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The Filmgoers' Annual
WHAT IS
THIS GLAMOUR OF ^ THE STARS f
THEIR names are household words throughout the English-speaking world. Their faces are familiar to millions. Their features, their voices, their clothes, their gestures are studied daily by armies of filmgoers. They are the film famous.
They are discussed and dissected, down to their separated eyelashes, in a never-ending flood of argument or adoration. It is the merest literal truth to say that there is not on? minute in the round of the clock when the moods and the mannerisms of Greta Garbo cease to be topics of conversation.
It is an amazing circumstance that this little company of people is continuously in the minds of those who seek entertainment in cinemas, and, to-day, it seems there is no one who stays away from cinemas.
One easily recalls the time when the cinema was regarded as mentally contemptible and morally disreputable. One easily recalls the time that when to state that one was a film critic was regarded as a confession !
Times have changed. The whole world is under the spell of the stars.
In making this book, it has been necessary to conduct not one census, but many, of the stars of the screen. They have been examined and catalogued from the point of view of popularity contests and from the sterner point of view of
the money that names mean at the box office. The result of this examination — compilation and elimination — has been
IN the world of cinema stars, Douglas Fairbanks stands for the zest and the joy of high adventure. He has been one of the finest influences in the history of motion picture drama. In looking at his work, those of us who are tied to routine escape into a world of dreams. He has been to the art of the cinema what Robert Louis Stevenson has been to the art of letters.
to show that there are sixty-four stars who are supreme to-day in the cinema — who stand signally in filmgoers' favour and affection. They, with many others, are all noted in this book — the old and the new— for in this strange and wonderful business, fortune smiles on few, and that briefly.
The coming of dialogue has brought many new faces to the screen. The day of the beautiful and dumb is done. The star of the talking picture is greater by far than the star of the silent film. Those silent film players who remain have remained by virtue of their gifts.
In silent film days it was alternately a delightful and disturbing experience to meet the film famous. Some of these stars revealed new talent and new charm which the eye of the camera never caught. Some, on the other hand, revealed such lack of talent and charm that one felt, to them at least, silence was indeed golden. That has all been changed with the coming of dialogue.
O^O Gloria Swanson belongs the credit of being the first cinema star ^ to bring to the screen that glamour which is the dream of those who dwell in cotton and sigh for silk. In herself, she is a shining example of a star who has won artistic independence after having to fight adversity. She is one of the finest and most sensitive people in pictures. She has known disillusion and yet goes on from triumph to triumph. She has character in excelsis.