drama;silent

<p>Before movies talked, they clacked with swords, gonged with wedding bells and pulsed with perfectly matched orchestral accompaniment. The process that made it happen was Vitaphone, a sound-on-disk system that made its feature-film debut in this lavish 1926 classic. Starring in this swashbuckling tale...

<p>Slap him once, slap him 100 times -- the Big Top crowd roars. The clown known to delighted throngs as HE has made a comedic art of getting batted around. Life has battered him even more. Behind the mask, HE hides the torment of...

<p>While scavenging for food among dead bodies during the Russian Revolution, a slow-witted peasant named Sergei (Lon Chaney) is hired by a desperate woman to guide her out of the carnage. In exchange for promises of friendship and a secure future, he endures torture...

<p>As it was for the ancients, so it shall ever be for China's Mr. Mandarin Wu: do not dishonor the family name. Not even Wu's beloved daughter shall be spared her father's wrath after she shares a forbidden romance with an Englishman. Nor will...

<p>In Our Dancing Daughters, Joan Crawford stripped to her teddy and tore into a Charleston powered by a zillion watts of sexual energy -- and shocked the corsets and cravats off parents who'd heard disturbing rumblings of what their children were up to. But...

<p>With kohl-rimmed eyes and rouged lips, flapper fatale Billie Brown demands to live life on her terms, not society's. So she brazenly vamps a handsome diplomat in hopes of furthering her fiance's career. It's a perfect plan -- until Billie loses her heart to...

<p>The souls in question are silver-screen hopefuls in this witty, insightful glimpse at the early movie business. Feared lost for decades, it includes unique working cameos of director Erich von Stroheim and a non-Tramp Charlie Chaplin, and features starlet Eleanor Boardman, the "Cinderella of...

<p>Another of William Haines' sports-oriented vehicles, Spring Fever casts the star as lowly shipping clerk Jack Kelly. Falling in love with heiress Allie Monte (a young Joan Crawford), Jack bluffs his way into Allie's country club, posing as a champion golfer. By the time...

<p>Once you're in the lair of vile Dr. Ziska, is there any way out? That's what Johnny Goodlittle -- fresh from receiving his correspondence school detective's diploma and a starter kit containing a badge, handcuffs and a handgun -- must figure out as he...

<p>For the film fan making the case that silents were truly golden, The Red Lily is a color that serves them well. Hue plays an important part in this "black-and-white" classic, using sepia, red and orange to convey a complexity of mood and emotion....

<p>Lon Chaney -- the Man of a Thousand Faces -- used his makeup skills, astonishing physicality and profound empathy to create Quasimodo, the Phantom of the Opera and more of the Silent Era's greatest horror roles. In this hypnotic mix of creepiness and crime,...