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American films
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It is a bizarre thing that the single most important film in cinema history is also one of the most utterly repugnant. The Birth of a Nation was cinema’s first blockbuster, introducing camera and editing techniques that are now universally accepted as part of the language of cinema. It was also the most commercially successful of all the silent films and remained the most profitable film...
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In response to fierce accusations of racism in his film The Birth of a Nation (1915), director D.W. Griffith was inspired to make this epic morality work which argued that intolerance was a tragically fundamental part of the human condition. It is significant that the film was made during the First World War (just prior to America’s involvement)...
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Anyone who believes that D.W. Griffith only made grand historical epics such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) will be pleasantly surprised by this far more modest piece, a simple tale of pastoral love lost and won in which the director shows his human side as well as his consummate skill as a filmmaker. True Heart Susie was one of a series of comparatively low budget films that Griffith made...
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In one of his most ambitious and greatest films, D.W. Griffith skilfully combines melodrama and historical political intrigue to create one of the most spectacular and poignant of films of the silent era of American cinema. Real-life sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish play the two orphans of the title, bringing pathos and a sense of realism to a moving (albeit far-fetched) story of two innocents...
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The Kid, the most personal and poignant of Charlie Chaplin’s films, grew out of one of the most emotionally turbulent phases of the actor-director’s career. Chaplin had recently married the 17-year old actress Mildred Harris, only to discover that they had nothing in common. As a result of this intellectual mesalliance...
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The first of Harold Lloyd’s five reel films, Grandma’s Boy was conceived as a short film. Lloyd had only just made A Sailor-Made Man (1921), the longest of his short films at around 46 minutes and was reluctant to begin making feature films. It was only at the insistence of his producer, Hal Roach, that the story was extended and gradually grew to a full length film...
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Charles Chaplin’s first serious drama was not only a watershed in the career of Chaplin, but also a significant milestone in the development of cinema. A Woman of Paris is arguably the first realist drama, where all of the main characters are played in a naturalistic way, rather than in the stylised expressionistic manner which characterised virtually all earlier films...
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Safety Last, the third, and arguably the best, of Harold Lloyd’s full length films is the one that includes the comic genius’s most daring comic stunt – the ascent of a twelve storey building in Downtown, Los Angeles – and his most iconic image, dangling from a clock several hundred feet above a busy thoroughfare...
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With its plethora of inventive laugh-out-loud gags, Hot Water is undoubtedly one of the most entertaining of Harold Lloyd’s silent films, and it is no surprise that it was also one of his biggest successes. For once, the story is not concerned with Harold’s attempt to win his wife, but rather with the grim aftermath of the connubial coupling...
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An exquisitely crafted portrait of unrequited love, Lazybones represents one of the high points of Frank Borzage’s extraordinarily productive filmmaking career. The film transcends the conventional melodrama of its era, having a raw lyrical quality and simplicity that cannot fail to captivate and move an audience...
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Perhaps no other film captures the magic and humour of Charlie Chaplin more than his 1925 silent masterpiece The Gold Rush. The most ambitious film that Chaplin had made up until this point, it is chock-full of the kind of hilarious comic set pieces that earned him his enduring reputation as the greatest comic performer of all time...
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The Merry Widow is the second film that Austrian-born director Erich von Stroheim made for MGM studios during his productive (and turbulent) period in the United States. The first was Greed , a monolithic production which ran to seven hours before MGM took the project away from von Stroheim and ruthlessly cut it to two hours...
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Lost for nearly eight decades, this silent masterpiece made a surprising return in 2007 thanks to the efforts of dedicated film restorer Serge Bromberg and his company Lobster Films. When significant "lost" films are bought back from the dead, there is sometimes a feeling of disappointment when we finally get to see them...
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7th Heaven is the film that made Janet Gaynor an overnight star and further cemented Frank Borzage's reputation as one of Hollywood's greatest directing talents. Gaynor had previously played the female lead in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, but this was released a few months after Borzage's film. 7th Heaven was the first of twelve films in which the actress starred opposite another icon of the silent...
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Sunrise, F.W. Murnau’s timeless classic of corruption, redemption and true love, is widely regarded as one of the most exquisitely realised of all silent films, and arguably one of the greatest films of the Twentieth Century. Murnau brings his experience as one of Germany’s leading directors of the 1920s to slick Hollywood production methods...
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Buster Keaton, possibly the funniest man in history, was at the height of his powers as both a comedian and a director when he made The General , his greatest film, and arguably one of the best war films of the silent era. With some of the most spectacular visual gags ever recorded on film, it’s an icon of American cinema which continues to delight film enthusiasts of all generations...
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The film that sounded the death knell for silent cinema and revolutionised the movie making industry overnight is also the film that saved Warner Brothers from bankruptcy and made Al Jolson a household name across the globe. The Jazz Singer was not the first film to incorporate sound elements but it was the first feature-length film that employed synchronized dialogue sequences which the...
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The best of the eight collaborations of director Tod Browning and legendary star of the silent era Lon Chaney, The Unknown is also Browning’s darkest and most disturbing film, several orders of magnitude more chilling than his subsequent horror classic Dracula (1931). What makes this macabre tale of unrequited love...
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Buster Keaton ended his association with United Artists by co-directing and starring in this feature-length comedy in which his flair for understated pathos and death-defying sight gags is once again put to good use. This was the penultimate film over which Keaton would have directorial input; in his subsequent films for MGM he would have diminishing artistic control and would rarely achieve...
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The Circus is probably the most underrated of all Charles Chaplin’s silent films. Yet this is the film that won the actor-director his first Academy Award in 1929 – a special award "for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus". It was also one of Chaplin’s most commercially successful films...
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