Tweet Top Favorite Silent Film Books

One of my great guilty pleasures is Sabatini novels. I agree, sometime they are archaic and hard to get through the very thick wads of florid dialogue. They DO film better as a swash of the editor's sword can cut out the pounds of extraneous flesh to get to the meat of the discussion. They're still fun and ripping yarns. I've not read Mistress Wilding in decades, I wonder if I still have it in the box of unpacked books?

One post here mentioned Robert Klepper's book of reviews. I'd have to say Klepper has the most ... peculiar ... tastes and/or prejudices. His reviews frequently leave me stunned. There's no question about him possibly pulling our legs or deliberately trying to be provocative -- he's too serious for that. He just has an extremely bizarre opinion of too many films. (Not to mention that he sounds like George Shelps' even more odious brother whenever the subject of Chaplin comes up.)

Oh, I could tell a story or two about Robert Klepper. Yes, he had a passionate contempt for Chaplin, and I asked him about that once. He blamed Chaplin for the eventual alcoholism of Mildred Harris, and I knew Robert well enough to know that if there was anything that he hated more violently than Charlie Chaplin, it was hearing a viewpoint contrary to his own. So I dropped the subject. But yes, he was a man of firmly-held and sometimes inexplicable opinions.

He was also suffering a lot from the illness that finally took him away, and that probably colored his outlook. Finishing that book of reviews was pretty much the goal that kept him going.

[silentfilm]

I've just finished re-reading Anthony Slide's Early American Cinema. It's not a big book size-wize, so it fit great into my airplane carry-on bag. But it is a great overview of the American film industry from the 1890s until 1919. I still enjoyed the book, although in the many years since I've read it I've become famaliar with most of the history in it, so it is almost like a review for me.

But thinking about it, I almost have some of the reservations about this book that I did about Slide's much bigger Silent Players. For example, Mr. Slide does not like comedies very much. Chaplin gets about three pages in the book, mostly about his salary and contracts. Hal Roach gets barely a page. While Slide goes into great detail about the companies producing all kinds of shorts in the early teens, the comedy short producers, with the notable exception of Mack Sennett, get short shrift. At least he mentions comedies though, because his chapter on genres leaves out cartoons completely.

My chief beef with Silent Players was that it was too gossipy and that Slide speculated about the sexual orientation of too many actors with too little information.

One thing that got my attention in Early American Cinema was this sentence on page 199, about Pearl White's post-career life, "Her lesbian activities were the sensational gossip of French society." Just so there is no misunderstanding, I just want to say that there's nothing wrong with being a lesbian. And for some silent era personalities like William Haines and Alla Nazimova, being gay was certainly an important part of their career and life story. But I checked Eve Golden's Pearl While biography for Classic Images, and there was no mention of lesbian activities. Ms. Golden just mentions that Ms. White was married until 1921 to her second husband Wallace McCutcheon, when she divorced him. Denise Lowe's An Encyclopedic Diction of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930 only mentions her marriages also.

Ms. Golden also writes of Ms. White living in Europe, "Pearl also found happiness with a handsome young Greek millionaire (as indeed, who wouldn't?). She and Theodore Cossika shared homes in France and Cairo, and traveled all over the world: India, the Mid-East, the Orient, Russia." The full article is at http://www.classicimages.com/past_issues/view/?x=/1997/july97/white.html.

Still, I'd recommend Early American Cinema as a good overview, without getting too deep, of the first two decades of American movies. Silent Players is about as gossipy as a book can get without being Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon.

[Danny Burk]

Oh, I could tell a story or two about Robert Klepper. Yes, he had a passionate contempt for Chaplin, and I asked him about that once. He blamed Chaplin for the eventual alcoholism of Mildred Harris, and I knew Robert well enough to know that if there was anything that he hated more violently than Charlie Chaplin, it was hearing a viewpoint contrary to his own. So I dropped the subject.

I knew Robert fairly well and once asked about his disdain for Chaplin. He replied that he couldn't understand how anyone could see comedy in a starving person eating his own shoes. Feeling that this was only the tip of a large iceberg, I didn't press him further. He did indeed have very strong opinions that he never hesitated to voice with great enthusiasm, either for or against.

More aristocratic silent film books:

Lotte H. Eisner, "The Haunted Screen"
Lotte H. Eisner, "Murnau"
Lotte H. Eisner, "Fritz Lang"
Klaus Kreimeier, "The UFA Story"
Siegfried Kracauer, "From Caligari To Hitler"
Luciano Berriatúa, "Los Proverbios Chinos De F. W. Murnau"

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien
http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com/

One post here mentioned Robert Klepper's book of reviews. I'd have to say Klepper has the most ... peculiar ... tastes and/or prejudices. His reviews frequently leave me stunned. There's no question about him possibly pulling our legs or deliberately trying to be provocative -- he's too serious for that. He just has an extremely bizarre opinion of too many films. (Not to mention that he sounds like George Shelps' even more odious brother whenever the subject of Chaplin comes up.)

I almost included a caveat to that effect. But I still found the book generally very interesting even when I strongly disagreed with him. The other posts about his strong opinions reminded me of another book I forgot to list, Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen, by William M. Drew.

And I also didn't think of 2 more books covering specific films, both with many nice stills in addition to their text:
Fifty Great American Silent Films 1912-1920: A Pictorial Survey by Anthony Slide and Edward Wagenknecht
The Films of the Twenties by Jerry Vermilye

[silentfilm]

The other posts about his strong opinions reminded me of another book I forgot to list, Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen, by William M. Drew.

And I also didn't think of 2 more books covering specific films, both with many nice stills in addition to their text:
Fifty Great American Silent Films 1912-1920: A Pictorial Survey by Anthony Slide and Edward Wagenknecht
The Films of the Twenties by Jerry Vermilye

William Drew's Speaking of Silents: First Ladies of the Screen is a good book, and I can recommend it. Fifty Great American Silent Films 1912-1920: A Pictorial Survey by Anthony Slide and Edward Wagenknecht was one of the first silent film books that I bought. It has wonderful photos, and a nice commentary on each film.

I just got a birthday present of a book that we should add to our list: The Harold Lloyd Encyclopedia by Annette Lloyd. It's packed full of everything you ever wanted to know about Harold, but were afraid to ask...

I have two books by Bill Everson; American Silent Cinema, and The Western. Can anyone recommend further titles of his I should hunt down?? Superb writer.

I have two books by Bill Everson; American Silent Cinema, and The Western. Can anyone recommend further titles of his I should hunt down?? Superb writer.

My short answer would be all of them - choose the subject that interests you most. But to be more specific, my favorites other than American Silent Film are Love in the Film, the first of his books that I read and which led me to the rest, and Hollywood Bedlam: Classic Screwball Comedies.

I am not a big fan of horror films but I enjoyed Classics of the Horror Film. I also like The Detective in Film. I think he was coauthor of one book about westerns and sole author of another. The one I have is The Hollywood Western which is a 1992 revised and updated edition of a 1969 book. (It says most of the material is new.) Others include The Bad Guys and his small book Claudette Colbert in the Pyramid series.

Many of his program notes are online at NYU Everson Program Notes. And if you have access to issues of Films in Review he had many articles published there.

[Mike Gebert]

Well, as I mentioned above I have a nostalgic love for Classics of the Horror Film, but it's also interesting to me because he really has to wrestle with the genre, decide what's good and bad in it, recognize its frequent tendency to be cheap or stupid or to cheat the audience in some way... and it's also a genre that fully engages the tension between his veddy-British sensibility (since there's such an English tinge to the genre) and his love of American cinema. There's some of this in the western and screwball books, too, but it really comes out here (and in some ways even moreso in the second COTHF book, where he ends up writing about the decline and occasional high points in the genre of the 80s and 90s, and also the Hammer films, which he almost completely ignores the first time around).

American Silent Film is a little dry and textbooky by comparison to me (of course it's much less so than most actual textbooks). To me Everson is at his best dealing with genre films which are less than the best.

Thanks gents....a quick trip to abebooks then.

[silentfilm]

I just finished reading Coy Watson, Jr.'s The Keystone Kid. Watson's father was a special effects guy and assistant director at Keystone and later at Fox. Junior appeared in many silent films as a baby and small boy and a teenager.

The book doesn't have tons of information on silent films, but he does describe the working methods of comedy directors in the 1920s. The charm of this book is that it is packed with local flavor. The filmmaking industry at the time really did make up stuff as they went along. Watson did get to meet a few famous performers, and Mack Sennett of course. It is packed with photos, and a detailed filmography.

When Watson, Jr. became an adult, he became bored with film roles and became a successful news photographer instead.

The book doesn't have tons of information on silent films, but he does describe the working methods of comedy directors in the 1920s. The charm of this book is that it is packed with local flavor. The filmmaking industry at the time really did make up stuff as they went along. Watson did get to meet a few famous performers, and Mack Sennett of course. It is packed with photos, and a detailed filmography.

When Watson, Jr. became an adult, he became bored with film roles and became a successful news photographer instead.

OMG, I love "The Keystone Kid" especially for the picture of what it was like to be a little boy in 'teens Los Angeles. That Watson happened to be involved in the nascent film industry is almost secondary to the book's (and probably the Kid's) considerable charm. He could have been a plumber's assistant and the book would have been as good.

One of the best afternoon's worth of research I've yet spent was interviewing both Delmar and Coy, Jr. My questions didn't revolve around their showbiz experiences, I initially asked them about a reporter they'd both worked with. I guess they don't get asked about that side of their careers very often, and all it took was one prompt and off they went! It stopped being related to anything I was working on after a few minutes, but it was so interesting I wasn't about to try to stem the flow. Actually, I was helping it along.

Fred

There is one great book I found this year that I think hasn't been mentioned on this forum - William Parrill's European Silent Films on Video: A Critical Guide. It was published in 2006 by McFarland, and it's very similar in content to Klepper's Silent Films guide from 1999, with reviews of hundreds of films. The main difference is that Parrill's book is smaller in scope (being only European films available on video, so he doesn't review movies that are only seen in archives or festivals), but much more comprehensive within its range - there were hardly any videos I noticed that he missed. (For example, one glaring omission is the wonderful Soviet film Happiness, which is mentioned but never reviewed. Other foreign releases might have come out too recently to be included, since I noticed that he often reviews older versions of films that have since been restored & reissued in the US.) But with hundreds of films covered, shorts and features, there are many reviews of movies I never suspected were available on video - even better, he names the distributor of each film and its visual quality, if you want to go looking for it. His reviews are extremely thorough - for each film he typically gives the plot, a critical analyis, and a summary of other reviewers' opinions. He has definitely done his research in giving the background to many of these films; the Russian reviews were especially informative. Though expensive (about $100), this is one of the best reference works on silent films, and guarantees many happy hours of browsing to any lover of foreign silents.

I know this is late in the game and has been said already but I really would suggest James card's Seductive Cinema as the perfect intro book. I recommend it to people all the time because it is a fast read, it covers the main silent cinema folks that most people are already at least familiar with, and it truly does convey a love for the artform.
It is basically an autobiography (which I have never read one yet that had any real facts in it) BUT he makes film archivists sound like Indiana Jones.
I think James Card is the closest thing to a rock star the field ever had. Looking back he went about everything in a wrong, self serving way, but he did it so colorfully you can look back and go, "Man i wish I would have partied with that guy!" All the while knowing that if you really did you probably would have hated him, like any good rock star (cool as hell in concert, but a big useless mess in real life)

JAMES CARD RULES!

Also, I know it is not a book but if you can find Anthony Slide and Paul O'Dell's old fanzine from the 60's/70's called The Silent Picture (they pop up on ebay) - I would recommend them (I hink there was 20 issues) since it was written during their early "discovery" mode of silent film (and pre 1978 Brighton) so you'll get some nice short coverage of alot of broad facets of silent film which can help spearhead what your main interest might turn out to be to pursue further.

quote from Frederica: "....and on a far less exalted note, there is the hootworthy:
The Fatty Arbuckle Case, Leo Guild ("The Hollywood story no one dared publish!!)"

I looked up Leo Guild on the internet after reading this book because I wanted to find his grave and micturate upon it.

A. Slides 'Silent Essays' is a good research book, his chapter on music in silents was pretty interesting. Same with women directors.

quote from Frederica: "....and on a far less exalted note, there is the hootworthy:
The Fatty Arbuckle Case, Leo Guild ("The Hollywood story no one dared publish!!)"

I looked up Leo Guild on the internet after reading this book because I wanted to find his grave and micturate upon it.

The cover art is classic. Huge, vaguely-demonic Arbuckle bobble-head, looming over reclining 60s' babe Virginia Rappe...sinister looking champaign bottle to the side...

Paperback covers: a lost art.

Fred

[silentfilm]

I've been out of town for a couple of weeks and been able to catch up on some books and DVDs.

The Rivals of D.W. Griffith: Alternate Auteurs 1913-1918 (edited by Richard Kozarski) is the book program for a silent film series put on by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1976. It focused on films from this period that were not directed by D.W. Griffith. It has profiles on all the films by various different authors, plus nice photos.

In case you are wondering what the films were, they were:
Wild and Wolly with Douglas Fairbanks
Stella Maris with Mary Pickford
Juve vs. Fantomas by Feuillade
The Mysterious X by Benjamin Christianson
The Italian with George Beban
Hell's Hinges with William S. Hart
Straight Shooting with Harry Carey, directed by John Ford
The Gun Woman with Texas Guinan
The Wishing Ring by Maurice Tourneur
Behind the Screen, The Rink, The Immigrant by Charlie Chaplin
Thomas Graal's Best Child by Mauritz Stiller
A Poor Little Rich Girl with Mary Pickford
The Gangsters and the Girl with Charles Ray
The Outlaw and His Wife by Victor Sjostrom
Rumplestilskin by Raymond West
The Blue Bird by Maurice Tourneur
The Cheat by Cecil B. DeMille
Blue Jeans with Viola Dana by John Collins

A more fascinating book was The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-1923, also Who's Who in the Movies and the Yearbook of the American Screen by Robert E. Sherwood. It is the same Robert Sherwood who later became a playwriter and screenwriter. He won an Academy Award for The Best Years of Our Lives.

In the book, Sherwood picks the twelve best films from June 1922-June 1923. Some picks are surprising, such as picking Grandma's Boy instead of Safety Last, although the latter gets an honorable mention. He picks some lost films like Hollywood and Driven. Surprisingly, the independent Shadows with Lon Chaney made the list. He also picked 24 honorable mentions that don't get a chapter of their own.

There is an eye-opening chapter on the "Censorship Menace", and the book lists all features and shorts that were released during that time period. There's also a "Who's Who" section listing dozens of performers and directors and producers.

I guess the book didn't sell very well, because although he mentions a follow-up the next year, this was the only book in the series. I think Mr. Sherwood did alright in his career eventually.

I've been out of town for a couple of weeks and been able to catch up on some books and DVDs.

The Rivals of D.W. Griffith: Alternate Auteurs 1913-1918 (edited by Richard Kozarski) is the book program for a silent film series put on by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1976.

Speaking of Kozarski, I just picked up his Hollywood on the Hudson and am enjoying it immensely.

Thanks everybody. This list a great benefit to those of us starting out.

I recently finished reading Pola Negri's autobiography, Memoirs of a Star.

This is pretty obviously self-serving and she indulges in a bit of fibbing. Within the first few pages, she manages to claim she was six and eight years old simultaneously. The failures of her marriages and love affairs are never her fault; the man always changed for the worse. She does handle with great dignity and only minimal self-defence the stories of her overblown hysteria at Valentino's funeral.

That said, her book is wonderful. Just wonderful. The entire half about her life before heading to America is fascinating, highly original, and a unique portrait of Poland before, during, and after World War One, not to mention post-war Germany.

Highly recommended!

Jim

The Rivals of D.W. Griffith: Alternate Auteurs 1913-1918 (edited by Richard Kozarski) is the book program for a silent film series put on by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1976. It focused on films from this period that were not directed by D.W. Griffith. It has profiles on all the films by various different authors, plus nice photos.

Bruce,
Thanks for the memory jolt. I remember attending that film series back in 76 and I saw many of those titles for the first time. The Walker put on really good film programs in the 70's. I was already into film comedy but those showings allowed me to broaden out my interest in film.

Gary J.

The one book that introduced me to the real possibilities of silents was Katz's Encyclopaedia; here I could ponder over such names as Priscilla Dean and Larry Semon (among other) and know of their importance, in spite of Katz's many typos and mistakes (too often silent performers' careers are said to have "ended with the coming of sound" as if to demonstrate causality, even where his assessment is historically correct).

Katz is valuable in some ways--especially in that it covers many silent players and directors that are not covered elsewhere (at least in the first edition); but Katz is also riddled with errors--especially on birth dates (he seems to have just made them up!) I have, on several occasions, checked other sources and they nearly always seem to disagree with Katz. Even when there are mutiple birthdates from different sources on a single person, Katz will rarely agree with any of the other listed dates--and it is not because Katz is right and the others were wrong.

Katz is valuable in some ways--especially in that it covers many silent players and directors that are not covered elsewhere (at least in the first edition); but Katz is also riddled with errors--especially on birth dates (he seems to have just made them up!) I have, on several occasions, checked other sources and they nearly alsways seem to disagree with Katz. Even when there are mutiple birthdates from different sources on a single person, Katz will rarely agree with any of the other listed dates--and it is not becauyse Katz is right and the others were wrong.

He also notes (in the '94 edition at least) that Wanda Hawley died in 1949, which would have come as a surprise to her (incidentally, some newspapers in 1942 were also claiming that she died, although they were confusing her with *Ormi* Hawley!). I do find Katz less and less useful as time goes on, although he includes a number of set designers and other behind-the-scenes people that I wouldn't otherwise have paid attention to...and on the other hand, he didn't bother to include Anita Page in the '94 version.

-Harold

I wasn't around when this got started, but let me add:
Fort Lee: The Film Town by Richard Koszarski
An Evening's Entertainment, The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 by Richard Koszarski
The ARt of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers by John Kobal
The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915 by Eileen Bowser
Classical Hollywood Cinema by Bordwell, Staiger, Thompson
Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States by Douglas Gomery
A Million and One Nights by Terry Ramsaye
Silent Stars by Jeanine Basinger
Sin in Soft Focus: Pre Code Hollywood by Mark Vieira

but one book I find interesting in its not being included in anyone's lists Is A HISTORY OF THE MOVIES by Benjamin B. Hampton.

RICHARD M ROBERTS

I'm surprised to see that no one has seconded Hampton's book so let me be the first. It's very worthwhile.
And if I may be so bold as to include some fun fiction from the teens try THE FILM MYSTERY by Arthur B. Reeve and THE MOVING PICTURES GIRLS pen named as/by Laura Lee Hope. And if you want to listen to them they've both been read into Librivox.org.

Not sure if NitrateVille would allow stickies but I wish this thread was way on the top as a permanent sticky. Wonderful thread!

As a person who has become much more attentive towards silent films, I have now begun purchasing books (was recommended Brownlow's "The Parade's Gone By" which I purchased immediately), "American Silent Film" and recently ordered "Silent Films 1877-1996: A Critical Guide To 646 Movies".

But I was wondering...for some of the books recommended by some of you, such as the "Variety" reviews and the AFI book. Are these expensive because they are out of print or they were expensive to begin with?

The AFI books have always been expensive, at least the ones printed in the last 20 years or so. But thankfully, all their catalogue entries (silent and sound) have now been made available to everyone, at least temporarily:
http://www.afi.com/members/catalog/

The 1921-30 entries were the first to be compiled (in 1971) and are not as rigorously detailed as later decades. Some titles are now easily available (like 1923's Slow as Lightning, recently discussed here) that were so obscure back then that they carried the line "No information about the nature of this film has been found". I hope that someday the 20s volume can be comprehensively updated.

-Harold

[Mike Gebert]

But I was wondering...for some of the books recommended by some of you, such as the "Variety" reviews and the AFI book. Are these expensive because they are out of print or they were expensive to begin with?

My guess is, these kinds of things were generally produced at high prices for libraries, and in small numbers, and most of them are still on the shelves, so the number that escape into the used book market is not anywhere near big enough to make the price fall.

Boy, I'd love to find a whole set of those New York Times bound reviews, to just luxuriate in. I'm sure the content is online, but it wouldn't be the same (and neither would reading the actual papers; I want to experience being the geeky 12-year-old who leafed through them, marveling that so many people worked so hard to make things no one has seen or even thought about again, like this).

My public library, which is otherwise a fine institution, tossed their set of NY Times film reviews because it made their shelves look cluttered. And no, they were long gone by the time I found out about it. The librarian told me said, "We're a popular library, not a research library" as if the two were mutually exclusive. I guess dictionaries were the next books to go in the dumpster.