Douglas Messerli | Two Silent Remakes [Introduction]

two silent remakes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Although silent films had been dismissed, ignored, and maltreated, the large majority of them having even been destroyed through their being printed on nitrate and neglected. For example, 16 of the great director Alfred Hitchcock’s silent films have been lost or only survive in only fragments. Some of the greatest of silent filmmakers’ and actors’ works of the silent era have been lost including the 1917 Theda Bara production of Cleopatra, one of the first of science fiction films, Bruce Gordon and J. L. V. Leigh’s The First Men in the Moon (also 1917), the 1910 short version of Frankenstein, and the 1926 movie The Great Gatsby are among the many hundreds of films lost. It is estimated by perhaps 70-90% of silent films have gone missing.

                                        Poil de carotte, 1925

     Of those that remained, filmmakers of the 1920s and throughout Hollywood history turned to them again and again as sources of movies which, once sound came into being, they could readily pirate, plot intact, and remake in a manner that would further appeal to their audiences. On occasion, films were remade numerous times; one only need think of King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Student of Prague, or the numerous remakes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, several of which I recount in this very volume of My Queer Cinema. But just as many lesser-known films were also remade in the 1920s and long after, the endless sea of films from the first decade of this century and the 1920s brought to the screen over the following decades.

                                      Poil de carotte, 1932

     Some of these remakes of been written about, a few of them even extensively. But most of the attention to the films has been focused on the remake rather than the original, and often—and I know that those who dislike silent films will be surprised by my saying this—the original silent film was far superior to the talkie remake. And even if technically they were inferior, as I have noted about the earlier versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, some of silent films were much closer to their original sources and were far more adventurous regarding their themes, costumes, and dialogue than were the late large studio productions. Even when they were helmed by the same director as in the case of Julien Duvivier’s Carrot Top I describe below, the works of took chances and were more visually expressive than what came later.

      In this special gathering, I discuss two versions of Julie Duvivier’s Carrot Top, one from 1925, the second from 1932, both before the heavy hand of the Hollywood Production Code might have had any effect (European films were also affected by the code, particularly if they were attempting to market their films in translation in US). And I also compare the two versions of Ben-Hur, both grand Hollywood productions, the first from 1959. I believe the differences I noted might help in a new interest in and attention to how films are retransformed over the years, even in as short of a period as a single decade.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2025