Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime in Films of the Silent Era - Tapa dura

During the first twenty years of this century, crime, drugs, alcohol, prostitution, venereal disease, abortion, poverty, racism - all the problems that torment America today - were rampant, disrupting the lives of millions. Many contemporary silent films depicted a society shielded by a 'mask of innocence'; but there were others - hundreds of them, both serious and exploitative - that went behind that mask, to reveal the deep rents these problems tore in the social fabric. A tragic number of these films have been lost, but almost all of them are vividly re-created for us in this definitive study. Cinema historian Kevin Brownlow has delved deeply into contemporary sources to describe the context, creation, plot, and reception of the movies that showed America its true face - extraordinary documents that still have the power to move us, although we can know many only through this book. This is the final segment of Kevin Brownlow's trilogy, of which the first two volumes were The Parade's Gone By...(1968, about the entertainment movies of the Twenties) and The War, the West, and the Wilderness (1979).

Kevin Brownlow is a film historian whose other books include Hollywood: The Pioneers and Napoleon. He is a documentary filmmaker and has recently completed a trilogy of films on Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. He lives in London.