Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-Presented by Chicago Film Society | Free Admission for Music Box Members

Theatrical convention dictated that the eponymous lead of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, be played by a girl. Every actress in Hollywood eyed the role, but Barrie himself insisted on casting the unknown seventeen-year-old dancer Betty Bronson over the likes of Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford. Here and elsewhere, Herbert Brenon’s glorious adaptation benefits from its peculiar fidelity to the stage version: the Darling family dog is played by a man in a mutt costume and the very theatrical moment when Peter begs the audience to clap to save Tinker Bell (Virginia Browne Faire) is imported wholesale to the cinema. By locating the magic in plain sight, Brenon fashions an unassuming masterwork ofsilent cinema.

Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-Presented by Chicago Film Society

One of a handful of surviving silent features from Columbia Pictures, THE SIDESHOW is the kind of unpretentious, bread-and-butter entertainment that regularly tumbled out of the Gower Gulch assembly line to meet the demands of small-town exhibitors. After the dissolution of her family’s trapeze act, Queenie (Marie Prevost) takes up with the traveling sideshow troupe of P. W. Melrose (“Little Billy” Rhodes), a circle of social outcasts harboring a saboteur. Melrose suspects carnival barker Ted Rogers (Ralph Graves) to be the culprit, an accusation that could also serve as a swift resolution to their mutual pursuit of Queenie. The rare dramatic showcase for Rhodes (a little person who later acted in THE WIZARD OF OZ) was scarcely noticed, itself treated like a sideshow on the fringe of a changing industry. 

Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Co-Presented by Chicago Film Society

Clarence Brown turned a working rail line into his studio for THE SIGNAL TOWER, a mountain melodrama shot entirely on location in California’s redwood country, hundreds of miles from Hollywood. Switch operator Dave (Rockcliffe Fellowes) works a 12-hour shift at the signal tower, then goes home to his wife Sally (Virginia Valli) and Sonny (Frankie Darro) in their made-to-order cabin. The family takes on a new boarder, Joe (Wallace Beery), the dandified city boy who alternates shifts with Dave at the signal tower and aspires to do so in the homestead too. A stunningly photographed and emotionally direct saga of man and machine, THE SIGNAL TOWER has been restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in conjunction with Photoplay Productions.