As the rosy fingered dawn came upon America in 1913 it found Douglas Fairbanks, the man who would soon be Silent Hollywood's fair haired boy, wowing the crowds on Broadway. The play, Hawthorne of the U.S.A., starred Fairbanks in the title roll and closed after 72 performances; he was also married to a woman who wasn't named "Pickford" - but rather named Anna Beth Sully, who had sired his namesake. Life was good for the actor and he wouldn't turn his gaze West for another two years. By contrast, his future bride, Mary Pickford (né Gladys Smith, 1892 - 1979) had been prancing before the cameras since 1909 and by the time 1913 rolled around had appeared in well-over 100 short films and earned the nickname "Little Mary".
Attached is a Vanity Fair cartoon from the days of silent film illustrating how unsophisticated those movies truly were and how wildly predictable the plots and characters always seemed to be. This cartoon, along with a number similar magazine articles on this site, illustrate that such thinking was not entirely rare.
Another anti-silent film article can be read here...
This critic didn't like silent movies either - -
This is excerpt from a longer article about the goings-on in 1914 presented an interesting (if incomplete) list of Hollywood's offerings for 1914:
• The most popular screen performers were Mary Pickford, John Bunny, Ethel Barrymore and May Irwin.
• The most popular films were "The Peril's of Pauline" and an Italian film titled "Cabiria" (directed by Giovanni Pastrone, aka: Piero Fosco).
This reminiscence pays tribute to a stand-up comedian named Jack Gardner and his skit, "Curse You Jack Dalton", in which he interacted with the performers on a movie screen, "ordering" them about, cracking wise and even having the audience believe that he had shot one of them. This cartoon is yet one more piece of evidence on this site that serves to show that silent movies, although compelling and at times addictive, were still recognized by some of the brighter members of society, to be highly predictable form of entertainment.
-an additional article from the 1920s defaming silent film can be read here...
If you've been jumping from site-to-site for the past twenty minutes looking for reliable information regarding the early career of a silent film actor of the U.K. persuasion who was known as James Knight (1891 - 1948) - you have found it. Click the title above, gaze at the digitized image of his smiling mug and read on! The Conde Nast cartoonist Ann Fish wanted her swank readers to know that she was another Brit who recognized the reoccurring formula that young Hollywood relied on all too often and even though the film business was still in it's infancy, there was such a thing as "a typical American movie". | 
