Contemporary equivalents of silent stars - or not

[phil noir]

why would a website devoted to silents (whether peddling them or writing about them) promote a simple-minded-sounding book like this?

Sunrise Silents sells various silent titles on DVDs, and they produced the DVD of excerpts which comes with the book - so I suppose you'd say it was a bit of a cross-marketing exercise. (They've recently put out new prints of Clara Bow in Mantrap and Hula which have had positive reviews on this forum and elsewhere.)

[charliechaplinfan]

I've seen it advertised on the Sunrise Silents website

I think Judith is spot on with her remark about the plasticine stars of today vs. those of yesteryear. Even when watching and revisiting several 1970s films, I'm struck by how different the natural-looking stars of the cinema of that era were from today's mass-produced celebrities - even the sexy stars like Burt Reynolds, Jane Fonda, and Ali MacGraw. They were genuine people complete with moles, wrinkles, and scars, not models you see in the JC Penney catalog.

I agree wholeheartedly. I've watched a couple of seventies movies recently, not only do they look natural but they look healthy and normal, it's so refreshing and they look real. It brought me up sharp as to how airbrushed our stars are today.

[MichiganJ]

I think Judith is spot on with her remark about the plasticine stars of today vs. those of yesteryear. Even when watching and revisiting several 1970s films, I'm struck by how different the natural-looking stars of the cinema of that era were from today's mass-produced celebrities - even the sexy stars like Burt Reynolds, Jane Fonda, and Ali MacGraw. They were genuine people complete with moles, wrinkles, and scars, not models you see in the JC Penney catalog.

I agree wholeheartedly. I've watched a couple of seventies movies recently, not only do they look natural but they look healthy and normal, it's so refreshing and they look real. It brought me up sharp as to how airbrushed our stars are today.

While there is no doubt that we are living in an age of 'celebrity'--I mean, even I'm embarrassed knowing the name of the woman 'famous' simply for procreating (apparently a lot) and sporting a hideous haircut-- I don't see that as translating to the majority of the actors of today. The seventies were a pretty unique time in cinema, producing lots of great actors and movies (many shot on really bad film stock) but I don't think the actors from the seventies look any more or less healthy than the stars of today. And if modern stars are airbrushed, they are no less so than the stars from Hollywood's Golden Age. I think Mongo's Candids thread has proven that any number of times.

Since Burt Reynolds was mentioned as representing the sexy natural-looking 70s, and as he was in his late 30's--40's in the seventies, here are some modern stars in that same relative age group: Colin Farrell, Cate Blanchett; Ben Affleck, Tobey Maguire; Matt Damon; Penelope Cruz; Angelina Jolie; Don Cheadle, Kate Winslet, Audrey Tautou; Paul Giamatti, Charlize Theron; Marion Cotillard; Edward Norton, Uma Thurman, Billy Crudup, Benicio del Toro, Toni Collette, Hugh Jackman, Paul Rudd, Clive Owen, Jude Law, Parker Posey, Laura Linney, Johnny Depp, etc.

Lots of different looks and body types. I guess just don't see plasticine.

And I know I'm in the very small minority here about my admiration for some of the younger stars, but I think many have great promise.

Keira Knightly has shown she can do serious drama as well as high budget special effects movies, (despite being nearly as thin as Audrey Hepburn.) Evan Rachel Wood always wows me, from The Upside of Anger to Across the Universe to The Wrestler, and Emily Blunt in Sunshine Cleaning is terrific. While I can't imagine seeing the Twilight films, I liked Kristen Stewart a lot in Adventureland and Into the Wild (and Panic Room if we want to talk about children performances). Speaking of Into the Wild, Emile Hirsh was amazing. Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Bell, Jonah Hill (surely not plasticine), Ellen Page, who impressed me in the Canadian film Marion Bridge a few years before starring in Juno, etc.

Again, not seeing the plasticine (or enhancements).

[jdb1]

It may be that many of these younger performers have promise and/or talent, but as a great star said "It's the pictures that got small!" Those of us who love Classic Hollywood are used to seeing the cohesive, polished studio product, and all too many of today's films simply don't compare very favorably. In an era when the next step after cutting the film is planning for the DVD, pictures don't have to be big any more. Very few of today's actors give us the kind of no-holds-barred performance we've gotten from Classic stars, because the movies they make don't call for it. When one of them does give us an occasional BIG performance, a great big fuss is made over it as though it is something very unusual. That's too bad, IMO.

[phil noir]

Echoing both the previous posts a little, I think that the studio system makes a great difference to our perceptions of the classic and modern eras. In the twenties, thirties, forties and on into the fifties, actors were signed to long-term contracts, and carefully groomed and trained and assigned roles - for the most part - that played to their strengths and that could be proven to appeal to the public via healthy box office returns.

I don't think the proportion of talented performers is any smaller now than in 1928 or 1938 or 1948, but today film actors are predominantly freelancers. Many who by luck or talent end up in a big money-making film then have to continue their careers through their own artistic decisions and the business decisions of their agents. Some, who probably would have given Tyrone Power or Jean Harlow a run for their money in the Golden Age, are not good at this. They flounder and disappear. Alicia Silverstone is a case in point. She had a big hit in Clueless, signed her own two picture production deal, and then seemed to have little idea what type of project would suit her best. The result: her status quickly diminished.

There are actors today who I can see as stars in classic Hollywood; similarly there are stars from then, who, if they had to manage their own careers today, I don't think would have been nearly so successful.

I also think it makes a difference that stars don't appear in so many films now; in the '30s if an actor's first film of the year underperformed, there would be another one along in April and another in July and another in November and so on: this helped to maintain their star status. But if a star only make one film every eighteen months and they have a flop - as can happen today - then this is much more damaging.

[MichiganJ]

I agree with Phil Noir, especially about the quantity and quality of films a particular star appears in. I think that during the studio system, actors had little or no time to prepare for any given role, and, as good as those actors were, many of them continued to play different variations of roles the've already done and stayed within their comfortable personas. They may not have wanted to, but we all know that Cary Grant could never play a killer and there's not that much difference between Sam Spade and Rick Blaine. This is why we can easily single out some "best" performances by classic actors; they were different. Marilyn in The Misfits, for example. Bogie in African Queen. But what is Grant's best performance? (It's Notorious, of course.) The no-holds barred performances from any given actor in classic Hollywood are relatively few, especially within the context of their quantity, and those, too, are the ones we continue to make a fuss over.

Also, while the silent era actors used pantomime, acting in the studio era was equally stylized. It wasn't until the method that a more "realistic" approach to performance came into vogue--for better or worse. There's a story I've read, about the infamous dentist scene in Marathon Man where Hoffman stayed up all night to get the scene right and Olivier suggested, "why not try acting?". But look at Olivier's acting, in that film and his great films in the past. It's pretty big and quite stylized. (Please, don't make me bring up The Jazz Singer.) One of the reasons I like Marathon Man is seeing the competing acting styles (that, and Roy Scheider--I miss Scheider.)

I think that the actors of today meld a bit of the old-style with some method, or at least research and development of character, and have come up with yet another type of acting. Comparing them to classic Hollywood or even the acting of the seventies is like comparing the actors of the seventies with those from the forties, or those from the forties with the twenties. It's fun, but relatively meaningless.

That the actual release of a film is essentially a commercial for DVD release doesn't diminish the performance of an actor. And most of us have little opportunity to see classic Hollywood films on anything other than a TV (or an ipod--what is the world coming to?), but as far as pictures not having to be big, I would have thought the argument would be that modern films are too big. But either way, I don't see it. Look at the best picture nominations. Avatar, definitely big. District 9 (great film and equally big). But An Education? A Serious Man? Even The Hurt Locker, I don't know if it's big or not. (I do know it's a nail biter).

[jdb1]

Mish, I think we are having a terminology problem:

When I used the phrase "no-holds-barred," I didn't mean a grandstanding, scenery-chewing performance, but rather a total, committed, digging down deep performance. And I don't agree that yesterday's stars didn't have the time to develop their interpretations. One of the things that made them so great was that they did indeed dig deep, even when they had to make dozens of pictures a year. Can you really say, even if they did play similar types of characters, that the greatest of Classic Hollywood's actors did not give us fully rounded and well thought out performances? I think they did, and that's why we keep going back to them.

And, similarly, when I speak of "big" movies, I don't mean necessarily CGI spectacles. I mean the same as above -- cohesive, well conceived and satisfying cinema. The smallest-scale film can fit such a description. The size of the screen doesn't mean a dimunition in production values either: there are a great many made for TV movies that are excellent in every category.

I maintain that most of today's stars are stars for the wrong reasons, reasons which don't have nearly enough to do with the quality of their movie performances. That's the pity of the situation.

[JackFavell]

I think today's stars simply don't get the practice honing their craft that the classic stars did under the studio system. And by craft, I mean the whole package - acting, choosing roles, knowing your limitations and your strengths. Most of the classic stars went through dozens and dozens of B pics and even two reelers to get to be "big", and therefore they knew what their strengths and weaknesses were by the time they got their big roles. Nowadays, ya either got it, or ya ain't. You could have immense talent, and fall on your face due to not understanding how to pick a good role.

[charliechaplinfan]

I admit, I don't watch very many modern films and if I do they're children's films. When I do watch movies I want to go back to the past and enjoy the glamour of the golden age of cinema or watch seventies films and wallow in nostalgia, so I can't criticise the performances of todays actors, although I can't understand the appeal of some of the bigger names, I'm thinking of Tom Cruise particularly but there are a couple of others.

It's the images of the stars of today that are all over the celebrity magazines, I don't buy them but they're at the hairdressers, in the staff room, at children's play centres and I'm compelled to pick them up. Most of the women are quite a bit thinner than the actresses of the seventies and that's what brought me up sharply, the women of the seventies looked far better. The only other period that matches it for thinness is the thirties actresses like Carole Lombard were petite but looked very much in proportion.

It's a different discussion than the merits of the acting but that was the point of my original post.

I do agree with you MichiganJ that Cary's part in Notorious was his best role.