Recently I took my two daughters to see a silent film at Film Forum here in New York. “Kid Boots” was a hit romantic comedy of 1926, starring the stage comic Eddie Cantor (roughly the Martin Short of his era) and Clara Bow (think Britney Spears circa 2000).
I got the girls on board by promising them popcorn and soda and an Uber back home. But I couldn’t budge their hunch that silent films were bygone detritus, and that the only reason people used to like them was that back then, there was nothing better.
It’s a common impression, but it’s mistaken. Silent films still have a great deal to offer, and the reason has a lot to do — paradoxically — with linguistics.
We tend to encounter the genre on its heightened, macabre side: A Halloween showing of Lon Chaney grotesquely made up in “Phantom of the Opera” as Mary Philbin emotes as Christine alongside. The gloomy horror of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” The stagey, bug-eyed trance of Gloria Swanson as she plays a forgotten silent star in “Sunset Boulevard.” On the lighter side, we might encounter clips here and there of Charlie Chaplin walking funny. It all may seem mildly interesting, but hardly leaves you wanting to see more.
Even sampled more widely, silent films do have their problems when viewed from a century’s distance. You often have to work to wrap your head around who on the screen is supposed to be considered attractive, because fashion changes just as language does. Especially in earlier silents, the men are often in pancake makeup and lipstick. On the basis of hairstyle, clothing and even what unfiltered cigarettes did to teeth, we have to just go with the idea that in Erich von Stroheim’s “Foolish Wives,” Mrs. Hughes (played by an actress credited as “Miss DuPont”) is the intoxicating beauty. The top class comedies — I recommend those of Harold Lloyd, famed for climbing up a building in “Safety Last” — are still brilliant, but the rest survive as curios only. The cherry bombs, the people jumping up into the air before running, and the people falling into holes were all timed with more precision and wit in Looney Tunes (whose creators grew up watching these very films but took their routines to a new level). And the world of silent films is a brutally racist one, in which Black people and other minority groups are all but nonexistent except as passing figures of fun. (The storied Black stage sensation Bert Williams’s “A Natural Born Gambler” of 1916 is a precious exception.)
But it can be surprising how much of the silent work still holds up. The acerbic Buster Keaton, with his deadpan steadiness winning out against relentless chaos, speaks to the modern zeitgeist more directly than Chaplin; his work rarely requires us to put on what I call our history glasses to perceive its value. The drama “The Crowd” (1928) — the favorite of some silent movie fans, including me — depicts an Everyman who begins adulthood thinking he’s on the way to big things. He isn’t, and the haunting final image is of him and his wife sitting in a theater watching a show and laughing, having made the best of the worst — content, but forever anonymous. The climax of “Kid Boots” has cliffs, a fraying rope, a boulder and a conveniently placed rock ledge on the way down. It’s plain what inspired Chuck Jones and his story writer Michael Maltese for the Looney Tunes “Road Runner” shorts — and in this case, the action is timed just as artfully. Cantor and Bow even fall into a hole at the end.
Linguistics has allowed me to understand what I find so mesmerizing about these antiques: It’s that they show us how central gesture, posture and facial expression are to communication. In “Speaking Our Minds,” the cognitive scientist Thom Scott-Phillips argues that seeking cooperation and conveying personal attitude, which linguists rather infelicitously call “pragmatics,” was the first component of human communication. Words and grammar evolved later, as refinements.
This can seem counterintuitive. We might think that first came the giving of names, à la Genesis, and then came the ways to put the words together, and that without these, no communication could happen. Silent films vividly show us otherwise. They could have spelled it all out on hundreds of title cards, but instead they used only as many as were necessary to convey the most urgent or specific points. Also, despite the impression of Swanson’s performance in “Sunset Boulevard,” silent film acting was not always as broad as a caricature, especially by the 1920s. Rather, the actors were good at using normal expressions and gestures to get across what they were saying and feeling. “We had faces!” Swanson’s character memorably growls.
The centrality of cooperation and attitude over speech is why the comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were just as funny in their silent films as later, when we could hear them talk. (Their first sound film was cleverly titled “Unaccustomed as We Are” — as in, to public speaking.) In the World War I epic “Wings,” released in 1927 and restored to perfection in 2012, we know from the second Clara Bow first appears why she was a star and why Gary Cooper was about to become one. They get meaning across with their faces, hands and bodies, such that soon you forget there is no sound — just as you can forget an opera isn’t in English. In “The Crowd,” at a low moment, the protagonist runs into his wife’s brother, who has made a success of himself. The actor playing the brother-in-law conveys his success perfectly with slower movement and a quietly patronizing demeanor. In “Kid Boots,” when a man asks something like, “Did you see a little guy in here?,” no title card is needed: The context and quick hand gestures instantly convey what he said, as it could in real life. This is the heart of language, despite the additional precision that words and grammar allow us.
I’m happy to say that the girls enjoyed “Kid Boots.” A film made before penicillin was invented, when barely anyone outside of Italy had heard of pizza, still comes across after 98 years. To be sure, my younger one said, “It was good but I don’t want to see another one.” But since these are my kids, I’m afraid they are going to have to. Keaton’s “The General” will be next. And then Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s longtime companion, in “Show People.” Maybe just the scene when she shows a casting agent her five renditions of meditation, passion, anger, sorrow and joy — now, there was a face!
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