Eight to go.
It's been a fun two-plus years covering twenty years of Hollywood history. I've learned a lot. So before I leave for the 1930s, let's drop some final thoughts....
Sound: The Best (and Worst) Thing to Happen to Film
It's hard to overstate the way The Jazz Singer altered the cinematic landscape. In just a couple of short years, everyone was hopping on the talkie bandwagon and movies changed forever.
Obviously, we know how the leap to sound turns out just by heading to any multiplex screen. And the change is undoubtedly a good thing. However, I cannot help but be a little sad.
Beyond the loss of a very specific type of film, sound created a couple of unfortunate side effects. First, film regressed. When you look at the films of the last half of the decade, cinema was pushing boundaries. Dramatic camera moves, quick cuts and almost dialogue free productions produced some of my favorite images. Sound forced the cameras to be still again and actors had to stay near the stationary microphones. The cameras had to be enclosed in booths so the mics would not pick up the sound of the film rolling. It was a step back until the technology could catch back up.
More than that, sound really created the foreign film and the baggage that goes with it. When you had to "read" every movie, it did not matter what language the actors were speaking; you just slap the right intertitles on the film. Cinema was a universal language. And some of the best films were foreign. With sound, now the language matters and a lot of filmgoers to this day stop going to see films they have to read.
Germans rule
In light of the above, it's fascinating that most of my favorite directors were foreign. Specifically, German.
F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang captured my imagination like no other directors in the 1920s. Murnau moved from Gothic horror to an epic tale of a doorman to a romance that blossoms when a husband decides not to kill his wife. Lang gave us the goofy fun of an adventurous playboy, the shadowy world of an omnipotent criminal mastermind and a vision of a future city and its technology. I loved them all. I'm happy to see more of Lang's work, but knowing I'm nearing the end of Murnau's filmography is depressing.
Buster Makes Charlie Eat His Shoe
If you'd asked me coming into the 1920s whether Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin had the better decade, I would have had to go with The Tramp. But Chaplin underwhelmed in his few offerings while Keaton was both prolific and consistently great.
Where Did All the Teens Go?
The 1910s were dominated by D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Douglas Fairbanks amongst others. Where are they a decade later? Fairbanks had a decent decade, but the rest were at best mediocre. Pickford was almost embarrassing, continuing to play children long past her prime. And seeing how far Griffith fell from a decade in which he defined what film should be is downright depressing.
Disney Is Odd and Other Toon Observations
One of the things I was most excited for was to track the early career of Walt Disney. Having watched a fair bit of the Alice comedies, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and (of course) Mickey Mouse, I have come to one conclusion:
Walt Disney was a weird dude.
I won't go into all the details here, but his toons tended to feature some inventive animal torture and at their worst, racist.
The easy retort is that Disney reflected the style of the time, but you do not see the same type of characterizations in Felix the Cat for example. Disney was seemingly on his own here, or at the very least, in limited company.
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