The Must-See Movies Of 1927-28

Director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich has called 1928 the greatest year in the history of movies, which is definitely saying something. If we expand the time frame a bit to include both 1927 and 1928, I will agree that he's on to something.

Between January 1, 1927 and the end of 1928, more than a dozen films were released which might reasonably make a list of the best movies ever made, including The General, Metropolis, Napoleon (released too early in 1927 to qualify for this year's Katies), Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, The Crowd, The Man Who Laughs, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, The Circus, Wings; Laugh, Clown, Laugh and a handful of late 1928 releases, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, The Wind, The Cameraman, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Docks Of New York and The Wedding March (eligible for next year's Katies). Greta Garbo was never more popular, Gloria Swanson was still doing great work, Emil Jannings hadn't joined the Nazi party. Lon Chaney, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish gave the best performances of their careers. Directors Murnau, Chaplin, Keaton, Lang and Dreyer were at or near their peaks, and Lubitsch was emerging as the next great director. Movie audiences wouldn't see such an outpouring of quality again until 1939, the year most film historians fix as the best ever, and it's clear, at least in retrospect, that silent movies had reached their highest ever level of artistic achievement and were poised for even greater breakthroughs.

And yet, once The Jazz Singer hit theaters, studios couldn't pay audiences to see anything but talkies. Silent movies were better than ever but for the audiences of the time, they might as well have never been made. It's as if the "Mona Lisa" were hanging in Louvre unseen while art lovers rushed past it to crowd around a McDonald's placemat.

There wouldn't again be such a disconnect between quality and box office receipts until the present age.

Commercially speaking—in the long run, the only language Hollywood speaks—silent movies were dead and there was no going back.

Unfortunately, the new sound technology was primitive, relying on large, immobile cameras and unreliable microphones that glued actors in place and returned movies to that place from whence they had just escaped, the stage-bound theater. It took about five years for sound technology to become workable enough for directors to move the camera again and more than a decade for Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland to remember that they could.

In the meantime, in case you need reminding, this is my list of movies that I consider the must-see movies of 1927-28. Unlike my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On, not all of these movies are equally accessible to a viewer unfamiliar with silent movies, but I do believe every one of them is worth the time and effort is you are so inclined.

The Circus—Charlie Chaplin's comedy of a tramp who finds love and work in the circus

The Crowd—King Vidor's gritty tale of the American Dream turned nightmare

Laugh, Clown, Laugh—Lon Chaney as a man destroyed by love

The Man Who Laughs—a macabre love story about a man with a face that inspired Heath Ledger's Joker

The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—a bittersweet romantic comedy about a prince who falls for a commoner

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans—my pick for the best movie of the year, about a marriage in crisis

Wings—a rip-snorting war picture about World War I flying aces and the girl they left behind

All but two of these movies, The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg and Wings, are available on DVD.

You might also check out Sadie Thompson, the 1928 Gloria Swanson-Lionel Barrymore movie based on Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain." Time hasn't been kind to the print and the last reel has been lost, but film historians reconstructed the ending with the use of still photographs and what remains is very good. Sadie Thompson earned Swanson an Oscar nomination, the first of three, and might have earned her and Barrymore (the latter in a supporting role) Katies for their work if I could have been more certain of what I was seeing. Sadie Thompson is available on DVD.

What can I tell you? This whole business of handing out awards, even with eighty years of hindsight, is a frustratingly subjective business. It only gets worse the closer to the present we get.

Best Supporting Actress Of 1927-28: Clara Bow (Wings)

When I first decided to hand out Katie awards for supporting actress (despite the fact that the Academy didn't create the category until 1936), I kicked around a number of choices for the first one—Mary Philbin and Olga Baclanova in the horror classic The Man Who Laughs, Gladys Brockwell as a hooker with a heart of stone in Oscar-winner Seventh Heaven, Louise Brooks in A Girl In Every Port, Margaret Livingston in Sunrise and even Norma Shearer who was uncharacteristically fun in The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—but it was Clara Bow's turn in Wings that I kept coming back to.

Wings is the story of two pilots who have volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force headed for France and the First World War. They're both in love with the rich girl on the hill. She only has eyes for Richard Arlen but the third member of the triangle, a young and naive Buddy Rogers, is sure he's the one.

Ironically, Bow who was known as the "It Girl," the greatest sex symbol of the day, was not part of the triangle. Instead, she's on the outside looking in, playing an atypical role for her, the fresh-faced girl next door. She's been in love with Rogers ever since she was a kid, but he's never seen her anything other than a pal.

Clara Bow's part was not in the original story, penned by future Oscar-winner John Monk Saunders (The Dawn Patrol), but was instead inserted into the picture to take advantage of Bow's popularity. Director William Wellman, for one, was delighted—Bow's presence guaranteed a bigger gross at the box office.

As it turns out, it also guaranteed someone on the screen knew something about acting.

In order to achieve authenticity in the truly spectacular flying stunts, Wellman (himself a flyer during World War I) and special effects man Roy Pomeroy bolted cameras onto biplanes and hired actors based on their ability to fly. While the result is still some of the most spectacular aerial combat and trick flying ever filmed (Pomeroy won a well-deserved Oscar for his efforts), the acting, outside of Clara Bow's supporting role and Gary Cooper's three-minute star-making appearance, is spotty at best.

Bow, hopelessly in love with Rogers, follows him to France as a volunteer ambulance driver. While on furlough, she sees him with a Parisian hooker while he on the other hand is too drunk to recognize his old pal. In the best scene of the movie, Bow hustles him out of the bar just ahead of the MPs and takes him to a hotel room where he's too drunk to perform. As he sleeps it off, she sees a locket with the other woman's picture and finally realizes the truth about his feelings.

Victor Fleming, who directed Bow in two movies and who would go on to direct Gone With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, compared her talent to "a great violin; touch her, and she answered with genius."

Watching her in Wings (then in It and everything else I could get my hands on), I saw the same thing in Clara Bow that others saw in her at the time, that when she's on the screen, you simply can't take your eyes off her.

It's not that she was the most beautiful woman of the era; to be honest, she often wasn't even the most beautiful woman in whichever movie I was watching. But she had what all the great stars had, a quality that attracts attention no matter what else is happening on screen and an ability to make us root for her no matter what part she's playing.

Maybe in Bow's case that quality had something to do with the odds she had to overcome to succeed, both on-screen and off. Although she usually played a bubbly modern woman who knew just what she wanted, there was often (as there is in Wings) a vulnerability and pathos just below the surface. That contradiction—fighting for what she wanted when she's secretly afraid to—is called courage and that courage gives her characters a humanity her audience could relate to.

In what I suppose you could describe as proto-Method acting, Bow added depth to her characters by drawing on emotional memories of her horrific Brooklyn childhood—her mother was a mentally-ill prostitute who routinely assaulted Bow before finally trying to kill her; her father abandoned Bow at birth only to return when she was a teenager and rape her.

Those who worked with Bow said that whenever a scene called for tears, she would have someone play "Rock-A-Bye Baby" and real tears flowed. Given her childhood, I can only imagine what the song meant to her.

"All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing," she once said, "there's a feeling of tragedy underneath. She's unhappy and disillusioned, and that's what people sense. That's what makes her different."

I think Bow was describing herself.

Wings was a huge hit and won two Oscars, for best picture and for "engineering effects." In 1997, it was included in the National Film Registry.

Although she was one of the most popular actresses of her day, Bow was out of the movies within six years. Producer B.P. Schulberg of Paramount Studios shoved Bow into an interchangeable series of underwritten flapper and shopgirl parts then handled her transition to sound carelessly—MGM gave Greta Garbo two years to prepare for her first sound picture; Paramount gave Bow two weeks. Even though her Brooklyn accent was fine for the parts she played, Bow developed an odd phobia that left her terrified of the microphones that recorded her voice which led to numerous production delays.

In addition, Bow was a favorite target of the gossip columnists, particularly after she sued her personal secretary for embezzlement. Although she won the suit, the details of Bow's private life that emerged from the trial were scandalous and turned the public against her.

Schulberg took to calling her "Crisis-a-day-Clara" and dropped her from her contract when, exhausted from overwork and savage publicity, she suffered a nervous breakdown.

Bow made a brief comeback in 1932 for Fox and though both movies, Call Her Savage and Hoop-La, were critical and commercial successes, Bow was worn out from years in the public eye. She retired from acting at the age of 28, never to return to the screen.

"A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry," she later wrote, "when you're tired, hurt and bewildered."

At the time and for years after, Bow's notoriety obscured her talent. But she was, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, "the real thing," and the more I see of her work, the more I am convinced she was one of the greatest actresses of the Silent Era.

In addition, I would say that more than with any other performer or picture so far, watching movies for this blog has completely altered my perception of Clara Bow. When I began writing, I saw her as the empty-headed glamour girl the gossip columnists of the time so gleefully tore into. Watching her movies, I realized she was actually something quite special.

It's a measure of the lasting damage celebrity gossip can do when we so casually tar someone with the brush of scandal. The tabloids of Bow's day recycled their rumors, sold their papers, wrapped fish in them the next day and moved on. But the perception they created has lingered now for eighty years.

Best Supporting Actor Of 1927-28: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)

Before his name became synonymous with humanitarian causes, Jean Hersholt was also a fine character actor and never better than he was here in The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg, one of the last silent films directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch.

Old Heidelberg, as the movie was originally known, is the story of a young prince (Ramon Novarro, who played the title character in the silent classic Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ) who is torn from his family to prepare to take the reins of government from his uncle, the king.

It proves to be a lonely life and Hersholt, who plays the prince's tutor, Dr, Jüttner, is the only real friend and father the prince has ever known. While everyone in the palace is always telling the boy what he should do, the tutor is the only one who ever encourages him to do what he wants to do, and what little fun there is to be had for a prince growing up in a gated palace, the tutor provides.

Admittedly, Jüttner is not much at teaching the young man what it means to be a prince—in a funny scene during the prince's university exams, we learn that not only does the prince not know his country's history, neither does Jüttner—but he's done a first rate job at teaching him what it means to be a human being, and let's face it, future kings get their diplomas whether they know anything or not.

After graduation, instead of getting the expected medal and a forced retirement, Jüttner accompanies the prince who is sent to Heidelberg for graduate studies—studies which focus primarily on beer and a romance with Norma Shearer. The few months in Heidelberg are the best the prince has ever known.

Incidentally, this is one of Shearer's most appealing performances in a career that often leaves me cold. Here, she plays the niece of an innkeeper, the prettiest and most lively girl in Heidelberg, and the main attraction for the hoards of beer-swilling fraternity boys who crowd the inn's garden. Jüttner is delighted by her spunk, the prince by her beauty, as she shows them to their rooms in the tiny, third-rate inn and enthusiastically recommends the couch. "You can sit on it, you can lie down on it! You can't expect any more of a couch!"

She then proceeds, to the prince's embarrassment and the tutor's amusement, to demonstrate the virtues of the bed.

Love is in the air, but of course the tutor knows (and we suspect) that royal protocol will never allow the marriage of such a socially mismatched couple. And this ultimately is what The Student Prince is all about. The old tutor knows what the young prince doesn't, that you have to live as much as you can while you can because all things eventually end, and in one of the film's most poignant moments, Jüttner gently, but firmly steers the prince toward his inevitable duties as head of the government.

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg represented something of a turning point for Hersholt. Before this role, he had primarily played villains, and quite successfully, in classic silent films such as Tess of the Storm Country and Erich von Stroheim's Greed. His performance here was so effective, he afterwards became known for playing kind if weary wise men. His most remembered role may be that of the cantankerous yet caring grandfather searching for Shirley Temple in the 1937 version of Heidi.

Hersholt was twice awarded honorary Oscars, once in 1940 for his work in establishing the Motion Picture Relief Fund which was designed to help out-of-work and ailing actors, and again in 1950 after his years of service as president of the Academy. Shortly before his death in 1956, the Academy created the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award which is bestowed periodically on those from the Hollywood community who have significantly furthered humanitarian causes.

Note: I very seriously considered giving the first supporting actor award to Gary Cooper for his performance in Wings. He's only on screen for three minutes, he doesn't talk (of course), exits stage left and gets killed immediately. Given the way I usually feel about Gary Cooper's acting, I would normally say the only way his performance in Wings could be any better is if he wasn't in the movie at all. But the fact is, he's terrific—cocky but human, naturalistic and above all riveting—and those three minutes made him a star.

It wouldn't have been the briefest performance ever nominated—that would be Hermione Baddeley who was on screen for all of two minutes thirty-two seconds in 1959's Room At The Top. And Beatrice Straight won for Network in a role that lasted only five minutes forty seconds, so short in fact that the first time I saw the movie I didn't realize she'd been on screen until she was already gone.

There have been two dozen actors who have received Oscar nominations for performances that clock in at fewer than ten minutes (three of them won). So I think I could have gotten away with selecting Gary Cooper. But in the end, it was Jean Hersholt's performance that moved me most.

Best Director Of 1927-28: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

At the time studio head William Fox coaxed him to Holly- wood with the promise of an unlimited budget and complete control over the final product, F.W. Murnau was Europe's best director. Working out of Berlin, which hosted the continent's largest and most important film industry, Murnau had made seventeen films, including two classics of the era, Nosferatu, still the best telling of the Dracula story, and The Last Laugh, possibly the only silent movie ever made without title cards.

Fox's offer was a rare gift in the history of anything, much less motion pictures, and Murnau grabbed the opportunity with both hands. The movie he made, Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, was not only the best picture of 1927, winning three Oscars in the awards' inaugural year, but is one of the greatest movies ever made.

Sunrise is the story of a marriage in crisis told in a lyrical style that taps into the audience's most basic emotional memories to make it feel the events on screen rather than to simply observe them. The exaggerated story—with attempted murder, near drownings and illicit trysts in muddy fields—is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.

Because I have already written about Sunrise as the best picture of 1927-28, I want to focus here on Murnau's technique, first, his use of the camera and second, his use of sound.

Watching Sunrise, I was struck by how fluid and modern the camera work is, not just compared to other silent movies but to every movie that followed it until 1941's Citizen Kane. Murnau took advantage of a new electric-powered camera belonging to cinematographer Karl Struss to create swooping, seemingly hand-held tracking shots that helped establish the unsettled and unsettling mood of the story. Because Struss (who with Charles Rosher won the first Oscar for cinematography) did not have to hand-crank the lightweight camera from a stationary position, the camera could be hung from wires and float along with the actors as they moved through fields or through crowded city streets. This floating camera created a sense of "displacement" in the audience, that is, making the seemingly familiar just strange enough to force the viewer to see again as if for the first time.

Murnau also drew on other Express- ionist tech- niques to force his audience to see the familiar again for the first time—sets that looms over the farmer and his wife at impossible angles, strong lighting reminiscent of much-later film noir, and double exposures that reveal a character's thoughts such as the ghostly image of the man's lover embracing him and urging him on to murder.

Murnau also made effective use of sound at a time when other directors saw the new technology as a simple novelty and an excuse to shoe-horn a musical number into every movie. Released two weeks before The Jazz Singer, this was Fox Studios' first tentative foray into sound, and while Sunrise is silent in its lack of dialogue, it included a film score, sound effects, and although not yet synchronized to the images on the screen, even human voices.

After watching dozens of silent films while working on this blog, I was reminded again from the first moments of Sunrise just how powerful a music score is and what a difference it can make in setting a mood. Even before the opening credits are finished, the violin score establishes a sense of foreboding and the viewer is prepared for the conflict and violence that soon follows.

It seems obvious to say that a score written specifically for a movie creates a deeper emotional involvement that does a little random Wulitzer music, but if you see enough of these back-to-back-to-back, it jumps out at you nevertheless.

The score does something else, too. By creating a mood with a simple tune, it eliminates the need for many of the movie's title cards (those bits of written dialogue or explanation inserted between frames) which is a welcome relief. Pure exposition doesn't work any better in a movie than it does in a novel and it certainly doesn't work well when it's typed up and inserted into the middle of a love scene or an action sequence.

The use of sound isn't limited to the score and its effect is not merely a way to keep your ears busy while your eyes are working. Any number of sound effects—train whistles, barking dogs, squealing pigs—convey information beyond mere ambiance. Chiming clocks, for example, signal shifts in mood in Sunrise that might otherwise come as a surprise to the viewer.

And shifts in mood is as much what this movie is about as any mechanics of the plot. That Murnau was one of the first to understand how to use sound to create a specific effect is just one more reason why he is still considered one of history's greatest directors and wins the Katie for best director of 1927-28.

Unfortunately, Murnau's achievements went largely ignored. Sunrise was a masterpiece but failed in the only way that mattered to the studio—at the box office—and although the Academy acknowledged the film with three awards, including the only Oscar ever given for "Unique and Artistic Production," Murnau himself was not nominated for best director (neither, for that matter, was William A. Wellman who had directed the "other" best picture winner, Wings). The studio clipped Murnau's wings, limiting his budgets and reasserting control over the content and final cut of his movies.

Worse for the development of movies themselves, however, was the fact that cumbersome new sound-recording cameras made it impossible for other directors to follow Murnau's lead even had studio owners encouraged them to do so. Cameras of the era, even the hand-held ones used in Sunrise, were so loud they made sound recording impossible and they had to be enclosed in soundproof booths with the camera operator locked inside. The result was the theater stage look—medium and long shots with no movement whatsoever—that makes early sound movies so off-putting to a modern audience. It was not until 1958 that France's New Wave directors rediscovered the hand-held camera.

His creative freedom drastically limited, Murnau made two more movies for Fox, both critical and commercial failures, then left America for the South Pacific to work on the last great film of his career, Tabu, a love story between a young fisherman and a woman whom religious authorities have deemed sacred and therefore taboo. A week before the film's premiere, Murnau was killed in an automobile accident. He was 42.

I find it interesting that the greatest directors of the silent era, Murnau, Keaton, Chaplin, von Stroheim, Griffith, largely failed to make the transition to sound movies. There were individual reasons in each case—Griffith never progressed beyond the same simple story of virginity imperiled, Keaton's new contract with MGM proved to be a straightjacket, von Stroheim was an egomaniac, Chaplin was a slow-working perfectionist. And of course Murnau had the best excuse of all: he died.

But the overall impression is that an entire generation of great directors vanished, leaving the field to inferior hacks, and that this is how the studios wanted it. Film historians have suggested that the studios used the transition to sound as an opportunity to break well-paid directors (and actors) who had become too big for their britches.

I also suspect that to a degree, the directors themselves failed to adjust to the necessity of telling stories so badly after a decade of telling them so well. I'll note that given the opportunity to make Tabu as a sound picture, Murnau chose to make it a silent. Like many great directors of that era, if given the choice, he preferred silent pictures. The marketplace simply didn't allow that choice.

In any event, with the greatest directors gone or their output severely limited, and with the technology restricting their artistry, the directors who were left seemed to have forgotten how to make movies. It was more than a decade before John Ford, Orson Welles and others rediscovered the lessons Murnau taught and used them to bring motion pictures into the modern era.

A final postscript. Almost seventy years after Murnau's death, John Malkovich played him in the movie Shadow Of The Vampire, a fictionalized account of the making of Murnau's most famous work, Nosferatu. The movie is a sometimes funny, sometimes violent meditation on the damage an artist does in creating a masterpiece. In the case of Sunrise, a true masterpiece, the damage Murnau did was to his own career.

Meaningless Trivia: Out of curiosity, I looked up the total number of votes on the Internet Movie Database for movies made during the Silent Era (1900-1928). Not the average vote, mind you, just the raw totals, to get a sense of how many 21st century eyes have watched silent movies and which ones they're watching.

The top ten movies released before 1929 in terms of total imdb.com votes (with the director's name in parentheses):

Metropolis (Fritz Lang) 32,291

Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau) 24,422

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin) 17,038

The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman) 16,397

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) 14,815

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine) 14,115

The Kid (Charles Chaplin) 10,275

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer) 9,048

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau) 8,851

The Birth Of A Nation (D.W. Griffith) 7,524

Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5,284

Well, there it is, for what it's worth, which is, admittedly, not a lot. I would recommend any of the movies on the list except The Birth Of A Nation which would come as quite a shock to a modern audience and likely turn you off silent movies for good unless you've really prepared yourself for its stunningly racist views on American history not to mention its three hour running time which in a silent movie can feel like three weeks.

By the way, in case you're wondering, the most voted upon movie (as far as I can tell) is The Shawshank Redemption with 421,872 votes ...

Best Actress Of 1927-28: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)

Mary Pickford was the most popular actress of the Silent Era, earning the nickname "America's Sweetheart" with a series of winning performances as the plucky girl who overcomes long odds in such movies as Stella Maris, Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm and Tess Of The Storm Country. Film historian Scott Eyman has called her the "perfect incarnation" of the sweet but strong-willed girl and audiences flocked to her movies in record numbers, making her at her peak the highest paid performer in Hollywood.

My Best Girl was Pickford's last silent performance and arguably her best.

The story was a typical one for Pickford. "Maggie" is a working class shopgirl who meets and falls in love with Joe (played by Charles "Buddy" Rogers, who was quickly cast in the part after his success in the blockbuster war picture Wings), not realizing he is the son of the store's owner.

It's a fairly conventional set-up, but it's what Pickford does with it that makes it worth watching. In the opening scene, she carries an armful of pots and pans through a crowded department store, gets a pot stuck on her foot and in trying to shake it loose, ends up losing her bloomers instead. As Pickford scrambles to free her hands, another woman steps into Pickford's undies, assumes to her horror that they are her own, and winds up hiking them up under her own skirt.

That Pickford then meets the boy of her dreams while she feels a cool breeze blowing up her skirt is implied rather than explicitly stated, but you have to wonder what Charles Rogers was thinking when he knelt at Pickford's feet in the scene pictured here—the two fell in love and married after Pickford's divorce from Douglas Fairbanks.

Naturally, the course of true love never runs smooth, at least not in the movies. Joe has a wealthy fiancee and an overbearing father, and Maggie has family problems of her own: her mother is a slovenly depressive who attends the funerals of strangers—"I haven't had such a good cry since our wedding"—her sister is a flapper dating a gangster, and her father is an ineffectual milquetoast who sits in his wingback chair, chews on his moustache and frets as his family comes unglued.

Just bringing a man home for dinner requires more courage and finesse than most of us can muster in our greatest moment of crisis.

If you played this stuff seriously, you'd have Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams; if you played it half way, you'd have Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. My Best Girl is played strictly for laughs and what you wind up with is a nifty little comedy, albeit one only as good as the actress playing the title role. Pickford straps this potentially creaky vehicle to her back and carries it the whole way, making it feel fresh and light and funny while steering effortlessly clear of the pathos that would have brought it crashing down.

As film critic Steve Vineberg says, the performance is "an extraordinary combination of spunk and delicacy."

It's also at times unusually physical. I hadn't thought about it before until I saw Pickford doing physical comedy here—pratfalls and slapstick—that Hollywood has tended to shy away from asking women to do the sort of physical comedy Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Curly Howard and even Cary Grant did routinely. Lucille Ball had a gift for it, at least on her television shows, and occasionally an actress in a screwball comedy, Carole Lombard, say, would do some bit of business that required a little slapstick. But not often. Mary Pickford showed a flair for it throughout her career and is near the top of a pretty short list.

My Best Girl was released just three weeks after The Jazz Singer and was Pickford's last silent movie.

Pickford wasn't thrilled with the introduction of sound—"Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo"—but she was perceptive enough to realize that it added an extra degree of realism to the movies that made the prospect of a thirty-five year old actress playing nineteen year olds untenable. She was tired of that kind of role anyway. "I'm sick of Cinderella parts," she said, "of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover."

The next year, she bobbed her hair—a controversial act because of her iconic status as the perfect representative of traditional womanhood—and took on a more sophisticated role for her first sound picture, Coquette. She won an Oscar for the effort, but critics panned the performance and to be honest, the award had more to do with Pickford's skills as a party hostess—she's credited with being the first person in history to lobby for an Oscar—than with the quality of anything she did onscreen.

The public rejected her attempts to play more adult roles and, being too old to any longer play feisty shopgirls and teenage ingenues, Pickford retired from acting in 1933.

According to TCM's Robert Osborne, she attempted to make a comeback in 1947, testing for the movie Life With Father, but when that role went to Irene Dunne instead, Pickford made her retirement permanent.

During her career, Pickford appeared in 249 movies, produced 34 more (including one as late as 1949) and authored twelve. Along with Charlie Chaplin and then-husband Douglas Fairbanks, she founded United Artists. Despite her screen image as a sweet, innocent working class girl, she was actually a tough, smart businesswoman who remained an active owner at the head of the studio she founded.

As her biographer Eileen Whitfield wrote, "She knew what she was worth, and she didn't hesitate to ask for it. She was a woman in complete control."

In 1976 the Academy which she herself had co-founded awarded her an Oscar for lifetime achievement. She died at the age of 87.

Best Picture Of 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

The history of the Academy Awards, particularly when it comes to the best picture award, is a study in predictable middle-of-the-road conformity. The Academy has long favored dramas and biopics that turned a respectable profit; were artistic, but not too artistic; and above all, fit safely within a preconceived notion about what a movie is supposed to be. How else to explain the choice of, say, 1944's pleasant but predictable Going My Way over the groundbreaking noir classic Double Indemnity?

When Oscar does go out on a limb and choose something edgy, it's most often a so-called message picture—a drama seeking to teach a political or social lesson—albeit one with a message that Hollywood is already quite comfortable with. That's why you wind up with a head-scratcher like Crash but never with something truly controversial like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (well, okay, let's not get nuts here).

What Oscar doesn't do is pick a movie that twenty years later is still regarded as the best picture of the year. It's hard enough to do when you're trying, impossible when you're not.

That the first time out of the box the Academy should have managed to hand the Oscar for best picture (well, Unique and Artistic Production, anyway) to what time has revealed to be not just the best picture of the year but one of the best of all time is nothing short of a miracle. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans is beautiful, lyrical, a deceptively simple film that plumbs the depths of a marriage—and a soul—in crisis.

Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer (George O'Brien) to murder his wife. The city woman (Margaret Livingston) is a classic 1920s era flapper, with bobbed hair, cigarettes and a slinky black dress.

By contrast, the country wife, played by Janet Gaynor in an Oscar-winning performance, looks like she just blew in out of "American Gothic"—with a gingham dress, blonde hair in a bun and a baby on her shoulder—and as the opening scenes unfolded, I expected the lesson of the tale to be either (1) country = good; city = bad; or (2) men, don't marry women who dress like your grandmothers.

A third of the way through the movie, however, the farmer (who has lured his wife into the city so he can murder her) has a change of heart and from then on, the movie becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption.

That this abrupt shift in tone works so brilliantly is a testament to Murnau's skill as a director and also, I think, to the very human nature of the conflict within the farmer's heart.

Admittedly, the story is not realistic in the sense we've come to understand that word, a documentary-like fidelity to the world as it is. Instead, the story is what I would call operatic, painting with bold brushstrokes to evoke a series of strong emotional responses, and while the facts are not realistic, the emotions those facts evoke are.

Which is to say, from the outside, adultery may look sordid but it's pretty typical and not very interesting, whereas from the inside it plays like a grand operatic passion and the mad desire for a woman and the guilt, doubt and anxiety associated with leaving your wife feels a little like murder (or so they tell me). To tell this story in a way more true to the facts would be to lie about the feelings. And Murnau clues us in with the very title of the movie—it's a song of two humans, not a story of two humans—that it's emotional truth he's after.

This operatic search for emotional truth is what film critics are talking about when they speak of "Expressionism." It's a term I'd heard kicked around and I thought for a long time it had something to do with cinematography and weird, abstract sets, but it's primarily about evoking an emotional response in an audience and as an artistic movement it influenced not just movies but painting, literature and even architecture.

Which you no doubt knew already. Me, they didn't talk about this stuff in law school.

As an approach to storytelling, Expressionism is largely alien to a modern audience. Somewhere along the way, we bought into the idea that Realism, with a capital "R," is the only way to create a realistic portrait of the human experience. But Realism is just a technique and artists have explored any number of ways to convey truth, from Impressionism to Cubism to Reality Game Shows. Murnau was merely experimenting with another way to say something true about the human condition.

That Hollywood long ago abandoned this approach doesn't make it invalid, just unfamiliar.

Sunrise won three Oscars at the first ceremony, for Unique and Artistic Production, Actress (Janet Gaynor) and Cinematography (Charles Rosser and Karl Struss).

Sunrise's reputation as a movie has only grown since. The influential French film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma, called Sunrise "the single greatest masterwork in the history of the cinema." In a critics poll conducted in 2002 for Sight and Sound magazine, it was chosen as one of the ten best movies ever made. It also ranked #82 on the AFI's list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time and was selected in 1989 for the National Film Registry.

Although Sunrise was critically acclaimed at the time and later, however, it was not a success at the box office. The scenes set in the city were not filmed on location but on a vast and very expensive set and perhaps it was inevitable that given a blank check and a promise of no interference from the studio, Murnau made a movie that couldn't make back its expenses.

As I will discuss when I write about my choice for best director, after the box office failure of Sunrise, the studio reigned in Murnau who never again directed a film of this quality. It was a story repeated time and again as movies made the transition from silence to early sound.

[To read my essay about F.W. Murnau, click here.]

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards For 1927-28

PICTURE: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)

ACTOR: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)

ACTRESS: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)

DIRECTOR: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Clara Bow (Wings)

SCREENPLAY: King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd)

SPECIAL AWARDS: The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin) (Best Picture-Comedy); Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) (Best Actor-Comedy or Musical); Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd) (Best Actress-Drama); George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography)

MUST-SEE MOVIES OF 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans; The Man Who Laughs; The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg; The Circus; Wings; The Crowd; Laugh, Clown, Laugh

The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing—and after plowing through dozens of silent movies in the past couple of weeks, I can't say I blame them. You forget how much information you process through your ears and how much pleasure you can get from a human voice—at least until you do without for a while.

Only one problem with The Jazz Singer: it's a terrible movie. Really. I mean, yeah, being able to put sound in a movie was a tremendous breakthrough and audiences ate it up with a spoon, but beyond it's importance now as a historical footnote, I can't recommend it.

As for everything else that was released between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928 (I'm following Oscar's convention of straddling the two years), the Academy actually did a pretty good job of distinguishing the wheat from the chaff even if the awards were largely parceled out as a result of insider politicking and studio manipulation.

Wings (Best Production) and Sunrise (Unique and Artistic Production) won the two best picture awards, Emil Jannings was a well-respected actor and won for The Way Of All Flesh and The Last Command (remember, the award in those days was handed out for a body of work rather than a specific picture), and best actress winner, Janet Gaynor, was the star of the best movie of the year, Sunrise.

There were two best director trophies that year, one for comedy, one for drama. Lewis Milestone, who would win another Oscar for directing the classic All Quiet On The Western Front, won for the former; Frank Borzage, another two time winner, won the latter.

All respectable choices. With the benefit of more than eighty years worth of hindsight, however, I think the Academy could have done better.

That's where the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards come in.

I've done away with the splitting of categories—one director instead of two, one best picture award instead of the unexplained and unexplainable Best Production and Unique and Artistic Production awards.

I'm also doing away with Academy's habit of spreading the award for writing across a wide variety of ever-changing categories, including best original screenplay, best adapted screenplay, motion picture story, story and screenplay, screenplay and even this year's award for "title writing." With the Katies, it's one award, Best Screenplay, regardless of whether it's based on another source, wholly original or, as is often the case, a thinly disguised rip-off of last year's popular movie.

As I did with the career achieve- ment awards for the Silent Era, I will explain my choices in a series of essays over the next couple of weeks.

I've also included here a list of what I think are the must-see movies of the year, and will include a must-see list for each year I hand out awards.

Finally, I have included choices for best supporting actor and actress even though the Academy did not create those categories until 1936. I felt I otherwise would have ended up ignoring too many performances worth recognition. Besides, it gave me another excuse to see even more movies—and what could be wrong with that?

Notes: I don't have an official Fun-Stupid movie pick for 1927-28, but two might fit the bill: Wings is overly long for a silent movie and a bit corny but it also has at least an hour's worth of some of the best stunt flying and aerial dogfights ever filmed; and Charlie Chaplin's The Circus features a lot of physical comedy and acrobatic stunts and is readily available.

Best Picture Of The Silent Era: The General

If you're only going to see one movie from what I'm calling the pre- Oscars Silent Era, then Buster Keaton's masterpiece The General is the one to see.

Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame.

Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl.

This being the real thing (Keaton did all his own stunts and used full-sized trains, one of which wound up sitting in the bottom of a river for fifteen years), it's a wonder nobody got killed filming it.

Like in the best silent films, the lack of dialogue is almost irrelevant. The outline of the plot is easy enough to follow: war breaks out and to impress the woman he loves, Keaton tries to volunteer. But as an engineer for the Western & Atlantic Railroad, he is more valuable where he is than in uniform, so the army's recruiters reject him.

Of course, the army doesn't bother to explain the situation to Keaton or to anyone else. The girl assumes he is a coward and the rest of this brief, 75-minute movie involves Keaton proving otherwise.

In case you're afraid you don't have the patience to sit through a silent movie, I can reassure you the set-up takes only 14 minutes before the spies to show up, hijack Keaton's train—which, by the way, was based on a real-life Civil War era steam locomotive named "The General"—and kidnap the woman he loves. Even then, Keaton has already treated you to one of the most famous sight gags in movie history.

From there, the story unreels at breakneck speed.

In addition to the two separate train chases that bookend the movie, there's time for a daring escape, a battle between the two advancing armies, and an endless series of gags. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Buster Keaton number 21 on its list of the greatest movie performers of all-time; Entertainment Weekly listed him as the seventh best director; and Roger Ebert has written "Today I look at Keaton's works more often than any other silent films."

Watching The General again, it's easy to see why. I'm giving it the Katie-Bar-The-Door Award for Best Picture of the Silent Era.