Essay

You Never Know Women brings multiple gifts to lovers of silent film: the serene beauty of Florence Vidor (“the orchid lady of the screen”); two leading men, the handsome Clive Brook and the wryly sophisticated Lowell Sherman; character actors El Brendel and Eugene Pallette; performances from key … [Read more...] about You Never Know Women

A clock strikes 12. Whether noon or midnight is not yet known. Meanwhile in another room, a large bathtub filling with hot water nears to overflowing. As a servant girl closes the faucets in the nick of time, the camera begins to track backward, out of the steamy bathroom to the side of an unmade … [Read more...] about The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna

“I am a woman of the world, not the world’s woman,” states “Elnora Natatorini,” as played by Pola Negri in the 1925 A Woman of the World. She has just found the man she adores holding another woman in his arms. Despite her diamond earrings, her stylish bobbed hair, her lengthy fur train, her … [Read more...] about A Woman of the World

Two decades after Marlene Dietrich’s death, her legend still retains its allure. One persistent myth is that Josef von Sternberg created Dietrich the Seductress in Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), when in fact Dietrich herself had been carefully crafting her public persona long before von … [Read more...] about The Woman Men Yearn For

“The thing that makes Talmadge a star is the look in her eyes,” MGM studio head and star-maker Louis B. Mayer once said of actress Norma Talmadge. One of the most popular stars of the silents, her career ended after two poorly received talkies, and she is nearly forgotten today. If Talmadge is … [Read more...] about The Woman Disputed

“A gorgeous portrayal of the lives and loves of big outdoorsmen and big-eyed senoritas in the days when a beaver’s pelt was the people’s currency.” That’s how Paramount promoted Victor Fleming’s Wolf Song in 1929—and for once there was truth in advertising. Fleming based his shoot at the just-opened … [Read more...] about Wolf Song

You can read the program essay for our 2016 screening of Within Our Gates here “I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the Race a cross-section of its own life, to view the Colored heart from close range. It is only by presenting those portions of the Race … [Read more...] about Within Our Gates

You can read the program essay for our 2001 screening of Within Our Gates here Wiithin Our Gates is the earliest surviving feature film by an African American, a distinction that can make it seem merely some historic curiosity. Instead, the film remains dramatically gripping and socially … [Read more...] about Within Our Gates