Heading Home (also called Headin’ Home) is a 1920 American silent sports film directed by Lawrence C. Windom. It attempts to create a mythology surrounding the life of baseball player Babe Ruth. The screenplay was written by Arthur “Bugs” Baer from a story by Earle Browne. Besides Ruth, it stars Ruth Taylor, William Sheer, and Margaret Seddon. Plot summary: Ruth… Read more →
The Spoilers (1914) is a film directed by Colin Campbell. The film is set in Nome, Alaska during the 1898 Gold Rush, with William Farnum as Roy Glennister, Kathlyn Williams as Cherry Malotte, and Tom Santschi as Alex McNamara. The film culminates in a spectacular saloon fistfight between Glennister and McNamara. In 1916, an expanded version was released, running 110… Read more →
Intolerance is a 1916 epic silent film directed by D. W. Griffith. Subtitles include Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages and A Sun-Play of the Ages. Widely regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the silent era, the three-and-a-half-hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines, each separated by several centuries: (1) a contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption, (2) a Judean… Read more →
Orphans of the Storm is a 1921 silent drama film by D. W. Griffith set in late-18th-century France, before and during the French Revolution. The last Griffith film to feature Lillian and Dorothy Gish, it is often considered Griffith’s last major commercial success, after box-office hits such as The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Broken Blossoms. Like his earlier… Read more →
From the Manger to the Cross or Jesus of Nazareth is a 1912 American motion picture that was filmed on location in Palestine. It tells the story of Jesus’ life. Directed by Sidney Olcott who also appeared in the film, actress and screenwriter Gene Gauntier wrote the script and portrayed the Virgin Mary. The film received excellent reviews at the… Read more →
The Sheik is a 1921 American silent romantic drama film produced by Famous Players-Lasky, directed by George Melford, starring Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres, and featuring Adolphe Menjou. It was based on the bestselling romance novel of the same name by Edith Maude Hull and was adapted for the screen by Monte M. Katterjohn. The film was a box-office hit… Read more →
Hoodoo Ann is a 1916 American comedy-drama silent film, written by D.W. Griffith, directed by Lloyd Ingraham and released by Triangle Film Corporation. Plot: Ann (Mae Marsh) is a young girl who has lived in an orphanage since infancy. She is disliked and spurned by the other children, and treated coldly by the orphanage administrators. She is told by the… Read more →
Part 1: Part 2: Don Q, Son of Zorro is the 1925 sequel to the 1920 silent film The Mark of Zorro. It was loosely based upon the 1909 novel Don Q.’s Love Story, written by the mother-and-son duo Kate and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard. The story was reworked in 1925 (after Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard’s death) into a vehicle for the Johnston McCulley… Read more →
Nanook of the North (also known as Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic) is a 1922 American silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty, with elements of docudrama, at a time when the concept of separating films into documentary and drama did not yet exist. In the tradition of what would later… Read more →
The Nut is a 1921 American silent film comedy directed by Theodore Reed. Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance writes, “Admittedly a minor work, The Nut is frequently dismissed in critical assessments of Fairbanks’s career. This is unfortunate, for it contains some fascinating sequences and reveals much about the actor-producer’s state of mind at the time it was made.” Vance also notes,… Read more →
