Laurel and Hardy are debt collectors trying to repossess a console radio.
Destruction was the 25th short as a team. I’m only now dipping into Laurel and Hardy in a serious way, but the whole 20 year collaboration seems to be based on two things: the comedy of destruction, and a sort of flummoxed humiliation. We laugh at...
In this highly influential silent horror film, the mysterious Count Orlok (Max Schreck) summons Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) to his remote Transylvanian castle in the mountains. The eerie Orlok seeks to buy a house near Hutter and his wife, Ellen (Greta Schroeder). After Orlok reveals his vampire nature, Hutter struggles to escape the castle, knowing that Ellen is in grave danger. Meanwhile Orlok's servant, Knock (Alexander Granach), prepares for his master to arrive at his new home.
Bloodless, Sexless consider “Shadow of the Vampire” one of the most intelligent films ever made. Herzog’s remake of this is even interesting if terminally flawed (as Herzog himself gets bitten). And this has some intensity to it. One can readily imagine it set in its time...
Mia Verhag loses her job as a chorus singer when she rejects the advances of the theatre director. While she is in the grips of despair, she encounters the millionaire Roswolsky, who takes her to his luxurious house and gives her a key to the garden gate, allowing her to visit the surrounding park whenever she pleases. This chance meeting sends rumours flying everywhere, and soon Mia appears on the front pages of all the newspapers as Roswolsky’s mistress. The city’s merchants and creditors compete to lend her money, and she lands the leading role in the theatre’s new production. There, she falls in love with Count Albich – but, believing the rumours, he avoids her. Mia follows him to Monte Carlo, while Roswolsky himself falls genuinely in love with her and plots to take Albich out of the running. A grand drama is set to unfold.
Industrial Revolution came to this as a warmup for what trusted folks say will be an important viewing in her ‘Hamlet’ made this same year. This is a woman who invented women in film, so popular she went by ‘The Asta’. She was so powerful that...
A free adaptation of Shakespeare′s drama. The Danish queen masquerades her daughter as a boy, and thus, the girl lives her life as 'Prince' Hamlet. Her father poisoned by a venomous snake placed by the treacherous Claudius, Hamlet fakes madness to investigate without suspicion.
Citizen Asta has long been attractive to vain actors, despite its opposing energy. Mel Gibson! Olivier! So many… And such committed variety. There are four notable things. The first is that the play may be the richest long form narrative in history, essentially inventing poetic metaphor....
One of the first Czechoslovak films to be shown abroad--a fantasy horror, filmed on the fully furnished premises of the Berlin film studio Am Zoo. The central role is portrayed by the “arrivee from darkness”, Ješek, who is awakened from a deathly sleep. The film represents unusual sparks of creative efforts and the ambitions of creative community around the director Jan S. Kolár, who was inspired by international trends and techniques.
Parallel Realities this is yet another instance of a woman actress, made a star by her filmmaker lover. The story is a valentine to her charm and beauty, sufficient to bend reality. She indeed became a star until talkies made her accent unsellable. Here, she...
When Mabel catches her husband flirting with their maid, it leads to a sharp dispute. As part of making up, the couple decide to take a walk to the park. Nearby, another married couple have just had a similar domestic squabble, and they too go to the park together. But at the park, all parties involved find it difficult to avoid getting themselves into further trouble.
Wife-swapping a comedy, this one is poor in the things that seemed to matter, the physical bits, the comic takes when the situation turns sour. But its amazing in what it chooses as its story. Remember, film was young, younger in those days that the web...
Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.
Bad Influence film marked a disastrous turn in American society. No, I’m not talking about the overtly racist content. Any nitwit can see that and adjust, though I suspect that my grandchildren will decry with equal vehemence the content of the films I now casually...
Choose your own Revolution the basic info first. This is the first 15 minutes of a silent film without inter-titles that we are told is both a vampire story and a mystery. The people appear and act as any actors would representing the upper class...
Hand-tinted Italian verison of the Shakespeare Classic King Lear.
<strong>Colour Only you have not seen this, it is a pantomime of a play with all the characters and plot of “Lear,” but wonderfully coloured. Just looking at the colouring is an adventure because they are so abstract, so unnaturally pure. But the sad...