Conventional wisdom holds that many of the favorite silent movie actors who failed to survive the transition to sound films—or talkies—in the late-1920s/early-1930s were done in by voices in some way unsuited to the new medium. Talkies are thought to have ruined the career of John Gilbert, for instance, because his “squeaky” voice did not match his on-screen persona as a leading male sex symbol. Audiences reportedly laughed the first time they heard Gilbert’s voice on screen. And in the case of the late silent era’s most popular female performer, the original “It girl” Clara Bow, a voice sometimes described as a “honk,” along with a strong Brooklyn accent and careless diction are often said to have forced her into retirement at the relatively young age of twenty-eight.
The real issue, however, was less the voices than the essence of the art. Despite our early-twenty-first century use of the word “movie” to refer to any cinematic production, silent movies and talkies differed substantially. Where talkies relied upon spoken words to communicate plot, ideas, and emotions, silent movies communicated visually using, as the name suggests, pictures that moved. In short, as seeing differs from hearing, so too movies differed from talkies.
The essence of silent movies was visual. As one observer at the time put it, in silent movies “People are doing something. We see them do it; even if they are only thinking or feeling…, we still see it.” Writing a movie column for a Chicago newspaper in the 1920s, Carl Sandburg marveled especially at actor Charlie Chaplin’s ability to convey complex ideas and emotions “with shrugs, smiles, solemnities, insinuations, blandishments.” Chaplin’s visual “sentences” were so “alive with gesture and intonation,” that Sandburg—one of the great American writers—could not imagine “reproduc[ing] any story Charlie Chaplin tells verbally.”
The visual nature of silent cinema made it particularly interesting to deaf Americans, for whom visual forms of communication were more natural than audible ones. In fact, historian John Schuchman argues that the silent movie era “represents the only time in the cultural history of the United States when deaf persons could participate in one of the performing arts with their hearing peers on a comparatively equal basis.”