Eleanor Boardman

A young woman flees her marriage on the train to a small town and ends up in a desert film camp, where she stumbles into the movie business and becomes an extra, then a star. novelist and filmmaker Rupert Hughes wrote, produced, and directed the picture from his own novel, and the result is one of the great inside-Hollywood silents, full of real behind-the-scenes footage of a working studio. The film-within-a-film sequences show cameras cranking, sets being built, and stunts being rigged, and a string of famous directors of the day, including Erich von Stroheim and Fred Niblo, appear as themselves. Eleanor Boardman, in one of her first leads, carries the picture as Remember Steddon, a runaway who learns that fame costs something. Barbara La Marr, the "girl who was too beautiful," plays her rival. The film was a Goldwyn release and is one of the quieter rediscoveries of the 1923 public domain class. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Drama · Romance · Silent

King Vidor's film about an ordinary man who believes he is meant to be somebody and discovers he is, in fact, nobody. John Sims grows up dreaming of greatness, marries, has children, and slowly drowns in the routine of office work and a marriage that curdles. Vidor opens with a montage of a boy's birth and the title "The crowd laughs with you always, but it will cry with you never," then follows John into a vast, fluorescent office floor that was built as a single set to dwarf him. The film was a departure from the glamour MGM usually sold, and Irving Thalberg reportedly backed it against his own instincts. It was not a hit, but its influence on social realism in American film is hard to overstate. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Silent