When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks visited Moscow on a vacation trip in 1926, they were the most famous couple in the world. Among the first Hollywood celebrities, they were idolized everywhere, even in the Soviet Union, where audiences preferred American and German films to groundbreaking … [Read more...] about A Kiss From Mary Pickford
Kings of (Silent) Comedy
FELIX GOES WEST Directed by Otto Messmer, USA, 1924 With a few exceptions—notably Winsor McCay’s 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur—early film animation made little impact until 1919. That’s when producer Pat Sullivan’s Feline Follies, starring the rowdy cat Master Tom, captured the public’s attention. A … [Read more...] about Kings of (Silent) Comedy
The Kid Brother
In the 1960s and 1970s, the only exposure to silent films available to most Americans was on syndicated television programs like Fractured Flickers, which played the films at a faster-than-normal speed and featured narration that mocked the films and the actors. The Harold Lloyd Show, which … [Read more...] about The Kid Brother
The Kid
If the 12 Mutual-Chaplin Specials of 1916–1917 served as Chaplin’s early comedic laboratory, the best of the films he created for the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit reveal a filmmaker growing into his full artistic power. The First Nationals contain some of Chaplin’s best constructed and most … [Read more...] about The Kid
Jujiro
If one wanted to explore Japanese cinema history by studying the careers of its central figures, one could start with actor-turned-director Teinosuke Kinugasa. His biography is intertwined with each phase of his country’s cinema, from its roots in Japanese theatre traditions to the boundary-pushing … [Read more...] about Jujiro
The Joyless Street
Melchior Street is a microcosm of Vienna just after World War I. Inflation is rampant, poverty and vice are widespread, and the division between rich and poor is vast. Outside a butcher shop, the poor and hungry wait in line, ready to barter whatever it takes to buy a scrap of meat. Among them are … [Read more...] about The Joyless Street
Japanese Girls at the Harbor
When Hiroshi Shimizu released Japanese Girls at the Harbor in 1933, the veteran filmmaker had already made more than eighty-five films. When he died in 1966, he had at least 160 films to his credit in a thirty-five-year career, most of them made at Shochiku, also the home of his friend and colleague … [Read more...] about Japanese Girls at the Harbor
J’Accuse
Five months after the armistice was signed that ended World War I, Abel Gance premiered his epic J’Accuse in Paris. Called the Great War, WWI was also dubbed “the war to end all wars,” and Gance’s film was aimed at making that statement a reality. Many of his own friends had been killed in the … [Read more...] about J’Accuse