Language: Silent, English titles (201)

Featured image for The Silent Man

The Silent Man

Surprise: this drops Hart's standard cowboy-changed-by-a-woman formula. Bigger surprise: it's a total mess...

  • 52 words of highfalutin prose on 3 title cards in the first 40 seconds to describe...nothing: Gee, the desert is awfully empty!
  • It gets worse. From the 90-second mark until 3 minutes in, there's never more than 6 seconds between title cards. Since the title cards are onscreen 5-9 seconds, most of time is spent reading, not viewing. The barrage of titles doesn't slow to a more reasonable pace until 5-6 minutes in.
  • But just when the titles let up, the action on screen in this video gets hopelessly muddled: the hero fights the villain, tries to escape, but somehow ends up out cold on the floor. The next time we see him, a fortnight later, he is followed by a man with a rifle who tells him: “You're turned loose, stranger,” - apparently, he's been jailed but we're not told why.
  • The hero's version of later events doesn't seem to agree with what is shown on screen.
  • When the hero next encounters the villain, he gets his revenge by forcing him to...do something that seems pointless and of no benefit.
  • Both the heroine's-little-brother subplot and the parson's-church subplot are never made to feel relevant - and are never shown to be resolved.
  • Worse of all, the resolution of the main conflict, between hero and villain, is the worst kind of script cop-out.
And then there is the biggest unresolved mystery: why is the hero called “Silent” when he is no more silent than anyone else in this silent film?

Featured image for Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman

Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman

For any hardcore fan of suavecito-smooth, the first few minutes of Barrymore profiling is a fun ride. But it quickly gets old and repetitive. And any hope for mystery is dashed when it becomes apparent that every kid on the block knows that Raffles is "secretly" the Amateur Cracksman. And those who don't know, he reveals it to them. With a villain with no real commitment to skulking or skullduggery, and a story with none of the twists and turns of Fantomas flicks, there's nothing much to see here but the stereotypical American imitation of upper-class British.