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Overview
From one of America's most renowned film scholars: a revelatory, perceptive, and highly readable look at the greatest silent film stars -- not those few who are fully appreciated and understood, like Chaplin, Keaton, Gish, and Garbo, but those who have been misperceived, unfairly dismissed, or forgotten.Here is Valentino, "the Sheik," who was hardly the effeminate lounge lizard he's been branded as; Mary Pickford, who couldn't have been further from the adorable little creature with golden ringlets that was her film persona; Marion Davies, unfairly pilloried in Citizen Kane; the original "Phantom" and "Hunchback," Lon Chaney; the beautiful Talmadge sisters, Norma and Constance. Here are the great divas, Pola Negri and Gloria Swanson; the great flappers, Colleen Moore and Clara Bow; the great cowboys, William S. Hart and Tom Mix; and the great lover, John Gilbert. Here, too, is the quintessential slapstick comedienne, Mabel Normand, with her Keystone Kops; the quintessential all-American hero, Douglas Fairbanks; and, of course, the quintessential all-American dog, Rin-Tin-Tin.
This is the first book to anatomize the major silent players, reconstruct their careers, and give us a sense of what those films, those stars, and that Hollywood were all about. An absolutely essential text for anyone seriously interested in movies, and, with more than three hundred photographs, as much a treat to look at as it is to read.
Synopsis
From one of America's most renowned film scholars: a revelatory, perceptive, and highly readable look at the greatest silent film stars -- not those few who are fully appreciated and understood, like Chaplin, Keaton, Gish, and Garbo, but those who have been misperceived, unfairly dismissed, or forgotten. Here is Valentino, "the Sheik," who was hardly the effeminate lounge lizard he's been branded as; Mary Pickford, who couldn't have been further from the adorable little creature with golden ringlets that was her film persona; Marion Davies, unfairly pilloried in Citizen Kane; the original "Phantom" and "Hunchback," Lon Chaney; the beautiful Talmadge sisters, Norma and Constance. Here are the great divas, Pola Negri and Gloria Swanson; the great flappers, Colleen Moore and Clara Bow; the great cowboys, William S. Hart and Tom Mix; and the great lover, John Gilbert. Here, too, is the quintessential slapstick comedienne, Mabel Normand, with her Keystone Kops; the quintessential all-American hero, Douglas Fairbanks; and, of course, the quintessential all-American dog, Rin-Tin-Tin. This is the first book to anatomize the major silent players, reconstruct their careers, and give us a sense of what those films, those stars, and that Hollywood were all about. An absolutely essential text for anyone seriously interested in movies, and, with more than three hundred photographs, as much a treat to look at as it is to read.Editorials
Steve Vineberg
The heyday of silent movies began in 1915, when D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation; not quite a decade and a half later they were shoved into an early grave by the invention of talkies. Watching them now, you enter a coded, embroidered world that feels as remote as the Middle Ages. It's easy for a novice to get discombobulated -- as a college freshman, I wandered into a screening of Griffith's great Intolerance and was so thrown by the rhythms that I fled, dazed, at intermission.
At the outset of her nearly 500-page volume, Silent Stars, Jeanine Basinger, a much-published scholar who teaches film at Wesleyan University, attempts to define the world of the silent screen, where
stars look rounder. Their faces aren't shadowed or hawkish, with razor-sharp cheekbones, but romantic and soft, with apparently no bones at all…The women are often barely five feet tall, and the men are short, compact, and well proportioned…It's an Ur-world, full of strong emotion, and you seem to be constantly sharing lives in secret ways, looking on at secret moments, watching scenes of deeply felt and hyper-expressive revelation.
This is a promising beginning, but the book -- a selective yet varied series of portraits of the silent-movie personalities Basinger believes have been either forgotten or misunderstood -- is a major disappointment. Basinger isn't gifted at describing what actors do: She includes an array of details about performance after performance, but there's no lyricism to float these details into evocation, and there are surprisingly few ideas to ground what start to feel like interminable summaries. After 20 pages on Gloria Swanson, for example, all you've gleaned is that most of her movies were built around her costumes, yet somehow she was more than just a clotheshorse.
A study of the horror-movie chameleon Lon Chaney culminates in these unhelpful sentences: "What, after all, was Chaney's appeal? The answer is simple: he was unique." A chapter on Rudolph Valentino, the most parodied and, to Basinger's mind, the most underrated of the era's male romantic stars, includes this distillation of the 1921 film that made him a star: "So what was it about Valentino in 'Four Horsemen [of the Apocalypse]'? The answer is simple: as Julio, he has star power, though not much else." In a dual examination of the careers of the flapper heroines Colleen Moore and Clara Bow, we're met with the startling revelation that actors aren't always the characters they portray on the screen.
Basinger is such a ham-handed writer that somewhere in the middle of the book I began to suspect she might have something valuable to express about these performers but just couldn't get it out. I kept stumbling over bizarre sentences "Norma Talmadge is the proof of the basic fact about stardom: clearly in her case, you had to be there"; "[Pola Negri's Passion] combines historical sweep with intimate portraiture, and there is no overestimating what having a good director can do for the historical reevaluation of an actress's career" and wondering what she might have been trying to say. Sometimes she contradicts herself -- she lists all the customary reasons for the disintegration of John Gilbert's career as Hollywood's great lover, refutes each one, then claims the real cause was a combination of them all. At other times she makes comments that are so far off track you can't believe she meant them -- e.g., that Lillian Gish is "somewhat sexless" has she seen The Scarlet Letter?, that John Barrymore was a proto-Method actor the style of matinee idols like Barrymore was precisely what Method actors were breaking away from.
Some of the anecdotes she tosses into her discussions of the stars are fun. I enjoyed learning that Colleen Moore and not Louise Brooks pioneered the Dutch Boy bob, and that the plot of Warren Beatty's Bulworth has its origins in a 1916 Douglas Fairbanks comedy called Flirting with Fate. But only a single chapter in Silent Stars is the lark the whole book should have been: the one on the canine star Rin-Tin-Tin and his rivals. Here Basinger locates exactly the right tone, a mix of admiration and humor, and her descriptions of the movies illustrate clearly delineated points.
This is truly original research: No one has written seriously about animal performers, and though Basinger 's project throughout is to resurrect the shoddily reported careers of her other subjects, the fact is that other scholars before her have praised Mabel Normand perhaps more than she deserves, Chaney, Fairbanks, Valentino. It's been nearly three decades since Pauline Kael, in The Citizen Kane Book, set the record straight on the distinction between the talented comedian Marion Davies and the fictional character Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz cruelly modeled on her; and there's nothing in Basinger's chapter on Mary Pickford that Eileen Whitfield didn't cover in far greater depth in her brilliant biography, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. But, silent-movie lover though I am, I didn't know a damn thing about Rin-Tin-Tin.
— Salon
Gene Santoro
Fascinating, evocative and at times provocatively revisionist...Again and again she argues, usually persuasively, that the standard-issue ways we see these figures represent only part of their true cinematic and cultural scope...Basinger offers sharp new slants on female stars...Full of digressions and asides that give it resonance.— New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Tom Mix and dozens of others are the "forgotten, misunderstood, and underappreciated" stars whom film historian Basinger (A Woman's View, etc.) profiles in her excellent tribute to the silent film era. No tell-all, this book recreates the excitement the actors provoked while illustrating the nature of their appeal. Colleen Moore's onscreen transformation from maiden to flapper "is the exact story of what happened to the American girl" in the 1920s; tight-lipped William S. Hart provided the "first and truest face in the Old American West on film." Basinger also discerns the strengths lost in historical caricature: Mary Pickford's roles revealed a range far beyond that of "America's Sweetheart"; Marion Davies's successful career belies her legacy as inspiration for the off-key singer Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane. Not surprisingly, a recurrent theme is the ephemerality of fame. Not only do most silent stars' careers (famously, John Gilbert's) end with the talkies, but the near-obscurity of these actors today suggests that, for anyone, it's a mere four generations from footlight to footnote. While Basinger's blend of erudition and reportage often translates into an impersonal style, it is redeemed by her love of the subject and a Margaret Dumont-like lack of irony that allows her to assert, "The astonishing thing about watching Rin-Tin-Tin is that you begin to agree that this dog could act." Learned and wholehearted, the book is classic Basinger fare: effortless history that sets no fires but quickly establishes its necessity. 285 photos. Main selection of Eagle Book Club's Movie and Entertainment Book Club. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
Silent Stars is a fond yet perceptive look at some overlooked, misunderstood, or underappreciated stars of the silent era. With wit, enthusiasm, and a refreshing lack of condescension, Basinger (film studies, Wesleyan Univ.) surveys the lives and careers of stars like "America's sweetheart" Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, and even animal star Rin-Tin-Tin (whose exploits helped save the fortunes of one studio). She explores Valentino's sexual ambiguity, shows that John Gilbert's high voice did not doom his film career in talkies, and explains that Marion Davies's status as the mistress of William Randolph Hearst overshadowed her considerable gifts as a comedienne. In her excellent introduction, Basinger also notes that the silence allowed audiences to bond with their favorite stars and that the easily translated title cards made international fame possible--though, incredibly, some studies were reluctant to reveal actors' names, which they feared would lead to exorbitant star salaries. This book deserves to take its place next to Kevin Brownlow's classic The Parade's Gone By (LJ 2/15/69). Drew's (Speaking Silents) oral history-based book focuses exclusively on lesser-known leading ladies of the late 1920s and 1930s. After giving a bit of background, he lets each actress--including Constance Cummings, King Kong star Fay Wray, and Claire Trevor (best known for her Oscar-winning turn in John Huston's Key Largo)--tell her own story. They discuss the different paths that brought them to Hollywood and the divergent turns their lives took after the days of stardom. The inclusion of many personal details here may put some readers off, but the appended filmography is valuable. Silent Stars is highly recommended for public libraries; At the Center of the Frame is for large academic and special libraries.--Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Merle Rubin
Basinger is the perfect guide to movies past: savvy, discerning, funny, not only in love with her subject, but able to convey the reasons for her enthusiasm.— Los Ageles Times
From the Publisher
"Basinger is the perfect guide to movies past, passionate, savvy, discerning, funny, not only in love with her subject, but able to convey the reasons for her enthusiasm." --Los Angeles Times"Basinger's fascinating, evocative and at times provocatively revisionist Silent Stars measures the distance between celebrity and fame, and restores key early movie idols to their proper depth of field . . . She has hunted down and screened hundreds of extant silent movie prints . . . This buttresses her critical insights, allowing her to report in meticulous and convincing detail how each star's films present more sides and talents than we were aware of."--New York Times Book Review
"While Chaplin, Gish, and Garbo are still remembered, many silent-era celebrities have faded from view. Here Basinger discovers a Mary Pickford who was more tomboy than golden girl; a Gloria Swanson with Chaplinesque physicality, and a Marion Davies who, contrary to the mythology of 'Citizen Kane,' was a talented actress held back by her relationship with William Randolph Hearst. Particularly enjoyable are accounts of such exotics as kohl-eyed Pola Negri, whose white Rolls-Royce was upholstered in white velvet, and the lovable German shepherd Rin-Tin-Tin, who kept Warner Bros. solvent through the twenties and finally died in the arms of Jean Harlow."
--The New Yorker
"No tell-all, this book recreates the excitement the actors provoked while illustrating the nature of their appeal . . . Learned and wholehearted, the book is classic Basinger fare: effortless history that . . . establishes its necessity . . . [an] excellent tribute to the silent film era."--Publishers Weekly