“This is in. It has Doug,” trumpeted Film Daily in March 1926, “its pirates are as terrible as anyone ever pictured and it is the finest specimen of the all-color feature yet produced.” Which is pretty much all you needed to know to get you to the box office to see The Black Pirate: a star (the … [Read more...] about The Black Pirate
Dreyer’s Waking Dream
A good many years ago, while I was watching a videotape of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), my eight-year-old daughter came into the room and glanced at the screen for a few moments. What she saw unsettled her so much that she quickly walked away. She was disturbed not by any of the film’s more … [Read more...] about Dreyer’s Waking Dream
Forgotten Faces
Whatever became of the gentleman thief? The silk-hatted crook, who brought such debonair gallantry to his work that it would be a pleasure to be relieved of your jewelry by him, was once common on the silver screen—Raymond Griffith in Paths to Paradise(1925), HerbertMarshall in Trouble in Paradise … [Read more...] about Forgotten Faces
Safety Last!
Harold Lloyd will forever be associated with Safety Last! because of a single image. Even people who have never seen a Lloyd film are familiar with the iconography of a bespectacled man hanging off the hands of a collapsing clock on the side of a skyscraper high above teeming city streets. It is one … [Read more...] about Safety Last!
Pavement Butterfly
Born into the steam and starch of her father’s Chinese laundry in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong gained a toehold in Hollywood after her debut as an uncredited extra in the 1919 silent film, The Red Lantern, starring Alla Nazimova. Wong’s striking beauty and talent immediately drew the attentionof the … [Read more...] about Pavement Butterfly
The Eagle
In Silent Stars, Jeanine Basinger notes that for modern audiences Rudolph Valentino has “become an image frozen in time, a still photograph emblematic of the world of the 1920s, that crazy outmoded world of sheiks and flappers.” This static—even fossilized—image robs us of the very elements that … [Read more...] about The Eagle
The Wildcat
A few years ago Bob Dylan released an album entitledRough and Rowdy Ways, a title that reminded me of Ernst Lubitsch. (Apologies—it’s the way my mind works.) To be specific, it reminded me of Ernst Lubitsch’s German comedies. Case in point: Die Bergkatze (The Wildcat). The Wildcat isbasically a … [Read more...] about The Wildcat
Of Mice and Men (and Cats and Clowns)
FANTASMAGORIE (1908) Directed by Émile Cohl, HOW A MOSQUITO OPERATES (1912) Directed by Winsor McKay, ADAM RAISES CAIN (1922) Directed by Tony Sarg, AMATEUR NIGHT ON THE ARK (1923) Directed by Paul Terry, BED TIME(1923) Directed by Dave and Max Fleischer, FELIX GRABS HIS GRUB(1924) Directed by Pat … [Read more...] about Of Mice and Men (and Cats and Clowns)