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

“It isn’t really a war picture at all. It’s a peace picture. It holds out the hope that, in time, we may forget all about war and war pictures and just have a good time, which will throw that kettle-drummer out of a job, but otherwise will be all for the best.” — Screenland.

A spiritual precursor to All Quiet on the Western Front, BARBED WIRE is a quiet anti-war film beautifully photographed by frequent John Ford Collaborator Bert Glennon. Pola Negri plays a French farm girl who falls in love with Clive Brook, a German POW in the Middle of WWI.

Rare archival 16mm print

After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl (Louise Brooks) tries to escape the country with a young vagabond (Richard Arlen). She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police, and reach Canada. Released more than a year before The Great Depression, the film was loosely based on Jim Tully’s novel Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography, published in 1924, which describes his hardscrabble existence on the rails during the recession years of the 1890s and 1900s.

35mm print courtesy of the George Eastman Museum, permission Paramount Pictures. Preservation Funded by the Film Foundation. 

The Goat (Buster Keaton & Malcolm St. Clair, 1921, 21 mins, DCP)

A series of adventures begins when Buster is mistaken for the famous outlaw Dead Shot Dan. 

Cops (Buster Keaton & Edward Cline, 1922, 18 mins, DCP)

Buster Keaton gets involved in a series of misunderstandings involving a horse and cart. Eventually he infuriates every cop in the city when he accidentally interrupts a police parade.

The Bell Boy (Roscoe Arbuckle, 1918, 33 mins DCP)

At the Elk's Head Hotel, bellhops torment the lobby, each other and guests. The elevator is powered by a stubborn horse, a sham robbery turns into a real one, and a runaway trolley leads to a chase through downtown.

The Playhouse (Buster Keaton & Edward Cline, 1921, 22 mins, DCP)

After waking up from his wacky dream, a theater stage hand inadvertently causes havoc everywhere he works.

Character Studies (1925, 6 mins,  DCP)

An amusing, technically impressive curio featuring some of the greatest male movie stars of the silent era. On a vaudeville-type stage, Carter DeHaven, a popular comedian at the time, announces a series of 'impressions' of several of the biggest film stars of the 1920s. Also featuring Harold Lloyd, Fatty Arbuckle, and Rudolph Valentino.

One of the greatest comedy teams of all time, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared in hundreds of shorts before starring as a pair of hoboes in the 1927 short DUCK SOUP (no relation to the Marx Brothers movie). “Ollie” got into the motion picture business as a theater operator at the age of seventeen, who thought he could do better than the bums he saw on screen and set out for Jacksonville, FL (then a burgeoning city for film production), and Stan began his career as an understudy to Charlie Chaplin. This selection of restored 35mm prints represents some of their very best and uproarious work from the last days of silent cinema: Stan and Ollie star as sailors on shore leave stuck in a traffic jam (TWO TARS, 1928), stable workers (WRONG AGAIN, 1929), Christmas Tree salesman (BIG BUSINESS, 1929), and mud slinging golfers (SHOULD MARRIED MEN GO HOME, 1928). Sons of the Desert members welcome.

Special thanks to Todd Wiener and Steven K. Hill at UCLA Film and Television Archive, Lynanne Schweighofer at the Library of Congress, and Jeff Joseph.

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

Chicago International Film Festival Co-Founder Colleen Moore stars as “Mary Lou Smith, orphan – whose father left her a lunch wagon, a dog, and a lot of ambition.” When the love of her life goes to Plymouth Beach for vacation, she follows him and impersonates a duchess to win his heart. Thought to be lost for decades, HER WILD OAT screens in a restoration from the Academy Film Archive, reconstructed from a print found in the Czech National Film Archive. 

The film will be introduced by film historian Joe Yranski, who has been working to restore all of Colleen Moore's films, many of which were previously thought to be completely lost.

35mm print from the Academy Film Archive

Tsarist general Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings) is basking in the glory of imperial Russia. After sending the revolutionary Lev Andreyev (William Powell) to prison, he starts romancing Andreyev's girl. But when the Bolsheviks seize power, the tide turns for Alexander, and he flees Russia. Years later, Alexander, broke and working as a bit player in Hollywood, bumps into Andreyev, who is now a director. Andreyev casts his old nemesis as a Russian general, intending to humiliate him on set.

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

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