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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Francis Ford is mostly recalled today as a character actor in his younger brother John Ford’s classic films, but back in the 1910s and 1920s he was a prominent leading man and director. Most of his films from his halcyon days are no longer available, but his 1918 feature “The Craving” is now available in a digitally restored presentation from film historian and preservationist Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions.
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Notable as being among D.W. Griffith’s earliest attempts to blend cinema and politics, the 1909 short film “A Corner in Wheat” depicted the rise of the “Wheat King,” a speculator who manages to corner the commodity market on wheat. His success brings him great wealth that is spent on opulent entertainment for his friends, while the farmers who grow the wheat are stuck in hardscrabble lives and the lower classes who cannot afford the price gouging by the Wheat King – the cost of bread loaves is hiked from five to ten cents, forcing many to go hungry. However, the triumph of his business ruthlessness occurs moments before a freak accident where he crushed to death in a grain silo.
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It is highly unusual to watch one movie while searching for evidence of another, but that is the main reason why most people today would bother to subject themselves to the painfully unfunny 1913 one-reeler “Cohen Saves the Flag.”
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SYNOPSIS:
While Sandy Adams (Hoot Gibson) waits for the sheriff, three thugs, led by Slim Allen (Jim Corey) conspire to frame Duncan McKenna (Charles Newton) of rustling the sheriff’s cattle by branding them with McKenna’s brand. The sheriff returns to his office only to be greeted by Allen, whom tells the sheriff that McKenna has branded one of his calves. Adams overhears this conversation and rides off.
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