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Silent Melodrams in the 1980's and '90s
One of the most fascinating elements of the Pixar animated film WALL-E is its conspicious independence from dialogue. For the movie's first half, the story of mechanized Earth sanitizer WALL-E and his equally un-human love interest EVE is told without words -- using hyper-realistic imagery [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], as well as the two machine's limited sound effects, to tell its story.
* Writer-director-actor Charles Lane's feature-length silent film Sidewalk Stories (1989) shows a black artist who finds him
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* The Black Stallion (1980) showed a prize-winning race horse and a lonely boy left to fend for themselves on an islands after their ship sinks. For half the movie, until the pair are rescued, the story of their bonding is told entirely -- and successfully -- through wordless imagery.
Finally, a few years ago (in support of UnitedHollywood.com), Woody appeared in a minute-long clip in which he did nothing but cross his legs and drink a cup of tea -- making the point that without good writing, even Woody is "speechless."
Ever since Al Jolson blurted out, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" in 1927's The Jazz Singer, Hollywood has been eager to sweep silent movies under the rug, claiming that audiences will not sit still for dialogue-free movies. The box-office success of WALL-E demonstrates otherwise -- that if a movie's story is well-told and engrossing [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], dialogue can often seem superfluous. Here are some movies from the past 35 years that quietly held their own.
* If Sleeper was Woody's nod to the silent-movie era, Silent Movie (1976) was a Mel Brooksian head-rattle. Though set in the modern era, Brooks' story -- a Three Stooges-like trio (Brooks, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise) saving a fading movie studio by making a silent movie -- was told old-fashioned style, with only subtitles providing the settings and dialogue. (Well, not quite -- ironically, the movie's single vocal word was spoken by French mime Marcel Marceau.) Like his movie counterpart, Brooks reassured nervous movie execs by including cameos by famous actors (such as Paul Newman and Brooks' wife Anne Bancroft) -- but he still kept the movie old-school silent.
Stardust Memories (1980) opens with a silent sequence of Woody on a train filled with morose passengers. He looks across the track and sees a train filled with lively partiers (including Sharon Stone in an early role) and does his best to convince the train conductor that he should be across the track with the happy people.
* Though Woody Allen is best known for movies with rapid-fire one-liners and naturalistic dialogue, he has often been most effective without words. Sleeper (1973) was essentially an homage to silent-film comedy, with Woody as Miles Monroe, a health-food store owner who enters a hospital for a simple operation and wakes up 200 years in the future. Much of the movie shows Miles trying (wordlessly) to cope with his alien circumstances: clumsily waking up from his two-century nap, impersonating a mechanical robot, and the oldest sight-gag of them all: repeatedly slipping on an enormous banana peel.
* Like Allen and Brooks, Steve Martin's comic style owes much to silent-film comedy. His many comedies from The Jerk (1979) onward -- particularly his self-penned Roxanne (1987) and L.A. Story (1991) -- are filled with skewered-point-of-view, Buster Keaton-type sight gags and scenes. And one of Martin's most famed 1990's routines was The Great Flydini [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], in which he silently, nonchalantly produced a great deal of props from the open fly of his pants.

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