This is really exciting news. I can't wait. I've only ever seen Phyllis Haver in a Buster Keaton short (is it The Balloonatic ? I can't remember) and as Rod La Rocque's leading lady in The Fighting Eagle . Apparently she's supposed to be very sexy and funny in D. W. Griffith's Battle of the Sexes in...

Of course there's also Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1976), where Marcel Marceau has his famous line. 'Non'? I've just remembered another: not a whole silent film; but in Pedro Almodovar's fanatastic Talk to Her , one of the main characters is a silent movie buff, and at one point in the film, he has a...

Recently I watched an Argentinean ‘silent film’, La Antena , made about three or four years ago, I think. It was a kind of allegorical fantasy, set in a city whose population has been deprived of the power of speech and is tyrannized over by the man who runs the local television station. It was film...

... all of the "action" happens off screen. Basically the movie is a bunch of people in rooms talking to each other. Yes, it was very much a filmed play, silent style, which is even duller than a filmed play from the sound era. The source material needed to be much more radically adapted,...

I also watched Norma Talmadge's Within the Law , and all I can say is, if this was representative of the kinds of films Norma was known for, it's curious that she was known at all. The plot is nonsensical, the direction is abysmal, and the performances are one-note at best. For her part Norma had t...

On the subject of Ms. Collins' veracity, let us not forget the occasion on which, appearing as a guest on " The Arsenio Hall Show " (either '92 or '93), she remarked to her host that she was tired of the press quipping her about her age, as after all, she'd been born in 1949 , and anyone ...

Stuart, I only saw brief parts of this programme, and much as I have a bit of a soft spot for Joan Collins (a real old trouper and an old-fashioned glamourpuss), it strikes me as a bit convenient that the reason she might have lost out on the role of Cleopatra was because she rejected Zanuck's passe...

This will probably sound undemocratic, but the general public aren't really um.. qualified to vote on the greatest British actresses - unless a discrete time period, e.g.: of the last twenty years, is specified. If so, then this list is fair enough. I'm surprised that Kathy Burke figured so highly, ...

Erik Rhodes is just brilliant in Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee ('Your wife is safe with Tonetti/ He prefers spaghetti'), but of course the Astaire-Rogers films are bursting with loveable character actors: Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore ('you igneous intrusion!'), Helen Westley et al. It's Top Hat ...

Three off the top of my head: Paul Kelly in Crossfire . Glenn Anders in The Lady from Shanghai . Paul Valentine in Out of the Past (what happened to his career afterwards?) Plus: I'm not sure whether she really counts as a supporting player, but just in case she does: the wonderful Gloria Grahame!

That was charming, and somehow so poignant - all those ghosts capering through the park, and the film itself on the very edge of destruction. Reading the extra information posted by the BFI on youtube, I see it was co-directed by Cecil Hepworth: 'In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later,...

This week I watched two silents: one classic and one not so classic. I don't know what I can say about The Crowd (1928) that the readers of this board won't already have thought for themselves. I found it really moving; James Murray's acting brought a tear to my eye. In view of what happened to him ...

Echoing both the previous posts a little, I think that the studio system makes a great difference to our perceptions of the classic and modern eras. In the twenties, thirties, forties and on into the fifties, actors were signed to long-term contracts, and carefully groomed and trained and assigned r...

why would a website devoted to silents (whether peddling them or writing about them) promote a simple-minded-sounding book like this? Sunrise Silents sells various silent titles on DVDs, and they produced the DVD of excerpts which comes with the book - so I suppose you'd say it was a bit of a cross...

I was in the library yesterday, and started glancing through a book called Silent Cinema by Brian J. Robb. I've seen it advertised on the Sunrise Silents website - it comes with a DVD of excerpts from films. I didn't have long to look through it but it didn't seem that great (the entry on Marion Dav...