Old Hollywood: Silent Stars, Deadly Secrets (2007)
*** (out of 4)
This episode of the "City Confidential" series takes a look at the silent era of Hollywood and the various troubles they tried to keep their stars from getting into. The documentary starts off talking about how the movies ended up moving from New York to Hollywood and we get a brief history of some of the stars and the problems they were facing. The documentary also goes into detail how certain groups in America were getting fed up with the sex, drugs and violence in the city. All of this leads to the main story, which was the death of director William Desmond Taylor. He was found murdered in his home, shot to death, and just minutes after actress Mabel Normand had left. Many people thought it might have been her but others pointed the finger at an ex-friend while the most possible person was either Mary Miles Minter or her mother. The documentary, for the most part at least, is pretty good at giving people the basic details of the story. I thought the most interesting parts of the film were the things dealing with the death of the director and why it might have possibly happened. The weakest aspect of the film is how much time it spends talking about how dark Hollywood is. I don't mind a little of this being thrown it but it just takes up too much space when the more interesting story was the death of Taylor. If you're unfamiliar with the story then there's some nice information here but it still could have been much better.