John Gilbert

Two childhood friends, Leo and Ulrich, return from military service and fall for the same alluring woman, Felicitas, with destructive consequences. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert's on-screen chemistry was matched by a real-life romance that began during filming, and the picture made them one of Hollywood's first great celebrity couples. Clarence Brown directs with a fluid, intimate camera that was advanced for its time, and the film's sensual love scenes pushed the boundaries of what censorship would allow. Based on Hermann Sudermann's novel The Undying Past, the film was a sensation at New York's Capitol Theatre, where it ran longer than any picture before it. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 2006. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Romance · Drama · Silent

The first production to begin filming at the newly formed MGM, directed by the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom from Leonid Andreyev's play. Lon Chaney plays a scientist humiliated when his patron steals his wife and his work; he flees to a circus and reinvents himself as a clown whose act consists of being slapped by the audience, turning private shame into public spectacle. Chaney's performance is a study in dignified suffering, and the film gave early prominent roles to Norma Shearer and John Gilbert, both soon to be MGM stars. It was also the first film to feature Leo the Lion as the MGM logo. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2017. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

MGM's second teaming of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, this time in a loose silent adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The studio changed the title from Heat to Love so the marquee could read "Garbo and Gilbert in Love," one of the great publicity stunts of the silent era. The plot follows a married woman who ruins her social standing for a young officer, and the film leans hard into the erotic chemistry that made the pair famous after Flesh and the Devil. Edmund Goulding directed, and William Daniels photographed Garbo in the soft light that became her signature. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Drama · Silent

John Gilbert stars as Edmond Dantès in this Fox Film Corporation adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's classic novel of wrongful imprisonment and revenge. Directed by Emmett J. Flynn, the film follows Dantès from his betrayal by jealous rivals, through years of solitary confinement in the Château d'If, to his transformation into the Count of Monte Cristo and his methodical vengeance against those who destroyed his life. Estelle Taylor plays Mercedes, the woman he loves. Long thought lost, a print surfaced in the Czech Republic and the film has been restored. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Adventure · Silent

King Vidor's World War I epic follows a wealthy young idler who enlists on a whim, ships out to France, falls for a French farm girl, and is marched into the meat grinder of the Western Front. The film was a sensation: it became the highest-grossing silent film of the 1920s and turned John Gilbert into a major star. Vidor stages the battle sequences with a grim, ground-level realism rare for the period, and the famous march through a forest under shellfire is still studied. Beneath the spectacle is an antiwar streak that distinguishes it from the gung-ho pictures that came after. MGM made it on a large budget and a long schedule, and it paid for itself many times over. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

War · Drama · Romance · Silent

Erich von Stroheim's lavish adaptation of the operetta follows a American showgirl who marries a European prince, is banished by his royal family, and returns years later as the wealthy widow the whole kingdom is courting. Stroheim, never one for restraint, packed the film with decadent set design, a famous masked-ball sequence, and the kind of obsessive detail that made his productions famously expensive. Mae Murray's ballet training is put to use in extended dance numbers, and John Gilbert plays the prince with the smooth melancholy that made him a silent-era matinee idol. The film was a hit despite the studio's cuts to Stroheim's preferred cut. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Drama · Silent

The Show is a Tod Browning film set in a Hungarian carnival, among the performers of a sideshow called the Palace of Illusions. John Gilbert plays Cock Robin, the ballyhoo man who stars in a reenactment of Salome's dance that ends with a staged beheading. Lionel Barrymore is the Greek, a jealous villain who conspires to make the beheading real. Renée Adorée plays Salome, the woman both men want. Browning, who would go on to make Freaks, was drawn to the strange world of carnival performers, and The Show is thick with that atmosphere. The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Drama · Romance · Silent