For me, it's more stylized and less realistic than color, more dreamlike, more concerned with essences than details. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Rated PG for a disturbing image and a crude gesture.
Jean Dujardin as George Valentin. Missi Pyle as Constance. Berenice Bejo as Peppy Miller. James Cromwell as Clifton. Penelope Ann Miller as Doris. John Goodman as Al Zimmer. Malcolm McDowell as Extra. Reviews Black and white and great all over. The Artist, which centres on the romance between a fading star of the silent era and a young ingenue who rises to the top following the arrival of the talkies, picked up Golden Globes for best actor in a musical or comedy Jean Dujardin , best musical or comedy film and best score at the weekend.
That could change if the film triumphs at next month's Academy Awards: previous big winners such as Slumdog Millionaire and last year's The King's Speech experienced a significant box-office bounce after carrying all before them.
In particular, it reflects a longing for formality, precision, restraint—for tuxedos, against an age of blue jeans; for crispness, responding to an era of slouch; for self-control in lieu of untrammelled expression; for consideration and dignity as a reproach to shameless individualism. The silent cinema that the director, Michel Hazanavicius, celebrates is the romantic heroism of such glamour kings as Douglas Fairbanks, the sly eroticism of such drawing-room swordsmen as Adolphe Menjou. This morning, opening—at random—Herman G.
His parents were both deaf; as a child, he learned to mime for them, to break through the enclosure of silence, and he exploited silence ever after. Chaney opens his mouth in fury and dismay, and then, for the rest of the movie, alternates between menacing the girl and feeling the deepest shame. But Chaney, by joining horror to suffering, made it an aspect of life; deformity was just another possibility of our physical nature.
The absence of shrieks and clanking sound effects helps imprint the image of that face onto our souls. Film stocks were fairly insensitive in the silent period, and enormous amounts of light were needed to get a proper image. The men and women who became romantic stars were young, with perfect skin that could withstand the high-powered illumination.
They had saucer eyes, with very white whites, and perfect teeth not so easy to come by ninety years ago. The leading men had aquiline noses; the women bowed lips. In , a profile and a figure qualified a performer as much as mimetic talent. And actors had to wear elaborate costumes well. Silence often drove scenarists and producers to the lavish and the exotic—period dramas, royal fantasies, Ruritanian romances—where words mattered less than spectacle, and the actors had to either embrace it or upend it.
One way of looking at silent comedy is that it stripped the fat from the corned beef. Each parody is both critique and homage. But we miss the spark of rebellion and wit. Douglas Fairbanks—after Charlie Chaplin the most popular male star in silent cinema—had a sense of the absurd that helped him triumph over the claptrap. Again and again, he grins and throws up his arms like a circus performer, glorying in his own feats. And it was a product of silence: in a sound film, a reason would have to be given for all the nutty things he does.
Dujardin, with a pencil mustache, looks a little like John Gilbert, but his cavorting star is meant to be a Fairbanks equivalent. When he takes her in his arms, he blows the shot. But most of what Dujardin does is obvious and broad. He smiles fatuously; he grimaces when things go wrong.
For a while, Rudolph Valentino, who seems to have given his name though nothing else to Valentin, was almost as big a sensation as Fairbanks. Half male beauty, half buffoon, he grinned and widened his eyes as if he were trying to expel them from his head.
Gilbert has a fine moment in the renowned kissing-in-the-garden scene. He presents his profile, and, more important, his mouth, to Garbo, who knows what to do with it.
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