Why Silent Films Roared With the Reality of Their Times

The silent era is celebrated for its innocence. The charming picture it presents of America in the early years of the century has led people to assume that life was quieter then, gentler and more civilized.

But the silent era recorded another America. It revealed the corruption of city politics, the scandal of white-slave rackets, the exploitation of immigrants. Gangsters, procurers and loan sharks flashed across the same screen as Mary Pickford, but their images have mostly been destroyed, leaving us with an unbalanced portrait of an era.

I believe that one day, those films which give us an accurate impression of how people lived will be regarded as precious as the most imaginative flights of fiction.

Our view of the silent era is conditioned by the minuscule number of films in circulation--films which have selected themselves by virtue of their availability. . . . While few of these films made history, all of them--if only for a few moments -- recorded it.

The early films were made to a pattern which had proved its commercial value on the popular stage. Give the audience someone to identify with, bring in “heart interest,” a pretty girl or an appealing child, and wind up with a happy ending. Into this you can mix whatever theme you want. Banal it may sound, but some remarkable films were made with this formula.

. . . If the subject of prostitution were to be shown, a parable set in biblical times might (just) be acceptable to the bluenoses. Imagine their shock when upon the screen appeared modern settings, realistic playing and equally realistic prostitutes! No matter that such films were animated by reforming zeal. What of their effect upon adolescent boys?

Sadly, even these realistic films stopped short of attacking the system that led to prostitution. Melodramatic devices would place the police in the role of heroes; a love affair would end a corrupt regime in City Hall; an evil factory owner would be redeemed by a worker’s child. Melodrama was an antidote to the sting of truth.

Nonetheless, that sting sometimes penetrated the hokum, to the discomfiture of those in authority. They took their ideas from the newspapers. The stories of many one- and two-reelers, especially those of D.W. Griffith, were adapted from current issues. Many workers, illiterate and foreign-born, read no newspapers, and the nickelodeon was thus a source of astonishment. Nickelodeons were sometimes seen as breeding grounds for crime and sedition.

. . . The movies were born into the era of reform, which (roughly) opened with the inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 and closed with the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917.

. . . If the movies never quite lived up to the reformers’ expectations--either by preventing revolution or by causing it--they did eventually become the most powerful medium of communication in the world--a universal language. In order to outdo the rivalry of the press, they had to forego what a newspaper contained--hard news, preaching and propaganda--and become a reliable source of entertainment. Soon, even newsreels were full of hokum, extolling flagpole squatters and stunt flyers, but avoiding industrial or political unrest. In the ‘20s, if a film set out to educate rather than to entertain, audiences knew, by some sixth sense, how to avoid it.

. . . Countless social or message pictures had played on people’s sense of outrage, and they had grown tired of feeling ashamed or indignant when they went to the movies. A producer’s wisecrack--”If you want to send a message, send it Western Union”--summed up the desire to rid the movie theater of the problem picture. As people stayed away from war films once the war was over, so they stayed away from social pictures once the era of reform was over.

. . . Only one filmmaker in America devoted an entire career to making what were known as “thought films.” That filmmaker was a woman, Lois Weber, who worked as a reformer within the industry. Born in Allegheny, Pa., and educated in Pittsburgh, her ambition was to cultivate her voice in New York. Her parents refused, so she ran away, with eight dollars, only to find her music instructor had gone abroad. Too proud to return home, she endured the kind of poverty she so vividly captured in her films.

. . . Eventually, she joined a musical comedy company, became an actress and met her husband, Phillips Smalley. But she never forgot the immigrants and their struggles. “I came suddenly to realize the blessings of a voiceless language to them,” she said. As a filmmaker she decided to make what she called “missionary pictures.” Some of these she made with her husband (both were Christian Scientists), but she was always the dominant partner.

“I like to direct,” she said, “because I believe a woman, more or less intuitively, brings out many of the emotions that are rarely expressed on the screen. I may miss what some of the men get, but I will get other effects that they never thought of.”

The range of subjects Weber tackled was as astonishing as the speed with which she produced them. “Suspense” (1913) outdid Griffith in its technical wizardry. “Civilized and Savage” (1913) had Smalley as a white man nursed to health by a black woman (Weber), who, her task complete, sets out to find his wife.

In 1915, Weber created her first sensation, “The Hypocrites.” A four-reeler made the previous year, it was held back because of its inflammatory treatment. Using an allegorical style, with multiple exposures, to flay politics, big business and the church, it further shocked the Establishment by having a naked girl play the figure of Truth. Audiences flocked to see the nudity and were then obliged to sit through the moral lesson, upsetting to many of them. The nudity was filmed so innocently that few boards of censors could ban it. There were several attempts; the Catholic mayor of Boston demanded that Truth be draped, so clothes were allegedly painted, frame by frame, onto the film!

. . . Weber continued to make social films well into the Jazz Age, when she suffered the rejection of audiences. She and Smalley were divorced in 1922--he had become an alcoholic--and her company failed. She made a few more pictures, one of which, “The Angel of Broadway” (1927), combined the cynicism of the ‘20s (nightclub parodies of the Salvation Army) with the commitment of the reform era (social work in the slums). It was her last silent film, and by 1930 she was managing an apartment building.