Quote: The Mark of Zorro is a 1920 American silent Western romance film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Noah Beery Sr. This genre-defining swashbuckler adventure was the first movie version of The Mark of Zorro. Based on the 1919 story The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, which introduced the masked hero, Zorro, the screenplay was adapted by Fairbanks (as “Elton Thomas”) and Eugene Miller.Read More »
In late 19th century Vienna, Lena Smith, a naive peasant girl from Hungary, has a child by a corrupt young cavalry officer, and goes to work his house as a servant, hiding the truth from his unsympathetic father, while the son returns to his profligate ways. Robbed of her child first when he is a baby, and later when they are separated by the war, she suffers imprisonment, contempt, and shame in order to protect the child.Read More »
The film tells the story of the shipowner Werle attempt to cover up a crime. And out of jealousy, he sends his employee Gerd to India, forcing his ward Inge Sorensen marry him…Read More »
Quote:
When Prince Otto is involved in a hunting accident, the game warden’s daughter Ellen becomes his nurse. She falls head over heels in love with him and the infatuation is mutual. But when the prince’s father, the ruler, dies, it turns out that the prince’s heart is bequeathed to someone else. In her deep despair over her lost love, the game warden’s now downhearted daughter knocks on the convent gate.
The film was directed by Einar Zangenberg for the company Kinografen, where he was director, actor and artistic director from 1911 to 1914.Read More »
When Marie St. Clair believes she has been jilted by her artist fiance Jean, she decides to leave for Paris on her own. After spending a year in the city as a mistress of the wealthy Pierre Revel, she is reunited with Jean by chance. This leaves her with the choice between a glamorous life in Paris, and the true love she left behind.Read More »
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 »
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 »