Silent Movie Week 2024

In 1923, Louis B. Mayer brought Sjöström to Hollywood, where he directed Lon Chaney in He Who Gets Slapped (1924), Norma Shearer in The Tower of Lies (1926), Greta Garbo in The Divine Woman (1928), and Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (1926) and her last silent film, The Wind (1928). Gish plays a frail young woman from Virginia who arrives in Sweetwater, Texas, where she’s told that the ceaseless winds over the sandy plains tend to drive women crazy.

The Wind is “an audacious, intuitive investigation of Gish’s narcissism, female sex fantasies, and the brutal power of Mother Nature as expressed, and reflected, by checked and unchecked male libidos,” wrote Dan Callahan for Bright Lights Film Journal in 2006. On Wednesday, a newish restoration, complete with a synchronized score and sound effects that MGM added after the film was shot, will open this year’s Silent Movie Week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

MoMA will present seven recently restored features over the course of seven nights, and way back in 1985, series curator Dave Kehr reviewed Thursday night’s movie for the Chicago Reader. “Young director Howard Hawks hit his stride with this 1928 comedy, which established the themes, plot situations, and even some of the lines he was to use for the next forty years,” wrote Kehr. A Girl in Every Port stars Victor McLaglen (What Price Glory) and Robert Armstrong (King Kong) as sailors traveling the world and chasing the ladies. “Louise Brooks, already packing her bags for Germany and Pandora’s Box,” added Kehr, “appears as a circus performer who comes between the two buddies; distant and eerily self-contained, she unbalances the male-bonding themes with intimations of a superior femininity.”

Frank Borzage’s Secrets (1924) is a showcase for Norma Talmadge, who plays an aging woman looking back on key episodes in her life on the plains of Wyoming. Flashbacks take us to the years 1865, 1870, and 1888, and when Secrets screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2017, Mariann Lewinsky noted that the film’s three sections “correspond to three different genres: comedy, the western, and domestic drama.”

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival premiered the newly rediscovered and restored short comedy The Pill Pounder (1923), directed by Gregory La Cava and featuring future “It Girl” Clara Bow in a supporting role. On Saturday, The Pill Pounder will screen with Herbert Brenon’s Dancing Mothers (1926), with Bow as Kittens, the flapper daughter of a former Broadway actress, Ethel, played by Alice Joyce. Writing for the SFSFF, Farran Smith Nehme noted that Dancing Mothers “has marvelous Jazz Age atmosphere, including rebellious youth, rebellious parents, all-night dancing, bathtub gin, pocket flasks, and Spencer Charters billed as a ‘Butter and Egg Man’—an out-of-town businessman who’s rich, unwary, and very, very drunk. The movie’s high style, even then a characteristic of Paramount releases, went over well with fans.”

Jacques de Baroncelli’s Island Fishermen (1924) is one of several adaptations of Pierre Loti’s 1886 novel about a fisherman so moved by a supernatural encounter that he can no longer take up his lover’s offer to settle down and start a new life with her. According to MoMA, “Baronicelli’s direction blends ethnographic realism with a misty abstraction in the best tradition of French poetic realism.” Alfred Santell’s The Gorilla (1927), a comedic thriller in the Old Dark House tradition, “boasts as much humor as horror,” noted the SFSFF in April, “and its success inspired two sound remakes and a host of imitations.”

Before John Ford shot an adaptation of Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer in 1935, Arthur Robison directed one in 1929 that was released in two versions, one silent and one not. Lars Hanson plays Gypo, an Irish revolutionary, and “Robison's camera roams freely,” writes Nathalie Morris for the BFI, “with one particularly accomplished long take following Gypo as he pushes his way through a crowded street, halting with dreadful finality at the door of the police station where he intends to betray his best friend. Cinematographer Werner Brandes’s lighting is imaginative and atmospheric throughout, and the film's numerous chases and shoot-outs are exhilarating and rapidly edited by Emile de Ruelle.”