Been watching them a lot on Turner Classic movies. These are great movies!! I like them better than most talkies. There's also quite a few on Youtube. D. W. Griffith was amazing. He catches flak today because of "Birth of a Nation" (1915-which would have been a great movie if he'd just cut out the last hour) but movies as "Intolerance" (1916) are superb! It cost him $2 million to make. That's like $40 million today (I'm just guessing so don't pitch a frigging fit over it). It was complex too: four story lines from different periods of history all told side-by-side and then drawn together. Nobody was doing anything like that besides Griffith. In fact, the movie didn't do well because the audience of that time simply didn't get it. But it is undoubtedly one of the greatest movies EVER.

Griffith also did the first interracial love film in 1919 called "Broken Blossoms" about a Chinese Buddhist missionary, Cheng, who comes to London to spread Buddha's message but is swallowed up in the despair, racism and poverty of the slums. He takes in an abused girl (played by Lillian Gish) and nurses her back to health after a severe beating from her prize fighter father. The girl's heart starts to blossom under Cheng's tenderness and care. We might have expected Griffith to have made a safer movie with a white man and an "exotic" Chinese girl but Griffith was a true trailblazer. This movie came out when there was still a lot of Yellow Peril hysteria so it was pretty daring for its time. Seeing Hollywood's penchant for only teaming up white men with Far Eastern females as its default interracial love arrangement, we shouldn't be too surprised that "Broken Blossoms" has never been remade (I could be wrong but I doubt it).

I watched Mary Pickford's "The Poor Little Rich Girl" (1917) and loved it. She was great in that! Way better than Shirley Temple. And Pickford ad-libbed her own comedic bits in the film. She also came up with a new way of lighting the actors onscreen that went on to become a staple of both film-making and still photography. But you really have to see a 1926 Pickford film called "The Sparrows" to see the height of silent film greatness. What a shame talkies ruined everything. Silent movies were just really finding themselves by the late 20s and suddenly it was all over.

Another super movie is 1920's "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" starring Rudolph Valentino who is simply incomparable as a leading man. Gable and Flynn couldn't hold a candle to him. I never really watched Valentino before but now I realize what all the hullabaloo was about--the man was a superb actor besides being devilishly handsome (almost as much as me--yeah, I'm lying out my ass).

Harold Lloyd's "Safety Last" from 1923 is a great classic comedy. That's the one where he scales a building and ends up hanging from the hands of the big clock. He was really up there too--no fake backdrops. There was a platform under him to catch him if he fell but the camera angles are so clever, you simply can't see anything but the ground WAAAAY down there. He really looks like he's hanging a hundred or more feet in the air with nothing under him.

I loved Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill" which has the scene where a house facade falls on him but the open window comes down around him so he doesn't get crushed. That was real--no trick photography which they didn't have much of in 1928. Too bad he signed with MGM and lost his star status. I've seen a few Keaton movies from the 20s and his stunts were amazing.

Then there's Charlie Chaplin's "The Immigrant" from 1917. He does some of his best bits here. He apparently went four days without sleep while editing the movie himself. What's odd is that his stuff was made for silent films. There would be no advantage to making them into talkies. You can see where Rowan Atkinson learned a thing or two. The Pink Panther cartoons also seem Chaplinish.

Silent movies should not be considered obsolete. I think that was a huge mistake on the part of Hollywood and the public. They are a different genre. I'd love to see them come back. Actually, it's happening. I bought a DVD of Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu" that is a modern silent movie. They did it that way mainly because they had no budget to speak of but also because in Lovecraft's time, his story would have been a silent one. Considering how much nothing they had to work with, the film is really quite good. A million times better than the extravaganzas today that are overblown and overhyped and a huge disappointment. The guy at the store where I bought it said some bigtime director loved and wants to do a full budget version. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Here's to the silent movie...