Parallax View

Hitchcock / Selznick: Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound (MGM) Hindsight is 20/20, but teaming of British perfectionist director Alfred Hitchcock and American iconoclast producer David O. Selznick was doomed to conflict. Selznick, who brought Hitchcock to Hollywood with an exclusive contract, was a director in all but name. He micromanaged his pictures down to the shot, rewriting [...]

John Barrymore’s 1922 Sherlock Holmes was not the first screen incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, the most well-known fictional character in English literature, and certainly not the definitive. This production, directed by Albert Parker as a mix of dime novel adventure and pulp crime thriller, is ostensibly based on Doyle’s stories but more directly on the [...]

What are the odds of a silent movie, shot in black-and-white and the boxy old 1:33 screen ratio, wowing auds at this year’s Cannes Film Festival? Or that the star of such a throwback — Jean Dujardin, star of the OSS 117 spy spoofs — should show up in Entertainment Weekly as a potential Oscar [...]

The title of Flicker Alley’s box set Landmarks of Early Soviet Film: A Four-Disc DVD Collection Of 8 Groundbreaking Films may sound like dry lesson plan in film history on the surface. There are a lot of viewers, even lovers of movie classics, who consider watching any silent film not by Charlie Chaplin or Buster [...]

Whoever dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve is doomed to drive Death’s carriage for the next year, collecting the souls that pass on and carrying them to the afterlife. This bit of folklore is the narrative conceit on which The Phantom Carriage rests. It opens as a supernatural tale — part [...]

Let’s face it, Soviet silent cinema isn’t known for its sense of humor. Which is not say that it’s completely unknown; the 1925 comedy short Chess Fever is an often cartoonishly inventive parody of the chess madness that swept Russia in its day and the cheeky humor and tongue-in-satire of the 1926 adventure serial Miss [...]

In 1929, a loose collective of young German filmmakers working their way up the ladder of the German studio system took the reigns of a low budget production about a group of attractive young Berliners who meet up for a Sunday outing to lakes. They shot on the streets of Berlin and the parks and [...]

Silent cinema was uniquely suited to shooting in extreme conditions. Without worries of sound recording, cameras could be taken almost anywhere a person could, especially in the twenties, as equipment became more portable. But even in the early days of silent cinema, cameras were being hauled all over the world to capture parts of the [...]

There is a defining contradiction at the center of Mr. Fix-It, the buoyant 1918 Douglas Fairbanks comedy directed and written by Allan Dwan, their sixth or seventh feature together (they made four films together in 1918 alone). Fairbanks’ Dick Remington is ostensibly a British student at Oxford and roommate to American Reginald Burroughs (Leslie Stuart). [...]

Pina Menichelli is the very ideal of the diva in Il Fuoco (Italy, 1915). Introduced only as an illustrious poetess and countess, she steps out of her chauffeured car in a feathered outfit and hat that makes her look like a bird of prey. And she acts that way too when she meets the young [...]

The biggest film history news of 2010 was without a doubt the discovery of Upstream (1927), a John Ford comedy from the late silent era previously thought lost, found in a New Zealand film archive along with numerous other American shorts, features and fragments. After screenings in Los Angeles, Pordenone, New York and elsewhere, San [...]

The Merry Widow (Warner Archive) Erich von Stroheim was the auteur of unapologetic decadence in the silent era and he fills this old world fantasy, an adaptation of a popular operetta, with fairy-tale European kingdoms, arrogant royals and aristocrats and lives of uninhibited attitudes of entitlement that allow—nay, encourage—the most wanton behavior in its princes. [...]

Laila (Flicker Alley) The films made at end of the silent era are a reminder of what was lost in the transition to sound. On the one hand is a mode of visual storytelling that elevated even the most generic films and, at its best, was grace incarnate, directed with stylistic invention and dramatic ingenuity, [...]

Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 The Ten Commandments is quite the landmark for the director. While not technically his first historical epic (that was the 1916 Joan the Woman), it was his first Biblical pageant and his first financially successful epic. But it is also DeMille in the midst of his transition from the lively, witty [...]

F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise is many people’s idea of the greatest film ever made, but set that aside for the moment. The movie was produced toward the end of the silent era, when films hadn’t yet begun to talk, but after synchronized soundtracks had arrived and major productions were being released with recorded musical scores and [...]