, he pauses for a moment: “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.”
Norma turns to ice. She hisses: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
Like Norma Desmond, “the big pictures” still suffer from neglect. Conventional wisdom condemns them as clunky, boring, and saccharine—merely an appetizer for the real stuff: talkies. Even 2011’s novelty silent film, The Artist, treats the medium as a relic of the past—a technology to be transcended, rather than a genre worthy of notice. That’s unfortunate, because it means dismissing an entire field of classics.
Far from an artistic wasteland, silent Hollywood was an exciting, innovative era—a booming business to boot, churning out big-budget films in every genre. There’s something for everyone: riotous comedies, swashbuckling romances, science fiction, fantasy. Best of all: in the internet age, many of these hundred-year-old classics are available instantly.
Comedy is a good place to begin—and the most accessible silent comedian is boy-next-door, Harold Lloyd. Lloyd’s realistic style and bashful personality are more endearing than the eccentricity of Chaplin and the solemnity of Keaton. In The Kid Brother (1927)—a clever, extremely funny movie that will convince almost anyone to love silent film—Lloyd plays the shy, bespectacled son of the local sheriff. Accidentally mistaken for his father, Harold must tangle with robbers, medicine-show cranks, and his burly older brothers to win his lady love’s heart. The final sequence includes a cat-and-mouse chase in a huge atmospheric ship and a breakneck wagon ride. It’s impressive because it’s obviously real.
Since the medium couldn’t rely on sound, physical acting and daredevil acrobatics flourished—and without the safety net of CGI, these athletic feats take on an added edge. The insane stunt in Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923) creates the most indelible image in silent history as Lloyd clambers up the side of a 12-story skyscraper and careens out from the building, clinging to a clock face.
And then there’s the silent era’s Indiana Jones: Buster Keaton. Keaton always insisted on doing his own stunts, which include shots of the comedian leaping between high-rise buildings, levering heavy railroad ties from the path of a moving steam engine, or narrowly avoiding being crushed by a two-ton falling house.
Keaton’s Civil War era action thriller The General combines both fun stunts and a splendid, suspenseful premise. When his beloved General engine is stolen by Union spies, Southern engineer Johnnie Gray gives chase—at first on foot, then by hand car, bicycle, and another train. Johnnie faces a dizzying number of obstacles—from a malfunctioning cannon to a blazing boxcar. Distracted by his work, he fails to notice that he has pursued his opponents deep behind enemy lines. When he finally catches up, an accident of fate puts him in possession of the Union’s battle plans, and the chaotic reverse chase homeward takes on new intensity. It’s a great film—Die Hard meets Gone With the Wind—but also a surprisingly vivid and persuasive glimpse into the period.
Charlie Chaplin, the silent era’s most recognizable figure, mixed comedy with social justice in his movies. His first feature film was The Kid (1921), in which he co-starred with an adorable and talented six-year-old named Jackie Coogan (later Uncle Fester in The Addams Family). Coogan is a young boy abandoned by his unwed mother in a moment of despair. Discovered on a street corner by the Little Tramp, he becomes the Tramp’s pint-sized partner in crime, breaking windows which the Tramp then offers to repair for cash. It’s a sweet story which brings 1920s poverty into harsh relief.
Chaplin’s final silent film, Modern Times (1936), deals with similar themes, featuring one of his most famous gags: The Tramp is a worker in a vast modern factory who becomes so obsessed with his assembly-line job tightening bolts that when he’s accidentally dragged into the machine’s inner workings he doesn’t even notice, continuing to tighten every bolt he finds.
Silent comedy is a rich and varied field, but outside it lies still more diverse storytelling. One of the late silent classics was F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), in which a seductress convinces a farmer to drown his wife and move with her to the city. He changes his mind just in time, but it’s too late: his wife could see his intention in his eyes. When the couple become stranded in the very city where he planned to flee, they have to face the reality of their broken marriage and broken trust. It’s an engaging—if melodramatic—story in a vivid, expressionistic location.
As far as visuals go, Metropolis (1927), by German director Fritz Lang, is hard to beat. It takes place in a magnificently realized science fiction city. Freder, the foppish son of the city’s ruler, is given a glimpse into the hellish conditions of Metropolis’s working class and—his conscience awakened—sets off on a mission to free them. On the way he discovers a strange religious worker’s union, a mad scientist seeking to create a living automaton (because hey, why not?), and an underground city. It’s a trippy ride.
On the opposite extreme, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) introduced a radical hyper-realistic style. Using minimalistic settings and absolutely no establishing shots, the constant close-ups create an unsettling intimacy with Renée Falconetti’s Joan as she undergoes psychological and physical torment. Today it frequently appears on critic’s top ten lists.
While many silent films have entered the public domain, it’s worth taking the time to seek out remastered versions with synchronized scores. And it would be time well spent, because Norma Desmond was right: the pictures got small. It was the age of stars: Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford. It was the testing ground for modern cinema—full of all we love about the movies. Looking for adventure? There’s The Mark of Zorro. For horror? There’s Nosferatu. For sound? Ah, who needs it? As Desmond observed: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”
Hannah Long is a writer in Rural Retreat, Virginia.
