The period from 1927 to 1930 is one of the most interesting in film history. Beginning with the debut of The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with synchronized talking sequences, it saw the swift and almost complete obliteration of silent film as a popular moviemaking form. Even those of us who love silent film must admit this was inevitable. But there was certainly never a ‘clean break’ from the silent to sound eras. Into the 1930s, in many parts of the world, theatres still weren’t wired for sound. And of course, people in many parts of the world couldn’t understand English if they heard it. If one produced a full-talkie that one wished to have seen in many nations, one had to decide how to approach that situation.
And so it was that director Lewis Milestone made All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the finest silent films of all time—and one very few people know exists, because the sound version of it is so famous.
This post is part of Classic Movies’ Mary Pickford Blogathon, which is rolling right now.
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It’s important to know, before you slip a copy of this movie into your DVD player, or even read this post, that The Little American was directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Knowing this makes The Little American a more fulfilling viewing experience. It explains things.
DeMille’s sort of a controversial figure in film history. He’s remembered as a director who put the public’s appetites ahead of its need for art—giving them what they wanted in the form of splashy, often hugely expensive films that were thin on insight. He directed a silent film about Joan of Arc (no, not that one); he made two versions of The Ten Commandments and the humbly titled Greatest Show on Earth (considered by some to be the weakest-ever Best Picture winner, though it’s not even close). When he died in 1959, DeMille was planning a movie about space travel.
I wish he’d lived to make that one. It would have told us nothing about space, but an awful lot about what people hoped to find there.
DeMille had a gift for recognizing the public’s desires and delivering a product that met them. Yet The Little American seems not to be an example of this. It seems, instead, an attempt to change the public’s collective mind—a tool designed to steel Americans’ resolve for a bloody conflict their country had just joined.
