II.

American Silent Cinema of the 1920s

The major American production, distribution, and exhibition companies as they are known today were all consolidated by the mid-1920s, with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros., Columbia, and Fox (see 20th Century-Fox) joining Universal, Paramount, and United Artists, which had been formed several years before. As these companies increased in size, production methods became more regimented, and the producer system was instituted, whereby one man, working above the film directors, supervised the production of a small group of films from the scripting stage to finished film. Within the limits of mainstream cinema, a few film directors occasionally managed to produce something very individual, but only in the subject matter they dealt with. Cecil B. DeMille continued to be more interested in social trends than most film-makers, and his films dealt with such things as “jazz babies”, prison conditions, and Darwinism. Erich von Stroheim combined an obsessive interest in the detailed realism of his films with a taste for rather grotesque characters, as seen, for example, in Greed (1925). A more extreme instance was the collaboration between the director Tod Browning and the actor Lon Chaney in exploring human disfigurement and physical disability in a long series of films that made a star of the latter. Similarly, in slapstick comedy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had very individual approaches within a somewhat old-fashioned style, but by far the most popular comedian of the 1920s was Harold Lloyd, whose films, such as Safety Last (1923, Sam Taylor), were shot in the polished contemporary style, and who also played a realistic character in them. Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford continued as top stars, but others with a more up-to-date persona, such as Norma Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and Colleen Moore, had greater appeal for the general public.

In the mid-1920s, American film-makers were very impressed by German films made by F. W. Murnau (The Last Laugh) and E. A. Dupont (Varieté). As a result, there was a renewed interest in camera movement, superimposition effects, and montage sequences in American films. Successful examples can be seen in films such as Seventh Heaven (1927) by Frank Borzage.