Silent Clowns

From the dust jacket:

Illustrated with more than 400 pictures, many never before in print

This large and loving book reveals the world-and explores the art-of the great masters of silent screen comedy. A rare critical intelligence is applied full scale to that magical and all-too-brief flowering of genius-as the celebrated critic of the New York Times makes us comprehend, makes us see, the unique mastery of Keaton and Chaplin, Sennett, Langdon and Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Max Linder, and the swarm of amazingly gifted lesser figures that surrounded them.

Silent screen comedy came into being virtually all at once and all of a piece; flourished for less than two decades, captivating the world; then vanished at the peak of its popularity-an art without precedent and without heirs. Now, writing out of a vast knowledge and a lifelong passion for his subject, Walter Kerr explores the nature and delight of this endlessly fascinating form, the achievements of its masters, the special circumstances of its coming into being, the changes that made sound so suddenly and fatally attractive, cutting off one art and launching another....

Here, then, are the silent clowns themselves:

Keaton, the most silent and cinematic of them all, with his unforgettably sculptured face and incomparable presence, from the moment he stumbled out of vaudeville into film-a caveman dragging his mate by the hair across a prehistoric landscape in his first independent feature, The Three Ages-to his ultimate comedic triumphs, his unequaled knowledge of the camera and its subtlest uses....

The great Chaplin, the versatile and innovative Tramp, from the day he wandered into the camera's range in Kid Auto Races at Venice, through the scores of shorts and features that made him the most popular entertainer of all time, to the mastery of City Lights and Modern Times....

And Lloyd, the least "natural" of the comics, searching for his now-famous persona - the over-eager, earnest, and brash all-American fellow of ministerial calm in desperate, dangerous circumstances....

And baby-faced Harry Langdon, whose ambiguous presence confuses us today even as it once made America laugh...Fatty Arbuckle, hauling the Keystone Kops about by a rope...Mabel Normand, aloft and captive in a flimsy air- plane... Gloria Swanson, chained to the tracks... Raymond Griffith, blowing up gold mines in his top hat and cape...Laurel and Hardy, the lucky ones who made the transition to sound, perhaps because their comedy was not in essence silent... W. C. Fields, nearly as funny without speech as with it....

Kerr perceives silent screen comedy neither as nostalgia nor as a looting ground for anecdote. He comes to it with a full appreciation of its wonder and nuance. He projects its pleasures for us. The range and brilliance of his perception, together with the marvelous array of relevant photographs he intersperses through his narrative, make his book supreme in its field. The Silent Clowns is a work of the strongest originality.