Rex Ingram

Moonrise

by
Danny and Gilly

Having worked pretty consistently for 30 years, director Frank Borzage more or less bowed out with Moonrise in 1948. Ten years later he’d return with a couple of afterthoughts, but in the main this was it, his last picture. He’d been one of the big players of the silent era – when the Oscars were invented in 1927 he won the very first one for Best Director – and this goodbye is in a sense a farewell to all that. It’s also partly intended as a bookend to Sunrise, directed by fellow 1920s Fox director FW Murnau, a lament to a certain style of visual lyricism that disappeared with the dawn of the … Read more

100 Years of… The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

by
Alice Terry and Rudolph Valentino

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was the first of five films Rudolph Valentino made in 1921 and though it’s the film that made him a star he’s not the star of the film, which is an ensemble piece. The star is the film itself, an epic so complete and fine-tuned that it’s a reference point today whenever producers and directors are aiming to tell tender human stories against a background of raging conflict. It’s a big film too – two and a half hours long, which isn’t gargantuan compared to, say, Birth of a Nation (three and a quarter hours) or Greed (originally four and a half hours) – but surprises people who … Read more