A stranger comes to work at widow Halla’s farm. Halla and the stranger fall in love, but when he is revealed as Eyvind, an escaped thief forced into crime by his family’s starvation, they flee and become two of the many outlaws of Iceland’s mountains.Read More »
Ernst Lubitsch’s So This is Paris stars Monte Blue and Patsy Ruth Miller as a doctor and his wife. The couple is as faithful as the day is long–but when a dance team comprised of Lilyan Tashman and Andre Beranger make the scene, the days grow mighty short. Blue, Miller, Tashman and Berander spend the lion’s share of the film hiding their various peccadilloes from each other. The beauty of the Lubitsch touch is that, while So This is Paris suggests much, there isn’t a single censurable image throughout. Based on a play by Henry Meillac and Ludovic Halevy, this was a favorite of audiences and critics alike.Read More »
El Dorado is the fifth film directed by Marcel L’Herbier for Gaumont’s prestige collection ‘Pax’ which was characterised by high production quality. Its most striking aspect is the invention of new elements of the cinematographic language. L’Herbier uses distortions of the images to convey different messages or impressions: the faces of drinkers become distorted as they become drunk, Sibilla’s face becomes blurred as she thinks about her sick child, or photographs of the Alhambra are distorted to express the artistic vision of the painter intending to represent them.Read More »
The Buddhist priest wants the Daughter of the Daimyo to become a priestess at the Forbidden Garden. The Daimyo thinks if he were in Europe that his daughter should decide on her own, but he is denounced and has to commit harakiri. She meets Olaf, a European officer, falls in love and marries him, but after a few months he has to return to Europe. She gives birth to a child and is waiting for him, while he marries in Europe. When he comes back to Japan four years later, he is accompanied by his European wife…Read More »
1776. Poland. With his homeland partitioned and ruled by Russia, Polish nobleman and patriot Boleslas Vorowski heads a secret liberation movement. When Vorowski is wounded in battle, his mentor, the inventor Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, constructs the Turk, a marvelous chess-playing automaton. With the handsome Polish nobleman secreted inside, the Turk vanquishes the Russians – if only on the chessboard. When Catherine the Great summons the Turk to the Russian Imperial Court for a command match, the fate of Polish independence lies in the hands of the chess player.Read More »
King Louis XI tries to unify France by all means fair or foul, which does not please his powerful rival Charles the Bold. It is against this troubled backdrop that the loves of the daughter of a wealthy bourgeois and the king’s god-daughter Jeanne Fouquet and knight Robert Cottereau unfurl in spite of all the obstacles in their way. One of these being a pack of hungry wolves trying to stop Jeanne from carrying out an important mission assigned to her by the king himself.Read More »
A desperate, haggard-looking man puts a message into a bottle, and is able to throw it into the sea just as he is shot by an arrow. Some time later, well-known sportsman Kay Hoog announces to a large audience that he has found the message, which tells of a lost civilization that possesses an immense treasure. Hoog immediately plans an expedition to find it. But Lio Sha, the head of a criminal organization known as the Spiders, plans her own expedition, and she is determined to get the treasure for herself.Read More »
Danish Film Institute wrote:
Medical student Walter Fahrich has only two goals in life – to become rich and famous. In a dream, he is approached by Mephisto, who offers him exactly those things for ten years…Read More »
