1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 95.

2. Two films made in the black American cinema make substantial references to "Rain": Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. (1943) borrows the repressed clergyman from the first act of the play and the story's tropical setting, and much of the Nina Mae McKinney character in Hallelujah! (1929) seems to be based on Sadie Thompson and her conversion.

3. The change is so great, especially in regard to sexuality, that there is even a question of whether or not this Sadie Thompson is a prostitute. In his biography of Jeanne Eagels, Edward Doherty quotes her as arguing, upon first reading the play, "I don't want to be a prostitute. . . . The play doesn't really call me one. . . . I can't feel myself a prostitute. I don't want me to be cheap, sordid, vulgar" ( The Rain Girl: The Tragic Story of Jeanne Eagels [Philadelphia: McCrae Smith, 1930], p. 183).

4. Perhaps the few titleless silent films are so celebrated because when silent film is capable of attaining a full closed, single-voiced, purely visual language, it becomes a poetic system. See Burch 1979, p. 79.

5. In the play, title 4 appears as "Was I doing you any harm, was I?" (Colton and Randolph 1936, p. 147), and title 5 condenses "You'd tear the heart out of your grandmother if she didn't think your way and tell her you were saving her soul--you--you--you psalm-singing--!!" (p. 148).

6. This gesture is the visual equivalent of the business in the play where O'Hara tries to quiet Sadie. There he says, "Sadie--for God's sake!" (Colton and Randolph 1936, p. 145), and "Sadie--Sadie--come on--don't talk anymore" (p. 147).

7. In his book on Eisenstein, Yon Barna describes the painstaking care that went into Eisenstein and Prokofiev's collaboration on the score and the recording of the music for Alexander Nevski . According to Barna, Prokofiev "proposed experimenting with the microphones to produce deliberately distorted sound," recording instruments "so close to the microphone as to amplify the distortion" (p. 215). The 1988 Nevski tour and its substitution of a real orchestra was very much beside the point. See Yon Barna, Eisenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).

8. Noël Burch, "Narrative/Diegesis--Thresholds, Limits," Screen 23, no. 2 (July-August 1982): 18; Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York: Knopf, 1975).