By Dennis Harvey

POPULAR MEMORY IS short. Over the past decade the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has provided an opportunity to check out stars who were once huge, huge, huge – but whose reputations have long since shrunk to the size of paragraphs in film history books.

The biggest male star of the late 1920s – when Valentino had peaked – was John Gilbert, now remembered mostly for being Garbo's early leading man, and for being the poster child for "talking pictures killed the silent star" mythologies. It is true that audiences laughed at this male sexpot's first talkie effort, but the fault may not have lain with his purportedly high-pitched voice (a tag disproven in later films) or alleged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executive sabotage, as legend has it.

More likely, he was the simple victim of poor recording processes and a sudden shift in public tastes – the Great Lover act that played swell in 1927 looked antique by 1930, when an influx of stage actors and hard-boiled dialogue made him seem another epoch's relic. And Gilbert had become enough of an expensive pain in MGM's ass that it lost interest in the tough-guy makeover he might well have carried off. He drank himself to death, divorced (for the fourth time) and unemployable, in 1936.

But the tragic-loser image that lingered after Gilbert's demise serves him ill. For one thing, the guy was no vacant himbo: He wrote several of his earlier vehicles and provided the brilliant original story for 1932's Downstairs, wherein he plays a sociopathic chauffeur. (His best talkie performances tapped into increased offscreen self-loathing.) And in the silent period he wasn't just a pencil mustache propped up to moon at La Garbo and other histrionic honeys, but a charismatic main attraction who could be a cad, cocksure, passionate, vulnerable, or all of the above at once. He had, to use a somewhat antiquated phrase, dash.

The movie that made Gilbert was The Big Parade – the big noise of 1925, and deservedly so. It takes the 2005 Silent Fest's Saturday-night centerpiece slot in a newly restored print, and it's the real deal: great populist art, still as funny and moving as it must've seemed eighty years ago. It's also one of the least jingoistic war movies ever made, masculine but not at all macho, willing to admit that battle is chaos and horror at worst, an adrenaline rush born of temporary madness at best. King Vidor was a fine director with a taste for ambitious themes and a talent for maintaining human scale within an epic framework. Here, an atypically 'stache-free Gilbert is the spoiled rich kid who enlists at the first rah-rah wave of WWI patriotism. The first half's warm comedy and charming romance (with Renée Adorée as a French farmgirl) inexorably lead into hellishly immediate combat from which our hero emerges crippled, bitter, seemingly aeons older, but still within redemptive reach. Tom Hanks will never give Everyman half this good.

An even more neglected figure, Marie Prévost was another big '20s star doomed to be remembered best as a grotesque tragedy. Struggling to restart a career partly derailed by alcohol and weight gain, she dieted herself into extreme malnutrition and died in 1937. Kenneth Anger's infamous (if oft-inaccurate) Hollywood Babylon alleged that when she was found, she'd been partially devoured by her starving dachsund.

But well before becoming a morbid trivia-game answer, Prévost was a beloved flapper-era comedian and ingenue – stylish but accessible, less flighty than Clara Bow and softer-edged than Joan Crawford. She's top billed in The Sideshow, a 1928 Columbia Pictures programmer that costars amiable hunk Ralph Graves and, most strikingly, pint-size "Little Billy" Rhodes as Melrose, a circus performer turned proprietor with a major Napoleon complex. A ruthless competitor and tightfisted employer, he privately gets a little weak at the knees once good-natured tough girl Prévost shows up needing a job. One would be hard-pressed to find a Hollywood film from future decades that used a "little person" so centrally, without condescension, allowing the "normal" leads to view him not as a novelty but as someone well worth their respect, loyalty, and friendship.

'San Francisco Silent Film Festival' runs Fri/8 through Sun/10, Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF. $13-$17. (415) 777-8623, www.ticketweb.com. See Rep Clock for show times. For additional information, go to www.silentfilm.org.