American films
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In response to fierce accusations of racism in his film The Birth of a Nation (1915), director D.W. Griffith was inspired to make this epic morality work which argued that intolerance was a tragically fundamental part of the human condition. It is significant that the film was made during the First World War (just prior to America’s involvement)...
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In one of his most ambitious and greatest films, D.W. Griffith skilfully combines melodrama and historical political intrigue to create one of the most spectacular and poignant of films of the silent era of American cinema. Real-life sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish play the two orphans of the title, bringing pathos and a sense of realism to a moving (albeit far-fetched) story of two innocents...
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A curiosity from the silent era of film, Salome feels more like a bizarre Art Nouveau-inspired erotic dream than a piece of cinema. The extravagant costumes, striking minimalist set design and highly stylised acting suggest narcotic-induced fantasy, not realism. Whilst the film’s effete artificiality and sluggish pace are somewhat off-putting...
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Lost for nearly eight decades, this silent masterpiece made a surprising return in 2007 thanks to the efforts of dedicated film restorer Serge Bromberg and his company Lobster Films. When significant "lost" films are bought back from the dead, there is sometimes a feeling of disappointment when we finally get to see them...
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Sunrise, F.W. Murnau’s timeless classic of corruption, redemption and true love, is widely regarded as one of the most exquisitely realised of all silent films, and arguably one of the greatest films of the Twentieth Century. Murnau brings his experience as one of Germany’s leading directors of the 1920s to slick Hollywood production methods...
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Buster Keaton, possibly the funniest man in history, was at the height of his powers as both a comedian and a director when he made The General , his greatest film, and arguably one of the best war films of the silent era. With some of the most spectacular visual gags ever recorded on film, it’s an icon of American cinema which continues to delight film enthusiasts of all generations...
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The best of the eight collaborations of director Tod Browning and legendary star of the silent era Lon Chaney, The Unknown is also Browning’s darkest and most disturbing film, several orders of magnitude more chilling than his subsequent horror classic Dracula (1931). What makes this macabre tale of unrequited love, self-mutilation and grisly revenge so potent is the unbeatable combination...
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Buster Keaton ended his association with United Artists by co-directing and starring in this feature-length comedy in which his flair for understated pathos and death-defying sight gags is once again put to good use. This was the penultimate film over which Keaton would have directorial input; in his subsequent films for MGM he would have diminishing artistic control and would rarely achieve...
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The last but one of the ten collaborations of director Tod Browning and actor Lon Chaney is one of their best and, whilst not strictly a horror film, it is the film in which Chaney gives arguably his most chilling performance. The film was adapted from the successful stage play Kongo, which was performed on Broadway in 1926...
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When Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues was published in 1929 it became an immediate international best seller. With its horrifically detailed description of life and death on the battlefields of World War I, the novel obliterates the notion that war is a glorious thing and stands as the greatest anti-war statement in literature...
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City Girl is the third of four films that the legendary German-born filmmaker Friedrich Murnau made in Hollywood before his tragic death in a car accident 1931. It has many striking similarities with his earlier film Sunrise (1927), which is considered to be Murnau's masterpiece. Both films make wry contrasts between urban and rural life (at a time when the former was rapidly superseding...
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It was the enormous success of Tod Browning’s Dracula in 1931 which prompted Universal Pictures to make a second film in the fantasy/horror genre, and that film, Frankenstein, was to become the most influential film of its kind in the history of cinema. With its distinctive expressionist design and compelling narrative...
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Whilst it may not have been the first gangster film that was made in Hollywood, Little Caesar is certainly one of the most influential. Its success resulted in a spate of similar films – beginning with William A. Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) and Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932) – which made...
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The Miracle Woman is the film where Frank Capra, with around twenty films already under belt, found his voice and is the first of his noteworthy morality films. This was his second collaboration with Barbara Stanwyck, an actress who quickly rose to fame under Capra’s tutelage, whilst providing the director with the perfect muse for his early 1930s films...
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The Public Enemy was Warner Brothers’ initial follow-up to Little Caesar (1930), the first sound gangster film which turned the virtually unknown actor Edward G. Robinson into a star. Along with Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932), these two films would establish the gangster movie as a major genre in Hollywood of the 1930s...
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Frank Borzage’s masterful adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 semi-autobiographical novel may at times appear uneven and slightly dated, but it is still a film with great visual impact and harrowing emotional intensity. The film, a tragic love story set against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest conflicts in history...
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Blonde Venus marked the fifth collaboration of the gifted Austrian director Josef von Sternberg with screen legend Marlene Dietrich, a somewhat contrived melodrama that is salvaged from the tepid sea of mediocrity by its stunning art design, truthful performances and some moments of artistic brilliance. The charismatic Dietrich is...
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One of the all-time classics of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Grand Hotel is famously the first American film to use an ensemble cast made up of some of the leading film actors of the day. Whilst the formula may have been used on many occasions since, few films achieve the pure cinematic magic that comes from the bringing together of such iconic performers as Greta Garbo...
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Arguably the greatest gangster movie of all time, Scarface was so shocking to American sensibilities of the 1930s that it outraged public opinion and was quickly taken out of circulation by its producer, Howard Hughes. The film was forgotten for fifty years, only to be resurrected after Hughes’s death in the early 1980s...
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Shanghai Express is the fourth of eight collaborations of actress Marlene Dietrich with director Josef von Sternberg, following The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930) and Dishonoured (1931). One of Dietrich’s best known films, Shanghai Express is also one of the finest examples of early 1930s American cinema, setting a standard of excellence for Hollywood production teams for the rest...
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