Art Imitating Life
Silent screen star Mary Pickford once said: ‘It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the the other way around.'
It's a sentiment echoed by many film historians in the years since. Sound may have brought cinema to mainstream audiences, but it also made it easier for screenwriters to be lazy, with expositional dialogue to explain plot, ambient noise to set tone and score to elicit immediate emotional…