STORY STUDY - MEDIUM: FILM “Silent Movie”

(mouth flaps), (intertitle with clever opening sentence).

Directed by Mel Brooks, written by Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca, and Barry Levinson, and story by Clark, Silent Movie is about a director who has an idea for his comeback film: A silent movie. Cue the music that indicates a studio executive getting angry and having a panic attack.

He will only be given the green light if they are able to cast as many big name actors as they can. With the help of his two sidekicks, they run around all over Hollywood to do just that, all the while getting into many hijinks.

The film spends the entire time with our three main characters coming across famous actors, and convincing them to appear in their film. We never see the cameras rolling, any kind of rehearsals, anything. As with the comedy silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the main takeaway of this film is the comedic situations and physical comedy that everyone is put through; not just the main characters, but from the cameos as well.

For example, one of the actresses the director tries to convince is Liza Minelli, someone who is very well-known for singing and dancing. So what does this film have her do? Have her react to the hijinks of the three clumsily trying to stand while they are wearing suits of armor. Like with every actor playing themselves in their respective scenes, this would be her one and only scene.

“Insane” and “absurd” are just a few words to describe this film. Sometimes that’s a compliment, but it can be an insult as well. How the actors “agree” to be in the silent film is nonsensical: they get harassed by the three, and when you think they’re going to say no, they end up saying “yes.” There’s also a lot of visual gags that exist just to get a laugh, like a regular dog owner and a blind man with a seeing-eye dog have their dogs switched. The result is funny, but it doesn’t add anything to the plot. Also, why is the director dressed as a sea captain?

I vaguely knew about the film when looking through Mel Brooks’ filmography, when I decided to learn more about his work. I finally got to see it when I got the Mel Brooks film collection. I can certainly understand why he did the film, since he was aiming to do almost every genre out there.

Silent Movie is a rarity of contemporary films released at a time when silent films were pretty much dead. However, if done right, it shows that no genre of film is truly dead; there’s always something more to say about them. And Brooks’ use of the “dead” genre to tell a story about crazy people in Hollywood, from the actors to the businessmen, is just genius.