The 1920s and 1930s saw a fascination with the French state’s masculine extremes, with films exploring the romanticized French Foreign Legion and the notorious penal colony of Devil’s Island. Both attracted society’s cast-offs. Adventurers and men on the run seeking escape and anonymity were offered … [Read more...] about The Red Mark
The Devious Path
Underrated and all but forgotten by film historians, G.W. Pabst’s The Devious Path is, on the surface, a story of marital crisis and sexual mores in Weimar Germany. Released in 1928, it is also a prime example of a post-Expressionist film that eschews distorted sets, demonic characters, and … [Read more...] about The Devious Path
The Phantom Carriage
There are constants in the work of Victor Sjöström, a major figure in film history both behind and in front of the camera. One is the seeming always present sense of death. Sometimes, death might come in the form of disease or a sudden, violent mishap; or sometimes, a character in a film might … [Read more...] about The Phantom Carriage
The Kid Brother
To characterize Harold Lloyd as a perfectionist is to traffic in understatement. When he took up bowling, he wasn’t satisfied until he rolled a perfect “300” game. He brought that same determination to the feature-length films he made in the 1920s. He previewed them to see where the laughs were (and … [Read more...] about The Kid Brother
The Gorilla
Thrills and chills mixed with comedy has been a cinematic staple since movies began—even before, as optical toys and magic lantern shows used ghostly specters and apparitions to startle and amuse their audiences. The first person to use macabre imagery for comic effect in a wholesale way with films … [Read more...] about The Gorilla
The Joker
Not all heroes wear capes. But when they do, few perfect the ensemble with a jester’s hat trimmed in jingle bells. Still, Peter Carstairs, the debonair savior of distressed damsels played here by Henry Edwards in a pan-European production from 1928, dresses up as a court fool to carouse in Riviera … [Read more...] about The Joker
Sherlock Jr.
Preceded by ONE WEEK (1920, d. Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline, 23 mins) with Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely, and Joe Roberts When Sherlock Jr. opened, in April 1924, it was only a modest success, and Buster Keaton regarded it as not one of his big pictures. It had no developed storyline and the … [Read more...] about Sherlock Jr.
The Street
In the ongoing cataract of cultural history retrospection, ebbing and waning as it does, the silent German films of the Weimar era have come to be solely represented by the famous screaming-mimis of German Expressionist genre-film hyperbole—the in extremis launch of Caligari, the waxworks and … [Read more...] about The Street