Homeward Bound (1923)

Brand Upon the Brain!

After returning home to his long-estranged mother upon a request from her deathbed, a man raised by his parents in an orphanage has to confront the childhood memories that have long haunted him.

The Hungarian Nabob

After Count John Karpathy, belovedly known as the Nabob, falls ill while entertaining the peasants of his estate, his dissolute nephew and sole heir, Count Bela, comes home from Paris to acquire his inheritance. The Nabob recovers and, after hearing Bela's plan to squander the money, resolves not to give Bela anything while he lives.

Who Pays?

Who Pays? was a series of twelve three-reel dramas, released between March and July 1915. Henry King and Ruth Roland starred in each episode, playing different roles each time, with a variety of supporting players who varied from one episode to another. Each episode told a complete and individual story, but they were all inter-related by a uniform theme. Although there were no cliff-hanger endings, each episode did, in fact, end with a challenge to the audience: Who was responsible for the misfortune of the principal characters? The titles of the twelve episodes were: #1: The Price of Fame; #2: The Pursuit of Pleasure; #3: When Justice Sleeps; #4: The Love Liar; #5: Unto Herself Alone; #6: Houses of Glass; #7: Blue Blood and Yellow; #8: Today and Tomorrow; #9: For the Commonwealth; #10: Pomp of Earth; #11: The Fruit of Folly; #12: Toil and Tyranny.

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

The just-out-of-college, effete son of a no-nonsense steamboat captain comes to visit his father whom he's not seen since he was a child.

Broken Barriers

This 1919 silent is the first American film based on the same Sholem Aleichem stories as Fiddler on the Roof, but produced 50 years before the blockbuster musical. Unlike most adaptations of Aleichem’s work, Broken Barriers (Khavah) focuses not on Tevye the milkman, but on his daughter Khavah, who falls in love with the gentile boy Fedka and must navigate the reverberations from this with both her community and her family.

Submarine

Two sailors who are always competing against each other set their sights on the same girl. When she chooses one over the other, their friendship ends acrimoniously. However, things change when one the men is in a submarine trapped beneath the ocean and the other, a diver, is sent down on a rescue mission.

The Student of Prague

Prague, Bohemia, 1820. Balduin, a penniless student, falls in love with Countess Margit, a wealthy noblewoman whom he has saved from drowning.

The Unknown

On the lam, criminal Alonzo hides in the circus as The Armless Wonder – a performer who uses his feet to hurl knives. Alonzo keeps the arms he really has concealed to hide his identity. Meanwhile, ringmaster's daughter Nanon has a phobia of being touched by men, but is romantically pursued by not only Alonzo but the strongman Malabar. Alonzo's desperation to remain with Nanon will only end in tragedy.

The Unholy Three

Three sideshow performers form a conspiracy known as "The Unholy Three" - a ventriloquist, midget, and strongman working together to commit a series of robberies.

West of Zanzibar

A magician seeks vengeance upon the man who paralyzed him and the illegitimate daughter he sired with the magician's wife.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

A despairing clown suffering a broken heart and a self-indulgent count who uncontrollably laughs learn to help each other with their problems, but both fall in love with the same young woman.

A Blind Bargain

Chaney plays two roles: mad scientist Arthur Lamb and Lamb's "experiment", known only as the Ape Man. This hideous creature was the result of Lamb's attempts to transplant animal glands into human beings. A lost film.

The Penalty

Blizzard, deranged from a childhood operation in which both his legs were needlessly amputated after an accident, becomes a vicious criminal, and eventually mob leader of the San Francisco underworld.

He Who Gets Slapped

After a baron steals his scientific discoveries, runs away with his wife, and slaps him in public, a man joins a Parisian circus sideshow as a clown whose act consists of being slapped repeatedly and becomes infatuated with a showgirl colleague whose father intends to marry her off to the baron.

The Wolf Man

Gerald Stanley (John Gilbert) is an English gentleman who is engaged to Beatrice Joyce (Alma Frances). But Stanley's personality changes whenever he drinks, and his brother (who also loves Beatrice) uses this to his advantage.

The Racket

A renegade police captain sets out to catch a sadistic mob boss. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

The Avenging Conscience

Thwarted by his despotic uncle from continuing his love affair, a young man's thoughts turn dark as he dwells on ways to deal with his uncle. Becoming convinced that murder is merely a natural part of life, he kills his uncle and hides the body. However, the man's conscience awakens; paranoia sets in and nightmarish visions begin to haunt him.

The Ace of Hearts

A romantic rivalry among members of a secret society becomes even more tense when one of the men is assigned to carry out an assassination.

I Was Born, But...

Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Ozu's charming film is a social satire that draws from the antics of childhood as well as the tragedy of maturity.

A Trip to the Moon

Professor Barbenfouillis and five of his colleagues from the Academy of Astronomy travel to the Moon aboard a rocket propelled by a giant cannon. Once on the lunar surface, the bold explorers face the many perils hidden in the caves of the mysterious planet.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

A classic of the silent age, this film tells the story of the doomed but ultimately canonized 15th-century teenage warrior. On trial for claiming she'd spoken to God, Jeanne d'Arc is subjected to inhumane treatment and scare tactics at the hands of church court officials. Initially bullied into changing her story, Jeanne eventually opts for what she sees as the truth. Her punishment, a famously brutal execution, earns her perpetual martyrdom.

Thunder

A train operator's obsession with being on time leads to tragedy for his family.

Modern Times

A bumbling tramp desires to build a home with a young woman, yet is thwarted time and time again by his lack of experience and habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time..

Syv dage for Elisabeth

A hairdresser wins the lottery and decides to spoil herself by spending Easter at a mountain resort where she meets new people.

Cabiria

Young Cabiria is kidnapped by pirates and sold as a slave in Carthage. Just as she's to be sacrificed to Moloch, Cabiria is rescued by Fulvius Axilla, a good-hearted Roman spy, and his powerful slave, Maciste. The trio are broken up as Cabiria is entrusted to a woman of noble birth. With Cabiria's fate unknown, Maciste punished for his heroism, and Fulvius sent away to fight for Rome, is there any hope of our heroes reuniting?

Battleship Potemkin

A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre. The film had an incredible impact on the development of cinema and is a masterful example of montage editing.

Nanook of the North

This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.

October (Ten Days that Shook the World)

Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.

City Lights

A tramp falls in love with a beautiful blind flower girl. His on-and-off friendship with a wealthy man allows him to be the girl's benefactor and suitor.

Pandora's Box

Lulu is a young woman so beautiful and alluring that few can resist her siren charms. The men drawn into her web include respectable newspaper publisher Dr. Ludwig Schön, his musical producer son Alwa, circus performer Rodrigo Quast, and seedy old Schigolch. When Lulu's charms inevitably lead to tragedy, the downward spiral encompasses them all.

The General

During America’s Civil War, Union spies steal engineer Johnny Gray's beloved locomotive, 'The General'—with Johnnie's lady love aboard an attached boxcar—and he single-handedly must do all in his power to both get The General back and to rescue Annabelle.

The Gold Rush

A gold prospector in Alaska struggles to survive the elements and win the heart of a dance hall girl.

Love's Crucible

At the end of the middle ages, Ursula is accused of having poisoned her own husband. She claims she is innocent, but to prove it, she must submit to a ritual: trial by fire, walking on fire along a path leading directly to a crucifix. A film that has been much commended for the visual creativity shown by the director in successive blending in of images involving Ursula, her husband, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ. Much applauded, also: the performance of Jenny Hasselqvist, thus described by French director René Clair: “We shall never forget her flaming eyes, the severity of her spirit, her abrupt and alarmed expressions, like an animal under threat.”

Greed

A lottery win of $5,000 forever changes the lives of a miner turned dentist and his wife.

X. La mise en croix

Part 10 of Alexandre Promio's Passion Play, in which Jesus is nailed to the Cross.

The Joyless Street

In 1921, we follow two women - Marie and Grete - from the same poor Viennese neighborhood, as they try to better the lives of themselves and their families during the period of Austrian postwar hyperinflation.

Gold and Glitter

As the husband leaves for the lumber regions, his wife gives him a memory message to be opened after his arrival. Attracted by a maid, cherished by the love of two old brothers, he forgets it until sometime later. The message serves its purpose, however, for through it, after a thrilling experience, the maid learns the true value of the man's love, while he in his turn, goes back to his waiting wife and finds there, along with his shame and regeneration, his heart's desire.

Frangipane

Amelia and Abigail meet up for a nice day out as friends, but unable to hide their feelings for each other any longer they discover its not that simple

The Triplets of Belleville

When her grandson is kidnapped during the Tour de France, Madame Souza and her beloved pooch Bruno team up with the Belleville Sisters—an aged song-and-dance team from the days of Fred Astaire—to rescue him.

Faust

God and Satan war over earth; to settle things, they wager on the soul of Faust, a learned and prayerful alchemist.

The Kid

A tramp cares for a boy after he's abandoned as a newborn by his mother. Later the mother has a change of heart and aches to be reunited with her son.

The Torture of Silence

Hardly one of French filmmaker Abel Gance's masterpieces, The Torture of Silence nevertheless has more dramatic and psychological value than your average romantic-triangle tale. Simply put, the film concerns a doctor, his wife, and his brother. The doctor, a specialist in pediatrics, has no time for his wife Marthe. She seeks solace in the arms of his brother. Unable to keep up the charade, Marthe attempts to shoot herself, but it is her lover who is mortally wounded.

The Aerial

An entire city has lost its voice. Mr. TV, the owner of the city's only television channel, is carrying out a sinister plan to control all of the city's inhabitants.

The Signal Tower

A railroad worker accepts a colleague's offer to stay in his home, but when his friend is called out one night to stop a runaway train, he makes a play for the man's wife.

Lucha de corazones

Paco, a jealous and bitter man who is in love with Rosario, conspires in the shadows to bring about the downfall of Manuel, her husband.