Silent Movie Schedules an Impressive Bill of Rarities

The Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., launches its fifth weeklong, 8 p.m. daily festival of rarities beginning tonight, a lead-in to the annual Cinecon Convention, which presents rare silents and early talkies at the Hollywood Roosevelt Thursday through Sept. 4.

Screening tonight is a splendid Lillian Gish double feature, “The Fatal Marriage” (1915) and “Sold for Marriage” (1916), both directed by D.W. Griffith protege W. Christy Cabanne. The first is actually Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” in which Gish reveals that she is already a master of understated, natural expressiveness playing a wife and mother resisting for years remarriage (to a handsome, devoted Wallace Reid) in the hope that her husband (Alfred Paget), lost at sea, will return. This Griffith production, shown on a pristine print, is exquisitely cinematic and makes poignant use of iris shots, a Griffith hallmark. “Sold for Marriage,” likewise impressive, deftly protests that fate for young Russian emigre women, one of whom is played by Gish with an atypical earthiness.

Cecil B. DeMille’s “Romance of the Redwoods” (1917) and his “Old Wives for New” (1918), screening Tuesday, are a pair of winners. The first finds a spunky, radiant Mary Pickford in Gold Rush country, falling in love with the stagecoach robber (Elliott Dexter) who’s assumed the identity of her late uncle. This romance evolves with surprising credibility against remarkably authentic settings.

Despite melodramatic elements, the handsome “Old Wives for New” anticipates most strikingly the observant, socially critical Sinclair Lewis novels of the ‘20s as a small-town industrialist (the versatile Dexter), whose shrewish wife (Sylvia Ashton) has let herself go, finds himself attracted to lovely vacationing dressmaker Florence Vidor.

Ernst Lubitsch’s half-hour knockabout comedy “I Don’t Want to Be a Man” (1919), screening Wednesday with another rarity, “Sex” (1920), has a timeless effervescence as a hoydenish rich girl (Ossi Oswalda) dons a white tie and tails to go out on the town once her guardian uncle has sailed for America.

Six years before Mae West dared to call a play “Sex,” Thomas Ince produced and Fred Nible directed a film called “Sex,” starring Louise Glaum, who plays a New York cabaret star, the mistress of a married man. Steeped in period atmosphere, the film ultimately regards Glaum as a home-wrecker who gets her just deserts, but what gives it its edge is that in truth she is simply a blunt, honest woman who doesn’t realize her own vulnerability.

Maurice Tourneur’s 1919 film of Joseph Conrad’s “Victory” (Thursday) is not one of this major director’s more subtle efforts but is an amusing, handsomely produced melodrama in which an elegant Jack Holt has sought solitude in the Dutch East Indies only to give refuge to a desperate Seena Owen, triggering an invasion by three ruthless fortune hunters, including a gleefully nasty Lon Chaney. Playing with it is Irvin Willat’s “False Faces” (1919), a convoluted, exposition-heavy thriller which pits the Lone Wolf (Henry B. Walthall), a Belgian gentleman-secret agent, against Chaney’s nefarious German spy.

Occasionally, the Silent Movie actually shows a talkie, and “The Passionate Plumber,” an awkward and unfunny 1932 reworking of Frederick Lonsdale’s “Her Cardboard Lover,” is of interest only for its teaming of Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante, so soon to replace Keaton at MGM. A young socialite (Irene Purcell) passes off her plumber (Keaton)--Durante is her chauffeur--to her jealous suitor (Gilbert Roland, more amusing than either Keaton or Durante). A razor-sharp print shows off lush Cedric Gibbons sets. “The Passionate Plumber” screens Friday and Saturday with another early Keaton talkie, “Parlor, Bedroom and Bath” (1931). Information: (213) 653-2389.

The Monica 4-Plex’s annual Hong Kong Premiere Showcase concludes with the one-week run, commencing Friday, of Yuen Woo-Ping’s outstanding “The Tai-Chi Master,” a lively yet reflective martial arts epic, a mythical rendering of the evolution of the bold Tai-Chi style of combat in which two lifelong friends (Jet Lee, Chin Siu-Ho) trained by Shaolin Temple monks take radically diverse paths as adults. Michelle Khan co-stars. Information: (310) 394-9741.