On December 13, 1915, The Cheat, produced at the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, directed by acclaimed theater director Cecil B. DeMille, and starring Fannie Ward, renowned actress from the London and New York stages, made its debut in the United States. Depicting an interracial relationship … [Read more...] about The Cheat
Show People
1928 was a frightening year for the film industry. The first feature with synchronized dialogue, The Jazz Singer, had premiered the previous October, casting doubt on the ability of silent films to endure as an art form. Stars feared for their careers while studio bosses worried about their bottom … [Read more...] about Show People
The Toll of the Sea
The greatest depiction of a woman crying on the silver screen is one you’ve likely never seen. You may be tempted to call up the image of Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s stoic tears in The Passion of Joan of Arc, or the mesmeric power of the saline streams down Anna Karina’s face in Vivre Sa Vie. Both … [Read more...] about The Toll of the Sea
Forbidden Paradise
It's nothing short of scandalous how poorly treated Ernst Lubitsch’s American silent period has been. Fortunately that has begun to change with the Museum of Modern Art’s recent restorations of Rosita (1923) and Forbidden Paradise (1924), the fourth film he made in Hollywood. Lubitsch came to … [Read more...] about Forbidden Paradise
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Ernst Lubitsch never discussed what let to his audacious decision to adapt Oscar Wilde’s famously talky stage play Lady Windermere’s Fan as a silent film in 1925. Personally, I would like to think it was a gift to Irene Rich, the actress whose sublime performance as the tolerant queen to a … [Read more...] about Lady Windermere’s Fan
The Divine Voyage
Julien Duvivier is the forgotten man of French cinema. Prolific and bad-tempered, nicknamed “Julien-le-mal-aimé” (Julien the unloved), he careened from genre to genre, making thrillers, noirs, comedies, melodramas, and religious films during an almost fifty-year career of nonstop film production, … [Read more...] about The Divine Voyage
Salt for Svanetia
For more than forty years Mikhail Kalatozov (Mikheil Kalatozishvili) had a film career marked by the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. From his work in the early 1930s that earned him a place in the doghouse of Soviet officialdom to the glorious achievement of winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes … [Read more...] about Salt for Svanetia
Smouldering Fires
Having been greatly impressed by Clarence Brown’s The Goose Woman, which I found in 1962 in a British film library, I searched for more silent films by this remarkable director. Thanks to the British Film Institute’s John Huntley, Smouldering Fires came from overseas (an ostrich farm outside … [Read more...] about Smouldering Fires