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Silent Movies Are Still Creating an Echo
With silent films more available than ever, now is the time to remember the era's most influential directors
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King Vidor (1894-1982)
Vidor was a Hollywood rarity: A director who worked within the studio system, yet somehow managed to make highly personal films. No doubt, Vidor knew when to fight the studio brass and when to compromise, and the result was a career in features that spanned 40 years and 50 films. The Big Parade, his epic retelling of World War I, superbly balanced powerful scenes of then-modern warfare with a sentimental love story, and became one of the biggest box office sensations of the 1920s. But the highpoint of Vidor’s career, and the film upon which much of his reputation largely rests today, is The Crowd. In many ways, The Crowd is almost defiantly anti-Hollywood, particularly in its focus on the anonymous everyman, a topic which often appealed to Vidor. Like Murnau’s Sunrise, it is an example of the inroads that German Expressionism was making into American silent moviemaking.
Recommended Viewing: The Big Parade (1925), La Boheme (1926), The Crowd (1928), The Patsy (1928), Show People (1928)
Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957)
Was von Stroheim a genius crushed by philistines running the studios or was he a pretentious, undisciplined egomaniac who needed to be tightly controlled? He has been both damned and praised for his self-destructive obsession with realism, his refusal to compromise and his budgetary extravagances. Von Stroheim burned bridges from one studio to the next, and time and again was either fired from his films or had them recut by other hands. As a result, when viewed today, what we’re usually watching is someone else’s version of a von Stroheim picture with only fragments of the director’s intentions. Greed, at 140 minutes, is still only about a third of its original running time. Yet even in its butchered form, it’s one of the great silent films which, like von Stroheim’s other films, can be inspiring, frustrating, brilliant, confusing, self-indulgent, poetic and perverted—sometimes all in the same reel. He was never average and he certainly never played it safe, but one could also argue that he didn’t play it particularly smart. If he had been less of a self-created martyr, he would have had a longer career and we would have a few more complete von Stroheim films around today.
Recommended Viewing: Blind Husbands (1919), Foolish Wives (1922), Greed (1924), The Merry Widow (1925), The Wedding March (1928), Queen Kelly (1929)
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Hindi movies online on 2/05/08 at 10:03 pm
charlie chaplin movies were damn hillarious
have to chk other guys in list
This story was published in the Summer 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
An Echo from the Sound of Silents
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