The love of a man for a woman waxes and wanes like The moon…but the love of brother for brother is steadfast as the stars, and endures like the Word of the Prophet. — Arabian Proverb The title that opens Beau Geste is neither an Arabian proverb nor does it come from Percival Christopher Wren’s … [Read more...] about Beau Geste
The Wreck of the Hesperus
The Wreck of the Hesperus most likely would have never been produced without the convergence of several closely timed events. The initial push came with the ousting of film director Cecil B. DeMille from the Famous Players-Lasky film company. DeMille had been with them since 1916, when Adolph … [Read more...] about The Wreck of the Hesperus
The Flying Ace
Advertised as “The Greatest Airplane Mystery Thriller Ever Produced,” The Flying Ace stands as one of the best surviving examples of silent-era race cinema (films made with predominantly Black casts for exhibition to Black audiences). The Flying Ace represents both the ambition of race film … [Read more...] about The Flying Ace
Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA (1921), directed by Maurice Elvey, THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZ (1922) and THE FINAL PROBLEM (1923), directed by George Ridgwell The San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s love affair with Sherlock Holmes continues, albeit without one of its champions, the late Russell Merritt, to … [Read more...] about Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases
Amazing Tales from the Archives 2025
A LONDON PARTICULAR: FOG, FILM, AND THE GREAT DETECTIVE The three series (of forty-five episodes!) and two feature films based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, produced by Stoll Pictures in the early 1920s, are currently undergoing meticulous restoration by the BFI National Archive. … [Read more...] about Amazing Tales from the Archives 2025
The Gold Rush
Along with Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), The Gold Rush is one of the very few examples of the historical epic as slapstick. Standard procedure for most silent comedies was to exaggerate minutiae and the everyday to grandiose and absurd proportions—in the way a sales call gone awry leads to the … [Read more...] about The Gold Rush
Nosferatu
There’s an image from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu that I can’t shake: a pallid, pointy-eared ghoul stares down at a camera that is positioned below the deck of a ship whose ropes and mast are shooting skyward behind him, framing his figure to evoke a kind of authoritarian menace. And then there’s his … [Read more...] about Nosferatu
Chicago
Nothing guarantees immortality for a murderer quite like getting away with it, as Lizzie Borden could have told you. And so could Beulah Annan, the woman who, in 1924, shot a lover foolish enough to announce he was leaving her. Despite, or perhaps because of sensational press coverage nationwide, … [Read more...] about Chicago