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Behind the Mask of Innocence: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era
Combining film history and social history, Kevin Brownlow surveys the treatment of contemporary social problems by film directors and producers in the early part of the century. This is the definitive history of silent films, documenting many that have been lost or forgotten.
606 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
About the author
Kevin Brownlow
45 books55 followersKevin Brownlow, is a filmmaker, film historian, television documentary-maker, author, and Academy Award recipient. Brownlow is best known for his work documenting the history of the silent era. Brownlow became interested in silent film at the age of eleven. This interest grew into a career spent documenting and restoring film. He has rescued many silent films and their history. His initiative in interviewing many largely forgotten, elderly film pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s preserved a legacy of cinema. Brownlow received an Academy Honorary Award at the 2nd Annual Governors Awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on November 13, 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 14, 2026
Kevin Brownlow’s book had the intention of dispelling the myth that silent films were made during a period of innocence, lacking the deeper themes we see in films today. As he writes in the introduction, “The movies were born into the era of reform, which (roughly) opened with the inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 and closed with the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917.” During this period there was a view that the ills of society could be brought up in film, with solutions proposed. “Progressive” at this time meant something very different, and had elements of moral uplift and control of content via censorship. Some of these moral crusaders went off the deep end, like Jane Addams, who was “convinced that for every child driven distraught, a hundred permanently injure their eyes watching the moving films, and hundreds more seriously model their conduct upon the standards set before them.” So it’s a fascinating period, both because of the nascent film industry, but also because of the things going on in America (and the world), most of which is still highly relevant today.
Brownlow goes through literally hundreds of films, whether lost or still extant, as well as provides historical context on all of the themes he touches on: censorship, matters of sex, drugs, prohibition, crime, political corruption, women’s suffrage, prisons, poverty, immigration, and industry. This book is really quite a tour de force, and in addition to learning a lot about silent films, I learned about America in the early part of the 20th century. He is a true lover of these films, writing “When filmmakers of this period treated social themes, they tended to lose concern for those qualities we would term cinematic. But there can be no doubt that the message was conveyed to the nickelodeon audiences, even if the impression was only fleeting. And a few of the films were beautiful to look at, as well as being a valuable record of their time.”
Some things I wanted to remember:
- Conflicting politics. For example, Lois Weber’s fascinating film Where Are My Children (1916), which, despite including the stench of eugenicist views, also celebrated the work of Margaret Sanger, who coined the term ‘birth control’ and who worked to educate the public at a time when it was against the law in New York to give information on contraception to anyone for any reason. Her literature and birth control clinics led directly to the Planned Parenthood of today. Weber would also make films like The People vs. John Doe (1916), which was a protest against capital punishment and the police using the “third degree” to force confessions out of suspects.
- Conflicting politics, part two. We get this ugly bile from prominent sociologist Edward A. Ross on immigration, who was a leading progressive of the period and all the way through the 1940’s; see if you don’t think it sounds like Trump: “Immigrants were dirty and drunken, illiterate and often mentally unbalanced; they fostered crime and bad morals; they were the ones who read the yellow press, who wrecked the educational system with parochial schools, who caused the proliferation of cities, who, by selling their votes for protection and favors, aided the grip of the bosses on city politics. They threatened to overwhelm ‘American blood.’”
- Juvenile courts. This was highlighted by the story of Judge Ben Lindsey, which was made into the film Saved by the Juvenile Court (1913), of which only four minutes survives. Following along in an idea developed by Julia Lathrop and Lucy Flower a decade earlier, Lindsey was one of the pioneers in creating a separate juvenile court for child offenders, writing with great mercy that “the criminal court for child-offenders is based on the doctrine of fear, degradation, and punishment. It was, and is, absurd. The Juvenile Court was founded on the principle of love. We assume that the child has committed, not a crime, but a mistake, and that he deserves correction, not punishment. Of course, there is a firmness and justice, for without these there would be danger in leniency. But there is no justice without love.” Brownlow then notes: “Lindsey’s idea of trying youthful offenders in a special court spread across the nation. But he enraged those to whom property was more important than money.” They proceeded to wage war on him, among other things bribing prostitutes to naming him as a customer, but her prevailed, causing 151 new laws to be passed, and delegations from many countries to come visit his methods.
- Child labor. Lindsey was also notable for having recognizing child labor as wrong, saying “Probably no other evil of modern industrialization had a more devastating effect upon the home and family than child labor,” though his efforts to curb it were less successful. Brownlow writes further, “The fact that child labor should still be an issue at the end of the Reform Era is an indication of the strength of the opposition. The industrialists had found an all-purpose answer to their critics; they describe the issue as ‘a Trojan horse concealing Bolshevists, Communists, Socialists, and all that traitorous and destructive brood,’ citing at the end Jane Addams in 1930. How telling is it that a hundred years later, not only are these same techniques being employed to attack anything that threatens big business, but that child labor is again on the rise.
- Prisons. Brownlow quotes Veronica and Paul Henry King’s 1923 text Problems of Modern American Crime: “The jails of the United States are unbelievably vile. They are almost without exception filthy beyond description, swarming with roaches and body vermin. They are giant crucibles of crime.” They were also heavily populated, and in the south, this was the period in which convicts were put to work on chain gangs. And when you compare that to the recent documentary The Alabama Solution (2025) from a century later, you realize that sadly not much has really changed, despite the efforts of reform groups. Raoul Walsh made a name for himself with his prison reform film The Honor System (1917), a film which was highly lauded, but which is unfortunately lost. I loved reading Brownlow’s detailed description of it and reactions to it, however.
- Censorship. Notable was the terrible 1915 Supreme Court decision in Mutual Film Corporation v Industrial Commission of Ohio that the First Amendment did not apply to motion pictures (yet another thing SCOTUS got wrong in our history). Brownlow notes the supreme irony of censorship in Chicago focused on not showing the police in a negative light, or even showing firearms on the screen, when the reality of the city enduring a great deal of violence, and “police censorship regarded as one of the chief attributes of autocratic governments – like that of Imperial Russia.” Movies depicting extreme police brutality based on real-life cases, like The Third Degree (1913), would lead to the police department of Detroit coming up with a list of activities they did not want to see in film, and would censor them for, which started with “wrongs committed by agents of the law.”
- Censorship, part two. D.W. Griffith, obviously another conflicting presence, arguing hard for artistic freedom, that “the integrity of free speech had not been so seriously attacked since the sedition law of 1801. He argued for the constitutional right of every American to publish what he pleased – subject to his personal liability after publication.” Meanwhile, Will Hays taking office in Hollywood in December 1921 at $100,000 a year - $25,000 more than what the President was being paid - and a few months later banning Roscoe Arbuckle from the screen, and pushing for morality clauses in the contracts of actors.
- Corruption. Brownlow pulls no punches, e.g. this about prostitution: “Any treatment of this subject was inflammatory, for political bosses had property interests in the red-light districts; police chiefs and judges, not to mention the man on the beat, were on the take, the liquor interests were implicated through the saloons, and even big corporations and banks were involved,” citing Joseph Mayer’s book on vice from 1922. Another film, The Racket (1928) explores the link between gangsters, the police, and politicians, which Brownlow notes went back to colonial times.
- Corruption, part two. There were films that addressed the political corruption such as Tammany Hall in New York, which was “the most colorful example, but city halls across the nation were run by men intent on improving their financial standing at public expense.” And Brownlow quotes Lincoln Steffens, who wrote of big businessmen in his 1904 book The Shame of the Cities that: “I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics.” I thought to myself, tell that to the Supreme Court of the modern age, who with their disastrous decision in Citizens United further increased this corrupting power. Hold Your Horses (1921) and The Reform Candidate (1911) “showed how the businessman had replaced the gangster as the source of finance for the political machine.” And Brownlow relates the history of William Sulzer who after becoming governor in New York, attempted to assert some independence from Tammany Hall, and was then given a political lynching based on trumped up charges.
- “White slave traffic.” This is generally believed to be an overly hyped phenomenon, used against foreigners and even those involved in consensual sex after the Mann Act was passed. It was interesting to read that a 1913 congressional study determined that thousands of young women who immigrated alone never reached their destinations in America, having been forcibly abducted. Of course, it affected women of all colors, but the fact that white women were involved was of paramount importance, and seized upon by journalists to sell papers and politicians to get votes.
- Women’s rights. The Pathe film A Day in the Life of a Suffragette (1908) revealed the terrible attitudes of the day which women had to fight. In it, after protesting and marching against a police patrol, women are subdued by a militia force, and the next morning, “are seen coming out of jail and meekly following their husbands on their way back to their domestic duties,” which was meant to be hilarious to the audience, including some women, such as Mrs. Grover Cleveland, who said “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.” Argh.
- Socialism. A common theme in films about labor struggles was that they’d resolve with a rich man’s repentance and his joining forces at the end with the oppressed poor man. As Brownlow puts it, “Populist films about poverty or capital versus labor refused to condemn the system but blamed the grafting politician or the selfish millowner. Once the villain was removed, the sun came out and the workers marched happily back to their machines.” Writers like Upton Sinclair were very disappointed with the film industry, with the exception perhaps of The Jungle (1914), which had been adapted faithfully (though now is sadly lost). As he put it to a friend, “And then I discovered the difference between a motion picture and a grand opera. In a grand opera the heroine dies in the last act. While in a motion picture she marries the hero amid a shower of spring blossoms, and lives happily ever after in the imagination of the feeble-minded audience.” Brownlow correctly points out the condescension in Sinclair’s words, as making up most of the “feeble-minded audience” were working-class people, a phenomenon amongst liberals which plagues them to the current day.
- Socialism, part two. There were very few truly socialist films even made, especially after a letter from David Niles, chief of the motion picture section of the U.S. Department of Labor, was circulated amongst the leaders of the film industry in November, 1918, just before the Red Scare was ushered in the following year. It advocated portraying members of the I.W.W. and Bolsheviks as villains, “while portraying the hero as a strong, virile American, a believer in American institutions and ideals.” Socialist projects were soon cancelled, and things like this would be written in magazines like Photo-Play Journal: “There is much freedom of thought that should be imprisoned,” remarkably not seeing how contrary this was to the first Amendment, all while professing to hold up “American institutions and ideals.” William E. Leuchtenberg would write, “Perhaps at no time in our history has there been such a wholesale violation of civil liberties.” Things would only relax a bit at the end of 1920, as the threat of a Communist takeover of Europe receded. In the meantime, retrograde pictures like Bolshevism on Trial (1919) emerged, written by Reverend Thomas Dixon (the same dingus who wrote the Clansman, the basis for The Birth of a Nation), which was “an attempt to make socialism seem ludicrous in theory and impossible in practice.”
- Reaction to the Russian Revolution. Initial films like The Cossack Whip (1916) were sympathetic to Russian Revolution, comparing it to the American Revolution, before the inevitable backlash and the Red Scare a few years later in 1919. As Brownlow quotes author Gilbert Seldes in this absolutely brilliant observation: “This October revolution, as opposed to the Kerensky one, was the first revolution in any country since 1776 which was not based on our revolutionary principles. Given slight differences, the French revolution, the 1848 movement, the upsetting of kingdoms on the Continent, even the February revolution meant democracy. They were following us. And bang, in October 1917 occurred a revolution which had the audacity, the goddamn crust, to say that the American revolution was not the last one…as far as anyone was aware at all of what was happening, the awareness brought home to them this fantastic fact; that for the first time in nearly 150 years – we were not the New World. The Russians had started a new system; what right did they have? We invented revolution, and they turned it against us. The reflection of this in our movies was preposterous beyond words.” Brownlow notes later that from March to October 1917 Social Democrat Kerensky was in power, with the financial support of the United States.
- The wealth gap. The railroad baron Jay Gould: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Meanwhile, the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller reacting to the strike Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (a place he ran as a dictatorship, even censoring the movies his employees saw), by savagely attacking them with the militia (the Ludlow massacre of Easter, 1914). Among many union struggles that Brownlow mentions, he also points out the food riots in the cities when prices escalated after America had joined WWI, spurred on by speculators and profiteering by middlemen, shown in films like The Public Be Damned (1917). However, by the time the 1920’s rolled around, and despite the Brookings Institute estimating that the poor made up 60% of the country, poverty was shown less and less. The theater experience was one more of escape to symphony orchestras and scented air, designed to take people out of their mundane lives. It seems the rosy view that America would have of itself, as reflected in films, would really start here, and last for decades.
- Anti-immigration sentiment, west side: “In the 1890’s, the vast majority of immigrants were Italians, Slavs, and Russian Jews. The ‘native’ Americans and older immigrants regarded them as ‘educationally deficient, socially backward, and bizarre in appearance’ and disliked them on sight. Dislike combined with insecurity to produce fear, and racial theories were developed to strengthen the call for a firm restriction on immigration.” Horror stories about the Mafia and the Black Hand were stoked. It was very similar to what the Irish had gone through a half a century earlier (will we never learn?). A bill to require a literacy test was passed by Congress, but vetoed by President Cleveland, who said immigrants and their descendants “were now among our best citizens.” And interestingly enough, there were a few Swedish films made, like Emigranten (1910), meant to caution and discourage viewers from emigration to the awful conditions in the United States.
- Anti-immigration sentiment, east side: Chinese Exclusion Acts passed in 1882 and renewed several more times until the Deficiency Act in 1904 banned Chinese laborers permanently, despite them representing 1% of the entire immigrant population, and doing little to quell fear of “the yellow peril,” which was stoked in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. Bizarrely, the Japanese continued to be allowed to enter, though often were shunted off into agricultural jobs, and eventually with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, were also barred. Brownlow makes the point that this act spurred Japanese nationalism, and that historians like Leonard Mosely link it to the attack on Pearl Harbor 17 years later.
- Scandals, and what it revealed about prejudice. Consider the Leo Frank case of 1913, where the Jewish manager of a pencil factory was convicted of murdering a girl amidst antisemitic fervor, in what is now widely regarded to have been a miscarriage of justice. When he was ordered to be moved to a prison farm, an angry mob nearly hanged the governor. After Frank’s throat was cut and he was in the hospital, a group of 25 men lynched him. The Ku Klux Klan celebrated by burning a cross atop Atlanta’s Stone Mountain. The KKK were reinvigorated also by hateful antisemitism published in Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper that, among other things, produced the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and claimed the Jews were controlling the finances of the world, and caused WWI. Hitler was an admirer and not only had a large photo of Ford in his Munich headquarters, but also quoted from Ford’s articles at length in Mein Kampf.
Brownlow goes through literally hundreds of films, whether lost or still extant, as well as provides historical context on all of the themes he touches on: censorship, matters of sex, drugs, prohibition, crime, political corruption, women’s suffrage, prisons, poverty, immigration, and industry. This book is really quite a tour de force, and in addition to learning a lot about silent films, I learned about America in the early part of the 20th century. He is a true lover of these films, writing “When filmmakers of this period treated social themes, they tended to lose concern for those qualities we would term cinematic. But there can be no doubt that the message was conveyed to the nickelodeon audiences, even if the impression was only fleeting. And a few of the films were beautiful to look at, as well as being a valuable record of their time.”
Some things I wanted to remember:
- Conflicting politics. For example, Lois Weber’s fascinating film Where Are My Children (1916), which, despite including the stench of eugenicist views, also celebrated the work of Margaret Sanger, who coined the term ‘birth control’ and who worked to educate the public at a time when it was against the law in New York to give information on contraception to anyone for any reason. Her literature and birth control clinics led directly to the Planned Parenthood of today. Weber would also make films like The People vs. John Doe (1916), which was a protest against capital punishment and the police using the “third degree” to force confessions out of suspects.
- Conflicting politics, part two. We get this ugly bile from prominent sociologist Edward A. Ross on immigration, who was a leading progressive of the period and all the way through the 1940’s; see if you don’t think it sounds like Trump: “Immigrants were dirty and drunken, illiterate and often mentally unbalanced; they fostered crime and bad morals; they were the ones who read the yellow press, who wrecked the educational system with parochial schools, who caused the proliferation of cities, who, by selling their votes for protection and favors, aided the grip of the bosses on city politics. They threatened to overwhelm ‘American blood.’”
- Juvenile courts. This was highlighted by the story of Judge Ben Lindsey, which was made into the film Saved by the Juvenile Court (1913), of which only four minutes survives. Following along in an idea developed by Julia Lathrop and Lucy Flower a decade earlier, Lindsey was one of the pioneers in creating a separate juvenile court for child offenders, writing with great mercy that “the criminal court for child-offenders is based on the doctrine of fear, degradation, and punishment. It was, and is, absurd. The Juvenile Court was founded on the principle of love. We assume that the child has committed, not a crime, but a mistake, and that he deserves correction, not punishment. Of course, there is a firmness and justice, for without these there would be danger in leniency. But there is no justice without love.” Brownlow then notes: “Lindsey’s idea of trying youthful offenders in a special court spread across the nation. But he enraged those to whom property was more important than money.” They proceeded to wage war on him, among other things bribing prostitutes to naming him as a customer, but her prevailed, causing 151 new laws to be passed, and delegations from many countries to come visit his methods.
- Child labor. Lindsey was also notable for having recognizing child labor as wrong, saying “Probably no other evil of modern industrialization had a more devastating effect upon the home and family than child labor,” though his efforts to curb it were less successful. Brownlow writes further, “The fact that child labor should still be an issue at the end of the Reform Era is an indication of the strength of the opposition. The industrialists had found an all-purpose answer to their critics; they describe the issue as ‘a Trojan horse concealing Bolshevists, Communists, Socialists, and all that traitorous and destructive brood,’ citing at the end Jane Addams in 1930. How telling is it that a hundred years later, not only are these same techniques being employed to attack anything that threatens big business, but that child labor is again on the rise.
- Prisons. Brownlow quotes Veronica and Paul Henry King’s 1923 text Problems of Modern American Crime: “The jails of the United States are unbelievably vile. They are almost without exception filthy beyond description, swarming with roaches and body vermin. They are giant crucibles of crime.” They were also heavily populated, and in the south, this was the period in which convicts were put to work on chain gangs. And when you compare that to the recent documentary The Alabama Solution (2025) from a century later, you realize that sadly not much has really changed, despite the efforts of reform groups. Raoul Walsh made a name for himself with his prison reform film The Honor System (1917), a film which was highly lauded, but which is unfortunately lost. I loved reading Brownlow’s detailed description of it and reactions to it, however.
- Censorship. Notable was the terrible 1915 Supreme Court decision in Mutual Film Corporation v Industrial Commission of Ohio that the First Amendment did not apply to motion pictures (yet another thing SCOTUS got wrong in our history). Brownlow notes the supreme irony of censorship in Chicago focused on not showing the police in a negative light, or even showing firearms on the screen, when the reality of the city enduring a great deal of violence, and “police censorship regarded as one of the chief attributes of autocratic governments – like that of Imperial Russia.” Movies depicting extreme police brutality based on real-life cases, like The Third Degree (1913), would lead to the police department of Detroit coming up with a list of activities they did not want to see in film, and would censor them for, which started with “wrongs committed by agents of the law.”
- Censorship, part two. D.W. Griffith, obviously another conflicting presence, arguing hard for artistic freedom, that “the integrity of free speech had not been so seriously attacked since the sedition law of 1801. He argued for the constitutional right of every American to publish what he pleased – subject to his personal liability after publication.” Meanwhile, Will Hays taking office in Hollywood in December 1921 at $100,000 a year - $25,000 more than what the President was being paid - and a few months later banning Roscoe Arbuckle from the screen, and pushing for morality clauses in the contracts of actors.
- Corruption. Brownlow pulls no punches, e.g. this about prostitution: “Any treatment of this subject was inflammatory, for political bosses had property interests in the red-light districts; police chiefs and judges, not to mention the man on the beat, were on the take, the liquor interests were implicated through the saloons, and even big corporations and banks were involved,” citing Joseph Mayer’s book on vice from 1922. Another film, The Racket (1928) explores the link between gangsters, the police, and politicians, which Brownlow notes went back to colonial times.
- Corruption, part two. There were films that addressed the political corruption such as Tammany Hall in New York, which was “the most colorful example, but city halls across the nation were run by men intent on improving their financial standing at public expense.” And Brownlow quotes Lincoln Steffens, who wrote of big businessmen in his 1904 book The Shame of the Cities that: “I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics.” I thought to myself, tell that to the Supreme Court of the modern age, who with their disastrous decision in Citizens United further increased this corrupting power. Hold Your Horses (1921) and The Reform Candidate (1911) “showed how the businessman had replaced the gangster as the source of finance for the political machine.” And Brownlow relates the history of William Sulzer who after becoming governor in New York, attempted to assert some independence from Tammany Hall, and was then given a political lynching based on trumped up charges.
- “White slave traffic.” This is generally believed to be an overly hyped phenomenon, used against foreigners and even those involved in consensual sex after the Mann Act was passed. It was interesting to read that a 1913 congressional study determined that thousands of young women who immigrated alone never reached their destinations in America, having been forcibly abducted. Of course, it affected women of all colors, but the fact that white women were involved was of paramount importance, and seized upon by journalists to sell papers and politicians to get votes.
- Women’s rights. The Pathe film A Day in the Life of a Suffragette (1908) revealed the terrible attitudes of the day which women had to fight. In it, after protesting and marching against a police patrol, women are subdued by a militia force, and the next morning, “are seen coming out of jail and meekly following their husbands on their way back to their domestic duties,” which was meant to be hilarious to the audience, including some women, such as Mrs. Grover Cleveland, who said “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.” Argh.
- Socialism. A common theme in films about labor struggles was that they’d resolve with a rich man’s repentance and his joining forces at the end with the oppressed poor man. As Brownlow puts it, “Populist films about poverty or capital versus labor refused to condemn the system but blamed the grafting politician or the selfish millowner. Once the villain was removed, the sun came out and the workers marched happily back to their machines.” Writers like Upton Sinclair were very disappointed with the film industry, with the exception perhaps of The Jungle (1914), which had been adapted faithfully (though now is sadly lost). As he put it to a friend, “And then I discovered the difference between a motion picture and a grand opera. In a grand opera the heroine dies in the last act. While in a motion picture she marries the hero amid a shower of spring blossoms, and lives happily ever after in the imagination of the feeble-minded audience.” Brownlow correctly points out the condescension in Sinclair’s words, as making up most of the “feeble-minded audience” were working-class people, a phenomenon amongst liberals which plagues them to the current day.
- Socialism, part two. There were very few truly socialist films even made, especially after a letter from David Niles, chief of the motion picture section of the U.S. Department of Labor, was circulated amongst the leaders of the film industry in November, 1918, just before the Red Scare was ushered in the following year. It advocated portraying members of the I.W.W. and Bolsheviks as villains, “while portraying the hero as a strong, virile American, a believer in American institutions and ideals.” Socialist projects were soon cancelled, and things like this would be written in magazines like Photo-Play Journal: “There is much freedom of thought that should be imprisoned,” remarkably not seeing how contrary this was to the first Amendment, all while professing to hold up “American institutions and ideals.” William E. Leuchtenberg would write, “Perhaps at no time in our history has there been such a wholesale violation of civil liberties.” Things would only relax a bit at the end of 1920, as the threat of a Communist takeover of Europe receded. In the meantime, retrograde pictures like Bolshevism on Trial (1919) emerged, written by Reverend Thomas Dixon (the same dingus who wrote the Clansman, the basis for The Birth of a Nation), which was “an attempt to make socialism seem ludicrous in theory and impossible in practice.”
- Reaction to the Russian Revolution. Initial films like The Cossack Whip (1916) were sympathetic to Russian Revolution, comparing it to the American Revolution, before the inevitable backlash and the Red Scare a few years later in 1919. As Brownlow quotes author Gilbert Seldes in this absolutely brilliant observation: “This October revolution, as opposed to the Kerensky one, was the first revolution in any country since 1776 which was not based on our revolutionary principles. Given slight differences, the French revolution, the 1848 movement, the upsetting of kingdoms on the Continent, even the February revolution meant democracy. They were following us. And bang, in October 1917 occurred a revolution which had the audacity, the goddamn crust, to say that the American revolution was not the last one…as far as anyone was aware at all of what was happening, the awareness brought home to them this fantastic fact; that for the first time in nearly 150 years – we were not the New World. The Russians had started a new system; what right did they have? We invented revolution, and they turned it against us. The reflection of this in our movies was preposterous beyond words.” Brownlow notes later that from March to October 1917 Social Democrat Kerensky was in power, with the financial support of the United States.
- The wealth gap. The railroad baron Jay Gould: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Meanwhile, the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller reacting to the strike Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (a place he ran as a dictatorship, even censoring the movies his employees saw), by savagely attacking them with the militia (the Ludlow massacre of Easter, 1914). Among many union struggles that Brownlow mentions, he also points out the food riots in the cities when prices escalated after America had joined WWI, spurred on by speculators and profiteering by middlemen, shown in films like The Public Be Damned (1917). However, by the time the 1920’s rolled around, and despite the Brookings Institute estimating that the poor made up 60% of the country, poverty was shown less and less. The theater experience was one more of escape to symphony orchestras and scented air, designed to take people out of their mundane lives. It seems the rosy view that America would have of itself, as reflected in films, would really start here, and last for decades.
- Anti-immigration sentiment, west side: “In the 1890’s, the vast majority of immigrants were Italians, Slavs, and Russian Jews. The ‘native’ Americans and older immigrants regarded them as ‘educationally deficient, socially backward, and bizarre in appearance’ and disliked them on sight. Dislike combined with insecurity to produce fear, and racial theories were developed to strengthen the call for a firm restriction on immigration.” Horror stories about the Mafia and the Black Hand were stoked. It was very similar to what the Irish had gone through a half a century earlier (will we never learn?). A bill to require a literacy test was passed by Congress, but vetoed by President Cleveland, who said immigrants and their descendants “were now among our best citizens.” And interestingly enough, there were a few Swedish films made, like Emigranten (1910), meant to caution and discourage viewers from emigration to the awful conditions in the United States.
- Anti-immigration sentiment, east side: Chinese Exclusion Acts passed in 1882 and renewed several more times until the Deficiency Act in 1904 banned Chinese laborers permanently, despite them representing 1% of the entire immigrant population, and doing little to quell fear of “the yellow peril,” which was stoked in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. Bizarrely, the Japanese continued to be allowed to enter, though often were shunted off into agricultural jobs, and eventually with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, were also barred. Brownlow makes the point that this act spurred Japanese nationalism, and that historians like Leonard Mosely link it to the attack on Pearl Harbor 17 years later.
- Scandals, and what it revealed about prejudice. Consider the Leo Frank case of 1913, where the Jewish manager of a pencil factory was convicted of murdering a girl amidst antisemitic fervor, in what is now widely regarded to have been a miscarriage of justice. When he was ordered to be moved to a prison farm, an angry mob nearly hanged the governor. After Frank’s throat was cut and he was in the hospital, a group of 25 men lynched him. The Ku Klux Klan celebrated by burning a cross atop Atlanta’s Stone Mountain. The KKK were reinvigorated also by hateful antisemitism published in Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper that, among other things, produced the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and claimed the Jews were controlling the finances of the world, and caused WWI. Hitler was an admirer and not only had a large photo of Ford in his Munich headquarters, but also quoted from Ford’s articles at length in Mein Kampf.
August 21, 2008
The third and last of what I call Brownlow's Trilogy. This for many is the most compelling as it covers realism and the ugly subjects covered in silent film. Hollywood was not all pretty people. My admiration of Brownlow is second to none, his ability to uncover facts and write about them in a way that is anything but boring makes all of his books worth reading once, twice or as many times as you care to pick them up.
August 2, 2022
If there’s one thing Kevin Brownlow will never do in one of his tomes on the history of silent film, it’s half-ass any of the research and analysis. This collection shows that silent films, particularly those made during the 1910s, were far from the quaint artifacts that history would have you believe. Before the industry started self-policing themselves, studios in the 1900s and 10s were making films on such a wide variety of subjects as human trafficking, venereal disease, labor movements, prison reform, and many other hot-button issues. Unfortunately a majority of the films Brownlow discusses are completely lost, but his exhaustive research into what the studios were actually producing in this period makes it feel like the films are still here with us.
July 22, 2025
For many film buffs, Kevin Brownlow is a legendary figure. He's a expert on silent films, has produced several documentaries on cinema, written several books, and does important work in film restoration (he was a major force behind the restoration of Abel Gance's silent masterpiece Napoleon, the viewing of which, in a theater with a live orchestra, was a seminal moment in my development as a film buff). This book, while not quite legendary, has a strong reputation but I was disappointed in it. The subtitle is a little misleading: it's not really about sex, violence or crime in silent films, but about the social issue film in the silent era, some of which did indeed involve sex and violence. The thesis of the book is that despite the reputation of the silent era as innocent entertainment, the examination of social issues was a major theme in silent films, and some of these films led to real-world reform.
To his credit, Brownlow digs up a lot of information about a lot of movies, many of which are lost. But that's also a problem with the book. It becomes largely an annotated catalog of social issue films; some movies get a full page or more and have long summaries and reports of critical and commercial reaction, but some are one or two paragraphs with little substantial information. The 500-page book, broken up by categories like sex, drugs, Prohibition, immigration, politics, and poverty, becomes a slog to get through. Because so much is covered, I found very few films sticking with me. His thesis could have been proven in half the pages with less "for the record" information to wade through. He doesn't cover films about race, claiming that would take up too much space, but I would have welcomed at least a cursory examination of this issue. If the author can spend nine pages on TB films, 20 or 30 on race would have been very helpful. There are some very interesting films discussed here, but the sheer amount of facts and figures got me down to the point where I was skimming the last 100 pages.
To his credit, Brownlow digs up a lot of information about a lot of movies, many of which are lost. But that's also a problem with the book. It becomes largely an annotated catalog of social issue films; some movies get a full page or more and have long summaries and reports of critical and commercial reaction, but some are one or two paragraphs with little substantial information. The 500-page book, broken up by categories like sex, drugs, Prohibition, immigration, politics, and poverty, becomes a slog to get through. Because so much is covered, I found very few films sticking with me. His thesis could have been proven in half the pages with less "for the record" information to wade through. He doesn't cover films about race, claiming that would take up too much space, but I would have welcomed at least a cursory examination of this issue. If the author can spend nine pages on TB films, 20 or 30 on race would have been very helpful. There are some very interesting films discussed here, but the sheer amount of facts and figures got me down to the point where I was skimming the last 100 pages.
November 21, 2024
I once had a dream about Kevin Brownlow: he and his wife came to stay at the place where I worked, but I was too shy to tell him how important his television series, Hollywood, had been to me, and how it had sparked my interest in silent cinema. (Incredible to think that it was originally broadcast, I believe at nine pm, on a week night on ITV; that could never happen today.) Anyway…
This history of the social conscience films of the first three decades of the twentieth century, many of them lost, is obviously an extremely niche book – even in 1990, Brownlow had trouble finding a publisher – and not many people are likely to pick it up on the off chance and stick with it. Well, so be it (we now live in a world where a relatively famous movie actor’s memoir of what he ate for a year is not only published but pushed into the best seller lists). I found this book thoroughly absorbing, and have embarked on a programme of (re)watching some of the titles that still exist: a couple of nights ago, it was Lon Chaney in The Penalty.
Although it’s great to have Brownlow’s opinions of films he was able to view, I also enjoyed his almost archaeological reconstructions of those that had vanished – through reviews in trade publications and his archive of correspondence and interviews with some of their personnel. I liked his identification of the ‘silent talkie,’ in effect a silent film which attempts through an excess of gesticulation and/or title cards to transmit an essentially verbal message despite the strength of silent cinema lying in the visual. It occurred to me that the British film, Hindle Wakes (1927), after a thrilling start on the rides at Blackpool, becomes this sort of thing: characters stand about in rooms mouthing dialogue (presumably taken from the original play) which is then laboriously rendered by multiple title cards.
This history of the social conscience films of the first three decades of the twentieth century, many of them lost, is obviously an extremely niche book – even in 1990, Brownlow had trouble finding a publisher – and not many people are likely to pick it up on the off chance and stick with it. Well, so be it (we now live in a world where a relatively famous movie actor’s memoir of what he ate for a year is not only published but pushed into the best seller lists). I found this book thoroughly absorbing, and have embarked on a programme of (re)watching some of the titles that still exist: a couple of nights ago, it was Lon Chaney in The Penalty.
Although it’s great to have Brownlow’s opinions of films he was able to view, I also enjoyed his almost archaeological reconstructions of those that had vanished – through reviews in trade publications and his archive of correspondence and interviews with some of their personnel. I liked his identification of the ‘silent talkie,’ in effect a silent film which attempts through an excess of gesticulation and/or title cards to transmit an essentially verbal message despite the strength of silent cinema lying in the visual. It occurred to me that the British film, Hindle Wakes (1927), after a thrilling start on the rides at Blackpool, becomes this sort of thing: characters stand about in rooms mouthing dialogue (presumably taken from the original play) which is then laboriously rendered by multiple title cards.
November 15, 2024
Kevin Brownlow is the definitive silent film historian, and this is his extensively researched exploration of social films of the silent era. The hefty volume looks at everything from drugs, the immigrant experience, human trafficking, labor, crime, and poverty. The main concentration is on a vast number of films produced before 1920, the majority of which are now lost, but many recreated here through Brownlow's meticulous research of both archival and human sources. In some ways this is more textbook than a structured history, and the narrative could have used a better application of the context of these films in the history of film itself.
August 2, 2007
A fascinating study of forgotten film--and social--history, Behind the Mask of Innocence examines social issue films made during the silent era (1900-1930). Contrary to the image many people have of this period as a tranquil golden age of social order, this was the time when hot button issues that are still controversial today roared into American public consciousness: birth control, abortion, divorce, prostitution, sexually transmitted disease, racial discrimination, immigration, labor issues, drug use, prison conditions, poverty, class conflict and more. Film-makers who tackled these subjects took great risks, as it was illegal in most US states to discuss many of these issues, especially those related to sex, in public media. Even when the law was no obstacle, taboos against publicly discussing anything critical of legal or religious authority or prevailing public morals was so strong it was almost impossible for some film-makers to find theaters willing to show their work. Film-makers who touched the nerve of society too forcefully were ostracized, sued, imprisoned or even physically attacked.
Unfortunately, many of the films discussed in this book have been lost, but Brownlow has diligently unearthed the record of their existence and impact in film reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, court transcripts, commentary by those involved in the films or who saw the films and other documents. Brownlow does an excellent job of providing context for understanding the making of and reaction to these films: how the film industry operated at the time, the motivations of individual film-makers, the practices of film censors, legal rulings related to film, how common social prejudices (Puritanism, sexism, xenophobia, racism, hatred for the poor and others) affected what artists could show, and more. The book is insightful and information dense but written in an engaging and easy to follow style. Highly recommended for anyone interested in film, the development of modern popular media, or the early 20th century in general. Includes many film stills and period photos.
Unfortunately, many of the films discussed in this book have been lost, but Brownlow has diligently unearthed the record of their existence and impact in film reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, court transcripts, commentary by those involved in the films or who saw the films and other documents. Brownlow does an excellent job of providing context for understanding the making of and reaction to these films: how the film industry operated at the time, the motivations of individual film-makers, the practices of film censors, legal rulings related to film, how common social prejudices (Puritanism, sexism, xenophobia, racism, hatred for the poor and others) affected what artists could show, and more. The book is insightful and information dense but written in an engaging and easy to follow style. Highly recommended for anyone interested in film, the development of modern popular media, or the early 20th century in general. Includes many film stills and period photos.
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April 28, 2009Looks at deviance in films during the silent era and examines topics such as "abortion, drugs, bootlegging, red-light districts, opium dens, political corruption, poverty, venereal diseases, political issues, labor unrest, women's suffrage, the Russian Revolution, and the depiction of minorities. Rare movies include: Human Wreckage, The Devil's Needle,City Gone Wild,The Godless Girl , and The Cocaine Traffic. Many of these rare movies no longer exist!
March 18, 2008
There is so much amazing information in this book (which coveres social silent films). It teaches so much about American history - below the surface a little. It's written beautifully, if informative and very worthwhile. I wish this had been my history book in highschool!
September 16, 2007
as far as film history/criticism books go, this is probably my favorite. it's also arguably Brownlow's best.
August 23, 2008
Extensive discussion of silent films on social problem and ethnic themes. Excellent
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