Man With A Movie List

Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1918 Runtime: 338 min (originally 418 min split into 12 films) Source: A bootleg DVD version of what's on Youtube, but translated This had the potential to be the most interesting of the three Feuillade serials on this list.  Though it's not in his well-regarded trilogy of crime serials, it is clearly cut from the same cloth.  We have a well-to-do civilian and his friends faced off against a shadowy cabal, although the bad guys turn out to be German spies this time around.  Tih Minh aims to have one long continuous story arc, much more so than Fantomas  or Les Vampires .  The plot relies on a heady mixture of technology and psychology, and it involves amnesia potions, a great deal of hypnotism, and an extremely early mode of electronic surveillance involving wires strung through foliage.  Of course it also woudn't be a Feuillade serial without a man hidden in a wicker basket at some point.  (Seriously, the man love...

Director: Charlie Chaplin Year: 1918 Runtime: 33 minutes Source: Youtube Though it may come before his greatest and most well-known works, A Dog's Life shouldn't really be considered an "early" Charlie Chaplin film.  By 1918, Chaplin was a massive celebrity, one of the highest-paid men in the world, and his character "The Tramp" was already a global icon.  But it is clear from this film that Chaplin was only just beginning to push his character beyond pure vaudeville slapstick. A Dog's Life  is a breezy delight from beginning to end - there are plenty of great set-pieces.  The dog is plenty cute, although she doesn't actually play a huge role in what plot there is, or even in the best comedy bits.  Of course I'm just guessing here, but it's easy to imagine that Chaplin with his notorious perfectionism was immensely frustrated while dealing with a canine costar, and chose to limit her involvement.  In any case, Chaplin is more than cap...

Director: D. W. Griffith Year: 1916 Runtime: 2:47 Source: Amazon I knew of Griffith because of Birth of a Nation , the first true blockbuster film, known for both its innovative technique and explicit racism.  However, I wasn't aware that there was significant backlash at the time from the NAACP, which led to at least a few cities censoring or banning the film.  Intolerance  was intended as a response to those critics.  But despite its theme of love conquering the intolerance of others, it's certainly not an apology from the director.  The title is an outright rebuke to his liberal critics - in his eyes, they're the intolerant ones. In the case of Intolerance , though, the direct object of Griffith's scorn is not African-Americans or the NAACP, but rather the women-led Reform movement, fighting for prohibition and, implicitly, women's rights.  Intolerance  contains four concurrently-told stories from different eras, all to some extent cente...

Director: Louis Feuillade Year: 1915-1916 Runtime: 10 films with a total of 6:57:00 Source:  Kanopy Feuillade immediately capitalized on the success of his first crime serial with a more ambitious follow-up.  Les Vampires bears a lot of hallmarks of its rushed production.  It's nearly identical to Fantomas in its broad outline - criminals with devious disguises (no actual vampires, I'm afraid), a plucky journalist hero, plenty of curtains - but this time, Feuillade was making it up as he went along, apparently letting his actors workshop much of the basic plot. Contemporary critics considered it a classless genre flick at the time, but the public ate it up, and Les Vampires is now considered his finest and most influential work, the origin of the modern thriller.  While Fantomas comprised a sequence of mostly self-contained detective stories (like the newspaper serial it was adapted from), Les Vampires is more of a true serial, with a serpentine plot, and...