Ramon Novarro

One of the great silent epics, adapted from Lew Wallace's novel. A Jewish prince in Roman-occupied Jerusalem is falsely accused of treason by his childhood friend, now a Roman tribune, and condemned to the galleys. He survives, is adopted by a Roman consul, and returns to confront his betrayer in a chariot race that remains one of the most famous sequences ever filmed. Fred Niblo directed on a scale that was staggering even by 1920s standards: thousands of extras, a full-size Roman arena, and a naval battle staged with real ships. Ramon Novarro is the prince and Francis X. Bushman the villainous Messala. The film saved MGM from financial trouble and remained the studio's top earner for decades. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Drama · Action · Silent

A young lawyer in pre-Revolutionary France vows vengeance on the aristocrat who killed his friend in a duel, becoming a roving commedia player and then a master fencer as the Revolution engulfs them all. Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry star in Rex Ingram's celebrated silent swashbuckler. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Adventure · Romance · History

Mary Pickford plays an American girl whose ship is torpedoed by a German U-boat on the way to France — a sequence Cecil B. DeMille staged as open propaganda while the United States was still deciding whether to join the war. Rescued and sheltered in a French chateau near the front, she is caught between a French officer and a German officer who both love her, and the film builds to the occupation of the chateau and an attempted assault that American audiences in 1917 read as Germany's crimes in miniature. Released months after the US entered the war, it was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. A 1917 release, it is in the public domain.

Drama · War · Silent

Fred Niblo directed Ramon Novarro the year before they made Ben-Hur together, and this smaller, darker film shows what both could do without a chariot race. A young couple in Brittany are separated on the night they flee to Paris together; the boy is wrongly jailed and sinks into the city's underworld, while the girl becomes a cabaret dancer. The film follows them through the Paris slums, where Wallace Beery's pickpocket pulls Jean into crime, until fate and a recognizable scar reunite them. Victor Milner's cinematography moves from the misty Brittany coast to the nocturnal streets of Paris, and the film's mood of romantic despair was a contrast to Novarro's usual swashbuckling roles. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A cloistered young prince is sent to the university town of Heidelberg for his education, where he falls in love with a warm, down-to-earth barmaid named Kathi. When duty calls him back to the throne, he must leave her behind. Ernst Lubitsch directed this MGM silent for an enormous budget, and the film is an early showcase of what critics would later call "the Lubitsch Touch": the love story is built from small, specific gestures rather than grand declarations. Ramon Novarro plays the prince and Norma Shearer the barmaid, with Jean Hersholt as the tutor whose own attachment to Heidelberg is the film's quietest heartbreak. The film's copyright was renewed but it fell into the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Romance · Drama · Silent