‘Lorna Doone’ Set at Silent Movie

Maurice Tourneur’s “Lorna Doone” (at the Silent Movie, Wednesday at 8 p.m.) today is more impressive for the way its once-famous story is told than for that story itself, based on Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s 1869 novel. A triumph of production design and possessed of great pictorial beauty, it is a melodramatic tale of an aristocratic beauty (Madge Bellamy), a ward of Charles II no less, who is kidnaped and raised by the Doones, a clan of thieves and highwaymen whose leader (Frank Keenan, grandfather of Keenan Wynn) intends her to become the bride of his son (Donald MacDonald).

“Lorna Doone” offers a rare opportunity to see, as the film’s likable hero, John Bowers, who resembles the late singing star Allan Jones and whose professional decline and death provided the key inspiration for the character of Norman Maine in the various versions of “A Star Is Born.” Also on the bill: Charlie Chaplin’s “Behind the Screen” (1915), “His New Job” (1915) and an Out of the Inkwell cartoon.

Note: “Violent Femmes,” a weeklong retrospective of films featuring lethal women, commences Wednesday at the Nuart with Terence Malick’s 1973 “Badlands,” featuring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, and Noel Black’s 1968 “Pretty Poison,” featuring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.