With all the attention that The Artist has received as a silent novelty in today’s cinema, it will probably come as a surprise to many people that there have been several silent films made after sound was introduced in 1928. Up until 1976 they were made right here in America, after that they come from abroad. This is the first of a two part article dealing with silent films in the sound era and it focuses on those films made in the U.S.
While there were several silent films that straddled the transition which either had dialogue scenes added or were half silent and half sound, the first movie to be deliberately made without dialogue was Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights which first appeared in 1931. In fact it was Chaplin who said “I don’t need sound, I’m an artist,” a quote which helped to inspire the recent Best Picture winner.
City Lights is an undisputed masterpiece, probably Chaplin’s best film but its success was due to his popularity and his artistry not to the fact that it was a silent film. The same was true of Modern Times, Chaplin’s follow-up in 1936.
Mainstream Hollywood would not attempt to make a silent film until 1952 but in early 1941 a small independent silent film was made at Northwestern University that was based on the classic play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen. Several scenes from the play were set to the well known music of Edvard Grieg.
Shown in Chicago and a few Midwestern cities, Peer Gynt attracted the attention of Hollywood on account of the young college student playing the lead. He would go on to become a Hollywood icon. His name was Charlton Heston.
At the height of anti-Communist paranoia in 1952, Hollywood gambled on making a silent film that dealt with the stealing of atomic secrets. To play the lead, they chose Ray Milland who was evolving from a romantic leading man into a fine character actor.
The Thiefwas shot on location in Washington D.C. and New York City and concluded with a harrowing Alfred Hitchcock like sequence that took place on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. No title cards were used, only a musical score and everyday sounds. The film was not a success as 1950s audiences were bewildered and irritated by a film with no dialogue.
1953 saw the release of another film without dialogue or title cards but it was a low budget, outside of Hollywood production (today we would call it an “indie”) that made an impression on the Art House circuit. The film was Dementia and it was an expressionistic look at a young woman’s mental breakdown in a large, unnamed metropolis.
Lurid settings, low-key lighting, and a modern jazz score made a vivid impression on the people that managed to see it. Two years later it showed up at the drive-ins in an edited version with narration by Ed MacMahon (yes THE Ed MacMahon of The Tonight Show fame). That version was called Daughter of Darkness.
It would be more than 20 years before another silent film appeared. By this time the original silent films, especially silent comedies, were being rediscovered and Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd became the big three of silent screen comedy.
Mel Brooks one of the reigning kings of comedy in the 1970s (Woody Allen was the other), decided to make a silent comedy called Silent Movie. It featured an all-star cast and was a loving, if typically heavy-handed Brooksian exercise in overkill that rode the crest of Brooks’ popularity and was very successful but it prompted no follow-ups. And that was it.
But while America gave up on the silent movie, outside America a flurry of silent activity was about to begin. (Sounds of Silence will conclude next month with a look at European silent films in the sound era.)
The Capsule Critic 