"I am the cinema expert, the critic of the silent celluloid for the Daily News." Over the course of his long and distinguished career Carl Sandburg earned two Pulitzer prizes, one for poetry and one for biography, but it comes as a surprise to many that during the 1920s this noted American writer was also a respected newspaper film critic. At a time when movies were still considered light entertainment by most newspapers, the Chicago Daily News gave Sandburg a unique forum to express his visions on the burgeoning film arts. "The Movies Are" compiles hundreds of Sandburg's writings on film including reviews for such silent classics as Greed, The Gold Rush, The Thief of Bagdad, Nanook of the North, The Sheik, Little Lord Faunterloy, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Safety Last, and the "holy grail" of lost films, Lon Chaney's London After Midnight; interviews with such personalities as Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, Josef von Sternberg, theater director Constantin Stanislavsky, and writer George Bernard Shaw; and Sandburg's earliest published essays of Abraham Lincoln—which he wrote for his film column. "The cold, real, upstanding fact holds—the movies are." Take a new look at one of Hollywood's most exciting periods through the critical perspective of one of America's great writers. A passionate film advocate, Sandburg early on grasped and delighted in the many possibilities for the new motion picture medium, be they creative, humanitarian, or technological; intellectual, low-brow, or merely novel. In doing so, he began defining the scope and sophistication of future film criticism.
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