"My admiration for what Kerr has achieved is so unqualified that I'm afraid I can say here only a very few of the things I feel need to be said in celebra­tion of The Silent Clowns.... I find it hard to believe that there will ever be others who will celebrate-and mourn-them as profoundly as Walter Kerr." - Walter Markfield, The New York Times Book Review.

"No collector of Hollywood folklore should be without this book-it is a classic." - David Niven.

"The most important (and pictorially enticing) movie book of the year, and a major work of criticism ... an enthralling book." - The Village Voice.

"Beautifully written and provocative ... quite simply dazzling." - Newsday.

"The Silent Clowns is delicious... He makes us see more in movies we've watched before; he makes us want to hunt out others." - Walter Clemons, Newsweek.

"A lavishly illustrated, affectionate treatment by one of the finest critics of our time.... Kerr is more than a brilliant master of verbal description; he is a penetrating, lucid theorist. This book is as much about comedy as about movies, about eyes and ears and how and why we laugh." - Thomas Wills, Chicago Tribune Book World.

"A work of formidable scholarship that is also continuously amusing. Sure­ly nobody has ever seen more silent-movie comedies than Mr. Kerr, or has understood them half as well." -The New Yorker.

"I found myself laughing out loud at routines from movies I have never seen." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times.

Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon: these were the silent clowns, the great comic artists who carried the language of the silent screen to its peak of eloquence. Walter Kerr, one of the America's most important film and theatre critics, here presents what "may just be the best book about silent screen comedy ever written" (Library Journal).