Salomé

Alla Nazimova produced and stars in this adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play, with Charles Bryant directing. Nazimova plays Salomé, the stepdaughter of Herod who demands the head of John the Baptist in exchange for her dance. The film is a sustained art-deco experiment, shot almost entirely on a single set draped in beaded curtains, with designs by Natacha Rambova that lean hard into the stylized look Wilde's text invites. The cast and crew were largely gay and lesbian, and the production has long been read as a coded piece of queer cinema. It was a financial failure on release and nearly disappeared, but surviving prints made it one of the most talked-about rediscoveries when 1923 works entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.