This silent two-reel comedy from Hal Roach’s fun factory is better known for the talent involved in its production than its contents: character actor James Finlayson has a rare starring role, vaudeville funnyman Ted Healy made his film debut, and Stan Laurel was behind the camera as the director.
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People seek out movie reviews to learn about the latest cinematic offering. But did you ever stop and ask yourself about where and when movies were first made?
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Annie Malone is mostly unknown today, but during the first quarter of the 20th century she had a profound impact on the empowerment of African-American women. Malone was a business tycoon, style trend setter, educator, philanthropist and role model. A documentary film made in 1927 presented an in-depth celebration of her extraordinary career – but the film’s disappearance mirrors Malone’s absence from most historical texts.
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Few film scholars elevated the 1929 short “Wrong Again” to classic status, but I’m willing to go out on a limb to suggest it deserves such an honorific classification. It was among the last wave of Laurel and Hardy’s silent output and had three future Oscar winners behind the camera – director Leo McCarey, cinematographer George Stevens, and screenwriter Lewis R. Foster – plus one of the most wonderfully original sight gags of all time.
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The last major Jesus-focused film of the silent cinema era was Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 release “The King of Kings.” The production offered heaping servings of DeMille’s vices and virtues as a filmmaker: an astonishing sense of visual spectacle and the uncanny ability to make an epic move at a swift pace, coupled with a bizarre sense of dramatic puerility laced with the obsessive need to improve upon holy source material with old-fashioned vulgarity.
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For many years, the 1910 version of “Frankenstein” was the subject of endless speculation when the film was believed to be irretrievably lost. The agitation over its absence was understandable, since it represented an early foray into the horror genre and it was the first film adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel.
Strangely, much less interest has been generated by the second film version of the Mary Shelley novel. This 1915 production, titled “Life Without Soul,” was somewhat closer to its source material than the 1910 film, and it was later at the center of one of the most unusual intellectual property legal cases to emerge in the 1930s.
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A half-dozen genres are merrily mixed together in “The Bat,” the wild and often zany 1926 silent feature based on a Broadway play written by Mary Roberts Rinehard and Avery Hopwood, which in turn was based on Rinehart’s novel “The Circular Staircase” (1908).
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