Storm Over Asia

1928 · Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin

Vsevolod Pudovkin's visually magnificent final silent film, set during the Russian Civil War in Mongolia. A young Mongol herdsman is cheated by a Western fur trader, joins the partisans, and is captured by the occupying British forces, who discover an amulet identifying him as a descendant of Genghis Khan. They install him as a puppet ruler — but the puppet has ideas of his own. Shot partly on location in the Mongolian steppe with breathtaking landscape photography, the film builds to one of the most extraordinary climaxes in all of silent cinema: a literal storm that seems to sweep away the old colonial order. Pudovkin's fusion of intimate character study, anti-imperialist politics, and sheer visual grandeur makes this one of the crowning achievements of Soviet montage cinema.

Watch Now

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Released 102 years ago today

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Lon Chaney could make you believe he was anyone. A legless crime lord. A vengeful paralytic. A tormented circus clown. A disfigured phantom haunting the Paris Opera. He designed his own makeup, often enduring considerable physical pain to achieve his transformations, and he brought to every role a depth of feeling that elevated genre material into something genuinely moving. Between 1919 and 1930, he was the biggest star in horror cinema and one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, period. He died of throat cancer at forty-seven, just as the sound era was beginning, and the loss is still felt. What made Chaney extraordinary was not the makeup alone but what he did underneath it. His characters are almost always outcasts: men deformed by accident or birth, criminals shaped by cruelty, performers hiding behind disguises. In lesser hands these roles would be freak-show spectacle. Chaney found the humanity in them. His Quasimodo is heartbreaking. His Phantom is tragic. Even his most monstrous creations carry a loneliness that makes the audience complicit in their suffering. He understood that the most effective horror comes not from revulsion but from recognition. This collection traces Chaney's career from his first collaboration with Tod Browning through the iconic roles that made him a legend. Five of the thirteen films were directed by Browning, whose fascination with the grotesque and the marginal made him Chaney's ideal creative partner. The others showcase the range of directors who recognized what Chaney could bring to their work, from Victor Sjöström's European gravity to the grand spectacle of Universal's horror productions. Together, they constitute the most remarkable body of screen performance in the silent era.

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Mary Pickford was the most powerful woman in the history of early Hollywood, and for a time she was the most famous woman in the world. Born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto in 1892, she was a stage veteran by the age of eight and a film star by sixteen, and she leveraged her enormous popularity into a degree of creative and financial control that no actor — male or female — had previously achieved. She co-founded United Artists in 1919 with Chaplin, Fairbanks, and Griffith, becoming the first major star to own her own distribution company. She produced her own films, chose her own directors, and negotiated contracts that made her the highest-paid performer in the industry. Her screen persona — plucky, resourceful, emotionally transparent — was often dismissed as sentimental, but the performances themselves are far more sophisticated than their reputation suggests. In Stella Maris she played two roles, one a privileged beauty and the other a disfigured orphan, and the contrast revealed a dramatic range that critics consistently underestimated. In Sparrows she combined fairy-tale innocence with genuine physical danger, leading a group of kidnapped children through a swamp full of alligators in sequences she performed without doubles. She was not merely “America's Sweetheart.” She was a complete filmmaker who happened to perform in front of the camera. Pickford retired from acting in 1933, frustrated by the limited roles available to her in the sound era, and spent the rest of her long life as a producer and businesswoman. The nine films collected here span the full arc of her career, from the early features that made her a star through the late silents that showcased the full range of her talent and ambition.

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Films Like “The Blood Ship”

Danger Lights

1931

Juno and the Paycock

1930

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1925

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1929

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1929

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From: Soviet Montage

Storm Over Asia

1928 · Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin

Vsevolod Pudovkin's visually magnificent final silent film, set during the Russian Civil War in Mongolia. A young Mongol herdsman is cheated by a Western fur trader, joins the partisans, and is captured by the occupying British forces, who discover an amulet identifying him as a descendant of Genghis Khan. They install him as a puppet ruler — but the puppet has ideas of his own. Shot partly on location in the Mongolian steppe with breathtaking landscape photography, the film builds to one of the most extraordinary climaxes in all of silent cinema: a literal storm that seems to sweep away the old colonial order. Pudovkin's fusion of intimate character study, anti-imperialist politics, and sheer visual grandeur makes this one of the crowning achievements of Soviet montage cinema.

Watch Now

Film of the Day

Released 102 years ago today

The White Moth

1924 · Maurice Tourneur

When a girl tries to drown herself in the Seine, she is rescued by dancer Gonzalo Montrez. She then becomes a famous dancer known as the White Moth.

Watch Now

Storm Over Asia

Film of the Day

The White Moth

Recently Added

The Blood Ship

Where East Is East

The Captive

The Noon Whistle

Return to Reason

The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice

Limite

East Side, West Side

Hell's Heroes

Chicago

A Story of Floating Weeds

The Trail of '98

Pioneers of Cinema

Films Like “The Blood Ship”

Danger Lights

Juno and the Paycock

The Late Mathias Pascal

The Scar of Shame

Pandora's Box

Asphalt

Sinners in Paradise

Male and Female

Beggars of Life

The Dawn Patrol

Born Reckless

Dixiana

Action

The Three Must-Get-Theres

Zorro Rides Again

Serpent

Tell It to the Marines

By the Law

The Montana Kid

The Trail of '98

Life of an American Fireman

Men Without Women

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The Dawn Patrol

Easy Street

Adventure

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge

Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

Zorro Rides Again

Ivanhoe

Sumurun

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Peter Pan

The Holy Mountain

The Magic Cloak of Oz

Robin Hood

East of Borneo

The Cave of the Silken Web

Animation

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The Enchanted Drawing

The Sinking of the Lusitania

Fantasmagorie

The Haunted Hotel

Interplanetary Revolution

How a Mosquito Operates

Out of the Inkwell

And the Villain Still Pursued Her; or, the Author's Dream

Black and White

Victorious Destination

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

All Films

13 Washington Square

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