Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001
Long-Distance Runner
By Robert Gottlieb
Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life
by Charles Affron
Scribner, 445 pp., $35.00
Lillian Gish: A Life on Stage and Screen
by Stuart Oderman
McFarland, 408 pp., $55.00
Nothing is stranger in the history of popular culture than the fate of the silent film stars. Their day lasted less than twenty years, and when the break came, it was sharp, quick, and total—Hollywood was hit by a cataclysm, and most of its stars were extinguished almost overnight. There were survivors, of course: relative newcomers like Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Ronald Colman, Norma Shearer, and Janet Gaynor, who made the transition easily. Garbo, an exception to every rule, took her time (or M-G-M took it) and emerged triumphantly in 1930 with Anna Christie; Chaplin simply went on as he began.
Review, 5085 words
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