Even more impressive than most of the well-known silent titles, this movie is a real discovery! In fact, pictorially and dramatically it is one of the best silents ever made!
Alan Crosland's riveting "Old San Francisco" (1927) would be most difficult to go past. For one thing, Dolores Costello is surely the most convincingly beautiful heroine of all time.
On the other side of ledger, name someone who can present a more thoroughly nasty display of villainy than that so masterfully enacted by the great Warner Oland.
The support cast is likewise legendary: Charles Emmett Mack as the hero (a fine actor who was killed in a car accident three months before this film was released); Angelo Rossitto in perhaps his largest and most sympathetic part; always-welcome Anna May Wong in a promising but ultimately small role; and the Prologue's Martha Mattox, casting aside her sinister persona. (You can't have everything, even in a lavishly directed masterpiece such as this).
Available on a 10/10 Warner Archive DVD.
Alan Crosland's riveting "Old San Francisco" (1927) would be most difficult to go past. For one thing, Dolores Costello is surely the most convincingly beautiful heroine of all time.
On the other side of ledger, name someone who can present a more thoroughly nasty display of villainy than that so masterfully enacted by the great Warner Oland.
The support cast is likewise legendary: Charles Emmett Mack as the hero (a fine actor who was killed in a car accident three months before this film was released); Angelo Rossitto in perhaps his largest and most sympathetic part; always-welcome Anna May Wong in a promising but ultimately small role; and the Prologue's Martha Mattox, casting aside her sinister persona. (You can't have everything, even in a lavishly directed masterpiece such as this).
Available on a 10/10 Warner Archive DVD.