Two Arabian Knights (1927-28)

 

It takes a couple of scenes for Two Arabian Knights to reveal that it is truly a comedy. The film is set near the end of World War I and begins with two men fighting each other in a pit. They are American soldiers, W. Daingerfield Phelps III (the pretty one with the clever ideas, played by William Boyd) and Sgt. Peter O’Gaffney (the tough guy, a former con artist, played by Louis Wolheim), and they’ve just been captured by the Germans. They obviously didn’t like each other before being captured, and it takes a while for them to bond over their plans to escape from a prison camp in northern Germany. Through a series of misadventures, they wind up on a train bound for Turkey and then on a boat headed for Arabia. Each of these locations presents a new dilemma for them. They manage to escape the train by setting fire to some hay and then jumping onto a wagon carrying even more hay. The time on the boat involves them rescuing a beautiful Arabian princess named Mirza (played by Mary Astor) from near drowning and then having to escape possible death in Arabia at the hands of Mirza’s intended husband. Those might not sound like comedic bits, but each one of them involves some form of physical comedy. For example, the escape from the prison camp involves them stealing a couple of white robes so that they can blend in with the snow. Of course, they have large identification numbers on the backs of the robes, but never mind. They have to crawl under two barbwire fences, all while distracting a German shepherd who mimics their movements. They then almost get caught when Pete almost sneezes, but thoughtfully, Boyd’s character (whom Pete nicknames “Brains”) hits him and knocks him out. Then, of course, he has to dunk Pete’s head under water in order to revive him. It’s quite silly, especially when they emerge from the water and their robes freeze in a position that leaves the bottom flared out like a dress over a hoop skirt. The film must have been beautiful in its original condition, but even with a restoration about a decade ago, some images are almost completely gone. Watching silent films like this one, which was almost lost, makes you appreciate the beauty of the cinematography of that time. In terms of the overall plot, I’m not sure what to make of the moment at the end of the film when Pete looks at a character described as a eunuch earlier in the film; it’s almost like Joe E. Brown’s “Nobody’s perfect” moment at the end of Some Like It Hot. Pete has another rather enigmatic moment involving him asking the ship’s purser to come into his room; later he emerges with enough money to pay for his, Brains’, and Mirza’s fares even though none of them had money beforehand. The purser was played by, of all people, a young and rather handsome Boris Karloff. Both scenes raise some questions about Pete’s possible sexual fluidity. By the way, the category for which Two Arabian Knights won an Oscar, Best Director of a Comedy Picture, only existed during the first year of the awards. For just one time, the Academy acknowledged that making a dramatic film and making a comedic film are quite different processes.

Oscar Win: Best Director of a Comedy Picture (Lewis Milestone)

Speedy (1927-28)

 

Harold Lloyd plays the title character in Speedy, a baseball fan who seems unable to hold a job for very long. He’s in love with Jane (played by Ann Christy), the granddaughter of Pop Dillon (Bert Woodruff), who runs the last horse-drawn trolley car in New York City. A rich railroad magnate keeps trying to buy Pop out, but the old man keeps turning down the offers. That’s the basic premise for the plot, but much of the film is just an excuse to provide Lloyd with opportunities to engage in the kind of physical comedy for which he is justly famous. After losing a job as a soda jerk because he failed to deliver a bouquet to the boss’ wife successfully, quite a lengthy and intriguing sequence, he takes Jane to Coney Island for some entertainment. In terms of cinematography, the establishing shots of New York at the film’s beginning are rivaled only by the images from Coney Island. The montage of various rides and the shots of the lights of Coney Island at night are visually quite stunning, as is the running gag of how many ways that Speedy’s suit keeps getting ruined while they are there: condiments, dog pawprints, water, even paint. Lloyd’s characters are almost always the center of attention, but they seem unaware of how or why. That happens throughout Speedy, such as when a live crab in his pocket—don’t ask—swipes a lady’s slip from her purse or when the back of his jacket is striped with paint from when he backs up to a wet fence. He and Jane are quite successful during their day, winning lots of prizes, including a baby crib, and acquiring a pet dog in the process. Speedy pays a friend to take them back to the city in a moving van, and he takes advantage of the opportunity to set up the furniture in the van to look like a living room. It’s a touching, delicate, sweet moment. Speedy next gets a job as a cab driver for the Only One Cab Company (note the verbal pun there), but he proves to be a disaster there as well. The highlight of this job is when Babe Ruth, his idol, needs a ride to the stadium. Speedy talks to Ruth instead of watching the traffic, making for quite a harrowing ride. The film includes footage of a Ruth home run, and the baseball great seems to be quite a natural actor. Lloyd’s Speedy, though, doesn’t seem to have a natural ability for any tasks, and watching him trying to get fare-paying customers makes for some silly moments. All of the film’s set pieces—his various jobs, the day at Coney Island, the encounter with Ruth—are diversions from the central plot, though. Pop has to drive his cab at least once every 24 hours to keep his contract with the city, certainly a strange requirement. Speedy volunteers to help Pop out, but another series of odd events, including the theft by the railroad guy’s henchmen of the car and horse, provides a rollicking race through the streets of New York involving, among other gags, a policeman dummy and a broken tire and the dog from Coney Island. Choreographing the action in a Harold Lloyd film would have been a daunting task for any director, making the film’s lone Oscar nomination for its directing quite understandable. Lloyd himself never won a competitive Oscar despite the critical and popular success of his films.

Oscar Nomination: Best Director of a Comedy Picture (Ted Wilde)

Sadie Thompson (1927-28)

 

The central conflict in Sadie Thompson is between the title character (a reported prostitute) and a pious busybody trying to clean up the morals of the island of Pago Pago. They’ve arrived on the island at the same time, and thanks to a ten-day quarantine due to a smallpox outbreak, they wind up staying at the same inn. Sadie (gloriously played by Gloria Swanson) flirts with the Marines there, tells off-color jokes, smokes, chews gum… forcefully, plays jazz records, and hangs out with men in her room. None of this pleases Davidson (Lionel Barrymore, going for overwrought pomposity in his acting) or his wife. Sadie is supposed to go to another island for a new job when a ship is next available, but Davidson wants her to repent her sins and return to San Francisco to face criminal prosecution and punishment. He claims to be a “reformer” (read: Christian zealot, someone who disapproves of the natives dancing) and says he wants to help her reform herself. It’s quite the dispute. She says she’s a singer; he says she’s from “the disreputable district in San Francisco.” (I don’t know which district, in particular, he refers to, but it would be interesting to find out. The film could have boosted tourism for the area.) One of the Marines (played by the film’s director, the great Raoul Walsh) falls in love with Sadie and gives her a pin as a token of his feelings. Sadie already has quite a collection of pins, to be honest, but Swanson plays her as though she returns his affections. Davidson attempts to punish them both, getting the governor of the island to demand that she return to San Francisco as soon as a boat is available. He even attempts to subdue her physically at one point, demonstrating just what a bully he truly is. Barrymore is rather stoic and dull, but perhaps he chose that approach to fit the role; he doesn’t seem to have modulated his performance for a film audience. The film features lots of rain, torrential amounts, a clear homage to “Rain,” the story by W. Somerset Maugham that served as the source material, and the rain works both metaphorically and narratively. Sadie Thompson also makes very effective use of the inn as the primary location for much of the film’s action. The art direction on the film is masterful. Unfortunately, the film is a product of its time, stereotyping the indigenous people like the innkeeper’s wife. She’s fat and lazy and smokes all the time, and she’s the primary representation of the native people of the island. Their only other substantial appearance is at the end of the film pulling in fishing nets, a moment pivotal to the plot but perhaps not even the original sequence shot for the film. Sadly, portions of the (reportedly) only remaining print of the film are damaged, making the Oscar-nominated cinematography difficult to appreciate at times. It’s also incomplete, the last reel having been reconstructed using stills from the film and some repeated images and even shots from other movies. This tragic loss doesn’t really diminish the power of Swanson’s performance, justifiably nominated for an Oscar. It’s still the primary reason one would enjoy seeing Sadie Thompson, especially in its truncated form.

Oscar Nominations: Best Actress (Gloria Swanson) and Best Cinematography

Best Two-Reel Short Subject of 1938

 

The Declaration of Independence depicts the events leading up to the signing of the document that created the United States. It’s an earnest short, almost to the point of stodginess, and the acting is particularly stiff, but it does a nice job of showing some of the different points of debate that much of the delegates considered during their lengthy deliberations. The focus here is primarily upon Caesar Rodney, a delegate from the colony of Delaware who had to escape being held by loyalists and sidestep the subsequent attempts to halt him on his journey to Philadelphia to sign the final document. He makes it just in time to cast the deciding vote in favor of independence, but that can hardly be considered a spoiler at this point. Having such a relatively minor historical person get this much attention is a rarity, and it does allow us to consider these events from a different perspective. However, we also get some of the more expected moments of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin hashing out the wording of the declaration. There’s even a mention of the issues associated with slavery, but those are quickly passed over in favor of frequent moments of the reading of lengthy passages from the document. (However, it is a bit jarring to see Adams make the point that the Northern states were too invested in the slave trade to support any anti-slavery statements in the document!) You shouldn’t necessarily turn to a short film, or any film, for that matter, to get historically accurate information, but I do think that the broad outlines of what happened in 1776 ring mostly true in this film. The recreation of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is also impressive, thanks to the use of Technicolor to enliven what has become such an indelible image from our American history.

Swingtime in the Movies manages to cram a series of lively musical numbers into its twenty-minute run time. It’s essentially a backstage musical that shows us what happens when a film production goes badly. The director of the film within a film (a strange Western entitled The Texas Tornado) is Nitvitch (Fritz Feld), and he has a thick unidentifiable accent, and that makes it tough for his actors to understand him. He asks his leading lady for a “sous” or “soused” accent when he wants a “South” accent, and her attempts to play drunk cause Nitvitch even more frustration. Only Sammy (the gifted and sly Charley Foy) seems to understand what Nitvitch wants, and he serves as an ersatz translator, handing out jibes along with his explanations. However, when the leading lady starts to lisp out of nervousness, Nitvitch and Sammy decide a break for lunch is in order. The studio cafeteria is filled with stars of the time: George Brent, Marie Wilson, Pat O’Brien, Humphrey Bogart, Crime School Kids, John Garfield, Rosemary Lane, and Priscilla Lane. It also has some amazingly talented singing and dancing waitresses, who have one marvelous number involving some very precise moves through a row of kitchen doors. One of them, Joan Mason (played by the very game Katherine Kane), catches the director’s eye after there’s a misunderstanding involving a group of aspiring starlets from Joan’s hometown (and he hears her “authentic” Southern accent). Joan is hired, and as the saying goes, a star is born. Despite a series of mishaps during filming, including several attempts by different men to demonstrate how to kiss Joan properly on film, Joan (and Kane herself) shine in the scenes they film, especially the ones in which she gets to sing. Jerry Colonna, famous for his big eyes and large mustache, also has a cameo in the short, playing the title character of the Texas Tornado. Kane, who would later spell her first name Kathryn, also went by the nickname of “Sugar” (as in Sugar Kane…). She was very talented, featured in several shorts and a couple of features, but had a relatively brief Hollywood career. Even though it is a short film, Swingtime in the Movies is a great showcase for Kane’s talents.

They’re Always Caught, an entry in MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series of shorts, highlights what early crime investigation labs were able to accomplish. The plot revolves around the recently elected Mayor Fletcher (a brusque Charles Waldron) who wants to clean up the city by removing its criminal elements. He upsets contractors who have been taking money from the city without doing their promised work, he fires employees who’ve been taking bribes, and he criticizes and threatens those who are profiting from illegal gambling in the city’s parks. Needless to say, the criminals are unhappy with Fletcher’s crusade, particularly the aptly named Big Matty and his syndicate. The city’s prosecutor, Jimmy Stark (an unctuous John Eldredge), has a radio show where he touts his many successes (all of them small-time crooks) and remarks upon his close working relationship with the mayor. Of course, Stark is also on the take; he’s working with Big Matty more than he is with Mayor Fletcher. After listening to one of Stark’s broadcast, a small business owner, dry cleaner Eddie Diesel (Louis Jean Heydt, appropriately jittery from being a target of the crime syndicate), decides that he needs to talk to the mayor because he’s still having to pay protection money. He feels that Stark is arresting only the “little” criminals, not the ones in control. After the mayor is killed in a car explosion, Diesel gets framed for the murder because he was “prowling” around the mayor’s house the night before the explosion. Stark is particularly anxious to have Diesel convicted, but the crime scene investigations send a lot of evidence to the crime lab. While the plot up to this point has been interesting, when the crime lab (under the direction of Stanley Ridges’ Dr. Pritchard) begins its work, the short becomes much more intriguing as it demonstrates the methodical process that helps to identify the actual murder (if you haven’t already figured out that it’s Stark, you’ve not watched a lot of crime films). Examining burlap fibers and gunpowder residue might sound boring, but the earnestness with which Pritchard and his team search for the truth is quite endearing. They also have a suspect early on—and it’s definitely not Diesel. They allow Stark to watch as they determine the source of the bomb, prompting the prosecutor to get a manicure so that he can’t be connected to the materials from which the bomb was composed. That just makes Pritchard even more suspicious, and when the crime lab uses iodine spray on the mayor’s notepad, discovering that he wanted to fire Stark, they just have to figure out how to ensure that the police can arrest the right person for the crime. The Crime Does Not Pay series always had tight plots and restrained acting, but They’re Always Caught highlights just how even a seemingly minor aspect of law enforcement (a crime lab) can be key to having the right person in jail.

Oscar Winner: The Declaration of Independence

My Choice: They’re Always Caught takes a seemingly minor aspect of police work and makes it central to the solving of crime. This was decades before any of the CSI television series, but They’re Always Caught demonstrates the same sort of intellectual curiosity about how relatively minor-seeming clues can be the key to finding the true criminals.

Best Animated Short Film of 2019

Dcera (translated into English as Daughter) comes from the Czech Republic. At fifteen minutes, it’s the longest film in this category, and it also features perhaps the most complex (and most opaque) plot of the nominees. This short film features no dialogue, but a couple of flashbacks are meant to help explain the sequence of events. A daughter is visiting her father in a hospital when a bird crashes through the window. The wounded bird reminds the woman of a time when she was younger and brought another wounded bird to her seemingly uncaring father (who was busy trying to make a meal for them). They’ve obviously become estranged, but the movie is unclear as to why. Surely, the father’s lack of interest in caring for a wounded bird cannot have led to their separation from each other. The other flashback seems to be from the perspective of the father, who’s accompanying his daughter to the train station and trying to make her feel happy. It doesn’t work. While Dcera is touching and quite sad, it’s also kind of ugly, frankly. The paper-mache figures—even the versions of the younger parent and child—are rather grim-looking.

In just seven short minutes, Hair Love manages to invoke a full range of emotions: joy, sadness, frustration, you name it. The premise is simple: a young girl wants to have her hair done like her mother has done it in the past. She has a lot of hair to work with, and she can’t seem to manage it herself. She enlists her hapless father to help, but he fails miserably and keeps trying to get her to just wear a cap instead. However, the video tutorial on his wife’s blog about hairstyles for black women gets him through the process successfully. It’s when we find out why the girl’s mother isn’t available to help that the short achieves a poignant but hopeful climax. By the way, Issa Rae is the voice of the mother, and it is such a pleasure and a comfort to hear her familiar tones. Hair Love is one of the most accomplished and powerful short films in the category.

Kitbull is the most charming and delight of the entries. It’s a brisk nine minutes about a stray black kitten that’s hiding out in what appears to be an abandoned pile of junk. His quiet is interrupted by the arrival of a pitbull who’s being trained by its owners to fight. The kitten is very leery at first, but a game of swatting around an orange bottle cap allows the two animals to begin bonding. After the dog is severely hurt in a fight, the kitten nuzzles up to the pitbull, and they both seem to acknowledge the need to escape from the dog’s cruel owner (complete with butt crack, an intriguing little detail). The kitten is particularly hilarious. The filmmakers have obviously studied cat behavior quite carefully. It screeches, hits the bottle cap, runs around a lot, falls to the ground, purrs, hisses, and hides—all within seconds. Kitbull manages in its short running time to play with a full range of the audience’s emotions quite effectively.

Memorable, a short film from France, is quite an interesting statement on artistic expression. Obviously influenced by the style of painter Vincent Van Gogh, the filmmakers have created a series of clay animation characters. A painter suffering from neurological decline (most likely, Alzheimer’s or a similar form of dementia) keeps forgetting the people in his life and even the names of common household objects. He even fails to recognize his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Most sadly, he’s forgotten his wife, who was once his frequent muse. He confuses her for the housekeeper and asks her to pose for him. The painting is quite abstract for such an impressionistic film overall. The melancholy tone of Memorable is replicated in the blue colors in the palette of the characters and their surroundings. It’s an intriguing film, but it surprisingly doesn’t seem to have the strong emotional resonance of the some of the other nominees.

Sister is a co-production of China and the United States, and it is perhaps the most overtly political of the nominees. A brother describes his relationship with his younger sister. She’s characterized as a bit of a troublemaker, and they fight and disagree a lot, especially over which cartoon to watch. The stop-motion short uses figures made of some kind of fabric (wool?), and that makes for some interesting moments, such as when the brother tugs on his sister’s umbilical cord and it comes streaming out of her navel. He also pulls on her nose, and she looks like Pinocchio for a moment. It’s only when the narrator flips the story by talking about China’s one-child policy and its impact on his family that we realize the truth of his reflections. Sister is mostly shot in black-and-white, a somewhat fitting choice given the clarity of the argument that it ultimately makes.

Oscar Winner: Hair Love, a lovely choice, especially since…

My Choice: Hair Love. When you can encapsulate so much narrative in such a short period of time and make the audience care so deeply about the characters, you’ve accomplished something quite amazing.

Best Live Action Short Film of 2019

Brotherhood (Ikhwene) is set in Tunisia—the location for two of the shorts nominated in this category—at the home of a poor shepherd and his family. They live together in a one-room house. A prodigal son returns home after spending time fighting with ISIS, much to his father’s disapproval. The song also brings home a Syrian wife wearing a nigab, and their arrival demonstrates the tension between the Tunisians and the Syrians, at least on the part of the father. His wife is more supportive, even to the point of criticizing her husband’s behavior. The father’s skepticism and suspicious nature led to a heartbreaking conclusion. This is a sad movie that is only occasionally leavened by the fun of seeing the three red-haired sons interact with each other. The eldest regrets his decision to leave, but he’s too proud to admit it to his father. The tone of this film, like most of the ones nominated this year, is quite sad, a melancholy story. The cinematography is quite beautiful, but overall, Brotherhood is quite the somber short. Interesting sidenote: the film is a co-production of four countries, Canada, Tunisia, Qatar, and Sweden, an unusual mix, to say the least.

Nefta Football Club is also set in Tunisia, but it offers a somewhat more light-hearted plot than Brotherhood (or the other entries). Two young boys discover a donkey walking through the desert. It’s wearing a set of headphones and has been well trained to walk into Tunisia from a neighboring country. They realize that the donkey is carrying a lot of cocaine, and the two brothers decide to swipe it. To be fair, the younger brother doesn’t quite know what the white powder is; he mistakenly thinks it’s laundry detergent. The older brother knows exactly what it is, and he wants it so that he can get into the drug business and make some money for himself. Nefta Football Club offers some surprising humor, especially the ending. It’s really the funniest of the five options. The two guys who trained the donkey are quite funny, quite goofy in their bickering. The donkey’s disappearance results from a mix-up between the singer Adele and a Middle Eastern singer who seems to have a similar sounding name. One of them doesn’t understand who or what Pavlov (the scientist who gave us the theory of conditioning), and his friend’s exasperation is quite hilarious.

The Neighbors’ Window has a few fun moments, a few light-hearted laughs, but takes a rather dark turn about three-quarters through its run time. The premise seems inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window: a pregnant wife and her husband watch a couple in an apartment across the street; the new couple seems to be “breaking in” their new place by having sex with no shades or curtains serving as a barrier to voyeurs. The wife, in particular, becomes obsessed (although the husband has his moments) even to the point of using binoculars to watch while the lights in their apartment are dimmed to get a better view of the neighbors. By comparison, the people across the street have fun lives filled with parties and sex; meanwhile, the central couple are frequently tired from taking care of their three children. After the narrative shifts to a sadder outcome than originally anticipated, the focus seems to be demonstrating that you really shouldn’t be jealous of people you know very little about. The climax of The Neighbors’ Window actually ends up being rather unexpectedly upbeat and hopeful.

Saria depicts the horrifying abuse at a Guatemalan orphanage and the attempts by two sisters to develop a plan to escape to America. Saria, the title character, and her sister Ximena have few opportunities to talk when they aren’t being observed or harmed. The girls are raped, beaten, forced to do physical labor—a litany of corrupt mistreatment from those who are supposed to protect them and educate them. There are also apparently times when there’s no water for the girls to shower with. The boys at the orphanage join Saria, Ximena, and many of the girls in leaping from the building into a nearby tree. The police come after the escapees, and the brutal treatment at the orphanage will likely accelerate after their capture. The film is set at the same time as the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., that followed Trump’s inauguration in 2017, a momentary source of inspiration for the proto-feminist Saria. It’s based upon a real-life incident in which forty-one girls died in a fire. Saria, the short film (not the character), features some stellar camerawork and a great deal of narrative tension. It also features the fastest moving and perhaps the cleverest cockroach I’ve ever seen in a movie, an odd addition to such a serious story.

A Sister (Une soeur) is quite a harrowing film, a tense sixteen minutes. A young woman is in a car with a man. We’re not sure where they are headed, but she says she needs to call her sister. We listen to her side of the conversation, and then the film switches to an emergency call center where we discover that she’s actually called the Belgian equivalent of 911 instead. The viewer is never exactly certain what the man has done. Did he rape the woman? Kidnap her? A flashback reveals that there has been a sexual encounter, most likely without the woman’s full consent. The operator tries to decipher the clues that the woman gives, but the woman has to be very cryptic at times so as not to be caught by the man. The film goes back and forth between the woman in the car and the woman in the call center. A Sister could easily be expanded into a feature length film; the plot outlines are already there. We’d just need a bit more of what happened before the two people wind up in the car together and where they are headed.

Oscar Winner: The Neighbors’ Window, a very accomplished film with some very strong performances.

My Choice: Nefta Football Club balances very serious subject matter with some welcome moments of humor. In a field crowded with downbeat, depressing stories, it manages to inspire a range of emotional reactions.

The Patriot (1928-29)

Sadly, The Patriot is a lost film, one that has been missing for about seventy years now. Only fragments of the film are still known to exist, and the UCLA Film and Television archive has only about one-fourth of the film’s (reported) original footage. No complete copy is known to exist, but the trailer can be viewed here on YouTube. So many films from the silent era are gone—for various tragic reasons—but The Patriot is the only nominee for the Academy Award for Best Picture that no longer exists in any complete form.

The basic plot can be pieced together through various descriptions in books and online. In 18^th Century Russia, Czar Paul I is a weak, mad, volatile ruler who trusts only his Prime Minister, Count Pahlen (Lewis Stone). Pahlen has so much influence over the czar that even when the leader’s son, Crown Prince Alexander (Neil Hamilton), tries to warn his father about a plot to take control of the country, Paul I imprisons his own son. Pahlen himself—the so-called “patriot” of the title—has been plotting to rid the country of the czar because the ruler has become so crazed in his actions and attitudes. Pahlen claims to be looking after the greater interests of the country in his conspiracy to overthrow the czar.

Pahlen enlists the reluctant aid of his mistress, Countess Ostermann (Florence Vidor), and Stefan (Harry Cording), a guard whom the czar has brutally whipped for not having enough buttons on his gaiters—certainly an odd reason for attacking another person but undoubtedly meant as a sign of the czar’s madness. The Countess, upset that her lover is using her as a pawn in his conspiracy, tells the czar of Pahlen’s plot, but Pahlen reassures the czar long enough for Stefan and the other guards to kill Paul I. Stefan then shoots Pahlen, and the Countess tells her lover before he dies, “I may have been a bad friend and lover—but I have been a Patriot.” The shift from thinking of Pahlen as being patriotic to seeing the Countess as the “real” patriot must have been quite a moment in the film’s narrative.

The Patriot was the only silent film nominated for Outstanding Picture for 1928-29 and the last silent film to be nominated until 2011’s The Artist (which, to be fair, is not a fully or “true” silent film). The Patriot was filmed without dialogue and had sound effects added later. By this point in film history, silent films were becoming increasingly rare as the studios attempted to respond quickly to the growing desire of audiences to hear as well as see their favorite performers. So many films from this period have disappeared due to a lack of interest at the time in preserving a style of filmmaking that was on its way out. The studios and filmmakers had no idea just how much later generations would like to see their artistic achievements from the silent era.

The loss of The Patriot means that we do not get to experience the performance as Czar Paul I by Emil Jannings, who won the first Oscar for Best Actor the year before for his performances in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. We also don’t get to see the only Oscar-nominated performance by Lewis Stone, who is probably better known today for playing Judge Hardy in all of those movies with Mickey Rooney. It was also the first film directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch to garner him a nomination for Best Director, an honor he never received despite some marvelous comedies and musicals he directed later in his career. Finally, the surviving trailer and set photos clearly indicate why The Patriot was nominated for Best Art Direction with its massive and impressive sets. At a budget of nearly a million dollars, it was a huge and very expensive production.

Oscar Win: Best Writing

Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Lewis Stone), and Best Art Direction