Theodore Lorch

James Fenimore Cooper's novel as a sweeping silent epic, shot in the California mountains standing in for 1757 upstate New York. Wallace Beery is the vengeful Huron Magua, Albert Roscoe the scout Hawkeye, and Barbara Bedford the kidnapped Cora, with Harry Lorraine as the Mohican Chingachgook. Maurice Tourneur began the picture but was injured when a car drove off a cliff, and his assistant Clarence Brown — later the director of Garbo's finest films — finished it, earning his first screen credit. Regularly ranked among the best silent adaptations of American literature, it was restored by the Library of Congress. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Drama · Silent

The Man on the Box is a 1925 silent comedy film directed by Charles Reisner for Warner Bros., starring Syd Chaplin (Buster Keaton's half-brother). Based on the 1904 novel by Harold MacGrath, the film follows a wealthy young man who disguises himself as a gardener to be near the woman he loves, only to discover that the butler is an enemy spy planning to steal military secrets. As a 1925 work, the film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Romance

Bela Lugosi plays the title role in this Monogram poverty-row thriller, a Chinatown crime lord hunting down the twelve legendary coins of Confucius, which are said to grant their possessor control of a Chinese province. Bodies start turning up across the district as Wong's men retrieve the coins one by one, and wisecracking reporter Jason Barton, played by Wallace Ford, follows the trail into Wong's secret headquarters. Lugosi is clearly enjoying himself in a dual role that lets him be both the suave mastermind and his own humble shopkeeper cover. Directed by William Nigh, a Monogram regular who also helmed several of the studio's Mr. Wong detective films. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was never renewed.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller

A string of murders has witnesses giving identical descriptions of a man seen leaving each scene — Jerome Breen, a wealthy philanthropist who has been deaf and mute since birth and could not possibly have been overheard. Lionel Atwill plays Breen in a Monogram old-dark-house mystery directed by Phil Rosen, with Sheila Terry as the reporter convinced there is more to the suspect than his affliction suggests, and Paul Hurst as the detective working the case. The solution, when it comes, is a genuinely nasty piece of pre-Code plotting. Made the same year Atwill headlined Mystery of the Wax Museum, it shows why he was the era's go-to man for quiet menace. The film is in the public domain.

Mystery · Crime · Thriller