It's a film which sticks up for an era that has long been painted as dusty, desiccated, and antique in an irretrievable way. Even the most famous films about the silent era – Singin' in the Rain (1952), for example, which Babylon is in constant, often literal dialogue with – trade in these same hoary cliches about how embarrassingly protean and vulgar the period was, making fun of the silent-era style of "stagey" acting in a way that would invariably come to define the stereotypes about that time.
