Time to watch one of my very favorite early silent films, the 1903 film The Gay Shoe Clerk, in which a shoe salesman scores big time when his customer shows some hot, sexy ankle and mom is very unhappy about it. Now that’s a quality minute of film.
Tag: silent film
I always love the recovery of lost films and this story on early footage from Ireland really made me want to see the films. Hopefully I will have that opportunity. In any case, it is a good excuse to
Imagine yourself at the movies in the 1910s. By this point, there are real cinemas. You are going to go there with your family, or your friends, or your girl/boyfriend. The movies are still pretty sho
I may have linked to this film way in the distant past, but I never have since I started the film club, so let’s discuss the 1907 film The Teddy Bears. I had reason to show this to my class this morning and I am repeatedly amazed by it. First, you have Goldilocks and the […]
It’s hard to put the Progressive Era more succinctly than the 1912 film The Land Beyond the Sunset, about a boy who has a terrible home life and who gets a ticket to one of those Progressive pic
The reason D.W. Griffith was a great filmmaker isn’t that he had a great moral message, though he most certainly thought of himself as a liberal. Being a pro-Confederate liberal wasn’t exa
We haven’t touched on Georges Méliès for awhile, so let’s consider his 1905 film, The Legend of Rip Van Winkle, or sometimes just called Rip’s Dream. One of the most popular genres of silent film was turning old stories into film. Sensible. But hard. Now, in the 19th century, classic literature was frequently turned into […]
This remarkable Alice Guy Blaché film from 1912, Making an American Citizen, is a story in four parts. It shows an eastern European peasant and his wife becoming Americans. In each of the four parts,
An old favorite of mine for tonight, with an emphasis on old. This brilliantly creative 1909 film is a lot of fun. Hard out there for the smoker.
Last night, I got back in touch with an old friend, Tod Browning’s 1927 film The Unknown. I love this film so much. Joan Crawford, in one of her first major roles, plays the daughter of a gypsy circus troupe leader who clearly is suffering from serious PTSD after a lifetime already defining by sexual […]
Friends, I present you perhaps the creepiest document in the entire history of film, the 1907 film The Dancing Pig. I have been known to show this students just to give them a taste of the time period
Since we published the westerns podcast earlier today, let’s close out the day with one of the films I discussed in it. This is the astounding 1916 western Hell’s Hinges with William S. Ha