Epic Films

A modern love story and the biblical tale of Noah and the Flood run in parallel, building to a spectacular deluge that swept extras to their injuries and helped end silent-era recklessness. Dolores Costello and George O'Brien star in Michael Curtiz's part-sound Warners epic. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Drama · Epic

Cecil B. DeMille's first pass at the story he would remake in 1956, and the most expensive American film up to that time. The picture is built in two halves: a biblical prologue telling the story of Moses, from the bulrushes to the giving of the law on Mount Sinai, and a modern parable about two brothers, one who keeps the commandments and one who breaks them. The prologue is the part everyone remembers, with the Exodus staged on a vast scale, the parting of the Red Sea done with a clever combination of miniatures and reversed footage, and Theodore Roberts playing Moses as a bearded patriarch. The modern story, starring Richard Dix and Leatrice Joy, is a morality play about a corrupt contractor who ignores his mother's teachings. DeMille built full-scale Egyptian sets in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes in California and left the buried sphinxes there for archaeologists to dig up decades later. The film was a huge hit and saved Famous Players-Lasky from a slump. Its copyright expired at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019, along with the other 1923 works.

Drama · Religious · Silent · Epic