Silents Please! My new Silent Cinema column on Parallax View
Frequent readers of my blog (yes, both of you) may have noticed that I’ve dropped the ball on my "DVD for the Week" series at Parallax View. Yes, since I was already doing a weekly DVD column for MSN and a separate highlights list here, I decided it was too much. So I’ve decided to create something new for PV: a recurring feature on silent cinema, on the screen and especially on DVD.
I inaugurate "Silents Please!" with my coverage of the 14th Silent San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the weekend-long celebration that unspools every July at the Castro. In Part One, I cover the opening and closing night films: the Douglas Fairbanks feature The Gaucho (1927) and D.W. Griffith’s final silent feature Lady of the Pavements (1929). In Part Two, I spend time with Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927), the Czech feature Erotikon (1929), Gregory La Cava’s So’s Your Old Man (1926) W.C. Fields and the newly rediscovered and restored Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), starring John Gilbert and directed by King Vidor.
