Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Film
Ragtime and Reds
Hollywood ordinarily leaves American history well alone. But two of the winter’s big movies turn out to be meditations on early twentieth-century America. Ragtime , drawn from E. L.
As three recent films show—one on the atomic bomb, one on women defense workers during the Second World War, one on the government arts projects of the thirties —this history of our times offers film makers arresting opportunities.
The editors have invited me to write an occasional column on history as encountered in movies and on television. The assignment is welcome to one who has been irregularly a film critic as well as regularly a historian. But the job may not be so simple as it first appears.
Every man is the prisoner of his own experience; and no artistic production can escape the impress of its time.
The curious career of the Hays Office
The comparisons were inevitable. Just a year earlier, in 1921, organized baseball had tried to counter the effects of the Black Sox scandal by appointing the august Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to the newly created position of commissioner.
GOOD READING
The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay
by Alexander Walker William Morrow and Co., Inc. 65 photographs, 218 pages, $10.95
Why, that’s George Billings.
George Billings? Certainly, in Al and Ray Rockett’s long-forgotten silent epic Abraham Lincoln in 1924.
Back in the twenties, before, chances are, Jack Valenti and Linda Lovelace were even born, my Aunt Julia developed her own movie-rating system. This was based not on the movies themselves but on the stars who appeared in them.
The last of the major silent films, made shortly before sound engulfed the movie industry in 1928, may not have been golden, but they glittered brightly.
Stars of the era still glow brightly in portraits by photographer James Abbe
Superstar of the Silents
In early Hollywood there lived a King. He was married to a Queen. Her name was Mary, and she was a Golden Girl. He was dashing and marvellously graceful and young—above all young. Youth was very American, and besides, it was essential to the King
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