Featuring a live musical score performed by Music Box House Organist Dennis Scott.

DRIFTING, Todd Browning's last film for Universal, is an old-fashioned barnstormer about the drug trade, loose morals, and the redemptive power of love. Based on a 1910 play by John Colton that had enjoyed a successful Broadway revival in 1922, DRIFTING toned down its source material considerably at the request of Browning’s regular star Priscilla Dean, whose “lady of easy virtue” became a run-of-the-mill opium smuggler in China. Dean’s petty criminal finds herself making common cause with her underworld rival Wallace Beery and strives to throw government agent Matt Moore off their trail. An eighteen-year-old Anna May Wong appears as a local opium supplier’s daughter, who develops a crush on Moore. The unsigned New York Times review probably says it best: “a very improbable story, directed with gusty flights of imagination.” 

Print courtesy of George Eastman Museum. Preservation funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation. 

Co-presented by Chicago Film Society

Featuring a live musical score performed by Music Box House Organist Dennis Scott

One of the final features produced by Chicago’s own Selig Polyscope before the company’s bankruptcy, LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE is a film steeped in deprivation: by day children fight over dinners rescued from garbage cans and by night they cower under the covers, menaced by grotesque puppet monsters. Into the breach steps Little Orphant Annie (Colleen Moore, in her earliest extant performance), an eternal optimist and skilled storyteller whose fireside parables teach the other ragamuffins that “the Gobble-uns’ll git you Ef you Don’t Watch Out!” Adapted from the 1885 poem by Indiana’s favorite son James Whitcomb Riley that would later inspire the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, the film version is a work of dark whimsy and homespun special effects. LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE has been painstakingly reconstructed by independent archivist Eric Grayson using materials from the Library of Congress and assorted film collectors.

Introduced by Eric Grayson | Co-presented by Chicago Film Society

Shortly after acquiring the ailing Vitagraph studio, Warner Bros. set about remaking their 1914 melodrama A Million Bid for contract starlet Dolores Costello. Warners assigned the film to Hungarian émigré Curtiz, who needed a low-key follow-up to his ostentatious American debut The Third Degree. Costello loves a young surgeon, but is betrothed to a wealthy jerk (Warner Oland) who ponied up a million bucks for the privilege. Oland eventually forces himself upon Costello aboard his yacht, but a violent storm interrupts his plunder, causing the rapacious millionaire to develop amnesia in the aftermath. High seas hokum of the highest order!

Print courtesy of the Library of Congress | (Photo credit: Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive)

Presented by The Chicago Film Society and The Chicago Critics Film Festival

Although the Japanese film industry converted to sound a few years prior, silent cinema continued to present opportunities for experimentation and refinement for Ozu. Two pairs of adult siblings attempt to eke out a living in Tokyo: a university student shares an apartment with the sister who pays for his education through office work while his girlfriend lives with her policeman brother. When the cop learns that the typist may be supplementing her income with disreputable side gigs, he inadvertently ruins one life and another in turn. This staunchly feminist tragedy envisions gender roles as pernicious traps for men and women alike.

Plus: A Straightforward Boy [Surviving Fragment] (Yasujiro Ozu, 1929, 14 min, 35mm)