With its fairy-tale setting, The Blue Bird is generally considered a children’s fantasy, and the 1918 film version was presented as one. Yet the original play by Maurice Maeterlinck has roots in the French Symbolist literary movement, and the film has the visual sophistication that marks the work of … [Read more...] about The Blue Bird
The Blot
In 1908, the newly married Lois Weber, a woman steeped in Victorian mores, gave up the stage to play the good wife to Phillips Smalley, an actor traveling with the same theater company where the young couple had met one year earlier. Unaccustomed to sitting idle, she soon began a new career writing … [Read more...] about The Blot
The Blizzard
Without the writings of Selma Lagerlöf, Sweden might not have experienced its first Golden Age of cinema, which lasted from 1917 to 1924. The first woman and first Swedish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1909), Lagerlöf wrote novels suffused with a respect for nature and deeply rooted … [Read more...] about The Blizzard
Blackmail
Hitchcock’s silent Blackmail is one of the best British films, if not the best, of the late 1920s. Made in 1929, during the transition to the sound era, it was commissioned as both a silent and as a part-talkie with music and some dialogue scenes. With remarkable skill (and an eye to building a … [Read more...] about Blackmail
The Black Pirate
The Black Pirate is the epitome of motion picture art and science in the Hollywood of the 1920s. Whereas previous Douglas Fairbanks productions such as Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924) employed size and scope to push the limits of cinema production, The Black … [Read more...] about The Black Pirate
The Big Parade
In 1924, three companies merged to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The new studio’s first original production was He Who Gets Slapped (1924), starring Lon Chancy and two actors who soon became bright MGM stars: John Gilbert and Norma Shearer. That same year, director King Vidor made two films for MGM … [Read more...] about The Big Parade
The Big Business of Short, Funny Films, 1918-1929
THE COOK, 1918 Directed by Roscoe Arbuckle Cast Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (The Cook), Buster Keaton (The Pest Waiter), Al St. John (The Toughest Guy), Alice Lake (The Cashier), John Rand (The Proprietor), Bobby Dunn (The Dishwasher), Luke the Dog (Himself) Producer Joseph M. Schenck … [Read more...] about The Big Business of Short, Funny Films, 1918-1929
Beyond the Rocks
In 1922, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino were two of the biggest movie stars in the world. Both were under contract to Paramount, and their first film together was highly anticipated, especially since it was to be based on a novel by the reigning queen of romance novelists, Elinor Glyn. Beyond … [Read more...] about Beyond the Rocks