While film noir is typically associated with the 1940s and 1950s, Josef von Sternberg laid much of its groundwork at Paramount in the late silent era. Underworld (1927), often called the first modern gangster picture, gave audiences a doomed hero moving through the demimonde’s shadowy streets. Sternberg’s first talkie, Thunderbolt (1929), followed a gangster to…
Lupe Velez (1908–1944) was a Mexican actress, singer and dancer who began on the Mexico City revue stage in the mid-1920s. She rose to Hollywood fame in 1927. In the 1940s RKO starred her in eight “Mexican Spitfire” comedies. She was also an accomplished Broadway stage performer who starred in Florenz Ziegfeld’s last new production,…
America’s first supermodel wasn’t Janice Dickinson. It was Audrey Munson, the most copied model in New York, whose life story ran under her byline in a twenty-part 1921 newspaper serial.
In December 1915 Mae Murray left the Ziegfeld Follies for the Lasky studio. Trade papers, newspaper reviews, and her 1942 memoir tell the story of her lost first film, To Have and to Hold (1916), opposite Wallace Reid.
The silent film actresses who died young include Alma Rubens, Helene Costello, Helen Lee Worthing and Germany’s Maria Orska, all of whom struggled with addiction. Alcohol contributed directly to Marie Prevost’s death, while barbiturate sleeping pills killed others, among them Ruan Lingyu and Lupe Vélez. Why Did So Many Silent Film Actresses Die Young? The…
Mary Miles Minter (1902–1984) was an American silent-film actress who appeared in 53 films between 1912 and 1923, the last of them The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. She began as a child star and kept a childish, virginal reputation until the murder of a man she professed to love, the director William Desmond Taylor,…
L’Ange des projections lumineuses (The Angel of Luminous Projections) was an illustrated French monthly publication devoted to teaching the Catholic faith with magic-lantern slides. These slides were made of glass and were projected using devices with lenses and an intense light source—an oil or alcohol lamp, acetylene, limelight or an electric arc. The value of…
A flapper was a young woman of the 1920s who cut her hair short, raised her hemline, and refused the manners her mother was raised on. That definition holds for the later 1920s. It is not what the word meant when Americans first took it up: in 1916 a flapper was a schoolgirl, roughly twelve…