10 great films of 1925

Halfway through the roaring 20s, Hollywood had comfortably established itself as the film colony. However, 1925 was the year in which it went large, creating expensive, spectacular blockbusters. A case in point, the epic Ben-Hur (Fred Niblo), with its two-strip Technicolor sequences and magnificent chariot race, marketed by MGM as “The Supreme Motion Picture Masterpiece of All Time” and raking in millions at the box office. 

Other examples of Hollywood’s grand ambitions included World War I drama The Big Parade (King Vidor), starring John Gilbert, which was one of the biggest hits of the decade, and prehistoric adventure The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt), with effects by Willis O’Brien, who would later work on King Kong (1933). 

Hollywood also worked well in a gentler mode, producing first-class melodramas such as Stella Dallas (below) and also smart, adult-oriented films such as drama The Goose Woman and romcom Smouldering Fires (both directed by Clarence Brown). But American cinema was not all about Hollywood. Tenacious independents included Oscar Micheaux, who this year directed Body and Soul, a ‘race film’ starring Paul Robeson as estranged twins, one a good man and the other an escaped convict posing as a vicar. Yes, the same Robeson who denied he ever made any silent films.

More exciting things were afoot in Europe and the Soviet Union. The selection below samples some of the filmmakers who were making waves: Sergei Eisenstein, G.W. Pabst, Carl Theodor Dreyer. Jostling for a place on this list: international love-triangle drama Varieté (E. A. Dupont), Pirandello adaptation Feu Mathias Pascal (Marcel L’Herbier) and the debut feature by a young Brit named Alfred Hitchcock: The Pleasure Garden.

Director: Jacques Feyder

This intense, poetic-realist film was directed by Belgian filmmaker Jacques Feyder in 1923 and released two years later. Visages d’enfants was a deeply personal film for Feyder, who had already built a reputation as a great innovator in the French film industry. He and his wife Françoise Rosay wrote the screenplay, intending to show childhood with sentiment, and to portray a religious community, isolated in an unforgiving landscape – the snow-covered Swiss mountains. 

Jean Forest, who also starred in Feyder’s Crainquebille (1922), plays young Jean, anguished by his resentment of his stepmother and stepsister Arlette. A crisis occurs when Arlette is caught in an avalanche and Jean must take the blame. Striking as that sequence is, it is the film’s opening scene, 11 minutes of Jean’s late mother’s funeral, which sets out what makes this film special: in its rigour and clarity it offers psychological depth in its depiction of raw grief and childish innocence, as well as a complete portrait of the village.

Director: G.W. Pabst

Austrian-born director Pabst created a masterwork of Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, in this grim but rewarding study of the effects of hyperinflation on one slum street in Vienna in the early 1920s, adapted from Hugo Bettauer’s novel of the same name. Typically for Pabst, his social critique is mired in sleaze. His theme is the moral corruption that accompanies economic catastrophe, and he uses the lives of women to illustrate his message. 

Asta Nielsen, the great Danish diva, plays a young working-class woman who runs away from home and falls into danger when her boyfriend refuses to take her in. Meanwhile, Greta Garbo, in her first role outside Sweden, plays her neighbour, the middle-class daughter of a civil servant, prey to the same social traps but pointedly with a greater chance of survival – and rescue. Notable villains include the provocative cabaret star Valeska Gert as a brothel madam posing as a boutique owner, and Werner Krauss as the grisly butcher who demands female flesh in exchange for meat.

Director: Charles Chaplin

In a strong year for slapstick features, including Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances and Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush is the clear leader. Inspired by nothing less than the harrowing experience of the Donner Party, wagon-train pioneers who resorted to cannibalism after being snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, The Gold Rush sees The Little Tramp AKA The Lone Prospector set out to strike it rich in the Klondike. 

Chaplin believed comedy was just a tragedy in long shot, and in this film the prospector is beset by starvation, loneliness and a marauding grizzly bear, not to mention the terrifying Black Larsen, played by hillbilly musician Tom Murray. The film features some of Chaplin’s best-loved set pieces, including the dance of the bread rolls, the boot-feast and the nail-biting scene of his cabin balancing precariously on a cliff-edge. Hilarity, heartbreak, stunts and a touch of the bizarre: it was a winning formula for Chaplin, but incredibly difficult for anyone else to emulate.

Directors: Rupert Julian

Lon Chaney was at the peak of his powers in the mid-1920s, and his starring role in this melodrama exemplifies his talent for facial make-up and dramatic heft, a performance that unifies what was a notoriously troubled production. This adaptation of the Gaston Leroux novel looks amazing, with lavish set design throughout the opera house from the chandelier that comes crashing down into the auditorium to the cellars far below. Plus, a striking centrepiece in two-strip Technicolor, with the Phantom entering a masked ball dressed in magnificent scarlet as ‘The Red Death’.

It’s a film that plays constantly in a high key, from Christine (Mary Philbin) tearing off the Phantom’s mask to reveal his deformed face, to the climactic flood sequence. Horror films, as such, did not really exist as a genre in the 1920s and yet this can clearly be viewed in hindsight as an early, excellent, entry in the celebrated Universal monsters cycle.

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Not just a comedy from the famously austere director best known for his religious dramas, but a feminist comedy about the gender roles within marriage and the unequal burden of housework. In Denmark, where this film was made, it was known by the commanding title Thou Shalt Honour Thy Wife. Viktor, the frustrated tyrant-husband, is played by Johannes Meyer, a massive Danish film star, and his long-suffering wife Ida is played by the acclaimed actor Astrid Holm, a performer of great sensitivity. 

Dreyer, shooting in a small set designed to replicate the dimensions of a typical city apartment, and with a generous number of precisely placed edits, immediately reveals the inequity in their relationship, with an inspired opening sequence. Who can save this domestic disaster? Mads, Viktor’s former nanny, played magnificently by the imperious Mathilde Nielsen, arrives to take her former charge in hand once again. As sharp in its social critique as it is sweet on the bonds of family, Master of the House is a nimble, progressive delight.

Director: Henry King

Adapted by Frances Marion, this silent production of Olive Higgins Prouty’s weepie novel precedes the better-known 1937 film starring Barbara Stanwyck. Hold tight to your handkerchiefs, because the silent version is, if anything, more emotionally affecting. Belle Bennett embodies the single mother from the wrong side of the tracks who makes an incredible sacrifice for her daughter Laurel’s happiness, and she brings out Stella’s precarity and vulnerability in the most astonishing ways. “Both on stage and off, she is Stella Dallas,” said Marion. “She has had everything on earth happen to her.” A more familiar face, Ronald Colman plays her upper-class ex. 

Heartbreaking scenes such as young Laurel’s birthday party and the rainsoaked finale are still liable to provoke floods of tears in the audience. Samuel Goldwyn spent a small fortune ($700,000) on this, determined to make his masterpiece. And yet, the virtues of the film are the intimate moments between characters that carry such naturalness that you don’t realise your heartstrings are being tugged until it is too late.

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Oscar Wilde plus Ernst Lubitsch equals a veritable banquet of wit and innuendo in this sophisticated comedy drama, adapted from the 1892 play. The famous Lubitsch touch is fully present, as the director replaces Wilde’s wordplay with some audacious visual humour – here a cigar in an ashtray is worth a thousand words. 

The story that unfolds concerns a scandalous older woman, Mrs Erlynne (the fabulous Irene Rich), her estranged daughter Lady Windermere (May McAvoy, who also starred in Ben-Hur), and said daughter’s flirtatious admirer Lord Darlington (English smoothie Ronald Colman, once again). Savour, in particular, the beautifully orchestrated scenes at the racetrack, where Mrs Erlynne drives the attending gentlemen, and the gossips, to distraction. Lubitsch is on fine form lacerating high-society hypocrisy, but with a compassion for the love bonds between husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, that can survive this hostile terrain. It’s an immensely satisfying adult comedy.

Director: Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein’s debut feature, the labour drama Strike, which was released at the start of the year, well deserves a place on this list. However, 1925 was also the year that he directed the monumental Battleship Potemkin, the stirring dramatisation of a mutiny on a Russian warship in 1905, which may be the most influential of all silent films. 

An exercise in propaganda and an experiment in editing, Potemkin breathes new life and purpose into the medium of cinema. The oft-quoted and still-breathtaking Odessa Steps sequence alone would make this film a classic. In this scene, as the Cossacks crush a popular uprising in the Ukrainian city, Eisenstein’s montage emphasises both the horrific force of the violence and the revolutionary spirit that rises as a result of the massacre. A roaring lion among silent films, every frame of Battleship Potemkin works to rouse the audience to revolt, and bend their sympathies to solidarity.

Director: Julien Duvivier

Another heartbreaking film from France, and another one about a troubled young boy. This adaptation of an autobiographical novella of 1894 by Jules Renard was a favourite of director Julien Duvivier: “Of all the films I have made, this is closest to my heart.” The story of a boy’s abusive childhood resonated with the director’s own experience, and he remade it in sound in 1932. 

Duvivier’s poetic flair makes use of superimpositions and plays games with perspective to immerse the audience in a dysfunctional family dynamic. The monster in this nightmare is the mother, played as a full-on grotesque by Charlotte Barbier-Krauss, who humiliates and torments her redheaded son, played superbly by André Heuzé. It’s strong stuff, and an outcry about the liberties taken with the source novel led to the film being heavily cut and circulating for a long time without certain upsetting sequences, including the infamous potty scene. Eventually, in the film’s distressing climax, “Carrot-top” is driven right to the brink by his cruel treatment, and this film bears comparison with Visages d’enfants, two very different portraits of unhappy children, albeit made in the same artistic mode.

Director: Buntaro Futagawa

Much of 1920s Japanese cinema is lost, but the samurai film Orochi, which means ‘The Serpent’, is one of the highlights of what remains. Tsumasaburo Bando, a huge star known as Bantsuma and lauded as ‘The King of the Swordfights’, plays the antihero Kuritomi, a working-class samurai who is initially loyal but, when provoked, knows exactly how to unleash terrible violence.

The film combines a realistic strain, including Kuritomi’s existential crisis and a critique of the failings of feudalism, with frenetic fight scenes that dazzle the eye. The swords are sharp but so too are the fast and furious edits, which keep up the impossible momentum, combined with a deft use of tracking shots and close-ups. It’s exciting, intelligent filmmaking and is part of the transition from earlier, Kabuki-influenced swordfighting films to the action-heavy chambara movies we are all more familiar with.