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, as well as the two machine's limited sound effects, to tell its story.
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, dialogue can often seem superfluous. Here are some movies from the past 35 years that quietly held their own.
Semi-Silent Seventies Silliness
* 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.
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.
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."
* 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.
* 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, in which he silently, nonchalantly produced a great deal of props from the open fly of his pants.
Silent Melodrams in the 1980's and '90s
* 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.
* Writer-director-actor Charles Lane's feature-length silent film Sidewalk Stories (1989) shows a black artist who finds himself with an orphaned girl and takes her under his wing, Charlie Chaplin-style, while dealing with a modern-day Greenwich Village.
* If Sleeper and Silent Movie were homages to Hollywood silent film, offbeat theater director Peter Sellars reached even further back for inspiration. The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez (1991) was Sellars' tribute to the expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), yet its style owed to another German classic -- The Last Laugh (1925) -- in that it even dispensed with subtitles, using only the expressions of its famed actors (Mikhail Baryshnikov, Joan Cusack) to get its points across. (Unfortunately, movie distributors found the movie's style more frustrating than fascinating, and its only U.S. showings were at Sundance Film Festival in 1992 [according to LynchNet.com] and a single airing on PBS in 1993.)
Sound vs. Silent: Assault vs. Stealth
How, and why, do these movies fly in the face of the belief that audience will no longer sit still for silent film? Perhaps film critic Roger Ebert has the answer. In Ebert's laudatory review of Sidewalk Stories, he writes, "A sound film comes to us, approaches us -- indeed, it sometimes assaults us from the screen. But a silent film stays up there on the glowing wall, and we rise up to meet it. We take our imagination and join it with the imagination of the filmmaker." In short, a silent film makes its audience work for its payoff, as opposed to a movie doing all the lifting for its sated, jaded audience.
In cinema's first quarter-century, moviemakers knew this -- indeed, without sound as an option, they had no choice but to try and capture the audience's attention and imagination. Eight decades later, WALL-E demonstrates that as long as their efforts are rewarded, audiences are still willing to work a little for their satisfaction.
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