Best Films – 1921

A sensation in its day, Rex Ingram’s film adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from a screenplay by June Mathis, catapulted Mathis’ protégé Rudolph Valentino to superstardom. Ingram’s wife, the highly capable Alice Terry, played the romantic interest. More than 80 years after its initial release, The Four Horsemen remains a powerful cinematic experience.
 
FILM
The Conquering Power
d: Rex Ingram; scr: June Mathis
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
d: Rex Ingram; scr: June Mathis
Nobody
d: Roland West; scr: Roland West, Charles H. Smith
 

Wallace Reid, Bebe Daniels in The Affairs of Anatol
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The Affairs of Anatol
d: Cecil B. DeMille; scr: Jeanie Macpherson
 

Richard Barthelmess in Tol’able David
ACTOR
Richard Barthelmess
Tol’able David
Jackie Coogan
The Kid
Ralph Lewis
The Conquering Power
 

Kenneth Harlan, [...]

Rex Ingram Remembered

Since it’s still Jan. 15 in large chunks of the Pacific Ocean, I have enough time to briefly mention film director Rex Ingram (top right), whose birth — as Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock — took place in Dublin exactly 113 years ago. (Some sources claim Ingram was born in 1892, but in Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema author Liam O’Leary clearly states that 1893 is the right date.)
While writing Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro, I often became more intrigued with two of the story’s top supporting players than with the biographical subject himself. One was Novarro’s lover in the mid-1920s, columnist Herbert Howe, quite likely the wittiest writer to ever cover the Hollywood scene. [...]