“REAL ART ENDURES” blared a printed United Artists sales pitch to theaters in 1920. “Art is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of popular selection. D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms is a more powerful attraction today than when it was first shown last Spring, because people speak of it, they see it again and again, and those who have not yet had the opportunity are looking for it. They feel it is the one film they must not miss. That is why Broken Blossoms is a more compelling box-office feature for you now than ever before. It’s name above your theater entrance means big business and prestige for your house.”

In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten. (more…)

“I am really a coward. I know I am, so that’s why I did foolish things. I was decorated eight or nine times, trying to prove that I was not a coward, but after it was all over I still knew, know, that I was a coward.”

– John Ford –

June 4, 1942. The Battle of Midway. John Ford was on his back, covered in debris, unconscious. All around him bombs were dropping, buildings were erupting into monstrous fireballs, and young marines were dodging deadly lines of machine-gun strafing sent down by Japanese fighter planes. Ford and his assistant, young Jack MacKenzie Jr. (whose father was an RKO cinematographer) had been perched on the roof of a power station on Eastern Island, brazenly filming the morning attack by the Japanese and reporting enemy plane positions to headquarters, when a bomb landed a scant twenty feet from their position. The shockwave was so great that MacKenzie later recalled he was “bounced flat on my face by the terrific explosion,” adding, “we almost lost Commander Ford.” (more…)