WILD HORSE MESA. Famous Players-Lasky, 1925. Jack Holt, Noah Beery, Billie Dove, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., George Magrill, George Irving, Edith Yorke, Bernard Sigel, Margaret Morris, Eugene Pallette. Based on the novel by Zane Grey. Director: George B. Seitz. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The fellow who introduced the film referred obliquely to a very warm relationship between Zane Grey and female star Billie Dove. You can’t blame Grey. She’s very appealing, and after some initial palling around with Fairbanks, she finally settles on the character’s older brother (Jack Holt) when he shows up to get the plot really moving along.

   Noah Beery is the totally reprehensible villain, but he’s matched (if not in charisma, at least in villainy), by another of Dove’s admirers, Bert Manerube (played by George Magrill).

   Manerube conceives the dastardly plan of driving horses into a canyon whose exit is blocked by a barbed wire fence that he argues will bring the horses up short. They won’t, he claims, run into the fence in their eagerness to escape their pursuers.

   When Holt points out the fallacy in this plan, Manerube joins forces with Beery and the action doesn’t let up until the final romantic fade-out. Among the film’s many pleasures are the performance by the magnificent white stallion who leads the wild horses and the beautiful photography by Bert Glennon, who would be a member of John Ford’s regular crew, with Stagecoach among his credits.

MARRIED?   Jans Productions, 1926. Owen Moore, Constance Bennett, Evangeline Russell, Julia Hurley, Nick Thompson. Director: George Terwilliger. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   The complicated plot of this romantic action film brings together Eastern socialite Marcia Livingston (Constance Bennett) and Dennis Shawn (Owen Moore), the rugged foreman of her lumber holdings, in a “temporary” marriage arranged by elderly, aristocratic Mme du Pont (Julia Hurley), owner of an adjoining property.

   The marriage is intended to unite the two holdings and thwart the machinations of an unscrupulous corporation intent on gaining control of both properties. The unlikely couple turns out to be a good match but only after some hairbreadth escapes from situations that any fan of silent chapter plays will appreciate. The most innovative is a reversal of the heroine and an electric saw routine, here threatening the hero with death by buzzsaw.

   A wildly improbable adventure film that was wildly entertaining.

● PAMPERED YOUTH. Vitagraph, 1924. Alice Calhoun, Cullen Landis, Wallace MacDonald, Ben Alexander. Director: David Smith. Both this and the film below were shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   This is a real curiosity, a two-reel condensation of a seven-reel adaption of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons. William K. Everson notes that it is a “16mm blow-up from a badly battered 9.5mm print that Kevin Brownlow rescued from a market-place in France during the 1960s.”

   The condensation preserves the outlines of the decline and fall of the Ambersons, climaxing in a spectacularly staged fire sequence that reunites the remaining impecunious Ambersons (Isabel and her son George) with the successful suitor she once spurned, Eugene Minafer, also clearing the way for the marriage of George to Eugene’s daughter Lucy.

● DAYDREAMS. Angle Pictures, London, 1928. Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton, Harold Warrender, Dorice Fordred , Marie Wright. Based on a short story by H. G. Wells. 25min. Director: Ivor Montagu.

   A strikingly designed, delightful short film in which a housemaid (Lanchester) fantasizes about a rich marriage followed by a series of adventures in which Laughton figures importantly as a lascivious villain, all of it resolved when Lanchester, awakening from her day-dreams, walks away from her mundane job.

[UPDATE] 09-18-11. Thanks to a comment left by Mike White, Walter’s review of Pampered Youth has been amended to correctly identify Eugene Minafer’s daughter. Her name was Lucy, not Fanny. Thanks, Mike!

   (Mike was the long time editor and publisher of Cashiers du Cinemart. You might wish to visit his website at http://www.impossiblefunky.com.)

SHOOTING STARS. British Instructional, UK, 1927. Brian Aherne, Annette Benson, Chili Bouchier, David Brookes, Donald Calthrop. Director: A. V. Bramble, assisted by Anthony Asquith. Shown at Cinefest 28, Syracuse NY, March 2008.

   A stylish silent film, with Annette Benson as the wife of actor Brian Aherne and his co-star, who has a fling with film baggy-pants comedian Donald Calthrop.

   She wants to leave Aherne for her lover, but fears it will destroy her career. She substitutes real bullets for blanks in the gun that will be fired at Aherne in their thriller, but even though she decides not to go through with it, a series of misadventures results in the shooting of Calthrop and Benson’s withdrawal from films and her marriage.

   There’s a final sequence in which, several years later, she has a walk-on in a film directed by Aherne, unrecognized by him or anyone else in the crew, with a poignant fade-out as she appears to walk away walks away forever from her former husband and the movies.

   The behind-the-scenes look at the filming of silents, made this absorbing, ironic drama of unusual interest.

THE FINAL EXTRA. Gotham Productions / Lumas Film Corp., 1927. Marguerite De La Motte, Grant Withers, John Miljan, Frank Beal, Joseph W. Girard, Billy “Red” Jones, Leon Holmes. Story and scenario by Herbert C. Clark; cinematography by Ray June. Director: James P. Hogan. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   Pat Riley (Grant Withers) greatly admires his senior colleague, reporter Tom Collins (Frank Beal) who is murdered when he’s about to reveal the name of the leader of a gang of bootleggers in an expose he’s writing for his newspaper.

   Riley, who’s sweet on Collins’ daughter Ruth (Marguerite de la Motte), vows to finish the story, a promise that leads to Ruth being trapped in a house with the murderer as Riley races to her rescue.

   Hogan would later direct entries in Paramount’s Bulldog Drummond and Columbia’s Ellery Queen series, while Grant Withers would have a career in sound films that included programmers, serials and, later in his career, several of John Ford’s features.

   The Final Extra was a fast-paced, exciting film that was expertly produced in all departments, and was a splendid conclusion to my 34th Cinevent.

THE COMING OF AMOS. Cinema Corp. of America/PRC, 1925. Rod La Rocque, Jetta Goudal, Noah Beery, Richard Carle, Arthur Hoyt, Trixie Friganza, Clarence Burton.

Screen adaptation: James Ashmore Creelman & Garrett Fort from the novel by William J. Locke. Director: Paul Sloane; producer Cecil B. DeMille. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   This is the perfect Saturday matinee movie, with a climax in an island castle where the heroine (Jetta Goudal) is imprisoned by her villainous husband Ramón Garcia (Noah Beery) in a basement rapidly filling with water.

   With a Russian Princess and a noted portrait painter (the hero’s uncle) figuring in the cast, and a ’20s jet set crew of party-loving characters, there’s ample reason to crowd the screen with lavish sets and fantastic costumes, especially when an important scene takes place during a joyous carnival.

   The hero is naive but persistent, the heroine beautiful and constantly in peril, and the smirking villain doing everything but twirl his nonexistent moustache.

   There are touches of humor throughout, with some witty satire, the sharpest of which is the portrayal of two French policiers as consummate bureaucrats, stopping every other minute as they lead the “chase” into Garcia’s lair to take notes of the information they’re being given.

   This is a matinee film for adults, but the kid in the fun-loving viewer will have a grand time, too.

Editorial Comment: This film is available on DVD, but be aware that two of the three reviewers on Amazon disagree noticeably as to the quality of the print.

A BLONDE FOR A NIGHT. DeMille Pictures Corporation/ PatM Exchange, 1928. Marie Prevost, Franklin Pangborn, Harrison Ford, T. Roy Barnes, Lucien Littlefield. Screenplay by F. McGrew Willis & Rex Taylor. Director: E. Mason Hopper. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   After what appears to have been a whirlwind romance, Marcia and Bob Webster (Marie Prevost and Harrison Ford) are honeymooning in Paris. There are minor spats but the arrival of Bob’s friend George Mason (T. Roy Barnes) and his tales of their past exploits with blonde conquests provoke Marcia to don a wig and set out to see how faithful Bob will be if he’s put to the test by a seductive blonde.

   Her partner in this masquerade is Hector, a dress-shop owner, played with his trademark fuss-budget primness by Franklin Pangborn.

   I don’t think the wig was that much of a disguise, particularly in close-ups but, if you go along with the premise, the 60 minutes pass pleasantly enough.

THE SORROWS OF SATAN. A Famous Players-Lasky Corporation production, distributed by Paramount, 1926. Adolphe Menjou, Ricardo Cortez, Lya De Putti, Carol Dempster, Ivan Lebedeff, Marcia Harris.

Screenplay by Forrest Halsey, based on the novel by Marie Corelli (1895). Directors of photography, Harry Fischbeck & Arthur De Titta; art director, Charles Kirk. Director: D. W. Griffith. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   In this modern morality play, urbane Prince Lucio de Rimanez (Menjou) promises Geoffrey Tempest (Cortez), a struggling writer, great riches if he will surrender his soul. Tempest abandons his pregnant fiancee Mavis Claire (Dempster) and falls under the spell of the debauched Princess Olga Godovsky (Lya De Putti), whom he subsequently marries.

   The Prince is, course, the Devil, and Tempest is the Faust who sells his soul not for youth or knowledge, but for worldly success. Menjou is impressive, both charming and sinister, and Dempster is touching as the abandoned Marguerite.

   Lya de Putti, a Beardsley-like siren in a performance that seems molded on one of DeMille’s seductive vamps, captures the coldness of the often deceived searcher of forbidden pleasures and the almost desperate yearning for a pleasure that will prove more than fleeting.

   The weak link in the casting is Cortez, who seems too much the self-absorbed matinee idol to convincingly portray the adoration for the guileless Dempster and the lustful pursuit and conquest of the worldly De Putti.

   The film is greatly enhanced by the artful cinematography that is particularly effective in portraying the opulence of the world to which the Prince introduces Tempest. It may not have the power of Griffith’s use of the traditional materials of Victorian melodrama that he demonstrates in Way Down East, but it renews the time-worn themes of the Faustian tale with sensitivity and pictorial beauty.

DON Q, SON OF ZORRO. United Artists, 1925. Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Astor, Jack McDonald, Donald Crisp, Stella De Lanti, Warner Oland, Jean Hersholt. Based on the novel Don Q’s Love Story by Kate Prichard & Hesketh Prichard. Director: Donald Crisp.

   Three Bucks at a local Grocery Store sufficed to deliver unto me a genuine Rarity, Don Q, Son of Zorro. The most enjoyable of Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s Swashbucklers I’ve seen to date.

   I’ve carped before about the dreadful lack of Pace in Doug’s Costume Pictures, a defect that causes the films to drag even in the midst of some of the most flamboyant and fun-to-watch capering ever committed to the Screen. Don Q, however, harks back to the early knockabout comedies that made Fairbanks’ reputation (along with those of Chaplin, Keaton, et. al.) and spends most of its time indulging Doug in that insouciant showing-off he did so well.

   Hard to believe this fast-paced souffle was directed by none other than Donald Crisp, Hollywood’s resident Patriarch/Wet Blanket in films from How Green Was My Valley to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

   Crisp elicits neat performances from Warner (Charlie Chan) Oland as a German Prince, Jean (Dr. Christian) Hersholt as a fawning toady, and does a surprisingly neat turn himself in the Young-Basil-Rathbone style as a lecherous cad.

   As for Fairbanks, Crisp manages to indulge him without over-indulging him, and never lets the pace flag for a moment.

   No mean feats, those.

Editorial Comment: This film is, of course, a sequel to The Mark of Zorro (1920), also, as everyone knows, with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Out of curiosity, I investigated. The book by the Prichards (a mother and son collaboration) has no connection with Zorro whatsoever.

LORRAINE OF THE LIONS. Universal, 1925. Norman Kerry, Patsy Ruth Miller, Fred Humes, Doreen Turner, Harry Todd, Philo McCullugh, Joseph J. Dowling.

Scenario by Isadore Bernstein & Carl Krusada; screenplay by Isadore Bernstein. Director: Carl Krusada. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

   Herewith a feminist Tarzan ripoff that I wouldn’t have missed for anything other than a screening of the sole surviving print of London After Midnight.

   After a storm demolishes the ship bringing Lorraine (Patsy Ruth Miller), her parents, and their jungle circus back from an Australian tour, Lorraine is washed up on a desert island, where she is raised by one of the surviving animals, a gorilla named “Bimi” (played by Fred Humes).

   Years later, her wealthy grandfather; who’s been searching for survivors, enlists the aid of an itinerant psychic (Norman Kerry) who leads a rescue party to the island, returning the initially reluctant Lorraine, along with Bimi, to civilization, represented by her grandfather’s palatial San Francisco mansion.

   The print was excellent, and even though I kept telling myself that this was pure, unadulterated schlock, the kid in me didn’t believe a word of it.

   I would give this an unconditional recommendation for the junior set if it were not for an unfortunate plot turn that involved Bimi and cast a pall over the traditional happy ending.

   Would Tarzan have treated Kala the way Lorraine treated Bimi? I think not.

   I was also bothered by the fact that Kerry and the lead villain both sported the same pencil-thin moustache, were slender in build, and tended to wear what appeared to be the same grey suit.

   Well, what do you expect of a film in which the only real emotional resonance comes from a man in a gorilla suit?