The title might suggest a nostalgic longing for the age of innocence we think we’re looking at in those early silent films. But if there was ever an age of innocence, it certainly wasn’t that one, as film historians have revealed at length. And this memoir by D.W. Griffith’s wife, Linda Arvidson, is written with affection but without undue sentimentality.

It’s true that she looks back almost with disbelief at the time when the penny-arcade ‘flickers’ evolved into the film as we know it, when the young industry was conducted behind a few doorways on East 14th Street, with actors walking in unchallenged and wardrobe-baskets piled up on the stairs. And it is fun to watch the arrival of the unknown Goldwyn and DeMille, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish.

Not that actresses had names at that time, because the producers did not want to encourage a star-system, least of all Griffith, who held out longest, even as the fan-mail poured in, demanding to know their identities.

A one-reeler (15 minutes) was assumed to be all that the public could be expected to watch, but Griffith was the one to challenge that, soon offering them an incredible 5-reeler at two dollars a seat, instead of the usual ten cents. You may guess that this was ‘The Birth of a Nation’, on which the book closes, rather disappointingly, without telling us anything about the story of the production.

Meanwhile, her version of the discovery of Hollywood is just one of many, suggesting that something is being hidden. Is it true that Griffith and Mack Sennett had been warned to get out of New York, as they were liable for arrest for too much under-age mischief? And why did so many actresses who had worked for Sennett deny so emphatically that they had ever been one of his Bathing Belles? An age of innocence it was not.