Renée Adorée

Lon Chaney plays a dual role — both the Chinese patriarch Mr. Wu and his grandfather — in this MGM silent drama directed by William Nigh. When Wu's daughter Nang Ping (Renée Adorée) falls in love with a young Englishman and becomes pregnant, Wu kills her according to custom and then turns his vengeance on the Englishman's family. Louise Dresser co-stars as the mother who offers her own life to save her children. Chaney's elaborate makeup and prosthetics for the role were as remarkable as ever, though the film's racial politics have not aged well. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · 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

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