my favorite movie of 1920:
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A Washington Post critic wrote: “What’s amazing is that so much of Gish’s tough, funny, intuitive performance … transcends time, place and technology. Equally amazing is [director D.W. Griffith’s] mighty striving, with his arty location shots, quirky close-ups and riskily staged set pieces, to forge a new and expressly cinematic style.”
You can watch the whole movie here (in the public domain):
Unfortunately, at two and a half hours, Way Down East should have been cut way down! Forgettable comic subplots get in the way of the main story, in which Gish gets conned into a sham marriage and has an unplanned pregnancy.
The stunning climactic scene out in nature was done without stunt doubles (as described in this article), causing Gish’s hand to be permanently injured.
Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.
Is R.U.R. not here because you've not seen it, or simply because you didn't like it as well as Way Down East?
ReplyDeleteAnswer: because it's a play, and I was thinking of Metropolis, because I am a moron.
DeleteR.U.R. isn't a 1920 movie. It's a play that was first performed on stage in 1921. There were some movie/TV adaptions much later, but they seem obscure — I'm not finding any versions I could realistically watch.
ReplyDeleteAh, jinx! Yeah, R.U.R. and Metropolis are both ground-breaking sci-fi things from the 1920s, but only one is a movie. I included Metropolis as one of my favorite movies of 1927 in this post.
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