Film

<p><span class="deck"> Superstar of the Silents</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Stars of the era still glow brightly in portraits by photographer James Abbe</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> Why, that’s George Billings.</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> GOOD READING</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> The curious career of the Hays Office</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> Ragtime and Reds</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> The Dean of American Movie Men at Seventy-Five</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span style="italic" reason="other" class="typestyle"> George Eastman didn’t think the posters the movie companies supplied were good enough for <span class="typestyle"> his</span> theater. So he commissioned a local artist to paint better ones. </span></span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> Some of the best moments in hundreds of movies took place at Christmastime. And the author may have seen every one of them.</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> It was a great life being a contract writer for a major studio during the high noon of the American movie industry—but it could also be a nightmare. A survivor recalls the pleasures and ardors of working at 20th Century-Fox forty years ago.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> With the Depression pushing the studio toward bankruptcy, Warner Brothers had to resort to crime—and crime paid so well that the company was able to recruit the toughest guys that ever shot up a sound stage.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A little-known ancestor of the nightly news comes to light</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The men and women who labored in the ghostly light of the great screen to make the music that accompanied silent movies were as much a part of the show as Lillian Gish or Douglas Fairbanks.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Robert Benchley, a woebegone chronicler of his own inadequacies, was the humorist’s humorist, a man beloved by practically everyone but himself.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> Hard Looks at Hidden History</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck">President Wilson said that “The Birth of a Nation” was “like writing history with Lightning.” Movies have taught everybody else history, too.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Ken Burns, the maker of a fine new documentary on the Civil War tells how the medium of film can evoke the emotional reality of history.</span></p>

<p>"Gosh, it would be fun to play a president of the United States," said Lieutenant Reagan.</p>

<p><span class="deck">In 1932, the Communist International paid to send a cast of American blacks to Moscow to make a movie about American racial injustice. The scheme backfired.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Desperate improvisations in the face of imminent disaster saw us through the early years of the fight. They also gave us the war’s greatest movie.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">BORN IN SLAVERY AND RAISED IN ITS PAINFUL AFTERMATH TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL AMERICAN ICONS, SHE HAS BEEN MADE TO ENCOMPASS LOVE AND GUILT AND RIDICULE AND WORSHIP, AND STILL SHE LIVES ON.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The great democratic art form got off to a very rocky start. People simply didn’t want to crowd into a dark room to look at a flickering light, and it took nearly 20 years for Americans and motion pictures to embrace each other.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The author sent dozens of historians to the movies to find out how much and how well films could teach us about the past.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Locked in a strange, testy collaboration lit by the fires of a burning world, George M. Cohan and James Cagney produced a masterpiece of popular history in which everything is true except the facts.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Why, with cigarette smoking under attack everywhere, does everyone still light up on the movie screen?</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">It looks both backward to everything Hollywood had learned about Westerns, and forward to things that films hadn’t dared to do.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Here are 12 classic holiday movies worth seeing when you can’t sit through <em><span class="typestyle"> It’s a Wonderful Life</span></em> one more time.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">World War II is so difficult to get right on the screen. Here are some of the movies that do it best.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">One of America’s greatest documentary filmmakers takes on America’s greatest city: Ric Burns discusses his new PBS series, <span class="typestyle"><em> New York</em>.</span></span></p>

<p><span class="deck">JACKIE COOGAN REACHED THE PINNACLE OF SUCCESS AND STARDOM WHEN HE WAS FIVE. THEN, HE SET THE HOLLYWOOD PATTERN OF PAYING THE PRICE FOR EARLY FAME.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A critic looks at 10 movies that show how Americans work together.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">WHY JANE FONDA IS A MIRROR OF THE NATION’S PAST FORTY YEARS</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Martin Scorsese has drawn on his own youth and his feelings about the past, and has rebuilt 1860s New York, to make a movie about the fight for American democracy. Here, he tells why it is both so hard and so necessary to get history on film.</span></p>

<p>Who knows what would have happened if we kids had seen Jane Russell's boobs in that Boston movie theater?</p>

<p>The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. </p>