Religious Films

Alla Nazimova produced and stars in this adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play, with Charles Bryant directing. Nazimova plays Salomé, the stepdaughter of Herod who demands the head of John the Baptist in exchange for her dance. The film is a sustained art-deco experiment, shot almost entirely on a single set draped in beaded curtains, with designs by Natacha Rambova that lean hard into the stylized look Wilde's text invites. The cast and crew were largely gay and lesbian, and the production has long been read as a coded piece of queer cinema. It was a financial failure on release and nearly disappeared, but surviving prints made it one of the most talked-about rediscoveries when 1923 works entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Drama · Religious · Silent

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