During the Silent Era there were a number of film magazines that provided an avid film public with copious reporting on motion pictures & their stars. These magazines richly capture the zeitgeist of the film era in its early heyday, their pages bustling with photos, bios, interviews, gossip, story capsules, ads, reviews, and coming attractions. Today these magazines can be bought online for upward of $20 or so each; here I’m sharing the modest starter collection I have amassed over the last few months. The magazines shown here span from 1916, a year of explosion in the popularity of film following the sensational release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, to fifteen years later in 1931, when the “talkies” had all but driven silent film into extinction.
For the serious fan of silent & early-talkie film, these magazines deliver contemporaneous views into the state of “filmdom”, its public, and (most especially) its luminous stars during film’s fast-moving formative years. In their antique pages, tattered with age but resilient in their hardy paper stock, we may regress 100 years to acquaint ourselves with the bevy of attractive talents who served at the vanguard for motion pictures as a mass medium. In future pieces we will dive deeper into some of the issues featured here; here however they are presented by their covers with their colorful star portraits.
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Pictured above (from left across top row, then left across bottom row):
- Nov. 1916 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Kathlyn Williams
- April 1920 Picture-Play Magazine. Pictured: Helene Chadwick
- Oct 1931 Motion Picture Magazine. Pictured: Billie Dove
- Nov. 1924 Motion Picture Magazine. Pictured: May McAvoy
- Sept. 1928 Photoplay Magazine. Pictured: Gloria Swanson
- May 1931 Photoplay Magazine. Pictured: Marlene Dietrich
Pictured above (from left across top row, then left across bottom row):
- June 1916 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Evelyn Greeley
- June 1917 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Juanita Hansen
- June 1918 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Louise Huff
- March 1920 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Mae Murray
- May 1926 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Colleen Moore
- May 1926 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Richard Dix
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We’ll end here with a lovely color advertisement decorating the (torn) back inside cover from the Nov. 1916 issue of Motion Picture Classic above:
Here we see Mary Pickford, who by that year of 1916 had earned her singular (and still-enduring) sobriquet as “America’s Sweetheart”. That label was first used to describe Pickford as early as 1914, shortly after she had left Biograph studios where she had achieved fame under the direction of D.W. Griffith as the “Girl With the Curls” and “The Biograph Girl”. The use of her likeness here to endorse a beauty product suggests the power of the nascent film industry to move American commerce via the endorsement of its stars.
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Silent Age Daydream 