Celebrate Silent Film
Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer play young lovers divided by class in Ernst Lubitsch’s lavish operetta adaptation. Jean Hersholt steals the picture.
Continue reading “The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927) A Silent Film Review”
To put things in context, John Barrymore’s Sherlock Holmes starts out has a college kid chasing after the mysterious Moriarty. Gustav von Seyffertitz the the villainous professor. Von Seyffertitz seemed to have it in for the Barrymore boys. He menaced John again in Don Juan and drove Lionel to madness in The Bells.
On the great Moriarty scale, I give von Seyffertitz a 7/10. Pretty darn good, especially considering that he is not in the film very much.
On an unrelated note, I love Moriarty’s brush-off and plan to use it next time I want to get rid of a college boy whom I have met only once.
Welcome to my second-ever video review! This time, I am sharing Barbed Wire, a beautiful silent drama starring Pola Negri. She’s a French farmer. He’s a German soldier. Her farm has been converted into a POW camp. Not the likeliest setup for a romance but with a war on, we take what we can get.
I also cover the propaganda films of the first world war and talk about German-Americans in Hollywood. I also do a little bit of debunking as a rather odd rumor has attached itself to the film.
I hope you enjoy!
Mary Pickford tackles two roles in this Dickensian soaper. She is Stella Maris: beautiful, rich, innocent and paralyzed. She is also Unity Blake: plain, penniless, ignored and abused. Both girls love the same man but he is trapped in an abusive marriage. Will true love win? And whose true love?
Mary Pickford dusts off her pigtails one last time in her final child role. One of her darkest films, Sparrows tells the tale of a band of orphans who escape from an orphan farm and cross a dangerous gator-infested swamp. A surprisingly moody slice of Southern Gothic from America’s Sweetheart.