San Francisco Silent Film Festival

“Clara Bow is the quintessence of what the term ‘Flapper’ signifies as a definite description: pretty, impudent, superbly assured, as worldly-wise, briefly-clad and ‘hard-berled’ as possible.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

Inspired by a story by Elinor Glyn who specialized in risqué fare, Clarence Badger’s “It” is a frothy romantic comedy transformed by the incand...

How were movies made in the 1920s? Well, if you’re romantic about it, just imagine Irving Thalberg and King Vidor bumping into each other somewhere in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer building. Let’s say it was 1927.

Vidor was thirty-three. His boss, Thalberg, was only twenty-eight. They had just made a huge hit, The Big Parade, a picture about the Great War in wh...

You play the cineaste game, and eventually you build an Andrew Sarris-style hierarchy, a pantheon of the great filmmakers over the long game, from 1890-whatever to the present. Limit the top tier to ten or twelve, say, and a few names from the silent era will consistently arise. Fashions come and go: decades ago, when film history was only sixty or seventy years long, Eisenst...

Ernst Lubitsch famously declared, “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount.” Among the many dazzling Lubitsch films taking place in his imaginary, stylized version of the French capital is So This Is Paris, a frothy sex comedy as light as the most delicate soufflé. Made not at Paramount but at Warner Bros.—the la...

“The machine replaces five workers.” The job-killer in question, the Mercedes Addelektra, resembles a huge and complex typewriter; it is trundled into an office where accountants in pince-nez and sleeve protectors toil at desks, filling ledgers with sums in ink. The scene is the same one that has been repeated since the introduction of mechanical looms sparked the Luddites’ p...