Flicker Alley

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #12

The most popular of the Mutuals, THE ADVENTURER begins and ends with a chase. It is the fastest-paced film of the series, and although it has more slapstick than Easy Street (1917) and The Immigrant (1917), it is redeemed by its construction, characterization, and C...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #11

THE IMMIGRANT, which contains elements of satire, irony, and romance as well as cinematic poetry, endures into the twenty-first century as a comic masterpiece. The film, Chaplin's eleventh in the Mutual series, is the best-constructed of his two-reelers and was Chap...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #10

THE CURE, the tenth film in the series, is perhaps the funniest of the Mutuals. Inspiration for the film was drawn from the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where Chaplin was living at the time and where the idea of a health spa first occurred to him. The wrestling bouts ...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #9

For EASY STREET, his ninth film for Mutual and the most famous of the twelve, Chaplin ordered the first of the T-shaped street sets to be built that he would consistently utilize to provide a perfect backdrop to his comedy. The look and feel of Easy Street evoke the ...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #8

Chaplin's eighth film for Mutual, THE RINK, is one of Chaplin's most popular comedies. Charlie is an inept waiter who prepares the bill of Mr. Stout by examining the soup, spaghetti, melon stains, and other remnants on the sloppy eater's shirt front, tie, and ear. Ch...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #7

A refinement of his earlier comedies set in a film studio, BEHIND THE SCREEN, Chaplin's seventh film for Mutual, lampoons the unmotivated slapstick of the kind Chaplin disliked when he worked for Mack Sennett. Chaplin made the film as a sort of parody of the knockabo...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #6

In the sixth Mutual film, Charlie is a pawnbroker's assistant in a pawnshop that evokes the London of Chaplin's childhood. The film is rich in comic transposition, a key element to Chaplin's genius. The apex of such work in the Mutuals is the celebrated scene in THE ...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #5

The fifth film in the Mutual series, THE COUNT, further develops the situations of Caught in a Cabaret (1914) and A Jitney Elopement (1915) and anticipates the future Chaplin films The Rink (1916), The Idle Class (1921), and City Lights (1931), films in which Charlie...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #4

ONE A.M, Chaplin's fourth Mutual, is an impressive piece of virtuosity, a solo performance except for a brief appearance by Albert Austin as a taxi driver. The film is a tour de force of Chaplin's superb pantomime and comic creativity performed in a restricted space,...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #3

THE VAGABOND, Chaplin's third Mutual film, was an important step in Chaplin's career in which he interweaves pathos as an integral part of the comedy. In this way, THE VAGABOND is the prototype of The Kid (1921) and The Circus (1928). Chaplin employs the same romanti...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #2

In Chaplin's second effort for Mutual, THE FIREMAN, he portrays an inept firefighter at Fire Station 23, surrounded by a plot filled with arson and insurance fraud. Filmed partly at an actual fire station (Fire Station 29, located at 158 South Western Avenue in Los A...

CHAPLIN'S MUTUAL COMEDIES #1

Embezzlement is the subject of THE FLOORWALKER, Chaplin's first film under his landmark contract with Lone Star-Mutual.

Though it lacks the pathos of many future Mutual comedies, THE FLOORWALKER contains a stronger plot than most of Chaplin's previous films, with t...

Based on the controversial and best-selling novel by Hugo Bettauer, H.K. Breslauer’s 1924 film adaptation of The City without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden) was produced two years after the publication of the book, only a decade before events depicted in the fictional story became an all-too-horrifi...

Flicker Alley and Cinerama Inc. are pleased to announce the long-awaited re-release of THIS IS CINERAMA, now beautifully restored from the original three-panel, six-perforation camera elements. This is the most extensive and thorough restoration yet of the film that changed the shape and sound of...

At a star-studded premiere at Grauman’s World Famous Chinese Theater in Hollywood, WINDJAMMER: THE VOYAGE OF THE CHRISTIAN RADICH sailed into movie history on April 8th, 1958. The brainchild of National Theatres, who hoped to compete with rival widescreen sensation Cinerama, WINDJAMMER was the fi...

In the movies he made for the Mutual Film Corporation, Charles Chaplin perfected what would become the trademark themes and techniques of his career while simultaneously creating the short films that many critics and enthusiasts now regard as his best work.

Flicker Alley and The Blackhawk Film...

In late 1914, Charlie Chaplin was paid the then-unprecedented salary of $1,250 per week (with a bonus of $10,000) in exchange for signing a one-year contract with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. The resulting 14 films he created for Essanay find Chaplin further experimenting with new cine...

Legendary producer Thomas H. Ince and director Irvin V. Willat made BEHIND THE DOOR — “the most outspoken of all the vengeance films” according to film historian Kevin Brownlow — during the period of World War I-inspired American patriotism.

Hobart Bosworth stars as Oscar Krug, a working-class...

Teinosuke Kinugasa's A PAGE OF MADNESS (Kurutta ichipeiji), produced in mid-1920s Japan, is widely considered to be one of the touchstones of early avant-garde cinema, and is also one of the most challenging and narratively complex films of the era. The fact that this important work has never bef...

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR.WEST IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIKS centered around the exploits an American, Harold Lloyd-like character, who travels to investigate the barbarous Soviet state only to discover the "real" Russia. It was the first feature film that Lev Kuleshov made with a team o...

When Eisenstein signed a contract with the Sovkino studio for the film we now know as OLD AND NEW, it was described as a propaganda picture, meant to popularize the Party’s vision for the countryside. The “social order” for the film fit with Eisenstein’s own search for new art forms, which could ...

THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA was Boris Barnet’s fourth production, and a great hit with audiences. With its vibrant humor and a clever commentary on the historical moment, this film was unusual for 1920’s Soviet cinema. Barnet preferred to avoid the hot air of Revolutionary Romanticism, for his heart la...

Though praise for Vertov's newsreel work was not unanimous, there was enough of it to yield several feature-length commissions. The first of these was STRIDE, SOVIET!, a film intended to publicize, in the run-up to local elections, the work and accomplishments of the Moscow municipal council or "...

THE GHOST THAT NEVER RETURNS is an outstanding Soviet film by Abram Room, the director of Bed and Sofa (1927). Released to little notice in 1930, it joins other very late silents to show the screen still developing high eloquence after the first talkies stopped silent cinema dead in its tracks.
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Rescued and preserved after a five-year crusade by the Film Noir Foundation, this 1949 classic is at long last available in a clean digital version, transferred from a 35mm print painstakingly restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Jane Palmer (Scott) and her husband Alan (Arthur Kennedy)...

A lost gem rediscovered! Thanks to the efforts of the Film Noir Foundation, this terrific 1950 film noir, the only American print of which was burned in a 2008 fire, has been rescued and restored to its original luster.

Join the wild chase around San Francisco as a man goes into hiding after w...

The youngest president in our nation’s history, who brought an unprecedented excitement and power to the office, the life of America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, makes any fiction pale by comparison. His was the life of a magnificent maverick – a man of enormous popularity and legendary ...

Flicker Alley, in partnership with Disobedient Films, is proud to present the worldwide streaming premiere of LONDON SYMPHONY, a brand new silent film—a city symphony—which offers a poetic journey through the city of London. It is an artistic snapshot of the city as it stands today, and a celebra...

THE BEST OF CINERAMA is comprised of all the greatest thrills of Cinerama, from the breathtaking roller coaster ride to the visit to La Scala, Milan, for Aida; from the hurtling bobsled run, to the stirring dances of the African Watusis. Made up of over 20 such exciting highlights, the film is no...

Photographed over an eight-year period by Russia’s top filmmakers, CINERAMA'S RUSSIAN ADVENTURE brings together some of the most exquisite, jaw-dropping, and beautiful sequences from over six Soviet Kinopanorama productions (the Russian equivalent of three-panel Cinerama). The film’s locations st...

On a surface level, THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA follows the story of a man who travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention. But what director Dziga Vertov is able to accomplish with this simple set-up has been astounding audiences ...

Accustomed to experimenting with aural material, Vertov composed a particularly sophisticated sound track for his first talking film using the noises of machines and factory atmosphere. He was personally congratulated by Charlie Chaplin (who was himself in production with his first sound film eff...

Based upon a famous short story by Richard Connell, THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME follows big game hunter, Bob Rainsford, (Joel McCrea), as he becomes quarry for another, the opulently deranged Count Zaroff, (floridly played by Leslie Banks). Utilizing some of the amazing sets made for King Kong, the f...

Flicker Alley, in association with the Blackhawk Films Collection®, is proud to present THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, looking as if he had just stepped out from the original illustrations of Victor Hugo’s novel.

HUNCHBACK is a huge production: the sets depictin...

Robert Flaherty made this wonderful film of Eskimo (Inuit) life following six years as an Arctic explorer for the Canadian Northern Railway. Flaherty seized upon the idea of structuring his movie around characters who reenacted episodes of their lives and participated in the shaping of the film. ...

An obvious successor to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, THE WEDDING OF PALO (Palos Brudefaerd) is the last beautiful work of the famed Danish polar explorer and anthropologist Dr. Knud Rasmussen. Filmed in sound with an Inuit cast from the Angmagssalik district of east Greenland, PALO, lik...

True to its title, the 1925, 10-reel version of THE LOST WORLD effectively disappeared from circulation in 1929—all known positive prints destroyed—a move by First National Pictures to help clear the way for another “creature film” utilizing special effects and Willis O’Brien’s cutting-edge anima...

Like the musical CHICAGO that won the Best Picture Academy Award and five other Oscars in 2002, this original 1927 version descends from a 1926 hit Broadway play by Maurine Watkins. It’s a terrifically entertaining mix of humor and melodrama as well as a pungent critique of trash journalism. Fran...

Long considered lost until a complete dupe negative was identified in the vaults of La Cinémathèque française in 2014, this William Gillette film is a vital missing link in the history of Sherlock Holmes on screen. By the time it was produced at Essanay Studios in 1916, Gillette had been establis...

Flicker Alley, in partnership with the Blackhawk Films® Collection, is proud to present CHILDREN OF DIVORCE, starring Clara Bow and Gary Cooper.

The film begins in an American "divorce colony" in Paris after the First World War, where parents would leave their children for months at a time. Je...

J'Accuse, Abel Gance’s extraordinary breakthrough work, is a World War I drama considered to be one of the most technically advanced films of the era and the first major pacifist film. It was referred to by Gance as “A human cry against the bellicose din of armies.” It stars Marise Dauvray as Edi...

Once believed lost, a copy of the original, hand-colored version of Georges Méliès’ masterwork A TRIP TO THE MOON was miraculously found in Barcelona, Spain in 1993. Initially thought too fragile to restore, the film underwent one of the most complex and ambitious film restoration projects ever. ...

DISCOVERING CINEMA is a 2-part film program comprised of "Learning to Talk" and "Movies Dream in Color", produced by Lobster Films/Histoire, 2003-2004. Film historians Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg compiled materials from their own Lobster Films collection and material from archives throughout Eu...

THE GARDEN OF EDEN is a thoroughly entertaining romantic comedy from 1928 and was an important film for both its beguiling star, Corinne Griffith, and talented director, Lewis Milestone. The film was scripted by Hans Kraley, a scenarist of four 1920s Ernst Lubitsch comedies and contains gorgeous ...