The ink had barely dried on Owen Johnson’s novel Children of Divorce when Paramount bought the rights. Its transfer to film was fraught, and the script was tinkered over by no less than five writers. The resulting plot stayed faithful to the novel while transforming it into a quintessential silent … [Read more...] about Children of Divorce
A Story of Floating Weeds
The films of Yasujiro Ozu are rooted in a particular time and place—his own. But they bring to mind core elements of the human condition. Jealousy and desire, sacrifice, the family bond: elements that persist across cultures and the march of years, through changes in technology and outlook. We … [Read more...] about A Story of Floating Weeds
The Navigator
By now, the world has come around: the decades and decades of Chaplin domination have finally receded, and we’re all newly-born Keatonians. Why exactly this has happened is harder to parse—perhaps Buster Keaton appeals to a savvier, mass-media-educated culture, less naïve than the more guileless … [Read more...] about The Navigator
The Red Mark
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