Karl Dane

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

A faithful silent adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, directed by the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom (credited as Victor Seastrom) from a screenplay by Frances Marion. In 17th-century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is condemned to wear the scarlet letter for bearing a child out of wedlock, and she refuses to name the father, the Reverend Dimmesdale. Lillian Gish fought to make the picture at MGM and gives a restrained, dignified performance that is often cited as one of her finest. Lars Hanson plays the tortured minister, and Henry B. Walthall reprises the role of Chillingworth he had played in an earlier adaptation. Long considered the best screen version of the novel, the film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Drama · Silent