La Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000)

Stanislas Merhar and Sylvie Testud in La Captive

Cast: Stanislas Merhar, Sylvie Testud, Olivia Bonamy, Liliane Rovère, Françoise Bertin, Aurore Clément, Vanessa Larré, Samuel Tasinaje, Jean Borodine, Anna Mouglalis, Bérénice Bejo. Screenplay: Chantal Akerman, Eric De Kuyper, based on a novel by Marcel Proust. Cinematography: Sabine Lancelin. Production design: Christian Marti. Film editing: Claire Atherton. 

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is notoriously unfilmable, but that doesn't stop filmmakers from attempting their own versions of at least parts of it. Chantal Akerman is honest in the credits to La Captive in saying that it was "inspired by" the fifth volume of Proust's work, La Prisonnière. What apparently inspired her about the book is the stalemated relationship between the narrator of the book, called Simon (Stanislas Merhar) in the film, and the woman who obsesses him, Albertine, renamed Ariane (Sylvie Testud) in the film. As Simon's desire to possess Ariane deepens, she grows ever more passive, responding to his every proposition with "If you like." As fascinating as Proust makes the narrator's obsession in the novel, it doesn't translate well to film. The intricate backstory of the narrator and Albertine provided by the novel in its preceding volumes is untranslated to the story of Simon and Ariane, leaving us to surmise what brings these two enigmatic people together -- and keeps them apart. Much has been made of the queerness that pervades the film, a lesbian filmmaker's vision of a gay writer's work, but for most viewers that's a subtext that doesn't fully inform the narrative. Akerman's choice to end the film with the possible death of Ariane -- in the novel Albertine escapes her curious imprisonment and lives to continue to tantalize the narrator -- feels melodramatic rather than thematically integral.

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers

Cast: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy. Screenplay: Andrew Haigh, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada. Cinematography: Jamie Ramsay. Production design: Sarah Finlay. Film editing: Jonathan Alberts. Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. 

Movies are not poems. Cinema is based on externalities, on the documentary impulse to record and preserve that which is happening outside of ourselves. Poetry is interior, a response to the impulse to record and preserve the emotional and intellectual experiences produced within us by the outside world. Making movies tends to be communal, writing poems to be private. And yet the two are always superimposing themselves on each other -- on the one hand we have poetry readings, and on the other the viewing of movies in our living rooms and bedrooms. And from the beginning, moviemakers have striven for the poetic, just as poets have always tried to record the seen and heard as pathways to the emotion and the idea. Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers is the product of the attempt to find something like an objective correlative for a variety of emotions -- loneliness, desire, regret -- and ideas -- the centrality of family relationships, the nature of sexuality, the persistence of the past. Haigh finds it in a ghost story, a well-worn trope for literature and film, and tantalizes us into questioning how much of the experience depicted in the film is external and how much is interior -- whether Adam (Andrew Scott) actually encounters the ghosts or is projecting his psychological disorder onto the world. One critic wrote that she approached the ending of the film hoping that we would find out that what we have been watching is actually a story Adam has written. But that would have been on the order of the banal "it was all a dream" conclusion that has been foisted on us too often. Haigh wisely leaves us with questions -- maybe too many for the film's own good. His aim is to unsettle us, in the way the loose ends of a poem, the lines and images that don't quite settle into explicit statements, linger with us. It helps that the movie is perfectly cast, with actors who can translate longing and loss into visible experience. If you've ever been cautioned about a movie to not take it too literally, this is one of those times.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1932)

Nils Asther and Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Walter Connolly, Toshia Mori, Gavin Gordon, Lucien Littlefield, Richard Loo, Helen Jerome Eddy, Emmett Corrigan. Screenplay: Edward E. Paramore Jr., based on a novel by Grace Zaring Stone. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Edward Curtiss. Music: E. Franke Harling. 

Maybe the best way to approach a movie like The Bitter Tea of General Yen today is to think of it as science fiction: a story taking place on a distant planet called t'Chaï-nah. Think of the heroine, Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck) as coming from Earth to a planet torn by civil war, seeking out her fiancé, an astronaut tasked with bringing a message of peace. Captured by the forces supporting General Yen (Nils Asther), she discovers all manner of intrigue involving the beautiful Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), one of the general's servants, and Mah-Li's lover, Captain Li (Richard Loo), as well as some exploitative dealing by her fellow Earthling, a man named Jones (Walter Connolly), the general's financial adviser. Megan finds herself strangely drawn to the alien general, despite the prohibition against interplanetary sexual relations. That way we might be able to set aside our objections to the ethnic stereotypes, the yellowface makeup of the Swedish actor playing the title role, the chop suey chinoiserie of its design and costumes, and the nonsensical taboo against "miscegenation." Because Frank Capra's film has a core of good sense and solid drama to it that almost, but not quite, overcomes the routinely racist attitudes of the time when it was made. It has good performances by its leads, some lively action scenes, and a leavening of sardonic humor provided by Connolly's Jones, who admits that he's "what's known in the dime novels as a renegade. And a darn good one at that." It also demonstrates that Capra was a pretty good director when he wasn't indulging in the sentimental populism that his most famous movies bog down in.  

Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in Me and My Gal

Cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Marion Burns, George Walsh, J. Farrell MacDonald, Noel Madison, Henry B. Walthall, Bert Hanlon, Adrian Morris, George Chandler. Screenplay: Arthur Kober, Philip Klein, Barry Conners. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Gordon Wiles. Film editing: Jack Murray.

Why have I never seen Me and My Gal before? Is it because it's not an easy movie to pigeonhole, being not quite romantic comedy, not quite screwball, and not quite crime drama? Or because it's one of those pre-Code movies that teeter on the edge of seriousness and back off from it in sometimes uncomfortable ways? It starts with an old man about to drown his dog and ends with the police detective protagonist fudging the truth to protect the not entirely innocent. And in between it's wall-to-wall wisecracks, most of them delivered by a never-better Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, who does the gum-chewing dame as well as anyone, even Joan Blondell. Tracy plays Danny Dolan, a cop whose attitude toward those he's supposed to protect and serve is summed up in his response to someone telling him there's been another bank robbery: "Oh, who'd the bank rob now?" And when told that it was the bank that got robbed, retorts, "Ah, turned the tables on 'em, eh? Smart!" There's also a slapstick drunk, a well-staged bank break-in, and even a parody of the Clark Gable and Norma Shearer movie based on Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which Dolan remembers as Strange Inner Tube. Much of the credit for turning potential chaos into a thoroughly entertaining movie has to go to Raoul Walsh, one those Hollywood tough-guy directors who seem not to get the recognition they deserve today. 

Le Million (René Clair, 1931)

René Lefèvre and Annabella in Le Million

Cast: Annabella, René Lefèvre, Jean-Louis Allibert, Paul Ollivier, Constantin Siroesco, Vanda Gréville, Odette Talazac, Pedro Elviro, Jane Pierson, André Michaud, Eugène Stuber, Pierre Alcover, Armand Bernard. Screenplay: René Clair, based on a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Art direction: Lazare Meerson. Music: Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès, Georges Van Parys. 

The French do wonderful things with air. They invented the soufflé and Champagne, and the Montgolfier brothers mastered the art of ballooning. And no French director had a greater gift for buoyancy than René Clair, whose mastery of pacing keeps even the most cockamamie of stories from collapsing, going flat, or crashing to Earth. Le Million is the quintessential Clair film, a musical farce that inspired countless movies, some of which don't always stay aloft. You can see the lineaments of the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) in it as well as Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). The story is much ado about a lottery ticket left in an old jacket owned by a young artist (René Lefèvre) with a mountain of debts, and it carries us from his studio to the jail to backstage at the opera and back again, sometimes journeying over the rooftops of Paris, all of which are embodied not by the real things but by Lazare Meerson's evocative sets. The music is pretty but forgettable, which is really all you need it to be. 

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F.W. Murnau, 1931)

Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu. Screenplay: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty. Cinematography: Floyd Crosby. Film editing: Arthur A. Brooks. 

Humankind is its own serpent in the garden. If you expect F.W. Murnau's Tabu: A Story of the South Seas to be yet another fable about innocence spoiled by civilization, you're wrong. For Murnau, the fault lies in humans themselves, in their insistence on proscribing natural and instinctive behavior. The taboo that precipitates the crisis in the filn is not imposed by the colonizing Europeans, although we see the consequences of the clash between their value system and that of the islanders well enough, but in the tribal imperative that prevents Matahi and Reri from consummating their love. Reri is chosen to become the tribe's sacred virgin, an honor she doesn't want, so she flees with Matahi and is pursued by the tribal elder, Hitu, who is tasked with putting the lovers to death. On the French-colonized island where they land, they encounter a culture they don't understand, particularly its attitude toward money, a foreign concept that will be their undoing. But the valorizing of virginity produces the central taboo of the film. Much has been made of the "gay gaze" in the film: the camera's lingering on beautiful male bodies, which is attributed to Murnau's own gayness. But if Tabu is in any way a product of Murnau's sexual orientation, it's in the emphasis on the central theme: the proscription of desire. In Murnau's case it was the desire for others of his own sex, so the virginity taboo is a metaphor for the rejection of queerness that Murnau encountered in his own life. 

Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)

Cast: Stepan Shkurat, Semen Svashenko, Yuliya Solintseva, Yelena Maksimova, Mykola Nademsky, Petro Masokha, Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Mikhajlov, Pavlo Petrik. Screenplay: Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Cinematography: Danill Demutsky. Art direction: Vasyl Vasylovych Krychevsky. Film editing: Alexsandr Dovzhenko. 

At once lyrical, tragic, and enigmatic, Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth might be viewed today as an example of how Ukraine has always been a temptation and a thorn in the side of Russia -- or at least those in Russia who would try to rule it. As a film about the collectivization of agriculture in the young Soviet Union it bears comparison to Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929), which attempted that subject with a much heavier hand: Its celebration of the tractor, in comparison with Dovzhenko's somewhat problematic introduction of a tractor whose radiator has to be pissed in before it will function, concludes with a tractor ballet. And Eisenstein's treatment of the reactionary clergy involves an all too obvious montage in which the followers of the church are juxtaposed with a herd of sheep; Dovzhenko is content with just showing his priest's frenzied proclamations of anathema on the collectivists. But Eisenstein's film, like Dovzhenko's, met with official disapproval: Collectivization was just too important to Stalin not to undergo intense ideological scrutiny. Artistically, Dovzhenko's Earth has to be judged the greater film, one in which the relationship of beauty and terror informs almost every frame.

L'Âge d'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)

Lya Lys in L'Âge d'Or

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst, Artigas, Lionel Salem, Germaine Noizet, Bonaventura Ibáñez. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, based on a novel by the Marquis de Sade. Cinematography: Albert Duverger. Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: Luis Buñuel. 

Salvador Dalí was a bit of a hack, more interested in making money off of the bourgeoises he affected to mock than in advancing his art. So it was inevitable that he and Luis Buñuel would part ways, especially after Dalï turned to the right, supporting Francisco Franco and embracing Catholicism. Although their collaboration produced two extraordinary films, the 1929 short Un Chien Andalou and the feature L'Âge d'Or, it was Buñuel's career that proved to be the more lasting in terms of critical respect. And if there's anything memorable about L'Âge d'Or, it's Buñuel's ability to bring the Surrealist aesthetic to life in semi-narrative fashion. The extent of Dalí's actual contribution to the film has always been somewhat in question, especially since one target of the film's satire is the Catholic Church, which Dalí never quite abandoned before returning to it enthusiastically. The movie is essentially a series of vignettes, starting with documentary-like section on scorpions, then tracing the efforts of a couple to consummate their love, always frustrated by conventional society and religion, and concluding with an episode derived from the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, in which a group of people emerge from a castle where they have been participating in an orgy, led by a man who looks like Jesus. Bizarre images -- a cow in a bed, a woman sucking the toe of a marble statue, a cross decorated with the scalps of women, and so on -- punctuate the entire film, which is often unsettling and often very funny. The film's assault on the complacency of the bourgeoisie would become a constant in Buñuel's films, and the party scene clearly anticipates the experiences of the trapped partygoers in The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). David Thomson has noted the similarity of the country house party in Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939), pointing out that the gamekeeper in Renoir's film is played by Gaston Modot, who is the male half of the central couple in L'Âge d'Or, but I think we can also see its influence in such French New Wave landmarks as Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) and La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961).   

A Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929)

Charu Roy and Seeta Devi in A Throw of Dice

Cast: Seeta Devi, Charu Roy, Himansu Rai, Modhu Bose, Sarada Gupta, Tincory Charkrabarty. Lala Bijoykishen. Screenplay: Niranjan Pal, W.A. Burton, based on a story from the Mahabharata. Cinematography: Emil Schünemann. Art direction: Promode Nath. 

India would become one of the great filmmaking centers of the world, but the silent film A Throw of Dice, though one of the early classic films made in the subcontinent, was directed by a German, Franz Osten, who would be arrested in India in 1939 for being a member of the Nazi party. Osten was a prolific filmmaker who did much of his work in India, often in collaboration with actor-producer Himansu Rai, who plays the heavy in this story based on an episode in the Mahabharata. It's about two kings who fall in love with Sunita (Seeta Devi), the beautiful daughter of a hermit, Kanwa (Sarada Gupta), who has fled the corruptions of court life. When one of the kings, Ranjit (Charu Roy), wins the heart of Sunita, the other, Sohat (Rai), plots against him. He proposes a game of dice, with the stakes being each other's kingdom. Using loaded dice, Sohat not only wins Ranjit's kingdom and the hand of Sunita, but also tricks Ranjit into becoming his slave. But when Sohat's deception is uncovered, Ranjit's subject mobilize and attack Sohat's palace. In desperation, Sohat leaps from a high cliff. It's a slight tale in the telling, but the beauty of the north Indian setting and the opulence of the palaces give the story a sumptuous frame. There's also a cast of thousands on display and a whole menagerie of tigers and elephants and other animals. 

Storm Over Asia (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928)

Valéry Inkijinoff in Storm Over Asia

Cast: Valéry Inkijinoff, I. Didintseff, Aleksandr Chistyakov, Victor Tsoppi, Fyodor Ivanov, V. Pro, Boris Barnet, Karl Gurniak, I. Inkizhinov, V. Belinskaya, Anel Sudakevich. Screenplay: Osip Brik, Ivan Novokshenov. Cinematography: Anatoli Golovnya. Art direction: M. Aronson, Sergei Kozlovsky.

The great silent Russian propaganda films depended heavily on two things the nascent Soviet Union had in abundance: faces and landscapes. This reliance on closeups and sweeping views of fields and plains sometimes resulted in a loss of narrative coherence, but put the emphasis on the people and resources that the Bolsheviks needed to exercise control over. Storm Over Asia is no exception, beginning with the windswept land and Asiatic faces of the Mongol peoples of eastern Russia, which at the time depicted in the film was still a vast battleground for the Bolsheviks and European forces. After establishing the location, the film focuses on Bair (Valéry Inkijinoff), a young hunter whose father sends him off to the bazaar to sell a silver fox pelt. In the vividly filmed bazaar, Bair is cheated by an unscrupulous European fur trader (Viktor Tsoppi), who might as well be wearing a label: bourgeois capitalist. Beaten by the henchmen for the trader, Bair escapes and joins a group of Soviet partisans fighting the occupiers. The occupation forces seem to be British, who were never a significant presence in this part of the Soviet Union, but the film is vague about such details. They manage to capture Bair, who is sent out with a soldier to be shot, but when they examine Bair's belongings they discover an ancient document indicating that he's a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. (The original title of the film, in Russian, was The Heir to Genghis Khan.) They find the wounded Bair, restore him to health, and set him up as the puppet ruler of a Mongolian state. In the end, Bair turns against the imperialists and the film concludes with a literal storm sweeping them away. It's a film full of great set-pieces, including a montage mockng the imperialists and their wives as they put on their finery and then are driven on a muddy road to meet the new Grand Lama. After an elaborate ceremony (actually filmed at a Tibetan Buddhist celebration) the lama turns out to be a small boy, not at all impressed with his visitors.   

The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

Betty Compson and George Bancroft in The Docks of New York

Cast: George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova, Clyde Cook, Mitchell Lewis, Gustav von Seyffertitz. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, based on a story by John Monk Saunders; titles: Julian Johnson. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Film editing: Helen Lewis. 

Josef von Sternberg is mostly remembered today for his fetishization of Marlene Dietrich in romances with glamorous settings like Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932), but The Docks of New York shows that Sternberg could handle grit as well as glamour. If it's not as well known as the Dietrich films, it's partly because it was largely overlooked at the time of its release because of the flurry of interest in talkies -- it's one of the last important silent movies. But it's as strikingly visual in its way as the more opulent Sternberg movies, with the collaboration of director, cinematographer Harold Rosson, and art director Hans Dreier giving a solid story by Jules Furthman -- who also wrote Morocco and Shanghai Express -- the right flavor. Bill Roberts (George Bancroft), the burly stoker on a tramp steamer, goes ashore for a one-night leave in New York, after being warned by the engineer, Andy (Mitchell Lewis), not to come back drunk. Not one to follow his own advice, Andy then goes to a waterfront dive called the Sandbar where he is surprised to meet his wife, Lou (Olga Baclanova), whom he has abandoned. Meanwhile, Bill rescues a suicidal prostitute named Mae (Betty Compson), when she tries to drown herself, and takes the unconscious woman to a room above the Sandbar. Lou comes to the room to aid in reviving Mae while Bill goes to find some clothes for her. He steals them from a closed pawn shop and returns to find a revived Mae, who turns out to be quite pretty. They go down to the bar, where Andy puts the moves on Mae and gets into a fight with Bill, which Andy loses. Two lost souls, Mae and Bill are attracted to each other, and in a kind of what the hell way, he proposes marriage. They talk wistfully about his giving up the life at sea, and she accepts. A waterfront missionary (Gustav von Seyffertitz) performs the ceremony in the bar. But the next morning Bill has second thoughts and leaves for the ship while Mae is still asleep. Andy, however, still smarting from the beating Bill gave him, goes to the room, where Mae has discovered Bill has left her. She refuses Andy's advances and he tries to rape her, only to be shot by Lou, who has arrived just in time. Seeing the commotion outside the Sandbar, Bill returns to the scene, where he and Mae say their farewell. But when the ship sails, Bill thinks better of it, jumps overboard and swims to shore, where he finds that Mae has been arrested for stealing the clothes from the pawn shop. He confesses to the crime and is sentenced to jail, promising to Mae that he'll return once he serves his sentence. This is solid melodrama stuff, elevated by the performances, which establish the essential loneliness that unites Bill and Mae, and by the fine production values.   

The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

Joan Crawford and Lon Chaney in The Unknown

Cast: Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Norman Kerry, Nick De Ruiz, John George, Frank Lanning. Screenplay: Tod Browning, Waldemar Young, based on a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart; titles: Joseph Farnham. Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad. Art direction: Richard Day, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Harry Reynolds, Errol Taggart. 

One of the kinkier movies in the Lon Chaney filmography, The Unknown betrays its pre-Code nature very early. It's set in a circus where we see women in the audience ogling a performance by the strong man, Malabar (Norman Kerry). But the mother of one of the oglers, sitting across the aisle, hisses at her son to "go home and take off that dress." Chaney plays Alonzo, whose knife-throwing act involves his lovely assistant, Nanon (Joan Crawford), the daughter of the money-grubbing Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz), owner of the circus. What makes Nanon's job more perilous is that Alonzo throws the knives with his feet, being armless. Eventually Alonzo's attraction to Nanon will involve murder, dismemberment, and a love triangle in which Alonzo almost tears his rival, Malabar, to pieces. Chaney's gift for physical transformation reaches a new peak in the movie, which requires him to do everything from throwing knives to drinking from a teacup with his toes. In fact, although Chaney learned to do many of these things, some of the actions were performed by his body double, Paul Desmuke, who was in fact armless. Careful camera manipulation kept Chaney's upper body in the frame as Desmuke actually lit cigarettes and threw knives with his feet. The Unknown was one of Crawford's earliest featured performances, in a role that MGM originally wanted Greta Garbo to play. She's still a little raw as an actress, but her presence outshines that of her leading man, Kerry, whose career fizzled as hers ignited. The Unknown, one of eight movies director Tod Browning made with Chaney, lacks the sympathy for the physically divergent of Browning's most notorious film, Freaks (1932), although Alonzo's dwarf assistant, Cojo (John George), sometimes serves as the moral corrective to Alonzo's schemes.  

October: Ten Days That Shook the World (Grigoriy Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein, 1928)

Cast: Nikolay Popov, Vasili Nikandrov, Layaschenko, Chibisov, Boris Libanov, Mikholyev, Nikolai Podvolsky, Smelski, Eduard Tisse. Screenplay: Sergei Eisenstein, Grigoriy Aleksandrov. Cinematography: Eduard Tisse. Production design: Vasili Kovrigin. Film editing: Esfir Tobak. 

A whirlwind of action and film editing, October was created to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the revolution that put the Bolsheviks in power and gave birth to the Soviet Union. From the beginning it was subject to ideological scrutiny, withdrawn and re-edited -- to eliminate, among other things, references to Trotsky, who had recently been purged by Stalin. Released internationally as Ten Days That Shook the World, lifting the title of John Reed's bestselling 1919 book, it was compared unfavorably to director Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, and even an admirer like Vsevolod Pudovkin, a director who was no stranger to the kind of pressures under which Eisenstein labored in walking the line between art and politics, acknowledged that October was regarded as a "powerful failure." The film fails for us today to craft a clear-sighted account of the critical moments leading up to its spectacular climax, the storming of the Winter Palace. Eisenstein's montage techniques, used so powerfully in Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin,  sometimes feel obvious and superficial, as in the anti-religious montage linking an image of Jesus with images from other religions, concluding with a prehistoric idol, or the juxtaposition of Alexander Kerensky with a mechanical peacock. But as an action movie, it's compelling, from the scene in which the Provisional Government raises the bridges to shut off the protesters, trapping some of them, along with an unfortunate horse, in the machinery, to the final assault on the Winter Palace. Never subtle, and never convincing as an accurate version of history, October still has an aura of epic grandeur. Perhaps it's only for us to feel the irony in the film's opening sequence, pulling down a statue of Alexander III, which echoes for us not only the images of Saddam Hussein's statue being toppled but also Vladimir Putin's dedication of a new statue to the same czar in 2017.

The Eagle (Clarence Brown, 1925)

Vilma Banky and Rudolph Valentino in The Eagle

Cast: Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Banky, Louise Dresser, Albert Conti, James A. Marcus, George Nichols, Carrie Clark Ward. Screenplay: Hanns Kräly, based on a novel by Alexander Pushkin; titles: George Marion Jr. Cinematography: George Barnes. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Hal C. Kern. 

It's easy to overlook the absurdities of the story of The Eagle because the filmmakers embrace them, and everyone seems to be having so much fun. Rudolph Valentino is Vladimir Dubrovsky, a dashing (what else?) lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Guard, who catches the eye of Catherine the Great (Louise Dresser) when he rescues a pretty young woman (Vilma Banky) and her aunt (Carrie Clark Ward) from a carriage pulled by a runaway horse. Catherine wants him for herself, of course, but Vladimir is shocked by her advances and flees. Meanwhile, he learns that his father has been victimized by a wicked aristocrat, Kyrilla Troekouroff (James A. Marcus), who has confiscated his lands. When his father dies, Vladimir vows vengeance against Kyrilla, and assumes the identity of the Black Eagle, a Zorro-like figure who wears a mask and rights the wrongs of Kyrilla against the peasantry. (In fact, the Black Eagle wasn't in the Pushkin story on which the movie is based; he was inspired by the success of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro directed by Fred Niblo.) And wouldn't you know it, Kyrilla's daughter, Mascha, turns out to be the pretty young woman he rescued in the runaway carriage. Disguising himself as a French teacher, he works his way into Kyrilla's household and woos Mascha. Meanwhile, the empress has put a price on Vladimir's head for desertion, so when he manages to win Masca and defeat her father, he still faces a firing squad. This is probably Valentino's most light-hearted performance, and he gets fine support from Banky and especially Dresser as the randy czarina.  

The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924)

Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad

Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Julianne Johnston, Anna May Wong, Snitz Edwards, Sojin Kamayama, Brandon Hurst, Tote Du Crow, Noble Johnson. Screenplay: Lotta Woods, Douglas Fairbanks, Achmed Abdullah, James T. O'Donohoe. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: William Nolan. 

Back when Bagdad was synonymous with flying carpets and not prolonged international conflict, Douglas Fairbanks produced what is either a magical romp or an example of Orientalism at its worst, depending on your point of view. But for the purposes of film history, let's suspend political and social consciousness and appreciate The Thief of Bagdad for what it accomplished: an amusing spectacle, with marvelous sets and (for the time) remarkable special effects. Add to that Fairbanks's energetic performance -- if you can endure the balletic pantomime he often slips into -- and you've got a classic for the usual kids of all ages. It holds up well even today, in part because it's all spectacle: Sound would be superfluous. And yes, Sojin Kamayama's Mongol prince adheres to the "yellow peril" stereotype, a foreshadowing of Flash Gordon's Ming the Merciless, with Anna May Wong slinking around as his partner in malfeasance, but we're treating this as camp, right? Julianne Johnston's princess is a little vapid, not quite the astonishing beauty who's supposed to sweep the thief off his feet and turn him away from larceny toward love. The movie is a shade too long, and it loses some momentum when the thief goes off on his quest to find the thing that will win the princess's love. Even though it helps him save Bagdad from the Mongol hordes, I found his box of magic powder (if that's what it is -- the movie is a little vague about it) less impressive than the Persian prince's (Mathilde Comont) flying carpet, the Indian Prince's (Noble Johnson) crystal ball, and the Mongol prince's golden apple that gives him power over life and death. But even when the story lags, there's always something fun to watch.   

The Great White Silence (Herbert G. Ponting, 1922)

Cast: Robert Falcon Scott, Herbert G. Ponting, Henry R. Bowers, Edgar Evans, Lawrence E.G. Oates, Edward Adrian Wilson. 

Back in the 1980s, Ted Turner provoked an outcry with his proposal to colorize the black-and-white films in his library. Filmmakers, historians, and critics protested, and with good reason: I remember watching Turner's colorized Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and being startled by the paisley print on a blouse worn by Ingrid Bergman; I had never noticed it before the added colors made it stand out, which was certainly not the intention of the director, cinematographer Arthur Edeson, or perhaps even the costume designer, Orry-Kelly. Eventually, legislation put restrictions on such manipulation of old movies. But colorization was not a new thing: From the very beginning, filmmakers tried to add color to movies, usually by tinting the film stock a solid color: blue for night scenes; reds, oranges, and yellows for hot settings like Death Valley in Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924); even pink for love scenes. Most silent movies after 1920 were colored in this way. But there were also attempts at more realistic coloring: For some of his short films, like A Trip to the Moon (1920), George Méliès used a technique devised by Elisabeth Thuillier, a kind of factory assembly-line of colorists who painstakingly added colors to the actors, costumes, and sets in each frame of the film. The technique proved too cumbersome and expensive as movies reached feature length. But it's one of the hallmarks of Herbert G. Ponting's documentary about the fateful Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott in 1910-13, The Great White Silence. Even though the whiteness of ice and snow is Antarctica's dominant feature, Ponting decided to hand-tint the footage he had shot ten years earlier, and thereby accentuated the contrast between human and animal life and the deadly whiteness of the continent. Color provides the life in the life-and-death struggle to reach -- and return from -- the South Pole. The images Ponting captured as the photographer for the expedition, using photographic equipment that now seems primitive, are the essence of the movie, and they often seem as fresh as if they were shot yesterday. Ponting was not allowed to accompany Scott from the base camp to the pole, which is from our point of view fortunate, as we might not have the record he made of the expedition now. But he filmed Scott and his fellow explorers as they rehearsed for the journey, trekking through the snows, setting up tents, bedding down, so he was able to give us at least some sense of what the men endured. Too bad that The Great White Silence is accompanied by a narrative that seems antique in ways that Ponting's images aren't. There's a lot of rather jingoist rhetoric about how Scott's expedition is a tribute to the English spirit, a credit to what Ponting calls "the Race," by which he seems to mean Anglo-Saxons. (One of the crew members has a pet black cat with an unfortunately racist name.) Ponting seems unconcerned with the irony that the doughty Englishmen of Scott's team failed to reach the South Pole before their chief competitor in the race, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Ponting's images of the animal life of Antarctica, seals and gulls and penguins, are accompanied by coy, condescending, anthropomorphic commentary that sets the tone for nature documentaries that followed. Still, it's an astonishing and invaluable film that fully merited the careful reconstruction that makes it available to us a century later. 

The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924)

Emil Jannings in The Last Laugh

 Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Max Hiller, Emilie Kurz, Hans Unterkircher, George John. Screenplay: Carl Mayer. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Production design: Edgar G. Ulmer. Film editing: Elfi Böttrich. 

F.W. Murnau's landmark film The Last Laugh tells a simple story: An elderly, preening doorman (Emil Jannings) at a luxury hotel struggles to unload a large trunk one rainy evening, and the hotel manager (Hans Unterkircher) takes notice. The doorman goes home to his apartment building where he's greeted with the usual deference accorded to his regal bearing and his brass-buttoned uniform. But when he returns to work the next day he finds a new doorman wearing a copy of the uniform. The hotel manager tells him that he's been replaced, and to turn in the uniform and report to his new job: lavatory attendant. Appalled and crushed, he swipes his old uniform and goes home that night wearing it as if nothing has happened. His niece (Maly Delschaft) is being married. and the ex-doorman celebrates well into the night. Still tipsy the next day, he goes back to the hotel and his new job, stashing the uniform in a checkroom at the railroad station. He bumbles through his duties, but when he returns home he's mocked by his neighbors, who have discovered his fall from grace. The next day he's even more disenchanted with his new job, and incurs the anger of a patron who reports him to the hotel manager, who reprimands him. That night he stays in the washroom, where he's found by the night watchman (Georg John), who helps him retrieve the old uniform and return it to storage. Exhausted, he falls asleep in his chair, and the night watchman tenderly covers him with his coat. And that's where the one and only intertitle occurs: It proclaims that this is where the story would most likely end in reality, with the lavatory attendant living out the rest of his days with "little to look forward to but death." But instead, "The author took pity on him ... and provided quite an improbable epilogue." In short, the protagonist inherits a fortune and invites the night watchman to join him as they're wined and dined by the hotel. It's an audacious ending to a remarkably innovative film. The innovations have received most of the attention, especially Karl Freund's camerawork, which involved far more movement than was usual for the day, with Freund sometimes mounting the camera on a wheelchair or strapping it to his body and riding a bicycle through the sets. The doorman's drunkenness is simulated with a subjective camera, double-exposures, and focus changes. The absence of intertitles is also striking, with no loss of narrative coherence and only a little uncertainty about who some of the characters are: I wasn't sure about the identity of the bride until I saw her listed as his niece in the credits on IMDb. But it's the provision of an alternate ending that strikes me as most audacious. The English title, The Last Laugh, seems to derive from this "improbable epilogue." (The German title,  Der letzte Mann, means "the last man.") Does the last laugh really belong to Murnau and scenarist Carl Mayer, mocking the audience's sentimentality in wanting an unearned happy ending? 

La Roue (Abel Gance, 1923)

Ivy Close and Séverin-Mars in La Roue

Cast: Séverin-Mars, Ivy Close, Gabriel de Gravone, Pierre Magnier, Georges Térof, Gil Clary, Max Maxudian. Screenplay: Abel Gance. Cinematography: Gaston Brun, Mac Bujard, Léonce-Henri Burel, Maurice Duverger. Art direction: Robert Boudrioz. Film editing: Marguerite Beaujé, Abel Gance. Music: Arthur Honegger.

The plot is operatic, the technique is novelistic, and the aim is tragic. Abel Gance's La Roue (aka The Wheel) never satisfies on any of those counts, but it's not without a lot of effort on his part as well as his actors and technicians. At its premiere, it ran for somewhere between seven-and-a-half and nine hours (depending on which source you trust), spread over three days, and was a success, earning praise from Jean Cocteau among others. Gance then produced a cut that ran for two and a half hours, which was the version most people saw for many years until film historians set about to reproduce the original. That restoration is the one I sat through for sevenish hours spread over four nights on the Criterion Channel. I have seen seven-hour movies (and some that seemed like it) before, most notably Bela Tarr's Sátántangó (1994). The urge I usually have afterward is to try to justify the expenditure of time, typically by categorizing it as an "immersive experience." That approach works with films like Tarr's, which has a grounded reality to it that provides a look into a human existence other than my own, which is the aim of all narrative art. It's less easily justified when the film is as preposterous as Gance's is in many ways. I said it was operatic in its plotting, and here it's useful to think of the melodramatic excesses of works like Verdi's Il Trovatore, based on a florid Spanish play that involves foundlings, mistaken identities, and people torn between passion and duty. La Roue has a foundling, survivor of a train wreck, rescued by a railroad engineer who raises her along with his own son, allowing both of them to believe they are siblings, which works until she blossoms into a young woman and first the father and then the son realize they're in love with her. The treatment of this story evokes, as others have noted, the novels of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, but it also reminds me of Thomas Hardy's works, in which fate (which Hardy calls "hap," or the blind workings of chance) forestalls any efforts by the protagonists to chart their own course. And since the story involves a kind of incestuous passion, the legend of Oedipus comes to mind, and sure enough Gance quotes Sophocles in one of the intertitles. But of course it's a movie, and that necessitates a good deal of spectacle, starting with the train wreck that sets the plot in motion. La Roue is never dull, and it's sometimes emotionally affecting, but it's not an opera (although Arthur Honegger's score suggests its potential in that regard) and it's not a novel or a tragedy. It's a movie, and one with a great deal to watch if you're willing to commit seven hours to it, but I think you have to be devoted to learning about the craft of movie-making to profit much from it.   

Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)

Erich von Stroheim and Maude George in Foolish Wives

Cast: Erich von Stroheim, Miss DuPont, Maude George, Mae Busch, Rudolph Christians, Dale Fuller, Albert Edmondson, Cesare Gravina, Malvina Polo, C.J. Allen. Screenplay: Erich von Stroheim; titles: Marian Ainslee, Walter Anthony. Cinematography: William H. Daniels, Ben F. Reynolds. Art direction: Richard Day, Elmer Sheehy, Van Alstein. Film editing: Arthur Ripley. 

Erich von Stroheim's reach exceeded Hollywood's grasp, though not without some initial encouragement by the studio heads. Universal eagerly promoted Foolish Wives as "the first million-dollar movie," and most of that sum was apparent on screen: the huge sets re-creating Monte Carlo that were built on the Monterey Peninsula in California. Some of it, too, wasn't visible: Stroheim reportedly insisted on having underwear created for his actors bearing the monograms of their characters. But there were limits to what the studio would do for the director: When Rudolph Christians, a key actor in the film, died in mid-filming, Stroheim proposed that his scenes be reshot with his stand-in, Robert Edeson, but was forced to give in to the studio's work-around: Edeson played the role in the remaining scenes with his back to the camera. But mostly, the studio's resistance was to Stroheim's vision of a movie that would run somewhere between six and 10 hours and be shown on two consecutive nights. He was forced to settle for a three-and-a-half-hour version, which was subsequently cut again under the instructions of the New York censors. More cuts by the studio followed after the film was a box office disappointment, so that what we see today is a reconstruction cobbled together from existing versions. But after that, what we have is a juicy, kinky melodrama about decadent Europe trying to corrupt innocent America. Stroheim plays a con man pretending to be an exiled Russian aristocrat, Count Sergius Karamzin, living with two women he says are his cousins: the phony princesses Olga Petchnikoff (Maude George) and Vera Petchnikoff (Mae Busch). They're out to milk whatever cash they can from suckers at Monte Carlo, and Sergius sets his sights on Helen Hughes (Miss DuPont), the wife of an American diplomat (Christians). In his down time from that seduction, he also pursues, with purely carnal intent, a hotel maid (Dale Fuller) and the pretty but mentally challenged daughter (Malvina Polo) of the man who counterfeits the money Sergius uses to bilk gamblers at the casino. There's a spectacular storm and an even more spectacular fire, too, before Sergius gets perhaps more than what's coming to him. Even in its truncated version, Foolish Wives is almost too much. 

The Smiling Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1923)

Germaine Dermoz and Alexandre Arquillière in The Smiling Madame Beudet

Cast: Germaine Dermoz, Alexandre Arquillière, Madeleine Guitty, Jean d'Yd, Yvette Grisier, Raoul Paoli, Armand Thirard. Screenplay: Germaine Dulac, André Obey, based on a play by Obey and Denys Abiel. Cinematography: Maurice Forster, A. Morrin, Paul Parguel. 

Mme. Beudet (Germaine Dermoz) really doesn't have much to smile about. She's married to a gargoyle of a husband (Alexandre Arquillière) who bullies her, and when he doesn't get his way likes to pull a gun out of his desk drawer and pretend to be about to commit suicide. He mocks her interest in playing Debussy on the piano, and when he goes out to the theater with friends one night -- she has declined to accompany them -- slams down the lid on the keys and locks it. No wonder that she daydreams about a handsome tennis player she sees in a magazine and fantasizes his getting rid of her husband. She knows one secret about his familiar suicide ploy: The gun is unloaded and he keeps the bullets in a separate drawer. So she surreptitiously loads the gun. Then one day he calls her into his study to harangue her about household expenses, starts to pull his usual suicide ploy, and then points the gun at her. It goes off, missing her, and a startled Beudet runs to his wife, thinking that she loaded the gun to kill herself. He hugs her tearfully, but her expression is the usual one of glum misery. Germaine Dulac's short film is often called the first feminist movie, although that seems too superficial a label. What does distinguish it is Dulac's use of superimposed images, such as her fantasy of the tennis player, to give further insight into the characters. In the climactic scene in which Beudet hugs his wife, a picture in the background changes to what seems to be the proscenium of a puppet theater whose curtain falls. Dulac seems to suggest that The Smiling Madame Beudet is a kind of puppet show, with the squabbling Beudets as her version of Punch and Judy.

The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)

Cast: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Mary Alden, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann, Walter Long, Robert Harron, Wallace Reid, Joseph Henabery, Elmer Clifton, Josephine Crowell, Spottiswoode Aitken, George Beranger, Maxfield Stanley, Jennie Lee, Donald Crisp, Howard Gaye, Raoul Walsh. Screenplay: Thomas Dixon Jr., D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods, based on a novel and play by Dixon. Cinematography: G.W. Bitzer. Film editing: D.W. Griffith, Joseph Henabery, James Smith, Rose Smith, Raoul Walsh. 

Is it an overstatement to say that the stench of The Birth of a Nation is more than a subset of the blight cast on American society and politics by slavery? Because Griffith's film informed an entire industry, not only with its undeniable influence on the language and grammar of film, but also in the tendency to valorize bigness above intimacy, action over thought, sensation over understanding that has characterized the mainstream of American movies. It was the first blockbuster. It was both intelligently crafted and abominably stupid. It just might be the most pernicious work of art ever made, a magnificent nauseating lie. Its portrait of Reconstruction warped the teaching of history for generations, and although the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan that it inspired has waned, we still find ourselves swatting down the heirs of the Klan like the Proud Boys, the Promise Keepers, and others who would defend what one of Griffith's title cards calls the "Aryan birthright." Even the reaction against The Birth of a Nation has its dark side: The recognition of the power of movies that followed its release eventually produced calls for censorship that would hamstring the medium. On the right, a suspicion that movies had the power to promote a leftist agenda led to the blacklist era, in which communists, not racists, were the target. And what is the crusade by some against "wokeness" in the media but another call for the kind of ideological purity that would stifle art? So to call The Birth of a Nation an essential film is an understatement. Looking at it as a demonstration of the ability of cinema to profoundly affect society could reveal it to be the most important movie ever made.     

Lured (Douglas Sirk, 1947)

Lucille Ball in Lured

Cast: Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Charles Coburn, Cedric Hardwicke, Boris Karloff, Joseph Calleia, Alan Mowbray, George Zucco, Robert Coote, Alan Napier, Tanis Chandler. Screenplay: Leo Rosten, based on a screenplay by Jacques Companéez, Ernst Neuback, and Simon Gantillon. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Production design: Nicolai Remisoff. Film editing: John M. Foley. Music: Michel Michelet. 

Lured gave Lucille Ball a chance to break out of -- or at least transcend -- the wisecracking dame roles in which she had been cast. She plays Sandra Carpenter, an American dancer who came to London with a show that swiftly closed and is now forced to make ends meet by working as a taxi dancer, the profession immortalized in the Rodgers and Hart song "Ten Cents a Dance." When a chum of hers, a fellow dancer, disappears, she finds herself aiding Scotland Yard in an investigation of similar mysterious disappearances of young women: She plays bait, a role that puts her in contact with all manner of unsavory characters, including a crazed fashion designer played in a cameo role by Boris Karloff. But it also puts her in touch with Robert Fleming (George Sanders), a nightclub entrepreneur, with whom she falls in love. Eventually, Fleming himself will become a prime suspect in the case. It's a busy, semicomic crime story with few surprises for anyone who has seen this sort of thing before, made memorable by Douglas Sirk's crisp direction and Ball's smart, attractive presence -- one of the few substantial film roles she found before becoming a major star on television. William H. Daniels's cinematography helps give Ball the kind of glamour she seldom found on the big screen, somehow making her hair look orange even in black-and-white. There's not a lot of chemistry between Ball and Sanders, who is trying to transcend his own stereotype, the world-weary cad, but even in their separate ways they're always fun to watch.   

A Private Function (Malcolm Mowbray, 1984)

Maggie Smith and Michael Palin in A Private Function

Cast: Michael Palin, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, Tony Haygarth, John Northington, Bill Paterson, Liz Smith, Alison Steadman, Jim Carter, Pete Postlethwaite. Screenplay: Alan Bennett, Malcolm Mowbray. Cinematography: Tony Pierce-Roberts. Production design: Stuart Walker. Film editing: Barrie Vince. Music: John Du Prez. 

A Private Function begins with Joyce Chilvers (Maggie Smith) and her mother (Liz Smith) entering a darkened movie theater where a newsreel is playing. We watch the newsreel, about meat rationing in postwar Britain, as the two women make their way to their seats, with Joyce scolding her mum for not finding a seat of her own. Then the lights come up and the theater organ rises from the pit. Joyce is playing the organ with her mother awkwardly sharing the bench with her. It's a nifty way to introduce not only two of the movie's key characters but also the era in which the film is set and the core of the plot. The newsreel also includes footage of the preparations for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Sir Philip Mountbatten, so we know that we're in November of 1947. The setting is a town in Northern England where the local dignitaries, led by the irascible, snobbish Dr. Swaby (Denholm Elliott, are preparing for a private function, a banquet, to celebrate the marriage of the future queen and prince consort. But how do you put on a banquet when everything, especially meat, is strictly rationed, and a diligent civil servant named Wormold (Bill Paterson) is enforcing the consumption laws with an iron hand? The banquet planners have found a way: They're raising an illegal pig. Eventually, Joyce and her meek chiropodist husband, Gilbert (Michael Palin), will get involved, especially after the would-be social climbing Joyce is not only frustrated by her inability to get around the rationing laws, but is also piqued by not being invited to the banquet. The only solution, it seems, is for Gilbert to commit pignapping and to hide the purloined swine in their home. The rest is farce in the manner of the British comedies made in the late 1940s and early 1950s, e.g., Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), and The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955). It's raunchier and a good deal more scatalogical than those classic films, and it's sometimes edited a little choppily -- there are jump cuts where none are needed -- but it earns the comparison on the strength of fine comic performances by Maggie Smith, Palin, Elliott, and especially Liz Smith as the endearingly dotty Mother. ("She's 74," Joyce often interjects to excuse, explain, and even praise her parent's behavior.)