Sessue Hayakawa’s Haworth Pictures—established in 1918—was a self-conscious attempt by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars (and certainly its most popular nonwhite leading man) to escape from the typecasting he so loathed. He was envious—so the story goes—of contemporaries like Douglas Fairbanks, who played dashing action heroes and charming romantic leads—roles closed off to Hayakawa because of his race, and because of his success as a cruel, foreign, “forbidden lover” in The Cheat (1915). Creating his own production company was the only way to tell stories his way, and marked the first time that an Asian actor seized control of their own destiny in Hollywood, and setting precedent that would eventually be followed by Anna May Wong and others.

Here’s the thing, though: The idea that Sessue Hayakawa was confined to stereotypical villainous roles he didn’t want to play by the success of The Cheat (and Hollywood racism) is a myth, and a fairly easy one to debunk. During the three-or-so years after his breakthrough performance as the abusive ivory trader Hishuru Tori, Hayakawa frequently played opposite his wife, Tsuru Aoki—thereby dodging the miscegenation issue—and rarely played an out-and-out villain even when he was paired with a white actress. He appeared as a heroic Japanese spy in The Secret Game (1917)1 and as a self-sacrificing lover in The Bravest Way (1918), in which he takes on one of his favorite archetypes: the East Asian student living in America. He gets the girl in that movie, as he also does in Paramount’s The Honorable Friend (1916). Films like Alien Souls (1916), The Soul of Kura San (1916), and Each to His Kind (1917) returned to the titilating theme of miscegenation, but often with more subtlety, casting Hayakawa as noble, but misguided figures—usually driven by a justified sense of wounded honor.2 In Kura San, for example, he played a man whose betrothed committed suicide after she was seduced by a white man—he plots to rape the man’s fiancée as a way of evening the score, but ultimately doesn’t go through with it. In The Call of the East (1917), he plays a wealthy Japanese gentleman on a quest to avenge his sister—once again, she’s been seduced by a white man—but ends up falling in love with his intended victim’s half-sister.3

The point is that Sessue Hayakawa could sometimes land the kind of roles he wanted, and even after he went independent, he continued to play morally ambiguous characters—forbidden lovers with frosty, brooding exteriors concealing hearts of gold. What Hayakawa wanted—what so many Hollywood stars in the Silent Era wanted—was control over his own image—the power to pick his own projects and turn down roles he felt depicted Japan in a negative light. The Tong Man (1919), one of Haworth’s many productions in 1919, has Hayakawa as Luk Chen, a Chinese highbinder who falls in love with Sen Chee (Helen Jerome Eddy4), the daughter of the opium smuggler he’s been assigned to murder. At first glance, it’s a strange choice for a newly-liberated Hayakawa. Tongs were standard villains in American fiction, and “Tong wars” were regularly reported in the sensentionalist press. They were associated with opium smuggling, murder, and white slavery.

So, what exactly drew Hayakawa to this role?

The Tong Man is, among other things, a hard-boiled action movie. Hayakawa was a trained martial artist and swordsman—he liked to pose with his katana when photographed for film magazines—and The Tong Man gives him plenty of opportunities to display his physicality—climbing over rooftops, leaping from great heights, overpowering his opponents by force. He even does a few jiu-jitsu throws. Actually, by silent movie standards, The Tong Man is a violent film. Hayakawa’s character splits open an opponent’s face with his hatchet in the penultimate scene—it even happens in a closeup, just so you won’t miss it—and guns down his enemies throughout the film with all the nonchalance of a hardened killer—which, as a Tong hachet man, he obviously is. This gangster-style violence was unusual before the late 1920s, and Hayakawa probably deserves to be recognized as an innovator in the genre, even if the exact genealogy is impossible to trace. Morevoer, at no point in the film is his character forced to confront his past as a murderous enforcer, and opium—a drug that was causing someting of a moral panic in the early 20th century—is treated as casually as liquor or tobacco (although Hayakawa is never shown smokling it, he has a large supply of the stuff).

Again, though, none of this quite fits with the traditional image of Hayakawa as a man who resented having to affect brutality or callousness. And it goes back to what I said my original review of The Cheat: Hayakawa’s roles—all of them—are far more ambiguous than is usually recognized. There’s a surprising nobility to Hishuru Tori and his other “forbidden lover” characters, just as there’s an unexpected darkness in Hayakawa’s heroes—even the ones he chose to play. Basically, Hayakawa was a good enough actor to sense that anti-heroes (and sympathetic villains) were what American audiences really wanted, and what would give him the best chance to show off his impressive dramatic talents. Even when he took on characters of true nobility—like Kara Tamura in The Bravest Way, or the lawyer Suki in The Courageous Coward (1919)—they were characters who were unjustly ostracized due to the misunderstandings of others.

Of course, Sessue Hayakawa knew first-hand what it was like to be mistaken for a villain.

The Tong Man is a short movie—just over 45 minutes—but this definitely works in its favor. All the thrills of a full-length pulp novel are crammed into three-quarters of an hour—love, betrayal, drugs, murder, suicide, chase scenes, narrow escapes—without any of the tricks silent movies sometimes used to cheat audiences out of seeing the good stuff (like having stunts and deaths happen off-screen). It makes the most of its small (and mostly Asian) cast—only two actors, leading lady Helen Eddy and Marc Roberts, “the Spider of Chinatown,” appear in yellowface, and both use relatively naturalistic makeup.5 It appears to have been filmed on location in San Francisco, and while its treatment of Chinese Tongs is rather simplistic and stereotyped—it provoked a campaign to ban the film by Chinese community groups in major American cities—its gritty depiction of the Chinese-American underworld from within again presages the mob movies of a later era. There are all kinds of little details that draw you in, like the fact that the Chinese characters speak in a relatively elevated way when talking to each other (in Cantonese, one infers) but switch to Pidgin when speaking to non-Chinese characters. Hayakawa, as we know from The Cheat, contributed details like that even when he was hesitant about his role.

There is one other thing that does a lot to explain Hayakawa’s willingness to play a Chinese gangster. To Hayakawa—who grew up in Japan and frequently returned to his homeland as an adult—the actions of a Chinese character were no reflection on him, a Japanese actor. Of course, that’s not how white American audiences saw it. The Yellow Peril was… well, yellow. Asians were a race, not merely a convenient catch-all term for the peoples of the broader Sinosphere, where the shared influence of Buddhist spirituality, Confucian morality and political thought, the Chinese writing system, and a love of natural beauty created (for outsiders) a misleading impression of cultural homogeneity. We shouldn’t blame Hayakawa for failing to notice this. He was, as he liked to constantly remind American reporters, Japanese in identity and outlook—but, like all the stories about Sessue Hayakawa’s life, this is a little too simple. Hayakawa went to college in the US—he may have even played American football—and obviously preferred acting in American or European contexts.6 The Tong Man isn’t just a fun little Chinatown thriller—it’s Sessue Hayakawa trying to figure out who he really was. The creative freedom offered by Haworth Pictures, in other words, didn’t solve Hayakawa’s problems.

Turns out you can’t get away from yourself.

Postscript: This was supposed to be a review of The Tong Man and it somehow ended up being an essay on Sessue Hayakawa’s struggles to define himself as an actor in 1910s, even on his own terms. Oh well. I hope there was enough here to make clear that Ren and I really liked The Tong Man, and we’re definitely going to come back to Sessue Hayakawa again (I really like the sound of The Secret Game). Oh, and I know I link back to my review of The Son of the Sheik (1926) way too much, but there’s some pretty obvious commonality between Hayakawa’s experiences in Hollywood and those of Rudolph Valentino, and they navigated their struggles in similar ways.

I originally wanted to do something really ambitious for the 50th installment of Silence and Silver.

You know, like reviewing every Charlie Chaplin film all at once, or taking on another French crime serial from the 1910s. Something suitably important to mark this milestone in the history of Art Deco Rhythms. But then I remembered that some of my favorite silent movie reviews were obscurities and genre films—the forgotten features that made up most of what people actually watched in the 1920s. Harry Houdini’s ineptly-filmed Haldane of the Secret Service. The contrived but strangely earnest Boston Blackie/Strongheart team-up The Return of Boston Blackie. The weirdly unsettling Soviet Poe adaptation A Spectre Haunts Europe. These movies weren’t good, but they were interesting, both as windows into 1920s pop culture and studies in the art of silent filmmaking—its triumphs and (more often) its blunders. After all, most silent films weren’t Metropolis or The Thief of Bagdad. They were just entertainment—the cinematic equivalent of the pulps.

So, we’re not doing a critically-acclaimed masterpiece or a seven-part silent epic for Silence and Silver 50. We’re doing First National Pictures’s Go and Get It, possibly the weirdest film to be released in 1920 by a major American distributor.1

(Although, when it comes to silent movies, you never know.)

Go and Get It was apparently quite popular when it first hit theaters in July of 1920. Wid’s Daily (a trade magazine for the film industry) called it a “Sensational Knockout,” and it was successful enough that nearly the entire cast and crew reunited for a spiritual sequel, Dinty, just a few months later.2 At the same time, it’s obvious why the newspaper caper/crime thriller/weird science blockbuster didn’t come to be regarded as a classic of the silent era. Even the distributors’ magazines—known for schooling their readers in shameless hype—admitted that the story makes practically no sense at all, and that it was the comedy and the stunts—things modern critics don’t usually care about unless they’re coming from a big name like Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton—that made the movie. The cast is mostly no-name—the only exceptions being forgotten leading man Pat O’Malley, a pre-The Sheik Agnes Ayres, and prolific silent character actor Noah Beery—so there’s basically nothing to interest modern critics to take a serious look at the film…

…except for the ape man.

Here’s the setup. “Shut the Door” Gordon (J. Barney Sherry3) is trying to bankrupt the Gazette—the newspaper he runs—in order to sell it to his rival for… some reason.4 The endgame of their scheme is never made completely clear. Roberta Milton, the owner of the newspaper, suspects something is off, and sends her friend Helen Allen (Agnes Ayres5) to go undercover as a reporter. She ends up sharing an office with Kirk Connelly (Pat O’Malley6), a WWI veteran (of sorts—he was a chef for the Army Air Service) who she knew as a Red Cross nurse. After Connelly gets a big scoop only to have his article plagiarized by a rival newspaper, Allen and Connelly team up to untangle a mystery involving gorillas, brain transplants, a mysterious Algerian, and a dead convict—a story big enough to save the struggling paper, if Gordon doesn’t steal it from under their nose.

So, the narrative is a bit of a mess. The plot jumps back and forth from scene to scene without much concern for pacing or coherence, with blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em asides to other plot threads and strange omissions (the gorilla’s murder rampage happens almost entirely off-screen) that make you wonder whether writer Marion Fairfax just couldn’t figure out what kind of story she was supposed to be telling with Go and Get It. Maybe she (or director Marshall Neilan) was afraid that audiences wouldn’t fully buy into a scenario about brain-swapping and monster apes, and so kept the focus mainly on the newspaper plot and the romance between Allen and Connelly. Dinty, the office boy (Wesley Barry7), also gets a lot of screen time, playing a similar role to René Poyen in Judex (1917)—alternately causing childish mischief in the world of adults and taking part in their adventures as an equal.

Then again, they obviously had faith in this movie. The airplane stunts are completely insane—Connelly manages to score an interview by transferring planes mid-air, and then boards a moving train (and then a cruise ship) by air in his attempt to catch up with a missing witness. The sets are pretty good too—there’s a prison, a newspaper office, a science lab, a dingy tenement—all the places you’d expect to visit in a 1920s thriller. And Gordon—despite his scheme making basically no sense—is a great villain—suitably hateable, with the right balance of malice and ineptitude for this kind of story. Really, apart from the nonsensical and off-balance plot, the only real letdown is Bull Montana as the ape man, and only because he’s being held back by the costume. For whatever reason, they were obviously worried about having Montana move around too much—maybe the facial prosthetics kept falling off—and the camera work is careful to keep him in the shadows. It could have worked—I could name a few German directors who could have pulled it off—but it doesn’t. Again, it’s entirely possible Marshall Neilan wasn’t confident in how audiences would react to the weirder aspects of the film, and decided to keep the ape antics to the bare minimum.

The funny thing is that First National obviously loved Montana as the ape monster, because he’s featured prominently in all the advertising for the film. They also liked him enough to bring him back for a similar role in The Lost World (1926), another Marion Fairfax-scripted science fiction adventure starring one of the Beery brothers as a daring scientist who unleashes a monster on an unwary modern city. Not that Go and Get It is in the same league as The Lost World—not even close—but there are strange convergences that suggest a shared cultural fascination with crack reporters, renegade scientists who thumb their noses as the establishment, and half-man, half-ape creatures with murder in their eyes. Both films are products of the transitional period between Victorian adventure stories and modern speculative fiction—that weird time when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was being published in the same magazines as E. E. Smith and H. P. Lovecraft. During the 1920s, fear of the unknown could coexist with a surprising optimism about the modern world. Everything turns out alright at the end of Go and Get It: Connelly and Allen get engaged, Gordon is fired and the newspaper saved, and the ape creature is killed before he can claim his final victim. What ought to be a fairly worrying idea—the brain of a convicted murderer being placed in the body of a massive ape—is shunted safely back into the realm of science fiction with the death of both the ape and its creator (Noah Beery8). Romance, not weird science or murder, triumphs in the end. It’s a narrative status quo that couldn’t hold for long.

But it would take until the 1930s for the movie monsters to really come out of the dark.

Postscript: The only surviving copy of Go and Get It was found in Italy sometime in the 2010s and has Italian-language intertitles, which can be a little distracting (especially since the translator changed quite a few of the characters’ names, some of them significantly). Sinister Cinema has a version on DVD which may have English intertitles, but I didn’t want to spend $16.95 to find out. It’s otherwise preserved in wonderful condition—much better than we can usually hope for with a film this obscure—and I certainly hope it gets a professional restoration sometime soon.

“A mystery always interests me.” - Nancy Drew, The Secret of the Old Clock

I’ve acquired something of a liking for the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s made-to-order adolescent adventure books over the past few months. Call it a guilty pleasure. They’re hardly sophisticated literature by any standard, and you get used to the formula pretty quickly: short chapters ending in cliffhangers, constant twists and misunderstandings, the adults being kept conveniently out of the loop, and all-too-obvious villains who always get what’s coming to them. Every series was pitched as an easy-to-grasp adolescent fantasy: the boy inventor (Tom Swift), the teenage crime busters (The Hardy Boys), the rising baseball star (Baseball Joe)—you name it, Edward Stratemeyer probably had one. It all sounds rather cynical, but if Stratemeyer really was just in it for the money, he could have done better. He paid his ghostwriters well—$100 for what was probably no more than two or three weeks’ work1—and still took the trouble of developing and outlining each series himself. He was a writer, originally, and his book-packaging empire emerged because he couldn’t keep up with his own ambitions to produce exciting books for children to read—books that let them feel like they were on the kind of adventures that the grow-ups wouldn’t approve of.

Which brings us to Nancy Drew. She was a latecomer to the Syndicate—one of the last new characters Stratemeyer created before his death in 1930—and in some sense its accidental masterpiece. The pitch was simple: Stratemeyer wanted a female equivalent of the Hardy Boys, and handed the job to Mildred Wirt, a newspaper reporter who had already done some work on one of the syndicate’s other series, Ruth Fielding. Wirt—writing as Carolyn Keene—created a character who was, if anything, even bolder and more independent than the Hardy Boys, and (in the first book, at least) practically a vigilante. The setup is a familiar one—an eccentric’s missing will, deserving-but-penniless heirs, a family of snobs (the Tophams) who want to make sure the new will is never found so they can keep all the money, etc. Enter Nancy Drew, the smart, beautiful, stylish, empathetic, cool-headed, fearless daughter of a famous lawyer, who’s determined that the inheritance should not fall into the Tophams’ hands.

And I do mean determined.

Nancy Drew is what the D&D kids call “Chaotic Good”—basically, she never lets petty considerations like “legality” get in the way of justice. She’s one of those people who regards the speed limit as a mere suggestion—she spends a good chunk of the novel rocketing around back roads in her roadster at top speed, and implies that she had plenty of experience doing so—and, near the novel’s climax, she helps herself to stolen property and conceals the fact from the police, who she’s supposed to be helping. There’s also the fact that cutting the Tophams down to size seems to be just as significant a consideration as helping Josiah Crowley’s penniless relatives recover their rightful fortune—understandable, given how unpleasant (and frankly despicable) the family is, but not the kind of demure behavior you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old girl from a respectable family.

And that’s what’s so damn cool about Nancy Drew. The girl is an outlaw. She’s feigns proper female decorum when it suits her purposes, but then next thing you know she’s breaking five different laws in her quest to set the world to rights, and—in typical Stratemeyer fashion—everyone who knows her thinks this is totally okay. As a parent, I was slightly horrified by how calmly her father takes the news that she’s committed several felonies and narrowly escaped being left to starve in a locked closet by burglars, but at the same time, I can absolutely see how a thirteen-year-old could have read that scene and simply come away with the impression that Nancy is an absolute badass. I mean, every kid dreams of that, right? Breaking the rules to do what needs to be done, and then having your parents praise you for it anyways.

Here’s the part where I lodge a few caveats—well, one in particular. The character of Jeff Tucker, the “negro caretaker” of the Topham’s summer house, is… difficult to read. It’s not just that his speech is written out phonetically in what’s obviously supposed to be Black Southern English, in a way typical of the era.2 He’s also dim-witted, cowardly, selfish, deceitful, and an alcoholic. He’s just about every 1920s stereotype about black people rolled into one, down to him taking an entirely passive role even as he rescues Nancy and fills in the missing info about the robbery at the Topham’s lake house. Nancy is rather condescending towards him—he is drunk on the job, and his carelessness nearly cost her the Crowley will, and her life—and doesn’t quite back him up when he claims to have been drugged rather than shellacked on rye when the robbery took place.

You can skip that chapter if you want. Wirt’s chapters are short, and you won’t miss anything central to the mystery if you pass on her ill-advised “ethnic comedy” routine.3 One of the main things the 1950s revisions of the Stratemeyer books did was remove the racial stereotypes—even in the twilight of the Jim Crow era, it was clear that Jeff Tucker was not an okay character for a children’s book—but I would still advise against picking up those versions of the series instead. The Nancy Drew of the 1950s is less of an outlaw—more interested in fashion and less in justice—and Harriet Adam’s revisions “took the spice out of” the girl supersleuth (at least according to Mildred Wirt, and you’d think she would know). The Nancy of the 1930s was a tough-as-nails teen flapper—responsible and refined, but not the kind of role model you’d want for girls in the more conservative 1950s. It’s a reminder how unique the years between the world wars really were—a time when so many of the old rules about what was “proper” for a woman were being challenged, even in children’s fiction. The original Nancy Drew is a punk—a rebel—always the smartest person in the room, and always ready to take up the cause of justice.

No matter how many felonies she has to commit in the process.

Fritz Lang is my favorite director from the Interwar period. I think I can now say that with absolute certainty. Metropolis (1927) is one of the greatest films ever made; M (1931) is a masterpiece of cinematography, suspense, and social psychology. Without waxing poetic about the zeitgeist of Weimar Germany or the grandoise artistic vision of Lang’s science fiction films, I think it’s safe to call him the Father of Decopunk, and the perfect embodiment of Jazz Age speculative fiction’s values and aspirations. Even a glance at Lang’s body of work should confirm a judgment that we would never hesitate to make today: By 1920s standards, the man was a total nerd. He loved crime fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and Art Deco. His movies were pulp illustrations brought to life.

I mean, think about it. In the 1920s alone, Lang made a two-part crime epic (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, 1922), a two-part Germanic fantasy epic (Die Nibelungen, 1924), a dystopian science fiction blockbuster (Metropolis, 1927), a labyrinthine spy thriller (Spione, 1928), and a space movie—Frau im Mond (1929)—that, for the first time in history, took the science behind the fiction in deadly earnest. This was the career of someone who loved the sensational and spectacular—who subscribed to Weird Tales and Astounding Stories.1 Both a cynical social psychologist and a futuristic dreamer, Lang saw the world around him the same way future generations would: soaring skyscrapers and airships, flashing and whirring machines, and monsters lurking in the shadows.

(That’s Decopunk, kids.)

Really, with a director who didn’t read sci-fi pulps at the helm, Woman in the Moon (1929) could have been a disaster. Journeys into space were, for the most part, unserious affairs before the advent of the actual Space Age. Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) is practically a comedy. Aelita (1924) has its moments, but ultimately treats the journey to Mars as a domestic punchline. Even Flash Gordon (1936) can’t quite figure out how to reconcile its space opera pretensions with its limited budget and janky special effects. But Fritz Lang was determined that his journey to the moon should be as realistic as it was thrilling. In a sense, Woman in the Moon is the prototype of fact-based space adventures like Apollo 13 just as much as more speculative fantasies. The science behind the journey—the actual procedure of getting the rocket from a hangar in Germany to the surface of the moon—is treated in meticulous detail, with the tension over whether Helius (Willy Fritsch2) and Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim3) can execute the complicated procedure forming the main conflict in the film’s second act. Once the rocket is safely in space, there’s a scene depicting the crews’ weightlessness, including—and this blew my mind—a fairly accurate depiction of how liquids behave in zero gravity. They do get other things wrong, of course. The moon has normal gravity and a breathable atmosphere—not to mention mountains filled with gold—but none of this was outside the realm of plausibility according to 1920s space science.

Lang would know—he brought on a real rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, to consult on the film, and even comissioned him to make a real rocket (unmanned, of course) to publicly demonstrate the science behind the spectacle. The rocket wasn’t finished, but the scientific advice Oberth gave Lang is on display in every scene. I had to keep reminding myself that everything in the film was speculative—that it was all educated guesses that Lang happened to get right because he had good advice and a good imagination. Lang’s journey to space was so influential in the scientific world that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy: when Wernher von Braun and the other German rocket scientists set out to make the V-2 for Nazi Germany—an expensive, ineffective weapon that laid the foundation for the designs seen in the Space Race—they used what they’d seen 15 years earlier in Frau im Mond as inspiration.

Woman in the Moon is also a romance, of course. The adventure to the moon is complicated by a love triangle between Helius, Windegger, and Friede (Gerda Maurus4)—a pure-hearted, motherly blonde who’s agreed to marry Windegger but gradually discovers that she really loves Helius. Romances in silent films are often cumbersome and hackneyed, but this one is deeply integrated into the plot, as the challenges they face on their voyage bring out the cowardly, selfish streak in Windegger and the tortured nobility of Helius. As with Metropolis, there are vaguely Biblical resonances—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel—ending with the embrace of death in the name of love.

After he moved to Hollywood and began specializing in psychological crime thrillers, Lang looked back condescendingly at the idealistic themes of his early works. As early as M, Lang had turned away from themes of hope and redemption, and into the darkness of the modern human soul. There’s some of that in Frau im Mond. The villains—represented by the slimy, reptilian Turner (Fritz Rasp5), who goes with the heroes to the moon—are a secret international cabal who aim to maintain their monopoly on the world’s gold supply, and Turner remains a monster to the end. But it’s precisely against that backdrop of selfishness and human greed that the triumph of hopeless hope on the surface of the moon shines so bright. It’s the ultimate defiance—the only possible defiance—against a world of darkness. Have Helius and Friede been cast out of Paradise, or are they founding a new Eden?

For a younger, less cynical Lang, it was obviously the latter.

Probably the most important 1920s detective novel you’ve never heard of, The House Without A Key was the debut appearance of Charlie Chan, currently pop culture persona non grata but once one of the most well-known and well-loved figures in American fiction and film. Chan was conceived as a subversion of standard Yellow Peril tropes—pleasantly corpulent, kindly and mild-mannered, thoroughly heroic, and widely-admired even by whites. By modern standards, he’s a little too deferrential and apologetic, and speaks in broken (but overly formal) English despite having lived in American-ruled Hawaii for two decades. His associates and coworkers call him “Charlie” instead of “Charles” or “Detective Chan,” although the shock that the Bostonian characters express at seeing a Chinese detective is treated as rather quaint and backwards in multiethnic, laid-back Hawaii.

And really, The House Without A Key is about 1920s Hawaii, not just Charlie Chan. Its protagonist, the old-money Bostonian John Quincy Winterslip, is a stranger in a land of Chinese detectives, “All-American Restaurants” with Japanese proprietors, young Hawaiian men singing folk songs on the late-night trolley with their steel guitars and ukuleles, and washed-up men of all the world scraping out an existence on the islands’ shores. Biggers occasionally emphasizes Chan’s “otherness,” but mainly Chan serves as an embodiment of all that the writer loved about Hawaii: its cultural diversity, its generous hospitality, its sense of adventure. A recurring motif has the inhabitants of Oʻahu reminding Winterslip that he’s still in the United States—that Waikiki is no less America than Boston. Yet the novel ends on a note that would have been startling in 1920s America: the affirmation of warm friendship between a white man and a Chinese man—a fleeting and imperfect vision of racial harmony without hierarchy or homogenization. That, for Biggers, is the romance and allure of Hawaii. Anything can happen there.

Chan jumped from page to screen almost immediately after Biggers published his first adventure, and would remain a mainstay in American cinema into the 1940s.1 The first actor ever to play Chan, George Kuwa, was Japanese, and Sōjin Kamiyama played him in his first feature-length film.2 Neither actor looks much like Chan—who Biggers seems to have modeled on the Laughing Buddha—so it may have been inevitable that the paunchy Warner Oland ended up taking over the role in 1931’s Charlie Chan Carries On. Oland, who is Swedish,3 doesn’t look particularly Chinese, but his performance eventually became synonymous with the great Honolulu detective, eclipsing the books entirely. Those who are familiar with the Chan of pop culture legend will probably be surprised to learn that—in the first novel, at least—Chan never drops little nuggets of pseudo-Confucian wisdom, nor is his studied politeness played entirely straight.4 He’s polite to Winterslip because he likes him—as previously mentioned, their growing friendship is at the heart of the story—and even his eccentric speech is supposed to demonstrate that he’s cultured and well-read (he just can’t quite get a handle on English grammar).

My point is that conventional wisdom has been unfair to Charlie Chan. He is not (as I’ve seen claimed) the moral and artistic equivalent or Fu Manchu—nor is he a mere inversion. I’m not saying a modern take on Chan could preserve him as-is—his strange way of talking doesn’t make much sense in any language, and certainly doesn’t sound like a Chinese person who’s been learning English for decades—but I am saying that The House Without a Key is a story for our times. As politicians and pundits have increasingly mainstreamed the idea that people who are different or “foreign” don’t belong in the United States, Charlie Chan reminds us that that ship had already sailed a hundred years ago. Can a Chinese detective from Oʻahu transform America into a more perfect union?

Earl Derr Biggers thought so. And I’m not convinced he’s wrong.

In the 1920s, “independent” was all-but-synonymous with “inferior,” at least when it was followed by the word “film.” Budgetary constraints hit much harder in the silent era—tracking shots and other fancy camera maneuvers were advanced pieces of cinematic technology, and technology costs money. So do sets, and costumes, and basically everything that made silent films stand the test of time. And yet Oscar Micheaux—an ambitious, independent writer-director making movies about black life in 1920s America—did not make “inferior” films. After turning his debut novel into a film in 1919 and winning acclaim from the black press in Chicago, Micheaux spent the rest of the silent era cranking out indie films that bucked the American racial order with their forthright (though never uncensored) portrayal of the struggles of African-Americans. Only three of these films—Within Our Gates (1920), The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), and Body and Soul (1925)—survive. The last of these is a crime film, a romance, and a morality tale of trust, generational conflict, and greed—a movie unlike any other made in the silent era.

Probably the first thing you’ll notice if you watch Body and Soul is that Oscar Micheaux makes use of a technique that was uncommon in the silent era: cutting frequently back and forth between contrasting scenes, allowing two sets of events to play out simultaneously, each clarifying and heightening the meaning of the other. He uses it so much that it seems almost more like a personal quirk than a deliberate narrative device—at least, that was my reaction on my first viewing—but understanding the plot makes it easier to see what he’s going for—the themes he’s subtly developing throughout the film. Really, the camera work is quite impressive and dynamic—again, considering the financial limitations—and Micheaux had an auteur’s eye for the powerful image. The scene where Reverend Jenkins (Paul Robeson) rapes Isabelle (Julia Theresa Russell) is masterfully shot,1 and the “blood money” montage hits like a dropped anvil. Artistry and hard-nosed integrity rarely converged in 1920s Hollywood, but Oscar Micheaux never played by those rules to begin with.

The main draw of Body and Soul—apart from seeing all the interesting things Oscar Micheaux does with his camera despite working on a shoestring budget—is Paul Robeson in his double role as Reverend Jenkins and Sylvester. Silent film actors liked a good double role. Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolf Valentino all gave it a shot at some point, and Robeson equals them all double-timing as a slimy clergyman and his intelligent and soft-spoken brother. This was an early role for Robeson—he was fresh off his breakthrough performance in The Emperor Jones—but the charisma that would make him an international star is already on full display. Reverend Jenkins is a thoroughly loathsome villain with a charming smile and rugged good looks whose predatory nature is only barely concealed. It’s a perfect part for Robeson, and it’s what truly elevates the movie above a mere historical curiosity. A movie about the duality of black life in 1920s America—faith and reason, progress and stagnation—needed a villain who could do both—be both. Robeson knocks it out of the park.

The rest of the cast is… well, hit-or-miss. We see a lot of Mercedes Gilbert,2 for instance, but she just isn’t up to the role of Sister Martha Jane, relying too much on mammy hysterics and vaudville-circuit overacting. Of course, she’s supposed to be an unsympathetic character—a clueless, old-fashioned mother who has to learn the hard way not to be taken in by an unscupulous imposter-clergyman—but watching her roll her eyes and throw up her hands just gets old, especially when Julia Theresa Russell (her daugher in the film) gives such an understated and compelling performance—amazingly, this was Russell’s only acting role. The supporting cast is strong overall—Laurence Chenault as the dapper criminal “Yellow Curley” Hinds, Marshall Rodgers as the “Negro in Business”3—but most of the minor characters and extras are still channeling the kind of popped-eyes, jazz hands gawping and slapstick that you would see in a mainstream Hollywood film.4

I haven’t touched much on the plot so far, though not because it’s forgettable. Micheaux’s plotting is naturalistic—at least by 1920s standards—although the twist ending (spoilers: it was all a dream) does leave the truth of most of the movie uncertain. Did Reverend Jenkins really rape Isabelle? Will he continue to swindle the town and its parishioners, even as Isabelle gets happily married off to his twin brother? Is Yellow Curley really blackmailing Jenkins to pay off his gambling debts—and did those debts even happen, since everything turned out to be…? Well, you get the point. Micheaux’s message seems to be that the older generation—those who grew up in poverty at the height of Jim Crow terror—need to support the ambitions of the younger generation—to escape the life of poverty and ignorance in the rural south and truly embrace the promise of the New Negro.

While not overtly political,5 Body and Soul takes aim at several black institutions—the rural Southern hamlet, the juke joint, the black church—in keeping with the Harlem Renaissance’s vision of a secular, educated, urban future for African-Americans.6 It’s no coincidence that Isabelle and Sylvester take their honeymoon in the North and return to a life of middle-class respectability. I think the “blood money” montage is the key. When Reverend Jenkins steals Sister Martha Jane’s savings—threatening to assault Isabelle if she doesn’t hand them over—the image of the dollars in his hand are superimposed by a flashback to the back-breaking work Martha Jane did to save up for her daughter’s future. Then, just as we think this is a simple bit of obvious imagery, another vision appears: black hands pulling the seeds out of cotton. Martha Jane’s struggle has been that of the slave and the sharecropper—and it is Jenkins who keeps her and her daughter in servitude, body and soul. Money—the blood money of black suffering—can be the ticket to a better life, or just one more way to be held in bondage.

Postscript: So, apparently reviewing an Oscar Micheaux film for Black History Month wasn’t a terribly original idea. I knew I’d made a mistake when I found out the local theater in Roanoke was showing it—I mean, Micheaux was based in Roanoke when he filmed Body and Soul, but still. I somehow doubt I’m adding any new insights to the discourse around Micheaux and his oeuvre, but at least I got to watch a pretty decent film and write a bunch of footnotes.

Sometimes written off as pseudo-sci-fi because of its central plot—a romance between a New York newspaper columnist and a widowed Austrian countess—Gertrude Atherton’s 1923 novel Black Oxen is actually a serious piece of speculative fiction, exploring questions of age and experience, scientific progress, and what really makes humans happy. Its fundamental conceit is an X-ray therapy that reverses aging in human cells, allowing men and women in their fifties to pass themselves off as members of their childrens’ generation. Not only does Atherton take the implications of such a technology quite seriously—there are several chapters in which characters do nothing but speculate about its consequences for human society—it allows her to interrogate 1920s gender relations in New York high society, the nature of marriage in the early 20th century, the varying societal expectations for men and women at different ages, and just what it means to be young.

And all of this unfolds within the whirl of post-WWI New York, at the overlap between genteel high society and literary bohemianism. Flappers, hot jazz, bootleg liquor, and Broadway make their obligatory appearances, and so do thinly-disguised members of Manhattan’s decadent Jazz Age literati. The protagonist is Lee Clavering, a drama critic who’s bored with the women of his own age and set until he meets Madame Zattiany, an American expatriate who married an Austrian count and has returned to New York—supposedly, at least—to put her elderly aunt’s affairs in order. Though she initially keeps her distance from New York society, the entrancing and intelligent Madame Zattiany can’t resist the allure of Clavering and his world. She becomes a sensation—a beautiful young woman with all the grace and intelligence of a woman of 50—earning the envy of the old and the disdain of the young when she reveals herself as Mary Ogden, a famous New York beauty of the Gay Nineties.1 She and Lee fall in love, and begin planning their life together, but being from two worlds—and having irreconcilable professional goals—begins to put a strain on their relationship.

Black Oxen is a rather bleak novel in the end. I guess I shouldn’t worry about spoiling a book that’s over 100 years old, but go ahead and skip this paragraph if you want to read it for yourself. Mary Ogden ends up leaving Clavering and going back to Europe to marry her ex, Prince Hohenhauer, who convinces her that marrying for love will ruin her political career. Mary and the prince are cut from the same cloth—ambitious, intelligent, patriotic, and dedicated to the greater good in a way that feels ever-so-slightly authoritarian.2 Part of what makes Black Oxen such an interesting book is that Atherton obviously agrees with Mary’s choice to pursue her political career and put her love of power first. Romantic love—even deep, genuine love likes exists between her and Clavering—won’t provide lasting satisfaction at the price of giving up your deepest convictions, even for a woman. Mary Ogden loves Lee Clavering. But she’s loved Austria longer, and, strange as it may seem, she’s clearly going to be happier in a loveless marriage to Prince Hohenhaur than she would ever be as the wife of American drama critic-turned-playwright Lee Clavering.

The message of Black Oxen is simple, and as old as the ancients: rational pursuit of one’s deepest convictions is the only path to true happiness. This may involve falling in love—Atherton isn’t quite as anti-love or anti-marriage as a superficial reading would suggest—but it may also involve forsaking romance for a higher calling. That’s exactly why Atherton doesn’t wholly condemn the de-aging process: in the hands of a rational, principled woman (like Madame Zattiany), a second youth could be an opportunity to continue one’s life’s work anew—to press on in the pursuit of the greater good, unencumbered by the mental and physical constraints of aging. But it will be a second youth only in a physiological sense. The weight of wisdom and experience cannot be cast off. To use a second youth to indulge in frivolities would indeed be contemptible, and part of Mary’s journey is realizing that the women who disdain her—the old-money matriarchs and fiesty young flappers—have a point. It really is ridiculous for a 56-year-old woman to act like she’s 30—even if she looks it.

Postscript: Part of what drew me to this story was the science fiction element, which obviously overlaps quite a bit with the plot of Fear Her Wrath. I will say that, although Black Oxen is a serious work of (social) science fiction—by 1920s standards, it’s practically hard sci-fi—there is a lot of sappy romance between Lee and Mary, and gets a little wearisome, especially if you see the ending coming a hundred pages away. There is a movie version as well—released the same year as the book—although its last few reels are missing, and it takes several liberties with the plot.3 It does have Clara Bow in a flapper role—and she is pretty funny—and a strong cast as a whole (Conway Tearle as Clavering, Alan Hale as Hohenhaur, Corinne Griffith4 as Madame Zattiany)—but surviving prints are low quality, and given that it just cuts off about 2/3rds of the way through the novel, I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the whole thing.

Oh, and I created a TV Tropes page for Black Oxen. Give it a look.

The specter of spiritualism haunted much of the speculative and spooky fiction in the Roaring Twenties—its ghost stories, its stage mysteries, its horror films. As religion appeared to retreat before the merciless advance of science and a World War (and an influenza pandemic) claimed human lives by the millions, the stricken and grieving sought solace in contact with the world beyond—in the quest for certainty that their relatives and loved ones were waiting for them just beyond the veil. Charlatans exploited the desperate and credulous—magicians and debunkers waged a counter-crusade on stage and in print. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lent his credibility to the spiritualist cause. His friend Harry Houdini infiltrated seances to expose mediums as frauds.

All this is important for understanding The Mystic, a crime caper/horror film/romance directed by Tod Browning, pre-Code Hollywood’s master of the macabre.1 The film opens on a sideshow act in Hungary. Zara (Aileen Pringle2), a Romani medium and escape artist, is performing her usual routine for a crowd of credulous bumpkins. Her father, Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis3), and his knife-thrower assistant (Robert Ober) think they’ve got a good thing going when Nash (Conway Tearle), an American con man, comes to them with a proposition: he wants to take their act to America, and use it to swindle the grieving rich. Nash has money—lots of it—and offers to bankroll the scheme if they’ll go along with it. There’s also an immediate attraction between him and Zara, much to the annoyance of Ober’s character. Cut to a swanky townhouse in New York. Nash and his Romani compatriots are running a phony seance—one good enough to create quite a stir in New York high society. They’re after the fortune of a young heiress (Gladys Hulette), which Nash suspects is being embezzled by her uncle and guardian (David Torrence4). If they can get him to confess to the “spirit” of his deceased brother, they can blackmail him and take the money for themselves.

Things don’t quite go according to plan.

There are a few reasons The Mystic isn’t better-known, despite the fame of its director. There’s the lack of star power in the cast—especially notable coming off Browning’s collaboration with Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three—and the subject matter that was already becoming dated. By the mid-’20s, the skeptics were winning the battle over spiritualism, and the phenomenon would fade by the end of the decade. Combine this with the lack of a home video release—MGM never re-released it at any point during the DVD era—and you’ve got a recipe for obscurity. It’s unfortunate, because The Mystic really is a great film. The balancing act between crime, romance, and terror is magnificent, and Browning was almost alone among silent film directors in his ability to ratchet up the tension in a scene—building the suspense by putting two characters with opposing goals and incomplete information in the same room and then throwing curveballs until one of them cracked. The fact that this is a story about swindlers and ghosts obviously helps—so does the decidedly unsettling soundtrack by Dean Hurley for the 2023 Blu-Ray release. But what’s really impressive is just how well Browning gets the silent medium. There’s no over-reliance on intertitles—no silent director worth his salt leans too heavily on dialogue—but there’s also the way Browning exploits the fact that the audience can’t always read the characters’ lips to double down on the tension. Strangely, not knowing exactly what the characters are saying becomes, in Browning’s hands, an artistic choice rather than a limitation. Its sharpens the audience’s discomfort—makes us feeling like we’re listening at the door to an argument we can’t quite make out.

Ambiguity—or uncertainty—is, if anything, the film’s grand motif. That things are not always as they appear was a frequently-revisited theme for Browning, and not all that unusual in the silent era more generally. Given that filmmaking was, in some sense, fakery, it makes sense that writers and directors were drawn to questions of reality and fantasy. What makes The Mystic so special is the way Browning ties together all the elements of the film—the story, the characters, the visuals, even the intertitles and editing—under that single theme. The seance—where the participants are almost invited to be skeptical, and yet can never be sure where the boundary between the natural and supernatural lies—was an ideal conceit for a film about the elusive nature of truth.

This is a really good movie, in case I haven’t made that clear—one of those finds silent movie fans dream of. It’s also a great piece of 1920s mystery fiction—the kind of thing you might read in Argosy or even Weird Tales—and covers all of Browning’s usual subject matter—criminals, sideshows, the supernatural. I expect The Mystic will eventually be regarded as a classic of the silent era, especially since its now readily available in a high-quality print. Watch it at night, with the lights turned out.

After all, if the spiritualists are to be believed, ghosts won’t show up except in the dark.

Postscript: It’s a new year for Art Deco Rhythms. I have to say, I’m excited. The 2026 public domain brought us the films and novels of 1930, officially ending the Roaring ‘20s and putting us firmly in the age of the talkies. One of my goals is to do more about the literature of the Art Deco era this year—I’m already mostly done with a post of Gertrude Atherton’s forgotten sci-fi romance Black Oxen,5 and I’m working my way through the early adventures of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. But we’re not done with silent films—not a chance. February will see us finally turning to the work of Oscar Micheaux, who—besides being a pioneering black filmmaker—also happens to have lived and worked in the same city in Eastern Appalachia where I currently reside. He’s even got a plaque downtown. Sometime this spring, we’ll also be taking on more films by Fritz Lang, the great auteur of early Weimar cinema. And with Silence & Silver 50 right around the corner…

Well, no spoilers. But it’s gonna be big.

The frozen wilds of Northern Canada. The land of the wolf, and the trapper, and the Mountie. 1920s Americans had something of a fascination with the frontier—Westerns made up a major portion of film releases each year—and the icy wastes of the Yukon shared in the mystique of the untamed West. So, when WWI veteran Lee Duncan drew up a script as a vehicle for his German Shepherd, the charisma Rin-Tin-Tin, he sent him to the snowy mountains of the Klondike, the setting of many a Jack London story. It was a career-making role for Rinty, and the beginning of the 1920s cultural phenomenon: the canine adventure film.1

Where The North Begins was, by 1920s standards, something of an indie film, despite having a major studio’s backing. Rin-Tin-Tin was still unfamiliar enough to American audiences that the movie opens with a brief (and somewhat misleading2) biography of the wonder dog, and the production was such a mess that it almost never made it to the screen. Warner Bros. took a risk by distributing what was to all appearances a complete distaster. The movie’s two directors (the second having been brought in to mop up the mess left by the former) worked separately, apparently not troubling themselves with such quaint concerns as “plot” or “continuity.” It was only in the editing room under the eye of Lewis Milestone—later an accomplished director in his own right—that it came together—and the studio still needed two test viewings to persuade them that they had a potential hit on their hands rather than a $100,000 tax write-off.

Despite the movie’s somewhat thin plotting, it’s not hard to see why the American public ended up falling in love with Rin-Tin-Tin. His character, the Wolf-Dog, alternates between canine cuteness and the savagery of the wolf. He goes all out in the fight scenes, making fully believable attempts on the lives of castmates Walter McGrail3 (the protagonist) and Charles Stevens4 (his would-be murderer). But he spends most of the movie either mugging for the camera or performing feats of agility and dexterity, like opening doors, climbing to high places, and leaping from great heights. His signature routine was crawling army-style across the floor—a trick he might have picked up as the mascot of the 135th Aero Squardon in World War I—but none of it would have worked if he wasn’t able to convince the audience that he felt all the same emotions that they did. Of course, humans aren’t that hard to trick in this regard—and I’m talking as someone who not only talks to my dog, but for my dog—but Rinty really does a great job of looking angry, or jealous, or betrayed. There’s even a scene where he appears to be crying out of sadness—something dogs don’t do naturally. It gets a little cute sometimes, but the movie-going public in the 1920s didn’t mind a little pathos, even from a dog.

Precisely because of its rather sensational premise, Where The North Begins maintains plenty of entertainment value, even in the 2020s. It’s got a thoroughly hateable villain, and a cheesy romance, and plenty of bits that make you go “Whoa!” In one scene, the villain sucker-punches a Mountie; in another, Rinty does a flying tackle into a character who’s fleeing on horseback. Given the lax standards for both human and animal welfare in 1920s Hollywood, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if much of the violence in the movie is competely real (and Rinty, by all reports, had a vicious temper). In any case, Where the North Begins is a fun way to spend an hour on a cold winter evening, watching Rin-Tin-Tin brave the elements (and go straight for the throat) while you’re safe and warm.

There’s nothing like a very good boy to drive the cold winter away.

Postcript: So, this was about the best I could do for a Christmas movie, at least for this year. I can’t shake the feeling that there are other silent holiday films that I’m missing, just because they’re not clearly labelled as such. (Would you know It’s a Wonderful Life was a Christmas movie based on the title and poster alone?) Really, it’s hard to surpass the whimsical weirdness of The Insects’ Christmas or the Hollywood spectacle of Ben-Hur, but I’ll keep trying.

Also, a special Merry Christmas to all the good dogs out there, bundled up in your Christmas sweaters and watching enviously as the humans pig out on holiday treats you’re not allowed to enjoy. May the spirit of Rin-Tin-Tin (and Strongheart) be with you on this and every Christmas.

Dan Tate (Lon Chaney) is a man who leads two lives.

As the Blackbird, he’s a robber and thug in London’s Limehouse district—crude, ambitious, and cunning—a man who always gets what he wants. He spends his evening at vaudeville houses, eyeing the music hall songbirds and looking for easy marks. As the Bishop, the Blackbird’s imaginary brother, Dan is a light in the darkness of Limehouse—a pure soul in a broken body who helps the poor and preaches the brotherhood of man. His one weakness—so he wants people to think—is his affection for his no-good brother, which allows him to conveniently alibi his own crimes when the police come calling.

As with every perfect setup in a silent movie, what spoils it all is a girl.

When the Blackbird falls for Fifi Lorraine (Renée Adorée1), a French dancer, he finds himself the rival of the gentleman thief West End Bertie (Owen Moore2)—worse, he discovers that his usual ways of winning a girl’s affection can’t compete with Bertie’s suave manners and good looks. So, he arranges a frame-up, driving Bertie and Fifi into the arms of the Bishop, who pretends to be their friend and confidant while sowing distrust between the couple. Meanwhile, the Blackbird’s ex-wife Polly (Doris Lloyd3) is back in town, still in love with him and determined to save him from himself before it’s too late.

Cinematically, The Blackbird is nothing special. Chaney’s films are always more about the characters than the camera, and the framing of the scenes is extremely conventional, as is the production design. The Blackbird himself is an interesting role for Chaney. He’s played criminals before—notably in The Unholy Three (1925) the previous year—but here Chaney seems to deliberately turn off the charm and trade his usual subtle intelligence for raw cunning. Even moreso than Echo, the Blackbird is an unpleasant character—a vicious manipulator who is beyond goodness or redemption. He even does his makeup differently, so that—even without a grotesque transformation—he doesn’t look like himself. The most interesting scenes are those when Chaney switches into the Bishop persona, adopting a double-layered performance as the malice of the Blackbird occasionally slips through the mask of his kindly brother.

Contemporary reviews complemented Chaney’s performance, but several also complained that his standard routine was getting old. It didn’t help that The Blackbird was such a blatant attempt to recreate the formula of The Unholy Three, with the same director (Tod Browning) at the helm. Browning was fascinated by deformity and the grotesque, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cast Chaney as a crippled missionary who was also a shameless criminal. That appearances are deceiving—that ugly is not always evil, and beautiful not always good—is a prominent theme in Browning’s work, and The Blackbird is a double subversion, in essence turning Browning usual formula right-side-up and letting Chaney play an unsympathetic man disguised as a sympathetic monster.

My own feelings, like those of so many of the critics who saw The Blackbird in theaters in 1926, are mixed. The title role almost doesn’t feel ambitious enough for Chaney—too much of it is recycled from earlier roles, particularly Echo in The Unholy Three and Blizzard in The Penalty. I also don’t understand the romance 1920s Americans felt for the Limehouse district. As a setting for a Sherlock Holmes story, sure, it works, but even then the cockneyisms and cliches quickly get old. And because The Blackbird is set entirely indoors,4 you don’t even get any of that foggy Victorian atmosphere that makes London such an appealing city for a mystery or murder.5

But, I don’t think Lon Chaney is even capable of giving a bad performance, and with a solid supporting cast to back him up—especially Owen Moore as West End Bertie—The Blackbird is a fine little “romantic thriller” (that’s how it was advertised) with an entertaining conceit at its heart. It’s certainly not a film any Chaney enthusiast could miss—the transformation scenes and the scenes where he pretends to argue with himself are the Man of a Thousand Faces at his best. But, as the success of Tell It to the Marines—his next non-Browning film—would demonstrate, Chaney didn’t need roles made to order to shine as an actor. He was just a good at what he did—ahead of his time with the realism he brought to his roles. Whether as a London gangster or an American marine or an opera house phantom, what Chaney brought was psychological depth.

The physical apparatus was just a well-chosen gimmick.

Postscript: It’s been a while the last Silence & Silver. I guess I overloaded myself with all the seasonal features for October and needed a rest. Christmas is right around the corner, though, so look out for a December update for Fear Her Wrath, at least one 1920s Christmas film, and maybe a little something on Christmas art in 1920s magazines.

Few of the so-called “horror films” of the 1920s are actually horrifying.

Nosferatu has an ominous Gothic atmosphere and a few solid scares—like when Count Orlok rises from his coffin in the hold of the Empusa. A Page of Madness is unsettling in its sheer weirdness and the insanity of its gaze—especially when the line between sanity and madness is obliterated in its final act. But the psychological horror of Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac may be the crowning achievement in silent-era chills. Paul Orlac (Conrad Veidt), a talented pianist, loses his hands in a train accident. At the urging of Orlac’s wife (Alexandra Sorina1), the surgeon Dr. Serra (Hans Homma2) replaces Orlac’s ruined hands with the hands of Vasseur, an executed murderer. Instead of being relieved that his hands have been saved, Paul is horrified, and becomes convinced that the new hands are corrupting him—remaking him in the image of their original owner.

As you would expect from a movie about the terror of being betrayed by one’s own hands, it’s the characters’ movements that really tell the story. Veidt’s performance is magnificent—no one else can so perfectly convey the horror and anguish of a man who is alienated from his own body. And Alexandra Sorina’s role as his devoted, clingy, at times almost obsessive wife—anguished in her own way by their family’s collapsing financial situation—is a perfect counterpoint to Veidt’s more isolated and unstable portrayal. Several Expressionist signatures, like the counterplay of shadows and light, the stark, cavernous sets, and the blurring of the scene to indicate Orlac’s altered state of consciousness place The Hands of Orlac in firm continuity with earlier films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—also by Robert Wiene, and starring Veidt as the murderous sleepwalker Cesare—and later films like Waxworks, where Veidt would play Ivan the Terrible. If it weren’t for the lighting and the unadorned sets and the high-contrast makeup, Veidt’s performance could have been over the top—certainly no one could accuse him of under-acting. But within the dreamworld of German Expressionism, the unmitigated anguish that contorts Orlac’s face and limbs seems perfectly natural.

I should say that The Hands of Orlac isn’t usually described as a horror film. Like Caligari, it’s predominantly psychological, and the plot draws heavily on the tropes of 1920s speculative and crime fiction. The fundamental conceit—a hand transplant—was pure science fiction at the time,3 and even more fanciful elements show up at the plot approaches its climax.4 But watching Veidt writhe and contort himself and stare in terror at his own hands as the shadows close in around him is… well, eerie and uncomfortable, and just as creepy as Count Orlok lurking the a doorway or Cesare emerging from sleep. And the fact that Orlac’s insanity rings true makes it that much more horrifying. There is a terror to madness—a fear of contamination, and a reminder that our own sanity may be more fragile than we realize. So while The Hands of Orlac may look like a crime thriller with mild sci-fi elements on paper, on the screen it’s a masterpiece of terror. Like Lon Chaney’s He Who Gets Slapped, Orlac derives its horror from the visceral discomfort it creates in the audience. It preys on our empathy—daring us put ourselves in Orlac’s place and imagine what we would do with the hands of a murderer.

Personally, I think I’d prefer stumps.

Postscript: Conrad Veidt is becoming something of a Halloween institution at Art Deco Rhythms, and I’d encourage you to check out his other horror roles—and especially his earlier collaboration with Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—if you’re looking for something silent and spooky to watch this October 31st. Keep an eye out for a podcast about 1920s Halloween coming up on Thursday.

Hindsight, much to the chagrin of those being chased by ghouls and ghosts, is 20-20. Probably nobody in the 1920s knew that Weird Tales—a somewhat obscure pulp magazine launched in 1923 and specializing in, well, weird tales—would become the most enduring of all the many magazines that catered to readers looking for ghastly thrills, scientific speculation, and journeys into the unknown. Like the more successful pulps, Weird Tales built up a community of readers who followed certain authors and wrote in requesting certain kinds of stories. Perhaps more importantly, by concentrating the best “weird” fiction of the 1920s in one magazine, it brought together writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith, who began referencing each others’ stories and exchanging letters—establishing the foundations of what would become known as the Cthulhu Mythos.

Illustrations first appeared in the third issue of Weird Tales (May 1923), but it would take a while before these began to distingish themselves from the standard pulp fare found in other magazines. Depictions of monsters were rare, and most of the stories (even the good ones) weren’t illustrated at all. This was partially because Weird Tales was initially on a rather tight budget—it would never fully escape its money woes—and its modern reputation vastly outstrips its actual success during the 1920s and 1930s. It certainly wasn’t considered highbrow reading, even by pulp standards, and new corners were constantly being cut.

By the end of the decade, however, the editors had fully embraced the magazine’s claim to uniqueness, and let the artists go wild in their imaginative and grotesque depictions of monsters, murderers, mad scientists, and black magic. Oh, and buxom damsels—a staple in later sci-fi and fantasy mags—also became increasingly common. Not that any of this represented an objective improvement in the quality of the art—quite the opposite, usually—but sometimes the rough sketches of a genuine enthusiast can outshine the more polished work of the professional. Weird Tales illustrations were at their best when they fully embraced the insanity of what they were depicting, grasping in the darkness for the most startling and ghastly imagery they would find. Sometimes—really, most of the time—it ended up looking silly, but it’s hard to laugh at something that’s so earnest and unrestrained. The vulgar weirdness of the art turned out to be a fitting accompaniment to the unconventional tales of mad science and cosmic horror.

And what is weird fiction but a descent into madness?

In honor of October, I’m sharing some of my favorite scary stories from the 1920s.

With the founding of Weird Tales and the growing appreciation for Late Victorian and Edwardian horror writers like M. R. James, Arthur Machen, and Lord Dunsany, the Screaming Twenties were a time of great creativity (and productivity) in the world of horror fiction. It saw the rise of a new generation of “weird fiction” writers who broke away from conventional ghost and vampire tales by incorporating elements of science fiction and themes of cosmic dread. While H. P. Lovecraft is probably the best-known of these writers—and the most influential—he was just one part of an entire network of horror storytellers that coalesced around magazines like Weird Tales and occasionally broke into the pulp mainstream (readers of Argosy wrote in expressing their appreciation whenever it published “weird stories”). Some, like Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, would become immortals in the world of speculative fiction, while dozens of others would survive only as bylines in pulp magazines—unremembered, uncelebrated, but masters of the Jazz Age horror story all the same. I’ve tried to include a good mix of famous and not-so-famous names in this post, to give a sense of what ordinary horror fans were reading on long, chilly nights in the 1920s.

“Pickman’s Model” by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)

Part of what set Howard Phillips Lovecraft apart from many of his contemporaries (especially in the “weird fiction” genre) was his preference for giving his horror stories a contemporary setting, even as they drew on undreamed-of horrors from the depths of the forgotten past.1 “Pickman’s Model” is set in 1920s Boston, in the midst of a decadent art scene and an auteur who goes one step too far. Its atmosphere of antique menace juxtaposed with modern life is part of what makes the story so unnerving, and the story’s punchline—in which an ancient horror suddenly bursts into the 20th century in a single startling sentence—is one of Lovecraft’s best.

The horror podcast EnCrypted has a good adaptation of this story, which includes host Jasper L’Estrange trying out a 1920s American accent.2 It can be found here.

“Ooze” by Anthony M. Rud (1923)

Coming from the first issue of Weird Tales, “Ooze” blends sci-fi and horror with a touch of the Southern Gothic—it’s set in the swamps of Alabama—and a healthy dose of unmitigated weirdness. Drawing on what was then cutting-edge science, “Ooze” is a monster story with a ring of plausibility—at least by 1920s standards. It’s that plausibility that allows Rud to construct a terrifying and ghastly tale without appeals to extradimensional entities, ancient cosmic horrors, or supernatural specters. It’s a bleak story—all journeys into the godforsaken backwoods in search of the truth always are—but it’s well told, with just the right hints dropped along the way before the ultimate revelation of the terrible truth. Not all the stories in Weird Tales’s first issue were knockouts—most were mediocre. But “Ooze,” with its distinctive 1920s sci-fi twist and dreary bayou setting, was one of the major exceptions.

Mike Golczynski recorded a solid, no-frills version of the story for Librivox, which can be found here.

“The Night Wire” by H. F. Arnold (1926)

One of the best-loved (and least-remembered) stories published in 1920s Weird Tales, “The Night Wire” takes the wire service—an important (if mostly forgetten) aspect of newspaper culture—and makes it the occasion for a surreal and horrifying tale of cosmic dread. Set during the graveyard shift in a news bureau somewhere on the West Coast, the tale unfolds in the form of dispatches received from an obscure western town chronicling what seems to be a bizarre invasion from beyond. As with any good tale of the weird, much is left unexplained, and even the narrator ends unsure exactly what kind of brush with the supernatural has just taken place. This was one of Arnold’s only published stories, but its unique setting and immersive mood of nocturnal dread made it an immediate favorite with Weird Tales readers—so much so that even the editors expressed surprise at the success of what they considered a “filler” story.3

The horror podcast EnCrypted has an excellent adaptation that perfectly captures the period atmosphere of the story, which you can find here.

“A Warning to the Curious” by M. R. James (1925)

The undisputed master of the ghost story, M. R. James is associated more with the Victorian Era—when most of his stories are set—than the Roaring Twenties. But nostalgia for the enchanted and ghost-haunted 19th century (or even the witch-haunted 17th century) was a central feature of 1920s horror fiction, and James continued writing new ghost stories into the 1930s. Morever, he was pivotal in the shift away from the over-explained horror tales of the Gothic era towards the terror of the unknown—an epochal transformation in horror fiction. James’s demons and spectres are enigmatic, half-glimpsed, and unexplained. His stories are sprinkled with arcane historical and philological references, rewarding readers for their knowledge of medieval history, Gothic architecture, or Latin. There’s also an impish streak in James’s tales, as he plays with the established conventions of the English ghost story and satirizes his own protagonists’ dusty antiquarianism. James knew that the best part of the ghost story was the nervous giggling after the lights came back on and everyone disclaimed having ever really been scared by something as ridiculous as a wailing ghoul or reveling demon.

All that to say, “A Warning to the Curious” is a horrifying tale that contains all of James’s signature elements—the quaint English village, the gentleman academic as protagonist, and the sinister reward that comes from the quest for lost or hidden knowledge. There are many good adaptations of M. R. James’s works, but it would be a shame to miss Christopher Lee’s (slighty abridged) version created for the BBC, presented as a “visual audiobook” of sorts.

“Beyond the Door,” by Paul Suter (1923)

Tales of the slow, inexorable slip into insanity have been standard in horror fiction ever since Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), but few stories in this mold are as unsettling and ghastly as “Beyond the Door.” The setup is a familiar one: the protagonist’s uncle, a scientst, has died under mysterious circumstances. His journal reveals a man with a haunted conscience. He’s wronged the woman who loved him—jilting her even as she begged to be his wife—but thinks he’s gotten away with it until the sounds and half-glimpses of a malevolent entity—a creeping, hunched creature, like a dog—begin to make his nights unbearable. Has his guilt driven him over the edge, or is there really something lurking in the abandoned well in the cellar, hounding him into the abyss? Well… telling would spoil the fun.

The podcast EnCrypted has a postively chilling adaptation of this story, which can be found here.

“The Human Chair” by Edogawa Ranpo (1925)

As with so much Japanese modernist art in the early 20th century, Edogawa Ranpo’s “The Human Chair” is astounding in its sheer weirdness. Though Ranpo is mainly known as a popularizer of Western detective fiction within Japan, he was also an accomplished writer of chilling tales, drawing inspiration from his idol (and namesake) Edgar Alan Poe. “The Human Chair” is probably the weirdest and most unsettling story published anywhere in the 1920s, simply because of the way it plays on visceral fears we didn’t even know we had. Unlike the period’s more typical horror fare, there’s no suggestion of the scientific or the supernatural in “The Human Chair.” Nor is there the threat of violence or madness—at least not of the cosmic kind. But good luck getting comfortable on the sofa for a nice, cozy nap after reading this one.

Only the original Japanese story is in the public domain, but the podcast Pseudopod created a new translation a few years ago, which you can find here.

Postscript: This is the first of three bonus posts in honor of October. Because this month will be otherwise be rather crowded, I’m skipping the annotated chapter that usually comes out on the 15th.

Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate (1926) wasn’t the first color movie of the silent era, but it was the first to be a major international success.

It did have a lot going for it. Fairbanks was at the height of his fame, having just come off the success of Robin Hood (1922) and the even more ambitious The Thief of Bagdad (1924). He knew what he was doing, and his artistic needs were being well-served by United Artists, the company he had helped found. Also, pirates were big in the 1920s—pulp magazines regularly featured swashbuckling tales, and novels like Treasure Island (1883) and Captain Blood (1922) had already been adapted as silent films. It was a formula for a smash hit, which was lucky for Fairbanks—he had risked a lot of his own money on the production, especially the long and expensive process of getting the color treatment just right.

Because Fairbanks so was focused on the technical aspects of the film, the plot is less developed than his other swashbucklers. The action of the story takes place over a single day—noon to noon, essentially—in which Fairbanks goes from being a maroon with a vendetta to the leader of a pirate crew to a traitor forced to walk the plank to a victorious pirate-hunter. He also captures a ship single-handed, kills a pirate captain in a two-sworded duel, and falls in love at first sight. It’s an eventful twenty-four hours, full of all that Fairbanks does best—acrobatics, swordplay, smirking, wooing. And yet the Black Pirate is more hesitant and brooding than Fairbanks’s previous heroes—less of an unrestrained force of nature. The Black Pirate seems to carefully plan each move—again and again, we watch the wheels turning as he devises the next step in his scheme whenever new complications arise. One almost gets the sense that his brash, swaggering persona is a mask hiding the true man—brave, intelligent, highly competent—a tactical genius—yet uncertain of himself. He believes in love at first sight, but not enough to take any liberties. He acts, but carefully and deliberately. Just like Zorro, the Black Pirate has a double identity—only this mysterious man in black is the constructed persona, not the real man.

It’s an interesting twist on Fairbanks’s usual shtick, and a reminder that despite his well-defined niche, the king of swashbucklers never did anything twice.

The movie is beautiful, by the way, with Fairbanks having achieved exactly the illustration-like effect he desired with the subtle, rich colors and lavish period costumes. The use of fabrics is obviously carefully tailored (sorry) to the film’s color pallete, and the captured ship, where most of the action happens, is a sumptuous set—larger than life in exactly the way we’ve come to expect from Fairbanks, with elaborate and ornate wood carvings that perfectly compliment Fairbanks’s vision of romance and adventure in the Golden Age of Piracy. And, of course, he brings along some of the usual suspects—Donald Crisp (his antagonist in Don Q, Son of Zorro) as the Scottish pirate MacTavish, Sam De Grasse (Prince John in Robin Hood) as the sinister pirate lieutenant, Charles Belcher (with credits in The Three Musketeers and The Thief of Bagdad) as the captured nobleman, and his old pal Charles Stevens (everything since 1915’s The Lamb) as the pirate crew’s shady demolitions expert.1 Billie Dove, though this was her first (and last) pairing with Fairbanks, gives a surprisingly strong performance, and shows some of the best chemistry of any of his leading ladies.2

While it doesn’t surpass The Thief of Bagdad as fantastic spectacle or The Mark of Zorro as a crowd-pleasing swashbuckler, The Black Pirate shows Fairbanks as a master of his craft. Part virile acrobat, part wise-cracking swordsman, part brooding hero, part sensitive lover, the hero of The Black Pirate is the perfect vessel (again, sorry) for Fairbank’s artistry and star power. Of course, Fairbanks never truly settled into one role. This was his first and last color film, and his next starring role—The Gaucho (1927)—gave his swashbuckling persona a darker turn. What other action star in any era was so restless—so eager to prove something which each new release? Every time he reinvented himself, Fairbanks also put his money where his mouth was—risking the future of his production company by taking the time to get each picture just right.

That freedom—the ability of an artist to realize their personal vision in blockbuster form—is part of what makes the silent era so unique and special, and Fairbanks so inimitable as its greatest action star.

Postscript: This post is published in honor of my wife’s 31st birthday. We’ve enjoyed every Douglas Fairbanks movie we’ve watched together—starting with our personal favorite, The Mark of Zorro—and this one was no different. This has been a tough few years, and I never could have made it without my best friend.

So, you want to give silent movies a try.

You picked a great time to do it. Due to the relentless advance of the public domain, every film from the silent era is out of copyright in the United States as of 2024. Even better, restorations don’t count as transformative under US copyright law, so digitally-remastered, 4K versions of classic films can be posted on Youtube with complete impunity. Getting into silent movies will cost you precisely nothing. There’s a wealth of silent cinema right at your fingertips.

Still, getting into something brand new can be a little daunting. “Where do I start?” is an understable question. So is “What exactly am I getting myself into?” I’m going to do my best to prepare your for your encounter with the defining pop culture phenomenon of the 1910s and 1920s.

A Very Brief History of Silent Films

Our story starts in the 1870s, when photographers began arranging series of photos taken in quick succession into “moving pictures” that were brought to life by spinning a wheel or turning a crank. These early films—if you can call them that—were only a few seconds long, but revealed the potential for using a sequence of images to tell a story—and put a static image in motion. By the early 1900s, the first film studios were experimenting with films made for a commercial release, using purpose-built film cameras and projectors. Feature-length movies that ran for an hour or more gained in popularity in the 1910s, and by the 1920s the Hollywood studio system—with its stars and promotional engine and million-dollar-pictures—was already well established. All across the world, from Chicago to Shanghai, from San Francisco to Stalingrad, millions of people regularly went to the movies. They saw short two-reel comedies and three-hour historical epics. They watched domestic films and foreign imports. They lined up for traditional romances and queued for cutting-edge science fiction films.

These films were all, of course, silent, because the technology for sound recordings was also in its infancy, and trying to synchronize sound and film—while obviously possible—was judged to be more trouble than it was worth. It wouldn’t be until 1927 that movies with spoken dialogue and recorded music—notably The Jazz Singer—would demonstrate that the technology was fully viable—and profitable—spurring a flood of musical films and other talking pictures (“talkies”) and revolutionizing the film industry.1 Silent films disappeared from American cinemas almost overnight, with movies filmed earlier in 1927 having soundtracks and sound effects hastily added to compete with the talkies. Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928) was one of the last major silent films to be released.2 While silent films were still made by smaller studios, mainstream audiences had moved on. None of the top-grossing films in 1929 were silent films—but nearly all of them were musicals.

Many of the great artists of the silent era found it uncomfortable or impossible to transition to sound films. Douglas Fairbanks—one of the biggest stars of the 1920s—effectively quit Hollywood after the sound revolution, and Charlie Chaplin’s films continued to glance backwards at the silent era—Modern Times, released in 1936, contains hardly any dialogue, and wouldn’t have seemed out of place in 1927. To Fairbanks, Chaplin, and many others,3 the silent film was a distinct art form with its own rules and its own unique style that didn’t translate neatly into talkies.

That uniqueness is what you are about to encounter.

Myths & Misconceptions

Part of the reason your average person doesn’t bother with silent films is that they have certain preconceptions about them. It’s the classic prejudice that old equals bad, but beyond that, there’s a sense that silent films are alien to modern sensibilities. So, before we get into some suggestions about where to begin with silent films, I want to clear about a few myths about the medium:

1. Myth: There’s a lot of reading in silent films. Filmmakers in the 1910s and 1920s knew that people didn’t like having to read loads of subtitles. The silent actor’s craft was all about communicating without words, spoken or written. Many silent movies expect the audience to interpret scenes based on an actor’s body language, and even occasionally read the character’s lips. Cheaper, less well-made films tend to have more intertitles—sometimes hundreds of them—but the true masters of 1920s cinema avoided using them as much as possible, or intergrated them into the action.4 There will be reading, but it will likely add up to no more than the length of a single book chapter—at most. It takes getting used to, but after a few movies you won’t even notice them.

2. Myth: Silent films are completely silent. Nearly every movie theater in the 1920s would have employed an organist to accompany its films with live music, and some directors even commissioned composers to draw up official film scores. Silent movies, in other words, were meant to be experienced with music, and most modern restorations include a complete score, often written by a modern composer in a style that matches the music of the period. There’s absolutely nothing inauthentic about watching silent movies with sound. Don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about it.

3. Myth: Silent films are slow and boring. Silent movies definitely move a little slower than modern movies, but it really depends on the genre. Dramas? Sure, they’re a little slow. Romances and Westerns? Yeah, I can’t be bothered with them either. But there are plenty of silent films that break the stereotype. The comedies of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton are stuffed full of non-stop visual gags and hilarious pratfalls. The swashbuckling adventures of Douglas Fairbanks have their star’s restless energy and never slow down for long. Even grand epics like Ben-Hur or Wings have scenes of nail-biting action. Also, as you accustom yourself to the rhythm of silent films, you’ll stop noticing the pace and get sucked in just like you would in any other good film, sound or no sound.

4. Myth: Silent films only use stationary cameras. It’s true that the camera work in silent films isn’t very lively by 21st-century standards. But techniques like zooms and closeups had been invented as early as 1915, and directors in the 1920s found plenty of ways to convey movement without actually moving the camera—like constantly changing camera angles or filling the shot with people and machines in motion. Some of them even experimented with tracking shots—or filmed from the roof of a moving car.5 It all depended on the skill and ambitions of the director.

5. Myth: Silent movies are full of racism and sexism. I want to be careful with this one. There was certainly a lot of prejudice in the 1920s—against foreigners, ethnic and religious minorities, women, members of fringe political groups, etc.—and it does spill over into the films of the era. But the racist content of silent films is often oversold. True, non-white roles in silent movies are often stereotyped, even if they aren’t openly racist or performed in black/yellowface. But not every silent movie is The Birth of a Nation.6 Few of them get much worse than “stereotyped,” and films that treat race or sex more explicitly (like The Sheik or The Cheat) often do so with a fascinating ambiguity. The cigarette-smoking, pants-wearing, fast-car-driving New Woman also makes plenty of appearances in silent films—there were even famous actresses who specialized in those roles. You will encounter racism and sexism in silent films, but silent films are not uniquely racist or sexist compared to media from other periods.7

Okay, with all that out of the way…

Where Should I Start?

That all depends on what kind of movies you like.

I wouldn’t recommend choosing a film just because it’s considered “important” for cinema history. If your first silent movie is a ponderous epic by D. W. Griffith or some other pioneering director, it will probably also be your last. So, no Intolerance or The Birth of a Nation or Cabiria unless that’s something you really, really want to take on. There are plenty of silent films that are entertaining by modern standards and don’t feel like you’re watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings without the action and dialogue.8 The 1910s and 1920s gave us snappy slapstick comedies, chilling horror films, exciting swashbuckling adventures, and the first true Hollywood blockbusters. Those movies, which defined the feature-film for the next century, are the best places to get started. Here are just a few of them:

(I should note that this list is based on my rather idiosyncratic personal experiences with silent films. I’m not going to recommend a film that I haven’t watched, no matter how universally celebrated. Don’t take the absence of a film on this list as an indictment.)

Action/Adventure: The Mark of Zorro (1920)

A fun, light-hearted adventure/proto-superhero film full of stunts and sword fights that’s the perfect introduction to Douglas Fairbanks, whose 1920s swashbucklers would define the genre for generations. The Mark of Zorro has everything: romance, comedy, swordplay, parkour, and a protagonist who’s bursting with swagger, charisma, and charm. The final chase scene is one of the most exciting ever filmed. If you want a real 1920s crowd-pleaser, The Mark of Zorro is the perfect place to start.

Comedy: Safety Last! (1923)

Harold Lloyd, along with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was one of the masters of 1920s silent comedy. His trademark character—known as “Glass” or “Glasses”—was a plucky, hapless everyman—half-boy-next-door, half-con man—who always kept just one step ahead of the chaotic modern world. Safety Last! is Lloyd’s greatest achievement. It’s got clever visual gags, frantic and cringy social comedy, and some of the greatest comic stunts ever put on film. It ends with Lloyd scaling a department store building—it was supposed to be his friend risking his neck, but those kind of misunderstandings are typical for Lloyd films—and the tension (and hilarity) only rises with the elevation. Lloyd has plenty of other great comedies, but Safety Last! is his best.

Fantasy: The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

The first fantasy epic where the special effects took center stage. Set in Bagdad in the world of the Arabian Nights, Thief rocks extraordinary sets and costumes, an all-star supporting cast (including Sōjin Kamiyama, Brandon Hurst, and Anna May Wong), and a story that spans an exciting fantasy world full of Persian palaces, flying carpets, monstrous beasts, and treacherous princes. It’s magical in a way that few films even dream of—especially in our modern age of CGI. Also, Fairbanks goes shirtless for the entire film. I hear some people like that.

The Thief of Bagdad does make use of some Yellow Peril tropes and imagery, so just be forewarned.9

Horror: Nosferatu (1922)

Even if you’re not ordinarily into horror, I’d recommend watching F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. There are no jump scares or gory dismemberments, but it’s nonetheless a very creepy and memorable film. Nosferatu is all about the atmosphere—Count Orlok’s vast mouldering castle in Transylvania, the doomed voyage of the Empusa, the shadow of the vampire spreading over Wisburg. Max Schreck’s performance as the dread vampire count is iconic for a reason. Also, Nosferatu is a great introduction to German Expressionism, one of the most important schools of 1920s cinema, and the gateway to many other masterpieces of silent film weirdness.

Romance: The Sheik (1921)

Rudolph Valentino’s career-defining role was a 1920s phenoma, and also one of the first great pop culture schisms of the 20th century—this one along generational and gender lines. Was Rudolph Valentino the embodiment of modern masculine charm, or was he an effeminate eyebrow-wiggler and a cruel woman-beater? Well, now you can watch The Sheik and judge for yourself. Valentino was certainly a very different kind of lover than the leading men who came before him, and the tension between Valentino and leading lady Agnes Ayres was incredibly edgy for the time. If you’ve always been curious about the allure of the Latin Lover, there’s no better way to get to know him.

(For a discussion of the interesting issues of gender and race raised in The Sheik and its unjustly-neglected sequel, check out my reviews.)

Science Fiction: Metropolis (1927)

German director Fritz Lang set out to surpass Hollywood’s signature spectacle with his science fiction epic of man vs. machine, and did just that. Metropolis includes some heady themes, but it’s easy to appreciate just for its futuristic cityscapes, masterful cinematography, and almost operatic performances—especially that of Brigitte Helm. The official score by Gottfried Huppertz survives, so you’ll be able to enjoy one of the most influential films of all time with its wonderful original score. Do note, however, that there are many different versions of this film, as it was trimmed down by studios and distributors almost immediately after its initial release. You’re looking for the 2010 restoration (linked above), which comes closest to the original runtime.

War: Wings (1927)

Wings is a big time investment, but it’s carried by the charisma of its three leads—Buddy Rogers, Clara Bow, and Richard Arlen—and the epic scale of its battles. It’s the story of three young people thrown into the carnage and confusion of World War I: a naive small-town boy who becomes an ace pilot, the scion of the wealthy family from the same small town who becomes his friend and rival, and the plucky tomboy who just wishes the boy-next-door would notice her (and follows him to war as an ambulance driver). The aerial combat scenes really hold up—which makes sense since they were completely real. Arlen was a real WWI pilot and Rogers learned to fly for the role, and hundreds of real soldiers took part in the battle scenes. The final third of the movie is one gigantic conflagration, and it leaves the film’s strong anti-war message in no doubt. Wings is melodramatic, but also deeply moving. It’s exactly the kind of thing audiences in the 1920s loved.

Honorable Mentions: If none of the above strike your fancy, try one of these silent classics.

• The Flapper (1920): A cute little coming-of-age comedy with Olive Thomas as the title character—a small-town girl who tries to pass herself off as a sophisticated flapper to impress the man she thinks she’s in love with. Seriously underrated.

• The General (1926): Buster Keaton as a Confederate train engineer behind enemy lines. Some of the most insane stunts you’ll see in any film, and hilarious to boot. Be warned that it leans strongly pro-Confederate.

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): A strange, surreal, and unsettling psychological horror film with a unique visual aesthetic. One of the most important films of German Expressionism. You’ll recognize its influence on the work of Tim Burton.

• The Lost World (1925): Dinosaurs! This Conan Doyle-approved adaptation is the forerunner of all giant monster movies—including King Kong and Jurassic Park. Thrilling adventure and charming stop-motion effects. A minor character (Zambo, played by Jules Cowles) appears in blackface.

• The Phantom of the Opera (1925). A familiar tale with horror master Lon Chaney in the title role. Creepy sets and strong cast. One of the founding works of the Universal Horror franchise.

• Any Charlie Chaplin film. There’s a reason Chaplin is so universally celebrated. His comic genius is truly timeless, and his human touch is unsurpassed. Even Chaplin’s “talkies” continued to play by the rules of silent film, so they can be a good place to dip your toes in.

One last thing: If you want to watch films that really bucked the American racial order in the 1910s and 1920s, check out the work of director Oscar Micheaux (only two of his silent films, Within Our Gates and Body and Soul, survive complete) or the movies Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa made with the Haworth Pictures Corporation. Micheaux created his own independent film company to make films starring black actors and aimed at black audiences, while Hayakawa rebelled against being typecast as a cruel “Oriental” misogynist by creating his own films where he played heroic roles, like The Tong Man (1919). This isn’t where I’d recommend starting with silent films, but I want you to know that it’s an option. The 1910s and 1920s were a strange and fascinating time for motion pictures, and not everyone played by the rules.

Soviet science fiction film Aelita is a tale of two worlds. In one, a brooding Soviet engineer (Nikolai Tseretelli) allows his marriage to disintegrate as he becomes obsessed with building a spacecraft that can travel to Mars. In the other, the ambitious queen of an alien race (Yuliya Solntseva1) falls in love because of a glimpse she caught through a telescope. When the two worlds collide, love at first sight proves the spark of revolution on the red planet, as two human inventions—kissing and communism—turn Mars upside down.

Aelita would probably be called “Expressionist” if it wasn’t a Russian film. The cubistic Martian sets and costumes are just as jagged and geometric as anything to come out of Weimar Germany, and—like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—things are never quite what they seem on the red planet.2 What Aelita is lacking is the Expressionist sense of human society as grotesque. As a Soviet film, it obviously can’t present post-Revolutionary Russia as a place of alienation (although it does take a somewhat cynical view of Soviet society in the era of the NEP). The oppression and fear that defines Caligari or Nosferatu just isn’t there in Aelita—and the film even trots out a little party-line propaganda in the final act, as the oppressed Martians rise up and proclaim an MUSSR under the banner of the hammer and sickle. Mars is depicted as a dystopia, but without a POV character apart from the queen, it’s difficult for the audience to experience it as such.

Really, despite its wacky premise and trippy modernist production design, as a film Aelita isn’t much to write home about. The plot is too bogged down in domestic anxieties and contrived relationship drama (”Just talk to each other!” my wife kept yelling at the screen every time some new misunderstanding arose between the engineer and his wife). About 2/3rds of the film is set in snowy, squalid 1920s Russia, and those scenes just aren’t that interesting compared to what’s going on back on Mars. The special effects aren't bad when they finally come, but they flash by so quickly you can't help but wonder if the director is hiding something. Mars is cool, and sinister, and weird, but it takes a long time to get there—and just as you’re getting used to it, it’s back to Earth for the film’s disappointing conclusion.

Since it’s been a hundred years since the film’s original release, I think I’m allowed to spoil that all the stuff on Mars turns out to be a dream. In good proletarian fashion, the engineer ultimately gives up his fantasies of space travel and returns to his wife, resolving to do his part to build the new Russia.3 And that’s my main problem with Aelita. Compared to the other groundbreaking speculative films of the 1920s, it’s just not that artful or elegant. Metropolis gives a better treatment of revolution in a futuristic world. Caligari makes much better use of the “it was all a dream” twist. Obviously Metropolis had an advantage: it could look to Aelita for inspiration, and learn from its successes and mistakes. But then Aelita could have done the same to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and it didn’t. The leading actors all give good performances, and the Martian aesthetic is almost recklessly avant-garde, but without themes to tie its images and characters together, Aelita never rises above the status of a cinematic curiousity—a standard 1920s melodrama that just happens to include a few scenes on Constructivist Mars. Inspiring and inspired-by better films, the first Soviet science fiction blockbuster was doomed to be overshadowed—a footnote or aside in the story of silent Expressionism and speculative cinema. On the right day, with the right people, drinking the right vodka, it might be enjoyable.

But you’re probably better off just looking at the pictures.

Postscript: Let me add two good things about this movie, since this was otherwise a pretty negative review. For those people who are attracted to silent cinema primarily because of the sultry charisma of its stars, Aelita has plenty of close ups of Tseretelli and Solntseva looking alienated and moody, so if that’s what you’re into, you’ll probably like it more than I did. The other thing has to do with the way the film was advertised. Within the film, engineer’s fantasies about the queen of Mars begin when the transmitting station where he works picks up a message stating “ANTA… ODELI… UTA…” and a coworker jokes that it may be a message from another planet. Eventually, the engineer discovers that the broadcasts were a publicity stunt by a new rubber tire company. The funny thing is that Aelita was actually promoted in this way, with mysterious messages (“ANTA… ODELI… UTA…”) claiming to be transcriptions of radio broadcasts being placed in magazines in the months leading up to the film’s release. So, the engineer’s experience of discovering that the mysterious messages were nothing but an advertising stunt parallels that of the audience learning that “ANTA… ODELI… UTA…” was nothing but a promotional gimmick for a sci-fi movie. It’s a clever piece of guerrilla marketing—and definitely the kind of weirdness worthy of the silent era, when studios would do anything to sell a picture.

Catania, Roman Sicilia. 218 B.C.

Fire pours from Mount Etna. The city of Catania burns, and the ground shakes as its columns topple and its villas collapse into dust. Cabiria (Carolina Catena), the young daughter of Batto, is spirited away from the ruins by her nurse. The two are captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Carthage, where the temple of the child-eating god Moloch towers over the great port city.1 Cabiria is to be sacrificed to the three-eyed god, but she is rescued by Fulvio Axilla (Umberto Mozzato), a Roman spy, and Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano), his mighty slave. So begins the two-hour epic about the great conflict between Rome and Carthage, and the quest to save the Roman maiden Cabiria from the clutches of Moloch—the first true cinema blockbuster ever created.2

Cabiria was groundbreaking in more ways than one. It was one of the first movies to achieve massive international success—Cabiria, and not The Birth of a Nation, was the first film screened at the White House—and it’s easy to understand why. Its innovative use of slow zooms was so influential that they became known as “Cabiria shots” within the industry. The sets were lavish on a scale never before seen, and the stunts often made deliberate use of the massive setpieces. The results are extraordinary. The shield pyramid scene is probably the most famous (and for good reason), but fantastic physical risks and feats of strength occur throughout the film—whether it’s characters leaping from the walls of Carthage or the brawny Maciste lifting and hurling full-grown men like they’re feather pillows. The battle scenes feature hundreds of extras (not to mention camels and elephants), all in full costume.3 Few silent films were so consumed with minute details, like what minor characters in the background are wearing or doing, but Cabiria cuts no corners.

The story and intertitles were the work of Gabriele D'Annunzio,4 who wasn’t afraid to assign paragraphs and paragraphs for the audience to read, all in a grandoise, poetic style befitting a classical epic. If you’re not that familiar with the Second Punic War, the historical sideplots can be difficult to follow, especially since most of the main characters are obscure Roman or Carthaginian allies in North Africa that you probably didn’t cover in high school history class. Really, the only parts of the story that stuck were Fulvio and Maciste’s quest to rescue Cabiria and the fatal romance between Massinissa and Sophonisba. I had no idea what was at stake in most of the battles, but I absolutely understand why Maciste became a silent film icon.5

If the film has a theme, it’s the triumph of Roman pietas and fidelitas over Carthaginian decadence and duplicity. That the Carthaginians should sacrifice their own children—much less the children of others—reflects their general character as scoundrels and degenerates. That seems to be the message, at least. Ironically, the one honorable act committed by a Carthaginian is Sophonisba’s suicide—an act motivated by pride that a Roman would have completely understood. Whether the real Carthaginians were actually much worse than the Romans,6 the theme of fidelity vs. duplicity gives some unity to an otherwise meandering and confusing plot. Taken in its original context, it’s hard not to see Cabiria as a paean to Italian nationalism, with the Carthaginians as a generic stand-in for those perfidious nations who would thwart Italy’s destined greatness. It helps to know that Mussolini is right around the corner, but Italy was already in crisis when it entered the First World War, as its ambitions for Great Power status (and Roman imperial grandeur) continued to go unrealized. Memories of the glory that was Rome probably provided some comfort to a country that was fast approaching the edge of oblivion.7

Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier, but I chose this movie because of its influence on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As is probably obvious, Lang got much more out of the Moloch theme than Cabiria director Giovanni Pastrone, even if the child sacrifice scene in Cabiria is much more unsettling. Moloch as a metaphor for industrial capitalism is visceral and stirring, but Cabiria has squirming children being fed into Moloch’s burning stomach. You really can’t top that. Lang also probably owes the scale and detail of his worldbuilding to Cabiria, even as he reinterpreted it in a sci-fi vein—there are no robots in Cabiria, and no elephants in Metropolis. There’s plenty that’s unique and original in Lang’s masterpiece, but its debt to the Italian epic is undeniable. And since Metropolis is the greatest film of the 1920s…

Well, go watch Cabiria. There’s something about the towering ambitions of these early epics that can’t be replicated. The early 20th century was an age of adventure, and Cabiria was one of the best.

Postscript: I would be amiss if I didn’t recommend the late Roger Ebert’s wonderful review of Cabiria, written after he saw the 2006 restoration at Cannes. It not only captures the delight of the film, but also pays tribute to the special magic of the silent epic. This may be my last silent film review for a little while since Fear Her Wrath IV is right around the corner, but I’m learning not to make predictions.

If anyone has a claim to really, really be the first screen superhero, it’s Judex (René Cresté), star of the 19171 French crime serial that bears his name. Director Louis Feuillade had already pioneered the cinema supervillain in Fantômas (1913) and Les Vampires (1915-1916), but complaints that he was glorifying crime led him to create a masked hero that had all the characteristics of the shadowy outlaws and gentleman thieves that French audiences in the 1910s loved so much. This new hero used the master criminal’s weapons—blackmail, deception, extortion, kidnapping—against evil-doers, blurring the line between justice and vengeance with his methods and delivering all the thrills of a good serial villain without the guilt. Judex wore a wide-brimmed fedora, and a magnificent cape of black velvet, and scowled and brooded like a true romantic villain. He worked from a secret lair hidden beneath a ruined château, equipped with futuristic electronic gadgets and an underground prison to hold his enemies. His trusted allies included an elderly ex-con with a vendetta, a charming, crafty street urchin, a bumbling private detective, and a pack of hunting dogs (plus one very talented poodle). And, of course, he had a tragic origin—revealed in Episode 7, “La femme en noir”—reminiscent of many a modern comic book superhero,2 which leads him into crisis when he begins to doubt the justice of his crusade.

(As so often, these tropes go back a lot further than we expect.)

For an antagonist, Judex had Diana Monti (Musidora3)—a sultry, vampish beauty with endless cunning and ambition and a really bad case of RBF—along with the various men she ensnares. These included Morales (Jean Devalde), a wastrel and petty criminal, and Vicomte de la Rochefontaine (Georges Flateau), an unscrupulous (and penniless) noble obsessed with acquiring the fortune of the missing banker Favraux (Louis Leubas). Judex’s love interest is Jacqueline Aubry (Yvette Andréyor), the daughter of Favraux, a pure-hearted single mother who learns of her father’s corrupt financial dealings only after his disappearance. Her son Jean (Olinda Mano4) and his friend the Licorice Kid (René Poyen5) are always either getting kidnapped or being unbearably cute, which ensures Judex always had something to do.

I should warn you that the first Judex serial is really, really long. Like, longer than the first two Lord of the Rings movies combined. We’re not talking about a moderate time investment here. Episodes in the English version run about 25 minutes, but in the restored French version, they average nearly ten minutes longer,6 and with 12 episodes and a 40-minute prologue… well, you can do the math. Still, it manages to be consistently entertaining, with a plot that’s always introducing new stakes and finding new uses for old characters. The typical twists you’d expect from a film serial are all there—kidnappings, daring rescues, disguises, double-identities, more kidnappings—but there’s also a fair amount of comedy and pathos, befitting a crime melodrama. What you won’t find is the padding of the kind that became standard in later serials: no recap episodes, no flashbacks to things we’ve already seen, no recycling of old footage. Feuillade obviously took this ostensibly vulgar medium7 quite seriously, and so gave us what was essentially a serial novel in cinematic form.

Audiences would have easily recognized the influence of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas on the characters and plot.

Without the formulaic elements that are commonly associated with film serials—like a life-in-the-balance cliffhanger at the end of each episode, or requiring each installment to be of equal length—Judex comes across as more enjoyable and less contrived than its later imitators. The progress of time isn’t always the progress of art. Compared to the superhero serials of the 1930s and 1940s, Judex may be short on two-fisted crime-busting action, but it shows the care of a director who really wanted to tell a story instead of just tick studio-mandated boxes. There’s an elegance to the plotting and characterization that you won’t find elswhere—at least, not in the classic era of the cliffhanger serial. For Feuillade, giving the characters resolution is just as important as winding up Judex’s crusade against Diana Monti and Favraux.

But what about as a work of superhero cinema—as the original superhero movie? Judex himself obviously inspired many of the heroes of the 1930s, from his secret lair to his oath of vengeance to his striking black costume. The Shadow probably owes him the greatest debt, and through him the Caped Crusader. That said, it’s not like director Louis Feuillade and writer Arthur Bernède conjured the modern superhero into existence fully formed. As noted, Judex hardly even uses violence, and his secret identity is preserved mainly because he’s devoted his life to vengeance, and so people obviously don’t recognize a man who hasn’t gotten around much (a lot like how the Shadow doesn’t particularly have to worry about his enemies recognizing him as Kent Allard—whoever that is). The sensationalist and science fiction elements also become less pronounced towards the end of the series, when Judex and the gang relocate from his underground base to his widowed mother’s seaside château—and even before that, he has no specialized weapons or supernatural powers to speak of. His main tools are disguise, intimidation, and subterfuge—plus a great hat and cape. I’m probably biased, but I can’t help but feel giving Judex two Ruby pistols and some knockout gas would have made the serial just a little more complete. To wax philosophical (and anachronistic), Judex was teleologically oriented towards full superherodom. He just wasn’t there yet.

I did really enjoy Judex, though, both as a bit of 1910s French cinema culture (modern French cinephiles are quite proud of Feuillade and his work) and as a superhero story. It makes sense that, despite the first serial’s happy ending, Feuillade decided to send Judex on another adventure in 1918. That, I think, is the core of a real superhero: we can never get enough of them. We always need just one more story—one more showdown between the vigilante and the maniac. In a way, Judex’s adventures have never come to an end.

After all, there’s still a new issue of Detective Comics every month.

Postscript: I don’t want to do serials too frequently—mainly because they take forever to watch—but I did have a slight ulterior motive for choosing Judex. Having failed to find a teaching job for the third year in a row (don’t let anyone tell you there’s a “teacher shortage” in this country), I’m now facing another year of part-time work and writing/blogging, and one of my projects is going to be developing a middle school class called Superhero Fiction. Besides Judex, I’m currently reading my way through Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (1913), which were both important works of proto-superhero fiction.8 I may or may not end up writing a little something about them, if that’s something you guys are interested in. Either way, I hope further explorations of the roots of superhero fiction will enrich Fear Her Wrath IV.

F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is a rom-com about a husband and wife reconciling after an attempted murder (there, now have I got your attention?).

It’s also not really a silent movie. There’s no spoken dialogue, and the characters are all unnamed, but it has a lively soundtrack—composed by Hugo Riesenfeld1—and lots of synchronized sound effects. More importantly, its cinematography is decidely of the talking era—more Dracula than Nosferatu (and really, not much like either). F. W. Murnau brings his usual bag of German Expressionist tricks (with a bit of the emerging “city symphony” genre thrown in), but the nimble moving shots—some of them nearly a minute in length—and the blurring and bleeding together of different images were still avant garde when Orson Welles did them in Citizen Kane—and that was nearly 15 years later. The layered, exaggerated, and at times slightly surreal set designs show clear Expressionist influence, but the atmosphere, movement, and rhythm of the film wouldn't have even made sense just a year earlier. There’s a reason Murnau subtitled his Hollywood debut A Song of Two Humans. Without the music and noise, without the camera that roams freely through the imaginary world, without the naturalistic yet thoroughly orchestrated depth of the camera’s perspective, Sunrise wouldn’t work as a film—and probably couldn’t have been attempted in the first place.

Speaking of which, I believe I promised an attempted murder. The Man (George O’Brien2), a young farmer with rugged good looks and brooding eyes, is having an affair with a chainsmoking flapper vamp from the city (Margaret Livingston3), who he (for some inexplicable reason) prefers to his knockout peasant wife (Janet Gaynor4). At the urging of the Woman from the City, the Man concocts a plan to drown his wife out on the nearby lake so he can sell his farm and marry the flapper, and nearly carries it out, only to discover that he can’t quite bring himself to wring his wife’s neck. Horrified, the Wife flees from him and hops aboard a trolly, followed by her husband, and they find themselves in the whirl and nouse of the city. After a few false starts, they gradually reconcile and end up having a great day rediscovering their love, surrounded by all the charms of the modern metropolis. They tearfully witness a wedding, nearly cause a traffic pile-up by making out in the middle of the street, get up to comedic hijinks in a barbershop, go to a carnival and accidentally set a piglet loose, and demonstrate a peasant dance to the charmed patrons of a nightclub. I am totally serious about this being a rom-com—the bulk of the movie is dedicated to cute scenes between the Man and the Wife, like when they go to get a wedding portrait (they’re pretending to be newlyweds) and accidentally destroy the photographer’s decorative statue, rushing out before he can discover the damage.

Not that it’s always light viewing. O’Brien’s physical menace when he’s about to strangle Gaynor is genuinely unsettling and almost horror-esque—remember, this is the guy who made Nosferatu—and it’s not the only attempted murder we see in the film. And Murnau takes seriously the complex emotions involved in two people—ahem, two humans—reconciling after a terrible betrayal. It’s a sentimental film, but with an undeniable darkness of subject matter and cinematic framing. The scenes near the end—which take place at night on a fog-shrouded lake—really feel like something out of 1930s Universal Horror in their atmosphere and camera work. Murnau’s artistry shines just as much in its moments of bleak despair as of its scenes of sentimental romance. No other director could have made this film, and no other moment—the pivot between silence and sound—could have given him the opportunity to take everything he’d learned making silent German Expressionist films and translate it into the idiom of the Hollywood avant garde (if that’s not a contradiction in terms). Sunrise is no Symphony of Horror, but it is an exceptional synthesis of all the best of silent and talking pictures under the guidance of a genius whose career would soon come to a tragic and premature end.5 It’s delightful and dark, funny and tragic, “silent” but bursting with sound.

With so many of Murnau’s works lost forever, there’s no excuse to pass on something this moving and unique. It’s a heartwarming rom-com from the guy who made Nosferatu. What are you waiting for?

Postscript: My wife found the subject matter of this movie extremely stressful, and so missed a lot of the cute romantic scenes because she was still anxious from the infidelity and attempted murder. Even if watching a man cheat on his wife doesn’t sound particularly romantic, just give it a chance. There are dark moments, but light wins out clearly at the end (just like in Nosferatu).6

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say Amazing Stories was the most important magazine in the history of science fiction.

There really wasn’t anything else like it in the 1920s. You could read thrilling stories of fantasy and horror in Argosy All-Story Weekly or Weird Tales, or read about the latest speculative scientific developments in Popular Mechanics, but to bring the two ideas together in a magazine dedicated to “scientifiction”—doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?—was revolutionary. Amazing Stories positioned itself as a pulp magazine for scientifically literate readers, even as its stories occasionally strained scientific plausibility. Readers who wrote in frequently discussed stories based on their scientific merits, or suggested recent scientific developments that could serve as foundations for future stories. The ads, like those in other pulp magazines, are obviously aimed at young men of a technological bent—advertising correspondence courses in radio, aviation, or electrical engineering—and the stories sometimes ended with a newspaper clipping demonstrating the reality of the scientific principles featured in the tale. This was, in other words, the original nerd magazine—the birth of science fiction as a subculture of devoted fanatics.

From the outset, Amazing Stories featured a mix of original fiction, tall tales about eccentric inventors with funny names, and serialized stories by established authors. Nearly every issue reprinted part of a novel by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Abraham Merritt, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, and every story was illustrated. If sci-fi fans know about Amazing Stories today, it’s probably because of its bizarre, eye-catching covers, which frequently depicted grotesque monsters or oddly-shaped starships, but it’s the illustrations inside the magazine that caught my interest. Frank R. Paul (“Paul”), Hans Waldemar Wessolowski (“Wesso”), and the other Amazing Stories regulars brought the strange stories to life with drawings that blended scientific plausibility and wild flights of imagination—creating an aesthetic that was clearly of the 1920s yet also utterly unique. Unlike in some other pulp magazines, the visual element was a core part of the Amazing Stories experience.

Flip through an issue of Amazing Stories, and it’s not long before you get a feel for some of the favorite tropes in 1920s sci-fi: giant insects (especially ants), the fourth dimension, time-travel television, starships shaped like airships, starships shaped like spheres, multi-level Art Deco cities with sixteen-lane highways, the planet Venus (always inhabited), carnivorous plants, giant lizards, death rays, diminutive futuristic beings with oversized heads (and brains), living heads detached from their bodies entirely, savage cave men, civilized modern women (wearing pants, of course),1 the power of radio, and whimsical future corporations selling everything from space travel to euthanasia. Robots appear only occasionally, and energy weapons are relatively rare. Really, the technology of the future bears a strange resemblance to what you could see in 1920s issues of Popular Science or Popular Mechanics—broadcast towers, television screens, airplanes, vacuum tubes, rockets, electrical generators, zeppelins—just transplanted to the 21st century (or space). As the 1920s Channel has pointed out, this gives ‘20s and ‘30s science fiction a unique identity all its own—neither Victorian steampunk (even Verne and Wells get a visual update) nor the streamlined, Raygun Gothic look that defined the Atomic Age. Maybe it would be wrong to call it “Decopunk.” It’s not a term Paul or Wesso would have recognized, and it implies something a little more dystopian than the optimistic vision of technological and scientific progress that was typical at the time. Yet the visual aspect is clearly there—Art Deco cityscapes, sleek airships, flappers from space—and what’s Decopunk if not a certain way of imagining the future? Amazing Stories gave us a vision of tomorrow seen from the Age of Art Deco—a world of sprawling megacities, spacefaring spheres, and the unlimited power of electricity, chemistry, and the atom.

Science fiction—and retrofuturism—would never be the same.