1925 – Sergei Eisenstein – The central committee of the Communist government decided in 1925 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the unsuccessful 1905 revolution against the Czar by sponsoring a series of films. Sergei Eisenstein and his collaborator Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko planned an epic that would encompass dozens of locations from Moscow to Siberia. All that changed when…
1926 – Fred Niblo – When the famous 1959 remake of Ben-Hur was passing through the many hands that worked on the script, someone (perhaps director William Wyler) had the sense to call in British playwright Christopher Fry to work during the shooting and to doctor the dialogue so that contemporary-sounding lines (“Did you like your dinner?”) took on a more classic sound…
1925 – King Vidor – Those who have never seen a silent movie might choose well to make The Big Parade their first. Those who have seen many will savor this masterpiece. King Vidor's film about John Apperson (John Gilbert) and his various adventures after enlisting in World War I holds up amazingly well. We think that the silent cinema is more primitive or at least more styliz…
1915 – D.W. Griffith – In Speed, as Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves wheel a bus at high speed through the streets of Los Angeles, there is a cutaway to a woman pushing a baby carriage toward a street corner. The film then returns to Bullock and Reeves racing along. A few seconds later, another shot appears of the woman on the corner, easing her baby carriage onto the street and star…
1921 – Rex Ingram – If The Big Parade is a silent film that showcases that art form especially well, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, coming four years earlier, features the static compositions that many contemporary viewers might expect when they think of silent film. The movie is noteworthy for making a star out of Rudolph Valentino, whose performance makes the film worth watc…
1916 – D.W. Griffith – Like Hollywood itself, there's not much good or bad you can say about this epic of epics that isn't true. Following the controversy surrounding charges of racism in The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith combined the urge to reply to his critics with the showman's desire to top himself. The result was Intolerance, which connects four separat…
1927 – Able Gance – Probably the worst luck that befell Napoleon was to have had its premiere six months before the debut of The Jazz Singer, the film that started the industry transition to sound. Gance's twenty-eight reel (or about six hour) silent epic covering the life of Napoleon from his boyhood to the Italian campaign was shown in its original form in only eight Europe…
1927 – Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov – “Formalist excess!”—one of the first and most important reviews of this film was that delivered by the inner ring of the Communist Party. Director Sergei Eisenstein was accused of caring more about film technique than about his film subject of the ten days that shook the world in October 1917, the Bolshevik Revoluti…
1921 – D.W. Griffith – In Intolerance, D.W. Griffiths’ lofty ambitions to intercut stories from four historical periods defeated his attempts to balance spectacle with a compelling personal element. But with Orphans of the Storm he returned to the form of the intimate epic that he created in The Birth of a Nation. Set against the background of pre-revolution France, the film …
1924 – Raoul Walsh – An enjoyable taste of The Thief of Bagdad occurs in the scene when the princess (Julanne Johnston) watches from a balcony with two waiting women as her would-be suitors ride through the palace gate. Unknown to the men, a prophecy has forecast that her future husband will be the one who first touches the rose tree in the courtyard. The audience knows that the das…
A nine-reel silent film from Italy, Quo Vadis? (1912), directed by Enrico Guazzoni, is credited by many with establishing the conventions of the spectacle film with its cast of thousands, memorable set pieces (a chariot race, the burning of Rome, lions in the Coliseum), and massive sets. Another influential early silent epic was Piero Fosco's Cabria (1914), which boasted even more magnifice…