The Last Man on Earth
A FILM BY: J.G. Blystone
WRITTEN BY: Donald W. Lee, John D. Swain (story)
STARRING: Earle Foxe, Grace Cunard, Gladys Tennyson
Not to be confused with the post-apocalyptic Vincent Price vs. zombies pic adapted from Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND, the silent version of THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is a work of speculative science fiction super-charged by festering 19th Amendment anxieties. It’s 1954 and the world has been beset by a global pandemic of masculinitis, a disease that mysteriously kills off all men aged fourteen years and older. Eventually one straggler (Earle Foxe) is discovered in the forest, a tree-dwelling Rip Van Winkle utterly unprepared to become a planetary sex symbol. (His childhood crush once taunted him, saying she wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth. Who’s laughing now?) Foxe is soon set upon by female gangsters, female politicians, female scientists, female everything. The climax even comes down to an extended boxing match between the “Senatoresses” from California and Massachusetts! “The girls really amount to very little, except that there are so many of them,” lamented Variety. “In fact the picture is just a super bathing-girl comedy and would prove a great attraction for the average burlesque houses.”
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation
BONUS: This screening will be preceded by the short cartoon “It’s the Cats” (Fleischer Studios, 1926, 7 min, 16mm)
Technical Information
Production Year: 1924
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Run Time: 70 mins
Format: 35mm
The Phantom of the Opera
A FILM BY: Rupert Julian
WRITTEN BY: Gaston Leroux
STARRING: Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry
Music Box Members get in free by showing their membership cards at the box office an hour before the show | Featuring a live musical score performed by Music Box House Organist Dennis Scott
Based on the 1910 novel of the same name, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is the role Lon Chaney was born to play, with a face made so grotesque and emaciated that audiences who saw the film as children on its original release remembered the film in terror for decades.
"It creates beneath the opera one of the most grotesque places in the cinema, and Chaney's performance transforms an absurd character into a haunting one." - Roger Ebert
Technical Information
Production Year: 1925
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Run Time: 93 mins
Format: 35mm
What Price Glory
A FILM BY: Raoul Walsh
WRITTEN BY: Maxwell Anderson (play), Laurence Stallings (play), Malcolm Stuart Boylan (titles), James T. O'Donohoe
STARRING: Victor McLaglen, Dolores Del Rio, Edmund Lowe
Featuring a live musical score performed by Music Box House Organist Dennis Scott
Released a year after the very successful THE BIG PARADE, WHAT PRICE GLORY is Walsh's first high-caliber war film and it's camouflaged beneath the same antiwar sentiment as the former. Unusually gritty battle scenes wallow in the muck of trenches even Kubrick would be proud of. But the real terrain to be taken is that of masculine rivalry. In roles they would reprise three times, Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe begin as suitors to the very suitable Dolores Del Rio, until the dreary realities of war arrive. Adapted from a notably bawdy play, lip-readers had a field day as McLaglen and Lowe dropped some profane bombshells. (description: Pacific Film Archive)
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation
Technical Information
Production Year: 1926
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Run Time: 116 mins
Format: 35mm
