While the Parade Went By

By Frank Rich

HOLLYWOOD: THE PIONEERS by Kevin Brownlow and John Kobal; Knopf; 272 pages; $20

The world knows that Hollywood's Pleistocene period was the dawn of popular art. According to Historian Kevin Brownlow, it was also the sunset of the movies' frontier spirit. "Pioneers are people of exceptional energy--a quality that sets them apart," he begins. The narrative that follows is a valedictory to the singular men and women who invested and finally squandered those ergs when the hills and plains of Hollywood were still uncharted territories.

Brownlow's oversize album is an adjunct to the Thames Television series now being shown in the U.S.--and an unofficial supplement to the author's classic about the silents, The Parade's Gone By.

Yet the new work can stand alone. It brims with fresh material: accounts by veterans of the silent era, accompanied by some 300 stills, many of them previously unpublished, from the collection of Archivist John Kobal. The photographs, carefully selected and strikingly reproduced, add more than decoration to the text. Stills of Theda Bara as a Madonna in The Forbidden Path (1918) and Corinne Griffith surrounded by a field of flowers in Outcast (1928) prove that the silents offered impressionistic masterpieces that have remained unequaled. A candid shot of Jackie Coogan, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks clowning on the set of The Kid helps flesh out Coogan's joyous memories of his child-star days. The many photos of old Hollywood sets --including a sun-flooded reconstruction of Ford's Theater for The Birth of a Nation --attest to the resourcefulness of movie craftsmen in the pre-sound-stage period. The eccentricities of Hollywood's first showmen are hilariously evoked in a picture that shows Cecil B. DeMille directing a scene to the accompaniment of his personal violinist.

In a succinct commentary, Brownlow manages to illuminate the crucial aspects of his story, from the revolutionary impact of The Great Train Robbery in 1903, to Hollywood's World War I boom era, to the arrival of Will Hays' censorship. Most of the time the story is told, as it should be, through testimonies of survivors. Without resorting to the keyhole journalism of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, Brownlow removes the filters from some widely accepted views. Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle is presented as a guileless clown who became a national symbol of infamy before he could grasp what was happening to him. Rudolph Valentino is convincingly portrayed as a modest, good-natured charmer whose gifts are unjustly neglected by modern audiences. In Brownlow's account, Leading Man John Gilbert's career was not destroyed by his allegedly high-pitched voice but by the soupy dialogue of his first sound movies.

There is also new information about the era's most famous flameouts (D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim) and the best-documented veterans (Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, Lillian Gish). Even the trivia somehow does not seem trivial. It is touching to hear Frank Capra recall Mack Sennett's sad mansion full of unread books and overdressed servants. Director Henry Hathaway, who remained active past True Grit (1969), wittily brings back the days when his job was to follow DeMille around with a chair on location. A writer remembers the shock of seeing her credits on a silent version of Macbeth: "By William Shakespeare. Titles by Anita Loos."

If the anecdotes are often tinged by sorrow, the melancholy is appropriate. Brownlow feels a true sense of loss about the era he describes. So many of the people and landmarks are gone now; so many early films have literally turned to dust. Brownlow holds that the advent of sound robbed movies of their power to stimulate the viewers' imaginations: once the audience no longer had to imagine voices, it ceased to be an active "creative contributor to the process of making a film." Hollywood: The Pioneers offers powerful support for that belief, including a 1928 photo that draws the curtain on an adventurous, fatally innocent era: as a group of bored technicians look on MGM's fabled trademark, Leo the lion, roars into a microphone for the very first time.

-- Frank Rich

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