carolyn kellogg

From the October 22 issue of the New Yorker, in which Denby meditates on film idols, but can’t bring himself to discuss the silent period beyond this one paragraph.

Let us not speak of the silent period. The stars are too far from us, too exotic in their jewels, chinchilla, and velvet, their slinky cars as long as boas, their barbaric aura of leopard-skin splendor. They played tramps (Charlie Chaplin), vamps (Theda Bara), sheikhs (Rudolph Valentino), waifs (Lillian Gish), flappers (Clara Bow), pirates and musketeers (Douglas Fairbanks), and other extravagant roles, and silence lent them the mystery of remote beauty. As youthful gods — the working metaphor for them at the time — they married one another or minor royalty and, in Beverly Hills or Bel Air, built enormous houses in innocently promiscuous Greco-Roman-Tuscan-Spanish style. Gathering together around the marbled swimming pools, or on yachts or polo fields, they enjoyed a kind of sanctified public leisure, relaxing and playing for everyone. It was unthinkable that these people should have children. The burned bright and then were extinguished; in the public imagination, they could not reproduce. In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, which was made in 1950, the sable past of the silent stars was already an object of amazement.

I am currently surrounded by books — with publication dates ranging from this decade back to the nineteen-teens — about the silent era. And I will speak of it. Denby is dumping out a fat load of hogwash.

He doesn’t want to talk about idol-ness of the silent era because, as far as I can tell, he recalls silent actors as glamorous and playful. Where does he think these images of chinchilla furs and marbled swimming pools came from? (mostly Sunset Blvd, I think, but let’s assume he actually has some knowledge of silent film or its players). Fan mags and newspapers, that’s where. It was during the early years of moviemaking that it became apparent that the people on screen captured the public interest, it was in those years that actors began receiving screen credit, it was at that time that fan magazines like Photoplay launched, it was in those years that the strange cycle of promotion, fame and gossip took hold of the new Hollywood royalty. Denby’s lopsided idea of the people of silent film was formed by exactly the kind of publicity machine he tries to attribute to later times.

But sound technology had exactly nothing to do with the formation of the Hollywood star system, and Denby is either lazy or self-deluded to assume otherwise.

What is his odd idea that silent actors couldn’t breed, like some audio-deprived pack of mules? OK, Valentino died at 31, twice married and without kids. But Douglas Fairbanks had a son, who went into acting himself; surely Denby has heard of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Little Caesar, Gunga Din). Clara Bow was said to have declined to write an autobiography so she might protect her two sons from salacious rumors. And Charlie Chaplin had 11 children (8 with his last wife, Oona), including Geraldine, who was excellent in Nashville, when she played, if I’m not mistaken, a BBC reporter covering American celebrity.

“In the sound period,” Denby goes on, “movies became more realistic, more ‘psychological’ and down to earth.” This is ignorant, uninformed, and incorrect, and it’s written by a man whose job is film reviewer.

Denby goes on to discuss a new book — The Star Machine — but I’m putting down the New Yorker to turn back to Two Reels and a Crank, the self-serving, fascinating autobiography of Albert Smith, a founder of the silent movie studio Vitgraph.