What was the last silent film that you watched? (NEW EDITION)

Hi lubin-freddy. So glad that you finally got to see Little Toys and that you enjoyed it. It's such a beautiful film and Ruan Lingyu is sensational as always.

Center Stage is an interesting biopic and Maggie Cheung does a very good job in that.







Go to bed Frank or this is going to get ugly .

No-one's seen any silent in the last two months? 

“Let me go far away from here, to a country with better men.”

After the disappointment of sitting through a public screening of the then-recently restored 1922 Michael Curtiz silent Sodom and Gomorrah with an audience of silent film fans whose anticipation turned to exponentially mounting disappointment and boredom as it unreeled, I had dialled down my expectations substantially for the Hungarian Filmlab’s new restoration of his recently rediscovered 1915 Hungarian film The Undesirable aka The Exile/A Tolonc. While it’s certainly not a lost masterpiece, it’s not the massive letdown Sodom turned out to be, offering a simple tale simply told – albeit with more sophistication than many of its contemporaries – that is very much part of the transitional era between the early declamatory style of performance and something more intimately tailored to the camera.

Based on a folk story, it’s very much a melodrama: Lili Berky learns that her dying father (who overdoes his death scene as much as she underplays her reactions) is in fact her uncle and that her real father was a cruel man who was murdered by her mother, whose fate remains unknown to him. As fate would have it, her mother (Mari Jázsai) is just about to be released from prison after serving 15 years for the crime at exactly the same time as her daughter travels to the big city to find work, becoming a maid to Mariska Simon and her James Finlaysonesque wastrel of a husband, whose son Várkonyi Mihály (before he moved to Hollywood and changed his name to Victor Varconi) falls madly in love with her. Unfortunately not quite as madly in love with her as he is with his own moustache, which he can’t keep his hands off for a minute, and not quite madly enough to stand by her when a vagrant steals the family jewels and the suicidal Berky gets the blame and is run out of town back to her village, where her long lost mother has already given up hope of ever finding her…

Offering doomed mother love, ill-fated romance across the class divide, poisoned wine and some broad comedy from the local larcenous vagrant who causes all the trouble and Simon’s battering of her husband, it’s very much a populist piece of its time. There are no great technical revelations, the camera always static, although there is one surprising close-up of Berky in the stepfather’s death scene. Yet the performances are mostly understated enough for it to avoid unintentional comedy, with Berky in particular confidently subtle, and you can definitely see why Mihály Kertész, as Curtiz was still called at the time, was soon wooed away from Hungarian films first by the German film industry and then by Hollywood.

While Olive’s region A-locked Blu-ray offers no extras, it does offer a splendid transfer of a rare almost pristine print of a silent film with only a few missing frames and one noticeable but very brief section of a single take that looks like it comes from a dupe: for the most part this is immaculate, rock steady and with a lot more detail than silent film lovers have come to expect and certainly wouldn’t have expected from a long-lost 101 year old film. It also benefits from an excellent orchestral score by Peter Illenyi that really compliments the film. The apparently vintage intertitles are all English, albeit with the odd spelling mistake but not without occasional wit (Varconi asks his mother for his inheritance before his father spends it all on wine, women and song and later breaks off a tryst with Berky when his warring parents return because ‘I should like to be present at the peace treaty’). It’s a film that’s of more interest to silent film lovers than general audiences, but it’s a very welcome and impressive restoration.


"Security - release the badgers."

Despite the expectations Lon Chaney and Tod Browning’s names above the title may automatically summon up among horror fans, 1929’s Where East is East is one of the star’s many melodramas (and the final entry in the star and director’s jungle trilogy after the all-but-33-minutes lost The Road to Mandalay and the dementedly lurid West of Zanzibar), albeit one with a grisly, though mostly offscreen denouement. Set in what was then French IndoChina - ‘a colourful spot of French rule and Chinese custom’ - Chaney, using his own face with just a few strategically added scars in his penultimate silent film, makes his living trapping tigers for circuses, raising his hyperactive half-caste daughter Lupe Velez himself and at first less than pleased to discover that she’s fallen in love with Lloyd Hughes, the son of the circus owner who is his biggest customer. No sooner is he won over by his courage than the boy falls under the spell of Estelle Taylor’s (metaphorically) man-eating vamp on a trip downriver: well, the nights of the East, so the title card tells us, are strange and wayward things and there’s not much else in the way of shipboard entertainment. Her maid (Mademoiselle Kithnou) warns Chaney, ‘She is bad. White boy like sheep with tiger,’ but Chaney already knows it only too well, because not only is he one of the many men broken by her heathen tricks, but she’s Velez’s mother – and that only makes her want to steal her prospective son-in-law from her own daughter all the more. Chaney would sooner see the tigers get Hughes than her, but Taylor isn’t going to give up without a fight….

It’s typical of the kind of colourful romantic melodrama set in exotic locales that was one of the mainstays of silent cinema, with MGM and production designer Cedric Gibbons ensuring it has lavish production values and quite a lot of location footage even if it’s obvious the stars never left California long before the bad back projection sticks out like a sore thumb on the boat trip up the Mekong Rover. Velez’s jealousy of women are no threat to her romance is played quite effectively for laughs in the first third of the film before things take a darker turn as Chaney tries to keep her long-lost mother’s true nature from her and Hughes from his prospective mother-in-law’s arms, which is no easy task when at one point the lad’s so tormented with desire he sees her face on every woman in a bar. As the critics complained at the time, everything pretty much plays out exactly as you expect – as soon as you see Old Ranghu you know exactly how this one will end – but it does so in a satisfying and entertaining fashion. Surprisingly despite the Kiplingesque associations of the title the film never makes an issue of its interracial pairings, but Taylor’s seduction technique and faux-Asian makeup don’t exactly make her a credible rival for Velez, and at times she’s as much a parody of sophistication as Velez’s overenthusiastic childishness is of her innocence. Small matter: Chaney’s commanding yet never overplayed presence carries the film, showing that he didn’t need tortuous makeup transformations to suffer compellingly. It’s hokum, but it’s high quality hokum.

Warner Archive’s US NTSC manufactured on demand DVD-R is not one of their best efforts, hailing from the early days of the program before they improved their mastering but it does include the original Movietone soundtrack that has a synchronised full orchestral score and some sound effects but has suffered a fair bit of wear over the intervening decades – no breaks but a lot of scratches, with detail better in the medium shots and close-ups than some of the early long shots of the waterfront village. No extras.



"Security - release the badgers."

I just watched The Iron Horse (1924) which is a pretty good flick!
Now I can't wait for Hell on Wheels to start again. :)

To give this thread an extra boost, here's the selection of mostly obscure silents I watched in February.


The Green Goddess (1923, Sidney Olcott)
--- In my review of the sound version of The Green Goddess (1930) I called it "...a bunch of mumbo jumbo" and might be my least favorite George Arliss film. Now I had the pleasure of seeing the original 1923 silent production of The Green Goddess (1923), where Arliss, Alice Joyce & Ivan F. Simpson did their roles like they did in the 1930 version, and it works better as a silent! The story is still a piece of exotic mumbo jumbo, but it feels less corny in this atmosphere. Not among Arliss' best work, but with that ugly mug he makes for a very alluring villain. So much that you end up rooting for him instead of those snotty Brits crashing in his kingdom!
5/10


Kärlek och journalistik [Love and Journalism] (1916, Mauritz Stiller)
--- Mauritz Stiller making a romcom of the lightest kind. And it works rather well within it's silent 1916 format. Easy to follow and likable characters, though I wouldn't call the plot all that creative.
4/10


Khlib [Bread] (1929, Nikolai Shpikovsky)
--- Khlib [Bread] (1929) is a Ukrainian film that didn't get past the Soviet censors. The third and last film Nikolai Shpikovsky got to direct! All his output is worth a look. Most famous is Shakhmatnaya goryachka [Chess Fever] (1925), but also Shkurnyk (1929) is a very fascinating comedy. As for Khlib, it takes a interesting look at the communist ideals on farming. One I guess the communist leaders wasn't so keen on. Shpikovsky has a good eye on how to compose this story, sometimes using far-shots and rapid editing to get the sense of feel for the moment. Quite impressive and a shame he wasn't on the good side of those governing the movie business so he could continue what he was good at.
6/10


La proie du vent [The Prey of the Wind] (1927, René Clair)
-- A lesser known René Clair and the only one of his silents I'd yet to see. Shows signs of his masterful direction, but narratively it gets too dull to engage. Becomes my least favorite of his silent features, but it's not a bad film.
4/10


Red Lily (1924, Fred Niblo)
--- This was a tragic love story. Not sure I believe the ending after all that, but for those that want to believe in the Red Lily (1924) that was the upswing one was waiting for. Ramon Novarro was good, but this is the movie one will remember Enid Bennett by! I must also praise the soundtrack on the restored print. Really helped create the mood during all the slummy moments.
7/10


The Young Rajah (1922, Phil Rosen)
--- Saw the restored version which uses a lot of still photos and inter-titles to explain what happens in the missing footage. Quite a lot is lost of the early portion of the film, but thankfully it feels more like a proper movie as the story takes form in the later stages. I've never been much of a fan for Rudolph Valentino's exotic pictures, and this one felt about average. Got some decent moments, but the focus is mainly on Valentino's handsome and muscular looks. A 1922 chick flick.
3/10


Les nouveaux messieurs [The New Gentlemen] (1929, Jacques Feyder)
--- Les nouveaux messieurs [The New Gentlemen] (1929) is clearly a work of love from the remarkable French director Jacques Feyder. Unfortunately in all it's playfulness in this tug-of-war romance it fumbles too much. Some scenes are brilliant, but most of the time it struggles to really express it's wit clear enough, much to do with it's excessive running-time dragging the flirting out too long. Didn't feel they had enough personality to get away with that.
5/10


Six et demi onze [6 1/2 x 11] (1927, Jean Epstein)
--- I always preferred Jean Epstein more narrative features to his avant guard mood pieces. Simple because he composes his imagery so powerful and his pure image driven films kind of overdoses on his creativity. Nice to have a straight story guiding us through. A tragic one, well suited to his style of shooting. Six et demi onze (1927)'s reputation had escaped me, but it's one that deserves broader exposure.
6/10


The Little Minister (1921, Penrhyn Stanlaws)
--- I still prefer Katharine Hepburn's The Little Minister (1934) and the way they handled this story there, but Betty Compson bubbly performance in The Little Minister (1921) was a joy to behold.
4/10


Nattens barn (1916, Georg af Klercker)
--- Swedish drama from 1916 about the experiences of a unlucky maid. Not a story which generated much interest. Looks alright, especially for a throwaway production for this period, but little about it stands out.
3/10


La casa sotto la neve [Under the Snow] (1922, Gennaro Righelli)
--- A Italian jealousy drama in the snow. Little on the long side for that sort of film, but Maria Jacobini magnetism warms cold parts and they do a solid job of building the suspense in several stages of the film. Quite a pleasant view.
5/10

Gloria Swanson has a great screen presence, some of my favorite films with her are actually talkies.
You should take a look at The Trespasser (1929) which was the first talkie she did and Tonight or Never (1931) in which she sings - quite well actually.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will definitely give them a look.

Just watched Clara Bow in 'It' (1927) for the first time last night.
She was just sensational and it was a really funny movie from beginning to end.
Perfect Rom-com. What a breathe of fresh air from the current pathetic deluge of comedies that Hollywood is now churning out- I will be turning more and more to the silents for something amusing and original. I have an Early Charlie Chaplin short 'Easy Street' (1916) left to watch on my Slapstick masters DVD.

Never the biggest Chaplin fan but I am sure with his huge 82 film offerings there should be something that should be to my likings.

Gee- a Ghostbusters remake!!!!
Just what everybody is asking for-LOL.