Directed by Maurice Tourneur • 1919 • United States
Starring Lew Cody, Mary Alden, Pauline Starke
Unseen for one hundred years until its recent restoration, this lost-and-found romantic melodrama from silent-cinema master Maurice Tourneur follows the fortunes of Marcene Elliot (Pauline Starke), a young woman whose passionate affair with a composer (Lew Cody) leaves her with a child and fuels the writing of his new symphony. But when Marcene’s disapproving aunt (Mary Alden) intervenes in the couple’s relationship, it leads to a series of misfortunes that will see the lovers pushed apart and pulled together again by the hands of fate.
Directed by Victor Sjöström • 1924 • United States
Starring Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert
Lon Chaney wears one of the most renowned of his thousand faces in this landmark silent—the first film produced entirely by MGM (and the first to feature their iconic mascot Leo the Lion). He star...
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1929 • United Kindgom
Starring Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, John Longden
Alfred Hitchcock’s—and Britain’s—first talkie finds the director using sound technology as inventively as he used the camera. Anny Ondra (prototype for the many Hitchcock blondes to come) play...
Directed by William Wyler • 1929 • United States
Starring Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, Fred Kohler
When three bank-robbing desperadoes find a dying mother in the desert, they swear to return the woman’s baby to his father—a promise that sets the trio on a quest that only one will survive. A...
