It could have been a lurid, “ripped from the headlines” melodrama from a studio known for its cheap genre films. Instead, The Goose Woman (1925) became one of Universal’s “Jewels,” a prestige production with a better than average script, an excellent cast and production values, and an up-and-coming … [Read more...] about The Goose Woman
Goona Goona: An Authentic Melodrama of the Isle of Bali
However neglected, perhaps correctly, the history of independent exploitation films is as long as any other varietal of film—the nudie, the sensational barnstormer, the adults-only “if you dare” faux-exposé have always been with us. How we might approach this kind of film, beyond any sort of … [Read more...] about Goona Goona: An Authentic Melodrama of the Isle of Bali
Good References
Good References, a 1920 “lost” film recently discovered in a Prague archive and restored by UCLA, is a classic example of the type of movie the silent film business learned was a sure-fire way to make money. Directed by R. William Neill, with a scenario by Dorothy Farnum from an E.J. Rath novel, … [Read more...] about Good References
The Good Bad Man
Made early in Douglas Fairbanks’s film career, The Good Bad Man is the fifth of his 12 feature-length films made for the Fine Arts division of the Triangle Film Corporation, and the second of ten collaborations between Fairbanks and director Allan Dwan. It is also among his earliest films to explore … [Read more...] about The Good Bad Man
The Golden Clown
Alone in the center ring, a white-faced clown sings. Rather than making the crowd laugh, he draws tears. This trope is as familiar today as it was in cinema’s earliest days, when the circus and the cinema were more closely linked. According to Italian scholar Carlo Piccardi, “In its first decade the … [Read more...] about The Golden Clown
The Gold Rush
After the public disappointment of A Woman of Paris (1923), a dramatic film in which Chaplin appears only briefly, he was anxious to begin work on his first comedy to be distributed by United Artists. Chaplin was determined to top the phenomenal success of The Kid. By any measure, he succeeded. The … [Read more...] about The Gold Rush
The Godless Girl
The films of Cecil B. DeMille offer a spectacle of extremes. Success was never more opulent than in a DeMille film, nor was poverty more grinding. Reared on Bible stories and the romance sagas that appealed to his preacher/playwright father, DeMille’s films relied on a pattern of sex, sin, damnation … [Read more...] about The Godless Girl
The Goddess
Made at a time of great changes in the Chinese film industry, political turbulence in China, and personal turmoil in the life of its star, The Goddess (Shennü) was dismissed as decadent by Chinese scholars during the Cultural Revolution. But these circumstances only served to fuel the film’s … [Read more...] about The Goddess