Welcome back to Late To The Movies, one woman’s attempt to learn about the history of cinema and fall in love with films as an art form.
After watching some of the first-ever movies last month, I was excited to see something different and new (to me): silent films. Hollywood’s silent era feels familiar even if you’ve never watched a silent movie: the intertitles in that 1920s font, the black and white, the costumes – they’re all recognisable as being from that specific time, now 100 years ago.
I had only really thought about silent films as an earlier, lesser version of modern films, but learning about this period in cinematic history made me realise that I was completely wrong – silent films are an art in their own right.
The fact that there’s no dialogue means that each look and gesture has to carry more weight, and things like lighting make a huge difference to a scene when there’s not only no sound but no colour.
It also means you have to really pay attention – if you look away to check something on your phone, you miss what’s happening and inevitably have to rewind. As a general rule I don’t spend a great deal of time on my phone while watching something – I like to be immersed in what I’m watching – but watching these movies really brought home the benefit of giving something your undivided attention.
For my venture into the world of silent movies, I watched three very different films, each of which went on to influence filmmakers much later. Those films were Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), and Greta Garbo’s The Mysterious Lady (1928).
The Gold Rush: comedy through and through
The Gold Rush is often cited as being Chaplin’s finest film, and with good reason. It’s both funny and poignant, starring Chaplin as his beloved character the Tramp. We see him moving to the wilds of Alaska to seek his fortune panning for gold, only to encounter all kinds of obstacles from storms, to criminals, to starvation, falling in love along the way and searching for a happy ending.
In one of the early sequences on the film there’s a bear – a live bear! – which I had forgotten was a thing back then (and was in fact a thing for decades afterwards). I can’t imagine any film using a live, trained bear nowadays, but here was a very well-behaved bear. It did make me wonder how Chaplin (and the crew) must have felt, being on set with such a potentially dangerous animal, not to mention how the poor bear must have felt.
I didn’t expect to laugh out loud as often as I did watching this. There’s a sequence where the Tramp and his friend Big Jim are trapped in a snowbound cabin, with nothing to eat. There are some rather clever special effects whereby Big Jim hallucinates the Tramp turning into a chicken, which look like they must have been both creative and complicated to achieve at the time, just as the tilting cabin scenes must have been.
In the end, Chaplin cooks and eats his own boot for Thanksgiving dinner – the whole piece is a masterpiece of physical comedy. The boot was made out of licorice, and Chaplin apparently ended up in hospital after filming the scene 63 times over the course of three days. Chaplin’s style of comedy made me think of other comedies from my childhood, like Fawlty Towers or Monty Python or even Mr. Bean – the type of comedy that’s rooted in physicality and absurdity.
There’s a very moving part of the film where the Tramp prepares a New Year’s Eve dinner for Georgia, the woman he’s fallen in love with, and her friends. The dinner doesn’t happen, and the Tramp is left alone with only the dream of what might have been.
I was surprised at how full of pathos and emotion the scene was and how effectively it conveyed the feelings of the character even without sound. It made me wonder whether the limits of the medium actually helped Chaplin and other filmmakers of the time to be more creative. I notice in my own creative work that limits often help me find better ideas and solutions, even when I’m chafing against them, and I suspect that might have also been happening here.
The General: action, adventure, romance and… trains
The General is an action-comedy starring Buster Keaton, and amazingly ambitious for its time. There are train chases, collapsing bridges, and elaborately staged gags, all mixed into a love story set during America’s Civil War.
Keaton plays Johnnie Gray, a railway engineer who lives in the Southern US. When the war arrives, he tries to volunteer as a soldier in the Confederate Army, but the recruiting officers refuse to accept his application on the basis that he can be of more use to the war effort as a train engineer than an unskilled soldier, although nobody actually tells him that. His sweetheart Annabelle and her family assume that he was too cowardly to volunteer and shun him.
In the meantime, Union spies are planning a daring operation – to steal a train from the Confederacy. The train they take happens to be Gray’s locomotive, known as The General, with Annabelle accidentally on board. Thus starts the beginning of the chase, with Gray following the spies and trying to rescue both Annabelle and The General, and then to foil the Union plot before the Confederate troops can be harmed.
It was loosely based on a real incident and it would be easy for it to be boring – one train chasing another up to the Union army camp and then back to the Confederate camp; certainly I can’t imagine it getting signed off in today’s world – but it’s so funny and engaging that it was a real joy to watch.
Keaton is absolutely brilliant on the screen – very different to Chaplin. I found Chaplin to be more emotional, and there’s an elasticity to his physical comedy that works brilliantly but is almost the opposite of Keaton’s style. Keaton is somehow more geometric, stiffer but precise.
There’s one sequence where he’s alone on a moving train, racing from car to car doing impossible things – shovelling fuel into the locomotive, dodging cannon fire, operating the train’s levers – and it’s perfectly choreographed and executed.
His deadpan manner makes it even funnier; in terms of his mannerisms, nothing is exaggerated or wasted, but it doesn’t feel cold either.
Keaton performed most of the stunts in the movie himself, some of which are extraordinary, and apparently broke his neck during one of them although it went untreated and he didn’t find out until many years later. Astonishingly, real trains were used throughout the production (another thing I can’t imagine being signed off nowadays) and the scene where a train rolls onto a burning bridge, collapsing into the river below, was not only a real train but also a real bridge, making the shot the most expensive in cinema history at the time.
They must have been under tremendous pressure to get it right the first time.
In a fun but unexpected link to The Gold Rush, there’s also a bear in this movie, possibly the same one given that both movies were filmed within the same few years and there likely weren’t that many trained bears available for movie appearances. It certainly looks the same.
In terms of storytelling, there’s an exceptional clarity to the film, especially compared to the others I’ve watched so far. I never found myself wondering what was happening or having to rewind to check something, which is even more remarkable given the lack of sound.
It also struck me that the film must have been one of the earliest examples of a blockbuster – the scope and aim and also the constant action, with the comedy being woven throughout, made me think a little of those big 80s blockbusters like Back To The Future or Ghostbusters, even though they’re very different films.
When reading about it, I was surprised to find that it was a flop when it was first released. However, it’s now considered a masterpiece, not just of silent cinema but generally. I can see why.
The Mysterious Lady: glamour, espionage, drama
The Mysterious Lady came out in 1928, just as silent cinema was coming to an end. The first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, had been released in 1927 and audiences were already adapting to watching movies with sound.
The Mysterious Lady stars Greta Garbo as Tania Fedorova, a glamorous and enigmatic Russian spy. Interestingly, Garbo’s people were concerned that audiences might find her Swedish accent off-putting if she switched to movies with sound, but she did end up making the switch in the end.
Set in Vienna after WW1, Garbo’s Federova falls in love with an Austrian officer – the same officer she is supposed to be stealing crucial military papers from. Will she go ahead and carry out her task, or will love rule the day?
Her performance here is mesmerising – always composed and elegant with small shifts of expression managing to convey a depth of emotion that’s quite remarkable. I found her surprisingly relatable – the men in her life all want something from her and she manages each of them with a chameleon-like deftness, delicately treading the lines between keeping everyone happy while preserving her own self-respect, something that I suspect a lot of women will understand.
I loved the sets and costumes in this film – the costumes especially were spectacular, from Garbo’s beautiful dresses to the various military uniforms – and the sets are opulent and lush.
Why silence still speaks
Watching these three films together felt like more than a history lesson – I was surprised and delighted at how engaging and entertaining these movies were. I found myself paying closer attention than I typically do, noticing nuances of expression and composition that might normally have passed me by.
I noticed that the silent movies still had some of the theatricality of the early films I watched last month, but in a way that had clearly evolved into something newer and more modern. The lack of sound became a pleasure rather than the difficulty I expected it to be and helped me realise how much can be expressed through simple light, motion and setting (as well as the acting, of course).
In a time when so many people are addicted to their phones and craving ways to engage more deeply, it makes me wonder whether there isn’t space for resurgence or reinvention of the silent film – a form which demands our attention but also rewards it many times over.
Join me next month for a side trip into German Expressionism, a 1920s genre of movie which became the foundation of horror and went on to inspire many modern films.