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"The first full-length gangster picture ever made," according to its director, Raoul Walsh, who would later make The Roaring Twenties , High Sierra , The Bowery and White Heat , Regeneration is a powerful slum melodrama produced in 1915 on location on the Lower East Side of New York City, with a gaggle of authentic lowlife types performing alongside professional actors. It's in the tradition of The Musketeers of Pig Alley , directed by D.W. Griffith from whom Walsh learned his craft as an...

From 1913 to 1916, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rose from the ranks of bit player to writer, director and star of comedies for Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Company. Because of Sennett's belief that actors were interchangeable, he lost Arbuckle to producer Joseph M. Schenck, who not only paid the comedian handsomely, but also permitted him complete creative control. To help in the new venture, Arbuckle recruited Buster Keaton, popular star of a knockabout vaudeville act; Keaton took a large pay cut...

Daring for its time - or any time - Bed And Sofa is the story of a love triangle between a woman and two men living together in a one-room basement apartment in 1927 Moscow. When Liuda becomes pregnant and no one knows which man is the father, she must determine her own future. With an involving plot, comic invention, pathos, naturalistic performances, and highly-charged use of space and objects, director Abram Room illuminates the lives of the characters but without offering a simplistic...

Carl Theodor Dreyer has long been exalted by film connoisseurs for The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, and Ordet . With The Parson's Widow , we meet a different Dreyer: a director who engages with broad humor, then gradually guides to a wise, bittersweet resolution. Sofren, an aspiring parson, is engaged to Mari, but her father won't allow them to marry until Sofren gets a ministry. He's hired by a small rural congregation only to discover that according to local custom, the...

Here are fourteen short films -- some favorites, others unfamiliar -- produced between 1902 and 1965. They were photographed silent, but they're not silent anymore. All boast new music composed and performed by The Alloy Orchestra, a three-man ensemble critic Roger Ebert called "the best in the world at accompanying silent films." Alloy Orchestra shuns the nostalgic approach, successfully using found percussion and state-of-the-art electronics to reinvigorate films for new audiences with its...

Four of the films in this collection arrived after the release of the much larger anthology Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film 1920-1970 had gone to press; they are such beautiful and extraordinary works that deserve to be seen after decades of unavailability. All are brilliant and true color copies mastered in high definition from original Kodachrome master copies or camera films. Abstract in Concrete (1952). John Arvonio shot footage for this stunning pattern film of New...

"A movie you may never have heard of but, after seeing it, one you will never forget." - The Bioscope The Ghost That Never Returns is an outstanding Soviet film by Abram Room, the director of Bed and Sofa (also available via Flicker Alley MOD). Released to little notice in 1930, it joins other very late silents to show the screen still developing high eloquence after the first talkies stopped silent cinema dead in its tracks. The story takes place at a South American oilfield where Jose Real...

A charming pastoral about two unwanted children finding acceptance and love, Timothy's Quest (1922) is a rare, cinematic gem based on a novel by Kate Douglas Wiggin (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), who was then known as "America's best loved author of stories about children."* The only production of the Dirigo Film Company, established in order to make films in the state of Maine adapted from works by Maine authors, Wiggin loaned her own home as one of the principal filming locations. Director...