Tag Archives: 1920s

Cainá is a young peasant who lives in a small village in Sardinia together with her goats and parents. She is a wild and free spirit and unconventional for any small and closed communities dominated by old rules. Cainà yearns to escape from such a closed atmosphere and the isolated island, so, as an old tune says: “Somewhere beyond the sea, somewhere, waiting for me…”; When a boat arrives to the island, she will do her best to flee away from her little oppressing village and experience new adventures in the continent with the help of the boat captain.

Hank owns horses, stables horses and races horses. He favorite horse always wins and he is prosperous and will known. His son (Bob), however dreams only of the future of the horseless carriage and not of the horse. This causes problems between Hank and Bob. As the people in the town convert from horses to autos, Hank detests those who switch – so he looses his friends, his son Bob and finally his livery business. Bob leaves his flame Rose and goes to Detroit, gets involved with the auto industry and does very well. He does not forget Hank and promises to see him again, but Hank’s hatred of the auto may cause the death of Bob.

An American boy turns out to be the long-lost heir of a British fortune. He is sent to live with the cold and unsentimental lord who oversees the trust.

A young girl and her father are kicked out of their house by a cruel noblewoman, and the girl’s heart is broken when her sweetheart, the noblewoman’s son, won’t go to Paris with them. After becoming an opera star in Paris, the girl returns to her homeland and finds her romance with the nobleman rekindled.

“Brüder”, a film directed by Herr Werner Hochbaum ( who was a remarkable film director in the talkie 30’s ), was one of those films which showed the harsh daily life of the working class. The film depicts, in a kind of fictional documentary, the 1896 Hamburg dockworkers’ strike: the workers receive meagre wages for hard work and live under miserable conditions and finally go on strike (to make matters more personal, one of the strikers has a brother who is a policeman). Even though the inspiration for the story was an event that took place in the XIX century, things had little changed by the troublesome twenties so the story had a perfect contemporary ring.

In a village on the banks of the Rhone river, Alban, a young farmer, is about to marry Margot. Monsieur Broc, a town hall employee, discovers his daughter is taken with Alban. When he rejects her, she collapses. Suddenly, the river rises and floods the village. One evening, Margot disapears… This peasant drama, adapted from a novel by André Corthis and shot during an actual flood of the Rhone, was Delluc’s last. The human madness is an echo to nature’s fury, magnified by moving images of a Provence submerged by water and mist.

A wife, tired of her husband’s non-stop carousing, sues him for divorce. The judge, however, comes up with a novel solution–he makes the husband take his wife’s place in the household–including dressing like her–for 30 days to see what it’s like to be his wife.

In 1914 a girl of the streets is befriended by two dashing young officers, an Austrian and a Russian. Both fall in love with her, but she picks the Austrian. When the war begins, Her town is overrun by Russians, lead by the once charming, now vengeful officer, who takes her prisoner and threatens death if she won’t marry him.

A young man who doesn’t find a job in his small hometown, tries his luck in New York, but is overwelmed by the life of the city, so decides to try his luck somewhere else after a only a few minutes in New York. He falls off a train near a ranch, where he tries his luck as a cowbowy, being in his own way very sucessful. But he shows what he can do when the farm has to bring a 100 head of cattle to the slaughterhouses of Los Angeles to avoid going bankrupt, against the will of his neighbour who wants a better price. After a shoot-out with the neighbour’s men he’s the only person on a Los Angeles bound train with 1000 cows….

This documentary promoting the joys of life in a Soviet village centers around the activities of the Young Pioneers. These children are constantly busy, pasting propaganda posters on walls, distributing hand bills, exhorting all to “buy from the cooperative” as opposed to the Public Sector, promoting temperance, and helping poor widows. Experimental portions of the film, projected in reverse, feature the un-slaughtering of a bull and the un-baking of bread.