Lillian Diana Gish www.lilliangish1893.com

  Hollywood 1920-1970 Edited by Peter Cowie (1977) Hollywood 1920-1970 Edited by Peter Cowie (1977) New York and South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes and Company London: The Tantivy Press The true achievement of Hollywood is only now being acknowledged. For years the prodigious output of the major studios and producers was damned with faint praise by the pundits. But during the past decade a reassessment has taken place. Critics as well as thousands of film buffs are aware of the enormous influence Hollywood has exerted on the social fabric not only of the US, but of the world. At its best — in the work of Lillian Gish or Garbo or Barthelmess or Keaton or in unpredictable flashes of brilliance in Valentino — screen acting for silent films had developed into an art, new and unique, which was lost when pictures spoke. Actors were obliged to develop new means of expression. The silent actors were serious about their work. Lillian Gish starved for days before she shot the fmal scene of La Bohéme.

  Sweet Liberty (1986) Entire film It was Gish’s penultimate film role; her first appearance on screen came in 1912 (An Unseen Enemy). ALAN ALDA’S ‘SWEET LIBERTY’ (The NY Times) By VINCENT CANBY MAY 14, 1986 ALAN ALDA’S talent as a writer-director-star is also his Achilles heel: he’s nice. He seems to be a genuinely reflective man in a business made up mostly of people who shoot first and ask questions later, who never underestimate the possibilities of con-artistry and who have only the foggiest notions of right and wrong. As he demonstrated with ”The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979), the political comedy he wrote and starred in (but which Jerry Schatzberg directed), Mr. Alda sees the world not through the Hollywood movie-maker’s periscope. He sees it in the round, more or less like the rest of us who ride subways and who read newspapers and books without hoping to find a hot property. In ”The Four Seasons” (1981), Mr. Alda’s first film as a triple-threat man, his decency and generosity

  Dorothy Gish – Beyond Hollywood’s grasp By Harry Waldman (1994) Beyond Hollywood’s grasp : American filmmakers abroad, 1914-1945 By Harry Waldman Copyright © 1994 by Harry Waldman Manufactured in the United States of America Dorothy Gish was invited to work in Britain in the 1920s. When she made Nell Gwyn in 1926, a different kind of screen persona came to the fore. She was out of the shadow of her more illustrious sister—and out of the glare of Hollywood. She did not return to America right away. The same could be said for Louise Brooks in Germany and France in the late 1920s, Gloria Swanson making her favorite film, Madame Sans-Gene, in France in 1925, and the Griffith actress Mae Marsh in Britain in the early 1920s. Finally, even D. W. Griffith went abroad. He did so once to make a contribution to the war effort in 1917 called Hearts of the World: a second time, ironically, in 1924 to make amends for that one-sided view of reality. That was something for Griffith to do, and others