Lillian Gish: The Birth of a Nation actress enmeshed in Bowling Green University controversy. Should Lillian Gish be labeled a racist because at age 21 she had one of the lead roles in D.W. Griffith’s landmark – and to this day contentious – 1915 Civil…
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American military movies: Besides depicting the Civil War, D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 feature The Birth of a Nation had the Ku Klux Klan saving heroine Lillian Gish. From ‘The Birth of a Nation’ to ‘Iron Man’: The love affair between Hollywood & the Pentagon In…
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The Whales of August with Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, Vincent Price, and Ann Sothern. According to my math, the careers of the three leading ladies – Lillian Gish, Bette Davis, and Ann Sothern – in Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August total 191 years. And…
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Cuban movie posters: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Here’s something unusual: hand-silkscreened Cuban posters for Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (right), Costa-Gavras’ Z, Ernesto Daranas Serrano’s Fallen Gods, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s Oscar-nominated Strawberry…
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The Fall of the House of Usher (top); John Gilbert, Eleanor Boardman in Bardelys the Magnificent (middle); Douglas Fairbanks, Lupe Velez in The Gaucho (bottom) Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, and Lillian Gish are only a few of the superstars to be found at the…
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‘Sold for Marriage’: Remarkably modern early silent film Though all but completely forgotten today, Christy Cabanne (at times billed as William Christy Cabanne) was a respected name in the 1910s and 1920s. Among his credits are the1916 Douglas Fairbanks vehicle The Mystery of the Leaping…
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Way Down East with Richard Barthelmess and Lillian Gish: Griffith Cinema. One of the movies included in Kino’s second D.W. Griffith cinema box set, Way Down East was one of the Broken Blossoms and The Birth of a Nation filmmaker’s last major hits, as his…
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A few recommendations for those who watch Turner Classic Movies: The beautifully photographed (and tinted) 1921 Cecil B. DeMille sex drama The Affairs of Anatol stars Wallace Reid as the Anatol of the title, married to poor, little Gloria Swanson, while getting acquainted with a…