The Silver Screen Oasis

I was just wondering on my way home, what are the 'must see' Silent and pre code films. You know, the ones if you don't watch before a certain age you're probably crying your head off because of it.

My "Must-See" Silents (for historical & cultural importance, as well as being wonderful films) would include:

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
Birth of a Nation (Griffith)
Intolerance (Griffith)
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (Griffith)
The Great Train Robbery (Porter)
The Crowd (Vidor)
Foolish Wives (von Stroheim)
Greed (von Stroheim)
Queen Kelly (von Stroheim)
Underworld (von Sternberg)
The Docks of New York (von Sternberg)
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Mother (Pudovkin)
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov)
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Lang)
Metropolis (Lang)
Nosferatu (Murnau)
The Last Laugh (Murnau)
Sunrise (Murnau)
Un Chien andalou (Bunuel)
The Gold Rush (Chaplin)
Modern Times (Chaplin)
The General (Keaton)
The Cameraman (Keaton)
Phantom Carriage (Sjostrom)

and the dozens of others that didn't leap to my mind (or crying my head off because I haven't seen).

My must-see Precodes are:

The Smiling Lieutenant
Baby Face
Downstairs
Freaks
A Man's Castle
Little Man What Now?
Heat Lightning
The Story of Temple Drake
Love Me Tonight
Shanghai Express
Song of Songs
A Free Soul
Private Lives
Red Headed Woman
Call Her Savage
Female
One Way Passage
Design For Living
Trouble in Paradise
Morocco
Gold Diggers of 1933
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
I'm No Angel
What Price Hollywood?
Girls About Town
Three on a Match
Tiger Shark
The Barbarian
She Done Him Wrong
Hot Saturday
Island of Lost Souls
Murders in the Zoo
Cleopatra
The Sign of the Cross
One Hour with You
The Last Flight
Central Airport
.....and that's for now

Very thoughtful and all encompassing list, ChiO.

I would add to those silents:

What Price Glory? (Walsh)
The Big Parade (Vidor)
Regeneration (Walsh)
He Who Gets Slapped (Sjostrom)
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Ingram)
Ben Hur A Tale of the Christ (Niblo)
Three Bad Men (Ford)
Hell's Hinges (Swickard, with William S. Hart)
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Lubitsch)
The Doll or Die Puppe (Lubitsch)
A Kiss for Cinderella (Brenon)
Diary of a Lost Girl (Pabst) or Pandora's Box (Pabst)
Flesh and the Devil (Brown)
Our Dancing Daughters (Beaumont)
Big Business (Laurel and Hardy, directed by Horne)
The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna (Shwarz)
The Man Who Laughs (Leni)

Oh Fernando, super list! Those are great representative pre-codes.

I'll have to think about whether I can add any films to your list. Both you and ChiO did a really wonderful job picking across the board best films.

Silents - no Borzage or De Mille? Gance? Feuillade? Mack Sennett?

Yikes! - Nanook of the North (Flaherty)

Always wonder about where Jacques Tati fits -- are his films really Silents? I left him off.

Oh, my goodness Georges Melies (A Trip to the Moon) and Louis Lumiere (La sortie des usines).

So many films that are crucial to film history.

Edit: Don't suppose it is that crucial, but my how I love The Unknown (Browning). And Browning -- and Chaney -- need to be on my list somehow.

Isn't every film crucial to film history? The domino effect: if this little nothing-of-a-picture weren't being made over here, then this actor ( or director, or producer, or... ) would have been free to work on that big-'un over there, and... We'd have a completely different story.

Just musing...

In theory, yes. In reality, no.

Although every lost film may have had an impact on the films that followed, we have no real basis (other than reports from those who may have seen some of them) for deciding that any of them were crucial.

And, given that the originating question was "what are the 'must see' ...films", a lost film can't be seen (until discovered) and, therefore, "every film" is an unmeetable standard (just as saying "X is the greatest film ever made" is inherently false, differences in quality standards and judgments aside, unless one has seen every - including lost - film ever made) and one is forced to limit a response to films one has seen (and, of course, to which one has applied one's own aesthetic and historical standards).

Sorry for the quasi-metaphysical digression. (But I love such things that force me to re-evaluate my own criteria.)

Two Movies ... that are Must See in my mind ...

Frankenstein 1910

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Zorro - Starring Douglas Fairbanks
Made in 1920

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Both of these movies are complete ...

Oh dear. I'm still coming out with twelve cows.

Do you guys know you're talking to a lawyer when you talk to ChiO?

Well, I used to play one in my so-called real life. (But E.G. Marshall still is a hero.)

You've got a way with words, LawyerMan.

I liked "Owen Marshall."

The name sounds familiar. (Just missing a last name and a Roman numeral.) Maybe that's how I got into law school.

Arthur Hill