The first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture — and it earned it. William Wellman's World War I aviation epic follows two young men, one wealthy, one working-class, both in love with the same woman, who become fighter pilots on the Western Front and forge a bond that the war will test in the most devastating way imaginable. The aerial combat sequences are among the most astonishing ever filmed: real planes, real dogfights, cameras mounted on the aircraft themselves, and a realism so visceral that several pilots were seriously injured during production. Clara Bow lights up every scene she's in as the girl next door, and the battle of Saint-Mihiel sequence — a massive ground assault filmed from above — anticipates Saving Private Ryan by seventy years. A cornerstone of American cinema and an unforgettable spectacle.
The first film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's beloved play — and a remarkably faithful one, produced with Barrie's direct involvement. Betty Bronson is a sprightly, androgynous Peter Pan, leading the Darling children to Neverland for adventures with pirates, mermaids, and the villainous Captain Hook (Ernest Torrence, magnificent). Anna May Wong appears as the Native princess Tiger Lily, bringing her characteristic grace and screen presence to a role that, while confined by the period's racial conventions, she invests with genuine dignity. The film's special effects — flying scenes achieved with visible wires that somehow add to the theatrical charm — capture the play's magic with a sincerity that later, more technically polished adaptations often lack. A genuine enchantment.
Lambert Hillyer's crime melodrama gives Lon Chaney one of his most physically demanding roles — a henchman for a San Francisco blackmail ring who is crippled, walking with a twisted, contorted gait that Chaney achieved through another of his legendary self-torturing contraptions. Sent to a small town to set up a banker for extortion, Chaney's character unexpectedly falls in love with the banker's daughter, and his loyalty to the gang begins to waver. The film's most remarkable sequence is a devastating earthquake — staged with impressive practical effects for 1923 — that serves as both literal catastrophe and metaphor for the moral upheaval in Chaney's character. Not among his most celebrated films, but a fascinating showcase for his physical acting and his ability to find humanity in characters defined by pain and disability.
A charismatic lieutenant newly assigned to a remote fort is captured by a group of mountain bandits, thus setting in motion a madcap farce that is Lubitsch at his most unrestrained. A wonderfully anarchic and playfully subversive satire of military life from…
