BLACHEFAN

Stark Love (1927) A maverick production in both design and concept, "Stark Love" is a beautifully photographed mix of lyrical anthropology and action melodrama from director Karl Brown. "Man is absolute ruler. Woman is working slave." Such are the rigid attitudes framing this tale of a country boy's beliefs about chivalry that lead him to try to escape a brutal father with the girl he loves. "Stark Love," cast exclusively with amateur actors and filmed entirely in the Great Smoky Mountains, is an illuminating portrayal of the Appalachian people.

7th Heaven (1927) "Seventh Heaven" (also referred to as "7th Heaven"), directed by Frank Borzage and based on the play by Austin Strong, tells the story of Chico (Charles Farrell), the Parisian sewer worker-turned-street cleaner, and his wife Diane (Janet Gaynor), who are separated during World War I, yet whose love manages to keep them connected. "Seventh Heaven" was initially released as a silent film but proved so popular with audiences that it was re-released with a synchronized soundtrack later that same year. The popularity of the film resulted in it becoming one of the most commercially successful silent films as well as one of the first films to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. Janet Gaynor, Frank Borzage, and Benjamin Glazer won Oscars for their work on the film, specifically awards for Best Actress, Best Directing (Dramatic Picture), and Best Writing (Adaptation), respectively. "Seventh Heaven" also marked the first time often-paired stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell worked together. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/7th_heaven.pdf

The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1927) Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich created one of the most creative (particularly in light of its reputed $97 budget) and bleakest of the early avant-garde films. Photographed by Gregg Toland, who would become best known for his work on "Citizen Kane," the film is the time-worn tale of a movie extra (Jules Raucort) marginalized by one casting director after another until he's seen only as a number symbolically appearing on his forehead. The ultra simplistic sets and props, made of toys and cardboard buildings projected like shadows, help to create intricate German Expressionistic cityscapes reminiscent at times of "Metropolis." The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/hollywood_extra.pdf

The Jazz Singer (1927) Starring Al Jolson as a young man who pursues his dream of becoming a jazz singer despite the wishes of his overbearing Cantor father (Warner Oland), "The Jazz Singer" was the first feature film to include sequences with synchronized spoken dialogue. This landmark technological achievement was made possible using Warner Bros.'s Vitaphone sound system, which involved spoken dialogue being recorded on a phonograph record that was then played in-synch with the projected film, thus resulting in synchronized dialogue. "The Jazz Singer," directed by Alan Crossland, won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Al Cohn, as well as a Special Academy Award honoring the film's scientific and technical achievements in revolutionizing motion pictures.

It (1927) Writer Elinor Glyn pioneered risqué romantic fiction aimed at a female audience, and her 1927 Cosmopolitan magazine story defined "It" as "that quality possessed by some few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force." Paramount saw the opportunity to capitalize on Glyn's popularity with a film by the same title, and cast one of their up-and-coming starlets, Clara Bow, whom Glyn claimed personified "It," according to the film's publicity. The frothy story of a salesgirl (Bow) who pursues her handsome playboy boss (Antonio Moreno) is best remembered for Bow's incandescence. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/it.pdf

The General (1927) In what may be his most memorable film, Buster Keaton plays a Southern railway engineer who has "only two loves in his life" -- his locomotive ("The General") and the beautiful Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). One of the most expensive films of its time, including an accurate historical recreation of a true-life Civil War episode in which a train is stolen by the enemy, hundreds of extras, dangerous stunt sequences, which Keaton performed himself, and an actual locomotive falling from a burning bridge into a gorge far below. A commercial failure at the time of release -- audiences felt it lacked the humor of Keaton's other films -- "The General" is now considered a classic of comedic understatement by film historians and audiences.

Flesh and the Devil (1927) One of the last silent film classics, "Flesh and the Devil" is the first on-screen pairing of silent superstars John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. It is a masterpiece of American romanticism from director Clarence Brown, who directed Garbo in seven classic films, and Garbo's favorite cinematographer, William Daniels. In "Flesh and the Devil," Garbo plays a seductress at the middle of a love triangle who sacrifices love for comfort and material luxury. The blistering chemistry between Garbo and Gilbert reflected their torrid, real-life affair at the time. The film proved a huge success for MGM, and the studio paired the lovers in three more pictures.

The Strong Man (1926) A vaudevillian for much of his professional life, Harry Langdon was discovered and brought to Hollywood by Mack Sennett in the early 1920s but languished until 1925, when director Harry Edwards and then-gagman Frank Capra developed three features and several shorts for him. Their great success added Langdon to the fraternity of "The Four Silent Clowns" along with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. In the film, Langdon plays the assistant of circus strong man Zandow the Great, who inevitably and most comically is forced to impersonate Zandow when the headliner is incapacitated. Langdon and Capra predated by five years Chaplin's "City Lights" with its story of a timid man in love with a blind woman, in this instance Priscilla Bonner, successfully mixing belly laughs with scenes of great emotional tenderness. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/strong_man.pdf

The Son of the Sheik (1926) Rudolph Valentino, who died at the age of 31 shortly after the film's release, inflamed female hearts for a final time in this slightly tongue-in-cheek adventure-romance. The son of an Arabian sheik (Valentino) falls in love with a dancer (Vilma Banky) whose father (George Fawcett) and his cronies are thieves. When the young sheik is mistakenly led to believe the girl seduced him as a front for her father's gang, he feels betrayed, and kidnaps her in revenge. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/son_sheik.pdf

So's Your Old Man (1926) While W.C. Fields' talents are better suited for sound films — where his verbal jabs and asides still delight and astound — Fields also starred in some memorable silent films. Fields began his career as a vaudevillian juggler and that humor and dexterity shines through in "So's Your Old Man." The craziness is aided immeasurably through the deft comic touches of director Gregory LaCava. In the film, Fields plays inventor Samuel Bisbee, who is considered a vulgarian by the town's elite. His road to financial success takes many hilarious detours including a disastrous demo for potential investors, a bungled suicide attempt, a foray into his classic "golf game" routine and an inspired pantomime to a Spanish princess. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/old_man.pdf

Mighty Like a Moose (1926) Actor/director/screenwriter Charley Chase is underappreciated in the arena of early comedy shorts. Chase began his film career in the teens, working for Mack Sennett with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. Moving on to the Hal Roach Studios, Chase starred in his own series of shorts. "Mighty Like a Moose," directed by Leo McCarey, is considered to be among his best. A title card at the beginning tells us this is "a story of homely people—a wife with a face that would stop a clock—and her husband with a face that would start it again." Unbeknownst to each other Mr. and Mrs. Moose have surgery on the same day to correct his buckteeth and her big nose. They meet on the street later, but don't recognize each other; they flirt and arrange to meet later at a party. A side-splitting series of sight gags follows.

Hands Up! (1926) As a comic actor, Raymond Griffith was worlds away from the frantic, rubber-faced funnymen who stereotypically appeared in silent films. An easy elegance was his stock-in-trade. When he performed a gag, Griffith executed it with understatement and panache. In the Civil War saga "Hands Up," Griffith is not only an amusingly intrepid Confederate spy, but also an endearing romantic figure with two young women vying for his attention. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/hands_up.pdf

Ella Cinders (1926) With her trendsetting Dutch bob haircut and short skirts, Colleen Moore brought insouciance and innocence to the flapper image, character and aesthetic. By 1926, however, when she appeared in "Ella Cinders," Moore's interpretation of the flapper had been eclipsed by the more overtly sexual version popularized by Clara Bow or Joan Crawford. In "Ella Cinders," Ella (Colleen Moore) wins a beauty contest sponsored by a movie magazine and is awarded a studio contract. New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall observed that the film was "filled with those wild incidents which are seldom heard of in ordinary society," and noted "Miss Moore is energetic and vivacious." The film is an archetype of 1920s comedy, featuring a star whose air of emancipation inspired her generation.

The Black Pirate (1926) This swashbuckling tour-de-force by Douglas Fairbanks, king of silent action adventure pictures, is most significant for having been filmed entirely in two-strip Technicolor, a process still being perfected at the time, and the precursor to Technicolor processes that would become commonplace by the 1950s. Fairbanks plays a nobleman who has vowed to avenge the death of his father at the hands of pirates, and once upon the pirates' vessel, protects a damsel in distress (Bessie Love)taken hostage by the band of thieves. Fairbanks wrote the original story under a pseudonym, and Albert Parker directed. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/black_pirate.pdf

Gus Visser and His Singing Duck [Theodore Case Sound Test] (1925) One of the Registry's more unusual entries, this film was created to demonstrate technological advancements by Theodore Case, a scientist specializing in recording sound on film. In 1926, Case joined forces with Fox Films which purchased the rights to one of his systems and began making short sound films. As Case made improvements to his processes, he would test them by recording popular vaudeville acts, including Gus Visser and "The Original Singing Duck." In this film, probably made as a demonstration for Fox investors, Visser warbles the Eddie Cantor song "Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me" with the help of a duck who Visser physically "prompts" to quack on cue. Within the year, Warner Bros. would beat Fox as the first producer of a feature-length sound film, and this short film may give some indication why. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/gus_visser.pdf

The Phantom of the Opera (1925) When escaped prisoner Erik (Lon Chaney), also known as the elusive phantom of the Paris Opera House, becomes obsessed with an up-and-coming singer named Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin), he kidnaps her and threatens the lives of her lover, Raoul (Norman Kerry), and the other men who come to rescue her. Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, "The Phantom of the Opera" is a classic horror film released by Universal, the studio that would go on to dominate the horror and "monster-movie" market during the sound era. The production and distribution process for "The Phantom of the Opera" was complicated and involved multiple directors, multiple reshoots, multiple script rewrites, shooting some sequences in two-strip Technicolor, and building a huge Paris Opera House set on the Universal backlot. Particularly impressive was Lon Chaney's makeup, which he applied himself and kept a secret from the cast and crew until the actual filming. Even today, the exact techniques Chaney used to create Erik's appearance are unknown.

The Lost World (1925) Based on the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and directed by Harry O. Hoyt, "The Lost World" is a fantasy adventure film that follows Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) and his fellow explorers (played by Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Hughes, and Arthur Hoyt) on a rescue mission to the jungles of South America to find a missing comrade and prove Professor Challenger's claim that living dinosaurs occupy the area. "The Lost World" is historically significant in that it was one of the first full-length feature films to include stop motion model animation. Willis H. O'Brien, who brought King Kong to life eight years later, was responsible for creating the sophisticated animation sequences. The expanded essay is below this location. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/lost_world.pdf

Lady Windermere's Fan (1925) Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and adapted from the play by Oscar Wilde, "Lady Windermere's Fan" stars May McAvoy as Lady Margaret Windermere, a happily-married society woman whose life is thrown into turmoil when she mistakes Mrs. Erlynne, her birth mother, played by Irene Rich, for a woman trying to win her husband's affection. When Lady Windermere rashly decides to leave her husband for the companionship of Lord Darlington (Ronald Colman), Mrs. Erlynne sacrifices her own social reputation to preserve that of her daughter. Lubitsch managed to translate Wilde's witty play into a successful silent film, one that bears his trademark "Lubitsch Touch." The expanded essay is below this location. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/lady_windermere2.pdf

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925) Courtesy Milestone Film & Video One of the earliest ethnographic documentaries, "Grass" follows a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe in Persia (present-day Iran) in their seasonal quest to find better grazing land for their herds. Its filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, both of "King Kong" fame, sought to depict the "timeless" and "ancient" human struggles of a nomadic people. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/grass.pdf

The Gold Rush (1925) Written, directed, and produced by Charles Chaplin, "The Gold Rush" follows Chaplin's Lone Prospector on his adventures in the Klondike. Often considered one of Chaplin's greatest films, "The Gold Rush" features many now-famous sequences, including Chaplin's "Oceana Roll" dance and the scene in which the Lone Prospector and his fellow prospector, Big Jim McKay (Mack Swain), are forced to eat a shoe to survive. In 1942, Chaplin rereleased The Gold Rush with music and narrative sound tracks; the rerelease was nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Sound Recording and another for Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. Charles Chaplin is known to have said that "The Gold Rush" was the film by which he wanted to be remembered. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/gold_rush.pdf

The Freshman (1925) The "collegiate" fad that swept the U.S. during the 1920s testified to popular culture's utter fascination with youth, and Hollywood shrewdly jumped on the bandwagon. The formula was deployed with such regularity that comic Harold Lloyd satirized it to great effect in his enormously popular film, "The Freshman." Lloyd plays the naive collegian who enthusiastically determines to be Big Man on Campus by copying the manners of movie collegians. After donning his letterman sweater, perfecting his "college yell" and rehearsing the ridiculous "jig" that he hopes will be his ticket to popularity, he begins his journey to college. Lamb's arrival at Tate University, billed as a "large football stadium with a college attached," begins a series of comical trials and tribulations that tests his mettle. In addition to providing the perfect showcase for Lloyd's ingenious gags, physical humor and tender pathos, "The Freshman" proved to be one of the most successful films of his career. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/freshman.pdf

Clash of the Wolves (1925) In one of the greatest stories in film history, German shepherd Rin-Tin-Tin (Rinty) was rescued from a German trench during World War I by American soldier Lee Duncan, who trained the dog and took him to Hollywood. Rinty quickly became one of the biggest stars of 1920s Hollywood, reportedly saving Warner Bros. studio from bankruptcy. In "Clash of the Wolves" resourceful Rinty ingeniously rescues the good guys while foiling the crooks. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/clash_wolves.pdf

The Big Parade (1925) One of the first films to deglamorize war with its startling realism, "The Big Parade" became the largest grossing film of the silent era. From a story by Laurence Stallings, director King Vidor crafted what "New York Times" critic Mordaunt Hall called "an eloquent pictorial epic." The film, which Hall said displayed "all the artistry of which the camera is capable," depicts a privileged young man (John Gilbert) who goes to war seeking adventure and finds camaraderie, love, humility and maturity amid the horrors of war. Along the way he befriends two amiable doughboys (Karl Dane and Tom O'Brien) and falls for a beautiful French farm girl (Renée Adorée). Vidor tempered the film's serious subject matter with a kind of simple, light humor that flows naturally from new friendships and new loves. A five-time nominee for Best Director, Vidor was eventually recognized by the Academy in 1979 with an honorary lifetime achievement award. Both stars continued to reign until the transition to talking pictures, which neither Gilbert nor Adorée weathered successfully. Their careers plummeted and both died prematurely.

Ben-Hur (1925) Adapted from General Lew Wallace's popular novel "Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ" published in 1880, this epic featured one of the most exciting spectacles in silent film: the chariot race that was shot with 40 cameras on a Circus Maximus set costing a staggering (for the day) $300,000. In addition to the grandeur of the chariot scene, a number of sequences shot in Technicolor also contributed to the epic status of "Ben-Hur," which was directed by Fred Niblo and starred Ramon Novarro as Judah Ben-Hur and Francis X. Bushman as Messala. While the film did not initially recoup its investment, it did help to establish its studio, MGM, as one of the major players in the industry. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/ben_hur_25.pdf

Body and Soul (1925) One of the truly unique pioneers of cinema, African-American producer/director/writer/distributor Oscar Micheaux somehow managed to get nearly 40 films made and seen despite facing racism, lack of funding, the capricious whims of local film censors and the independent nature of his work. Most of Micheaux's films are lost to time or available only in incomplete versions, with the only extant copies of some having been located in foreign archives. Nevertheless, what remains shows a fearless director with an original, daring and creative vision. Film historian Jacqueline Stewart says Micheaux's films, though sometimes unpolished and rough in terms of acting, pacing and editing, brought relevant issues to the black community including "the politics of skin color within the black community, gender differences, class differences, regional differences especially during this period of the Great Migration." For "Body and Soul," renaissance man Paul Robeson, who had gained some fame on the stage, makes his film debut displaying a blazing screen presence in dual roles as a charismatic escaped convict masquerading as a preacher and his pious brother. The George Eastman Museum has restored the film from a nitrate print, producing black-and-white-preservation elements and later restoring color tinting using the Desmet method.