The Better 'Ole (Charles Reisner, 1926)

Syd Chaplin in The Better 'Ole

Cast: Syd Chaplin, Harold Goodwin, Jack Ackroyd, Edgar Kennedy, Charles K. Gerrard, Theodore Lorch, Doris Hill, Arthur Clayton. Screenplay: Darryl F. Zanuck, Charles Reisner, intertitles by Robert E. Hopkins, based on a play by Bruce Bairnsfather and Arthur Eliot. Cinematography: Edwin B. DuPar. Art direction: Ben Carré. Film editing: Ray Enright. Music: Maurice Baron.

Slapstick comedy starring Charles Chaplin's older brother Syd Chaplin as "Old Bill," a British soldier in World War I. Based on a 1917 stage musical that had been filmed once before, The Better 'Ole was released in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process with a synchronized music track and sound effects but no dialogue. The character of Old Bill was created by Bruce Bairnsfather in a newspaper cartoon published as a morale builder during the war. The film, which centers on Bill's involvement in exposing a German spy ring, tends to drag a bit as it works out some plot switches, and most of the physical comedy is old hat.

Mare Nostrum (Rex Ingram, 1926)

Pâquerette, Antonio Moreno, and Alice Terry in Mare Nostrum

Ulysses Ferragut: Antonio Moreno
Freya Talberg: Alice Terry
The Triton: Apollon Uni
Don Esteban Ferragut: Álex Nova
Young Ulysses: Kada-Abd-el-Kader
Caragol: Hughie Mack
Doña Cinta: Mademoiselle Kithnou
Esteban: Mickey Brantford
Pepita: Rosita Ramírez
Toni: Frédéric Mariotti
Dr. Fedelmann: Pâquerette
Count Kaledine: Fernand Mailly
Submarine Commander: Andrews Engelmann

Director: Rex Ingram
Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck
Based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Cinematography: John F. Seitz
Art direction: Ben Carré
Film editing: Grant Whytock

The Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez is known today mostly for the melodramatic novels, many of them family sagas that reflect the early influence of Zola's Naturalist explorations of heredity as destiny, which attracted the attention of Hollywood filmmakers: Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922; Rouben Mamoulian, 1941) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921; Vincente Minnelli, 1962), as well as the ones that were used for Greta Garbo's American debut, Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926) and The Temptress (Niblo, 1926). The Four Horsemen in particular had been such a success, creating the phenomenon of Rudolph Valentino, that it was quite logical for its director, Ingram, to go back to Ibáñez as a source when he launched his European-based production company in 1926. Mare Nostrum was also a vehicle for Ingram's wife, Alice Terry, who had starred opposite Valentino in Horsemen. Unfortunately, he had no Valentino at his disposal this time, and Antonio Moreno, who had just starred with Garbo in The Temptress, is a rather pallid substitute. Still, Ingram had the advantage of being based on the French Riviera, putting some spectacular locations like Marseille, Naples, Paestum, and Pompeii close at hand. The glimpses of these places in Mare Nostrum during the interim between two World Wars are the most fascinating thing about the film, outweighing the clumsiness of the adaptation, which drags in too much backstory about Ulysses Ferragut's family history and a few too many secondary characters we don't care about as much as we seem to be urged to do. Terry makes the most of her role as the femme fatale, and there's a great campy bit by the actress known as Pâquerette as the large but sinister German villain.

Don Juan (Alan Crosland, 1926)

Estelle Taylor and John Barrymore in Don Juan

Don Jose de Marana/Don Juan de Marana: John Barrymore
Adriana della Varnese: Mary Astor
Lucrezia Borgia: Estelle Taylor
Cesare Borgia: Warner Oland
Count Giano Donati: Montagu Love
Pedrillo: Willard Louis
Mai: Myrna Loy
Marchesia Rinaldo: Hedda Hopper
Marchese Rinaldo: Nigel De Brulier
Donna Isobel: Jane Winton
Leandro: John Roche
Neri: Gustav von Seyffertitz

Director: Alan Crosland
Screenplay: Bess Meredyth; Titles: Walter Anthony, Maude Fulton
Cinematography: Byron Haskin
Art direction: Ben Carré
Film editing: Harold McCord
Music: William Axt, David Mendoza

Alan Crosland's silly action movie Don Juan has two things in its favor. One of them is historical: It was the first film with a synchronized sound track, though it's all music and no dialogue, which would have to wait a year for Crosland's The Jazz Singer. The score is played by no less than the New York Philharmonic. The other is the cast, starting with John Barrymore, first hamming it up in a death scene as Don Juan's father, and then doing some Douglas Fairbanks-style leaping about and sword-fighting as the great seducer. But the female cast is even more interesting, with Mary Astor teamed again with her Beau Brummel (Harry Beaumont, 1924) co-star and former lover Barrymore, as well as some actresses who went on to different sorts of fame. Before she became Hollywood's favorite wife and/or mother, Myrna Loy was often cast as a vamp or a sinister type; here she slinks around as Lucrezia Borgia's lady-in-waiting, spying and tattling and stealing scenes from Estelle Taylor's Lucrezia. And before she became one of Hollywood's two most feared purveyors of gossip -- the other being Louella Parsons -- Hedda Hopper had a long career as a supporting actress; here she's the Marchesia Rinaldo, who kills herself when her husband discovers her affair with Don Juan. As for the rest of the movie, it's predictably junky, "explaining" Don Juan's treatment of women as a product of witnessing as a child his father being murdered by a cast-off lover. This psychological trauma is, I guess, supposed to make us believe that Juan has been cured of his hypersexuality by the love of a pure woman, Astor's Adriana della Varnese, with whom he literally rides off into the sunset at the end of the film.