By John Exshaw
Imagine my surprise, on perusing last week’s Sunday Times, to discover that none other than the great Kevin Brownlow, Mr. Silent Cinema himself, was scheduled to appear, if not “at a cinema near youâ€, then at least at a rambling country estate not a million miles from me. Hot damn! I thought, and I’m sure you’ll agree it was warranted. For anyone with even a sliver of interest in the history of cinema, Brownlow is a positively Olympian figure, the man who, trusty two-reel tape recorder in hand, assiduously stalked the retirement homes of the Hollywood Hills to capture the last flickering memories of a time when the movies moved, later collected in his classic 1968 book, The Parade’s Gone By . . . The man who, together with his collaborator, the late David Gill, rescued and restored such great films as Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Abel Gance’s monumental Napoléon (1927), before returning them to the world, with scores by Carl Davis, in the manner in which they were meant to be seen. And the man behind a series of definitive documentaries on such luminaries as Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. Hot damn, indeed.