Happy Birthday, Louise!

For those of us who are silent film buffs, this week marks a very important occasion.

Yesterday was the 100th birthday of one of the great icons of silent cinema: Louise Brooks. Her centennial is being celebrated in various ways, including screenings at the Eastman House in Rochester, NY (the city where Brooks spent the last years of her life), a new coffee table book by Peter Cowie and, best of all, a Criterion Collection release of Brooks' most famous film, Pandora's Box.

Brooks was one of the most seductive women of her time (she managed to ensorcel the British critic Kenneth Tynan when she was on the cusp of her 70s), and many famous men was famously crazy about her. She had a Summer-long affair with Charlie Chaplin in 1925, when she was in the Ziegfeld Follies and he was in town for the premiere of The Gold Rush, and when he finally went back to Los Angeles he told the press when he got off the train that he was going to lease his studio, sell his house in Beverly Hills and make all his films in New York from now on -- a plan that was abruptly aborted when his teenage wife informed him shortly after he got home that she was pregnant with their second son.

What would some of us film buffs give for a film with Charlie Chaplin and Louise Brooks together?

If you've never seen Louise Brooks (or if you've never seen her on a big screen) you're really missing one of the great moviegoing experiences -- and if you have, then you'll understand why the great French cineaste Henri Langlois could be moved to exclaim: "There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!"

Tom Moran