“Perhaps the ballyhoo meant nothing,” Kevin Brownlow wrote in his defining history of the silent film era, “The Parade’s Gone By…”
It’s probably true that even avid moviegoers have increasingly drifted away from the films of what Brownlow called, with good reason, “the richest in cinema’s history.” In 1952, the Sight and Sound poll of critics had seven silents in the top 10 films of all time. The recent, much debated Sight and Sound list had just one.
