Despite the crescendo of
custard-pies and orange-peel, films and film-going in the
1920s were not all about conspicuous waste of food. An
important theme that links both American and Russian
cinema in this decade is the exact opposite: hunger. As
early as 1909, D.W. Griffith had pioneered the use of
parallel editing in a terse moral parable, A CORNER IN
WHEAT, which shows a grain speculator who has driven
up the cost of bread suffocated by his own wheat.
