Silent

Lights of Old Broadway
Essay by Matthew Kennedy
By 1924, Metro Pictures was ailing. Founded in 1915 it had major successes with child star Jackie Coogan, “Great Stone Face” Buster Keaton, and sensational Rudolph Valentino in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). But Metro lost Valentino to Paramount and was also in need of more theaters to better control exhibition. Goldwyn Pictures was in trouble, too, thanks to internecine fights between management and board. A merger could mitigate their respective business worries. When Metro and Goldwyn united on April 17, 1924, with the manipulative, canny, and robust Louis B. Mayer in charge, it became the nascent film empire Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer. Twenty-four-year-old “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, formerly at Universal, was signed as supervisor of production.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
A meek Belgian soldier (Harry Langdon) fighting in World War I receives penpal letters and a photo from “Mary Brown”, an American girl he has never met. He becomes infatuated with her by long distance. After the war, the young Belgian journeys to America as assistant to a theatrical “strong man”, Zandow the Great (Arthur Thalasso). While in America, he searches for Mary Brown… and he finds her, just as word comes that Zandow is incapacitated and the little nebbish must go on stage in his place.Read More »

Prince Wolfram is the betrothed of mad Queen Regina V of Kronberg. Supreme ruler, her word is law and he is a playboy…Read More »

Light Industry wrote:
In 1926, André Gide set sail from Bordeaux to French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo with Marc Allégret, his 25-year-old former student and lover of nearly a decade, who was brought on the trip officially as Gide’s “secretary.” Gide had been inspired to visit Africa by reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and planned his itinerary with Allégret as something of a recapitulation of Conrad’s fictional expedition. Travelling for thousands of miles by railway, river, and foot, through areas that today comprise the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Cameroon, the pair spent time with colonial agents and indigenous communities. Both Gide and Allégret produced important records of their epic journey. Gide kept diaries that he quickly published in two volumes, Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le Retour du Tchad (1928), while Allégret took some seven hundred photographs and shot the film Voyage au Congo: Scènes de la Vie Indigène en Afrique Équatoriale, one of the earliest feature-length ethnographic documentaries to be made on the continent.Read More »

Navy captain Avanti Planetaros is inspired by his astronomer-father to travel through outer space to reach other worlds. He becomes an aviator, and, along with the young scientist Dr. Krafft, the driving force behind the construction of a spaceship. Despite opposition from the mocking Professor Dubius, Planetaros gathers a crew of fearless men and takes off. During the long voyage, the crew becomes restless; a mutiny is narrowly avoided. Finally they reach Mars, and discover that the planet is inhabited by a people who have reached a higher stage of development, free of disease, sorrow, violence, covetousness, sexual urges, and the fear of death. Avanti falls in love with Marya, daughter of the Prince of Wisdom, the head of the Martians. Marya shares his feelings, and decides to return with him in order to bring the wisdom of the Martians to the backward Earthlings.Read More »

CinemaSerf, IMDB wrote:
Bruno Decarli (“Count Greven”) is quite good here, as the nobleman who likes to collect works of art. When in Java, he alights on a mystical totem and decides he has to have it – despite the objections of the local priest (Conrad Veidt) whom he swiftly despatches. That’s not the end of our holy man, however, as he haunts his killer with portents of impeding doom… Veidt looks superb as the spirit; his (heavily made up) facial features – always hugely effective – are lit with added poignancy and the direction from Robert Wiene builds a good degree of tension as the denouement, quite literally, looms.Read More »

Synopsis
In Gossette (1923), Dulac experimented with and designed a number of special lenses and prisms to produce a variety of effects and multiply the expressive means which translate the characters’ visions and mental states. She also reversed class and gender roles, as she made the female character Gossette come to the aid of Phillipe de Savières, falsely accused of murder, in order to save his name.Read More »

Quote:
Martha, a peasant woman expecting a child, experiences the fears typical of a woman in her condition. Encouraged by a neighbor, she decides to venture out into the world and join the working class fighting for a better future.Read More »

In a Villeville bustling with the upcoming jousting tournament, two men covet young Isabelle Ginori: François de Baynes, womanizer and overbearing leader of the Protestants, and Henri de Rogier, a Catholic nobleman and Isabelle’s beloved. Queen Catherine de Medicis is aware of the conflict opposing the two men, and commands that the adversaries fight in the Tournament according to the Rules of Divine Judgement; the champion will win Isabelle’s hand.Read More »