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San Francisco Silent Film Festival

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about silent film as an art form and as a culturally valuable historical record.

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SFSFF Collection

What’s the World Coming To?

Directed by Richard Wallace
23 min | 1920 | United States
Program Essay Borrow Title Watch Now Buy Now
Available Formats 35mm, DCP
Music Guenter Buchwald and Frank Bockius (on DCP)

About the Film

What’s the World Coming To? (1926) takes on cross-dressing by both sexes, also in an upper-class world. Written in part by comedy’s up-and-coming genius Stan Laurel, the script is set a hundred years in the future when women and men have switched roles. Women are the dominant sex, sporting waistcoats and close-cropped hair, and the men have become not so much feminine as ruffle-draped buffoons. In this imagining of 2026, it’s a zero-sum game, in which any power gained by women is a loss for men. —Aimee Pavy

About the Restoration

What’s the World Coming To? was produced by Hal Roach Studios and released in two reels on January 17, 1926. The film was copyrighted by the distributor, Pathé Exchange on January 23, 1926 (LU22294). This restoration is based on a 2K digital transfer from a black and white 16mm print (603.4 ft) printed circa 1944 and preserved in the William K. Everson Collection at New Your University. Projection speed is 20 frames per second. This restoration was completed in September 2015 as a collaboration between San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Carleton University, and New York University.

Restoration

San Francisco Silent Film Festival
Carleton University
New York University

Details

Director
Richard Wallace
Country
United States
Year
1920
Runtime
23 min
Cast
Clyde Cook, Katherine Grant, James Finlayson, Martha Sleeper, Laura De Cardi
FPS
20
Intertitle Language
English
Year Added to SFSFF Collection
2015

Image Gallery

Images from the Film
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