Description: Jeanine Basinger -- head of the Wesleyan film department, author of The "It's A Wonderful Life" Book and A Woman's View -- gives us a revelatory, perceptive, and funny look at the greatest silent film stars -- not those few whom everyone fully appreciates and understands, like Chaplin, Keaton, Gish and Garbo, but those who are either misperceived (Pickford, Fairbanks, Valentino) and those who are either forgotten or unfairly dismissed, like Marion Davies, forever slandered by the caricature Orson Welles made of her in "Citizen Kane." Here is Valentino, the Sheik, who was far from being the effeminate lounge lizard he's been branded as; Mary Pickford, who couldn't be farther from that adorable little creature with golden ringlets; the great divas, Pola Negri and Gloria Swanson; the great flappers, Colleen Moore and Clara Bow; the great cowboys, William S. Hart and Tom Mix; the great matinee idols, John Barrymore and John Gilbert; the beautiful Norma Tallmadge and her charming sister, Constance; the quintessential slapstick comedienne, Mabel Normand, with her Keystone Kops; the quitessential all-American hero, Douglas Fairbanks; and, of course, the quintessential dog, Rinty himself. ("Forget your Lassies, your Benjis, and your Beethovens, because great as you may think they are, amused by their shenanigans as you may have been, unless you have compared them to Rin-Tin-Tin, you cannot seriously discuss canine thespians. Other dogs may be good, but Rin-Tin-Tin was a Star.").

Interest in silent film is steadily growing -- more and more videos are appearing, more and more courses in the silents are being given (and taken) in film departments around the country. This is the first book --grounded in four years of watching obscure films and studying the fan magazines of the time -- to anatomize the major players, reconstruct their careers (which are literally unknown even to film experts), and give us a sense of what those films, those stars, and that Hollywood were all about. The absolutely essential text for anyone seriously interested in movies, popularly written and, of course, gloriously illustrated.

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