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This very brief review will give you a sense of how uneasily many men must have sat in their chairs when she was pictured on screen. "She is a very tigerish 'Tiger Woman' in this picture. Her heart, her soul, her finger tips, her eyelashes, her rounded arms, her heaving buzzum, all vibrate to a passion for pearls."

Theda Bara retired in 1926, having worked in forty-four films.

Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.


Charlie Chaplin's Salute to Child-Actor Jackie Coogan (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

Shortly before his movie "The Kid" was released, Charlie Chaplin (1889 - 1977) wrote a few "remarks on the discovery of Jack Coogan, and the picture built around him" in the attached VANITY FAIR article, "The Marvelous Boy of the Movies".


E.E. Cummings on T.S. Eliot (The Dial, 1920)

A review of T.S. Eliot's (1888 – 1965) second collection, Poems (1919), as reviewed by E.E. Cummings (1894 – 1962) in the well respected magazine of the arts, THE DIAL. It was in this volume that Eliot's well remembered series of quatrains first appeared: "Sweeney Among the Nightingales", "Sweeney Erect" "The Hippopotamus" and "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service".

Cummings at that time was living in Paris and writing his first book, The Enormous Room, which would be published in 1922. The review of that work can be read here.


Reviewed: 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (Saturday Review of Literature, 1929)

Henry Seidel Canby (1878 - 1961) was one of the founding editors of THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE and in this article he put pen to paper and presented his readers with a concise summation of what he liked to call "the five phases" of war literature. Canby sensed that since 1919 there had been five unique types of war books, all produced by veterans, and that Erich Maria Remarque's (1898 – 1970) All Quiet on the Western Front was typical of the fifth variety that was appearing in 1929:

"The balance hangs true in Remarque. Pacifism is a theory, militarism is a theory, war is a necessity - not in its causes, for who really hates the enemy! - but for this doomed generation it is a fact. War for these men is normal, which does not mean that they like it."

A 1930 article about the movie can be read herecan be read here.

Erich von Stroheim: an Immigrant's Story (Motion Picture Magazine, 1920)

Silent movie legend Erich von Stroheim (1885 – 1957) gave an account of his life and career in this 1920 interview printed in Motion Picture Magazine. The article touches upon von Stroheim's roll as producer for the movie "Blind Husbands" (1919), but primarily concentrates on his pre-Hollywood life and his disappointment with the "provincial" nature of American films:

"Motion picture audiences have been educated down to to accept drivel until they have lost all perspective. It will take time to again build up a sane balance and an artistic judgment."


Realistic Training for ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (Photoplay Magazine, 1931)

Prior to reading this PHOTOPLAY article we were convinced that Oliver Stone's Vietnam war film, PLATOON (1986) was the first production of it's kind to actually take the effort to school all cast and extras as to the horrors of war; however it seems that this unique distinction goes to All Quiet on the Western Front.

In this interview the seven leading cast members discuss how the making of that movie disturbed each of them in profound ways:

"We went into that picture a group of average wise-cracking fellows. We didn't come out that way..."

A 1929 review of the book can be read here

Filming "All Quiet On the Western Front" (Cinema and Society)