I think there is so much sweetness, innocence and hope in this film, I could watch the sequences in the cafe again and again, I love the atomosphere that Murnau creates. I know Charles Farrell is better known for starring with Janet Gaynor, I love his pairings with Mary Duncan. I agree - I think th...

The night before last I watched The Affairs of Anatol (1921). Underneath all the aspirational clothes and furnishings, it was a pretty sour story of matrimonial cross and double-cross. I was interested to see Wallace Reid for the first time, and he reminded me of a character from Scott Fitzgerald - ...

A few days ago, I saw the restored version of City Girl too, and I thought it was such a beautiful film. How poignant these late silent masterpieces are with the talkies snapping at their heels just as the art form was reaching its peak. I was keen to find out more about it, so went to the library a...

I saw Bonjour Tristesse about a year ago. The first still you posted, Moira, the one in monochrome of JS in a Paris nightclub, staring blankly over the shoulder of her partner, perhaps - we can't be sure - confronting the emptiness of her life, reminded me very strongly of Garbo's famous scene at th...

If anyone else on the forum has seen this film, I'd be interested to hear their opinions... Made in Denmark in 1943, and directed by Carl Theodore Dreyer, it centres around the marriage of a troubled minister to his much younger second wife. His mother hates the girl; his son falls in love with her....

I'd heard that CGI had been used to some extent in Australia, before I decided to go see it; yet, once caught up in the sprawling sweep of the saga, my eyes noted nothing in the progress of action or vista to suggest anything overtly bogus or that threatened the suspension of my disbelief. I suspec...

Eddie Izzard has been around on the comedy circuit here for a few years, he's funny, not my favorite comedian and totally at odds to how I think Chaplin should be. I'm prepared to put the film on my list and give it a go. How did Marion come across? I agree about Marion's reputation, I think the fi...

I've recently watched Peter Bogdanovich's disappointing The Cat's Meow (2001) which purports to tell the pretty much discredited 'true story' of the mysterious death of Thomas Ince aboard W.R. Hearst's yacht in 1924. Playing film stars Marion Davies and Charlie Chaplin are Kirsten Dunst and Eddie Iz...

I went to see Australia last year at the pictures, and I do agree with those of you who didn't care for the CGI effects. They have always looked incredibly phoney to me, and used on a large scale, never fail to take me out of the movie-watching experience. I admired the ambition and 'epic-ness' of t...

Donlevy's "post accident" scenes, where he attempts to forge a new life as a "new" man, has a pleasantly also-ran resemblence to Mitchum's small-town alias work in Out of the Past . That never occurred to me, but now you point it out, yes, definitely. I was also reminded a bit b...

A couple of nights ago, I watched this independently produced film noir, and I was really impressed. The plot involves self-made millionaire Brian Donlevy, who is married to conniving, honey-voiced Helen Walker. He is utterly besotted with her, so besotted that he doesn't realize she is planning to ...

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Marion Davies in The Red Mill (1927), which I thoroughly enjoyed. For eighty minutes I sat with a smile on my face except for when I was laughing out loud. She is such a clever comedian. The plot was quite Cinderella-like: Davies played a put upon servant in...

Ah, right. Thank you, JackFavell (big fan of your work in Rebecca, by the way). I know she wrote an autobiographical novel, Off with their Heads, in the seventies about her time in Hollywood. I remember looking at it on various second-hand book websites, and it isn't exactly cheap. I wish someone wo...

I haven't seen the documentary or read the book about Frances Marion, but one thing which has always puzzled me about her career is that although she was incredibly prolific in the teens and twenties, from the early thirties onwards, her credits thin out considerably. I believe she won an Oscar arou...

Just to say I've come across someone on the net selling what I presume is the full-length version of Rosita. Apparently it's with Russian intertitles.