THE CANADIAN. Famous Players-Lasky, 1926. William Beaudine, director; adapted by Arthur Stringer from W. Somerset Maugham’s play, The Land of Promise; Alvin Wyckoff, cinematographer; Thomas Meighan, Mona Palma, Wyndham Standing, Dale Fuller, Charles Winninger, Billy Butts. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   For me, this was the revelation of the convention, an outstanding silent film, with superb photography by Wyckoff, dead-on performances by every member of the cast, with Mona Palma lighting up the screen as the English woman, brought up in modest but cultivated circumstances, who goes to live with her brother on a remote Canadian farm in a desolate landscape.

   To escape the indignities she feels she’s enduring from his wife and the rough farmhands she marries his foreman who’s shown her some kindness, a decision that she quickly regrets.

   Every performance is true to the character, seemingly natural and unaffected, the soul reflected in characterizations where there’s not an excessive gesture. The subtitles are almost superfluous, the drama playing out in the visuals, with moments that are almost unbearable in their intensity. It’s this kind of experience that makes attending film conventions an adventure with a potential for transcendence.

   (Fellow attendee Jim Goodrich’s comment on this sentence was “Wow!” Could he be suggesting that I was tripping here?)

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.] The photo of Mona Palma is probably not related to the film, but after reading Walter’s review, I knew you’d like to have an idea of what she looked like at the time. Born in 1897, Mona Palma made only seven movies, all between 1923 and 1927, three of them as Mimi Palmeri. She died in 1989.

   Thomas Meighan is the tall fellow dominating the scene above, which was taken from the movie, and of course that’s him again in the publicity still on the right. His career was quite a bit longer than his co-star’s, consisting as it did of 82 movies between 1914 and 1934. Until talkies came along, he was quite a popular star.

   To make this post a little more crime-related, Meigan’s first movie was Dandy Donovan, the Gentleman Cracksman, in which he played the title role, and his first sound film was The Argyle Case (1929) in which he again played the leading character, this time homicide investigator Alex Kayton.