Kevin Brownlow

Best remembered as "America's Sweetheart," silent-film star Mary Pickford (1892-1979) was once the most famous woman in the world, a genuine American folk heroine adored by the masses for two decades. Yet today's audiences have little knowledge of the more than fifty feature films she made during her remarkable career, let alone her enormous behind-the-scenes power in early Hollywood. A pioneering independent star/producer and cofounder of United Artists with Charlie Chaplin. D. W. Griffith, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks, Pickford exercised complete control over her films and earned the loyalty of her collaborators, who were among the best of the industry's early directors, cinematographers, and screenwriters. Selected from the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences's Margaret Herrick Library especially for this book, the rare film stills, production shots, and personal photographs - most never before published - reveal Pickford's great versatility as an actress and attest to the high quality of her productions. The text is full of entertaining anecdotes about the star and her circle, offering a window into the process of filmmaking in the silent era.

Kevin Brownlow, a film editor in his own right and author of the seminal silent film trilogy initiated with The Parade's Gone By. . ., brings to Lean's biography an exhaustive knowledge of the art and the industry. One learns about the making of movies as realized by a master, but also of the highly personal costs of genius. The troubled Quaker family from which Lean came influenced his relationship with his son, his brother, and his six wives. Yet he showed in his work a deep understanding of humanity. The vastness of this scholarly and entertaining enterprise is augmented by sixteen pages of scenes from Lean's color films, thirty-two pages from his black-and-white movies, and throughout the text a vast number of photographs from his life and location work.

Passing in review here is the silent film era and Mr. Brownlow has done a splendid job of vitalizing the past through interviews and personal research. Most of this material has never seen print before and the filmophile will go wild over reminiscences such as Joseph Henabery's (who assisted Griffith on Intolerance). And the snaps: Garbo who loved watching talking pictures in reverse but refused to view them the right way. . . Fairbanks intimidated by the Robin Hood castle -- ""You expect me to jump across that?"" . . . Buster Keaton who broke his neck doing his own stunts and didn't realize it until ten years later. . . the chaos that was the original Ben Hur -- ""we'll paint muscles on you!"" . . . Irving Thalberg arguing with Von Stroheim over a foot fetishist -- ""You are a footage fetishist"" . . .