Unrivaled among silent-film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels are the four epic Danish features for Nordisk Films by its leading director, A.W. Sandberg: Our Mutual Friend (1921), Great Expectations (1922), David Copperfield (1922), and Little Dorrit (1923). The most visually spectacular is Our Mutual Friend, from Dickens’s last completed novel (1864-65), combining a comic satire about greed with a dark mystery that opens as a corpse floats in the Thames. Shot in 1918—the delayed release apparently due to disputes between Sandberg and Nordisk over the film’s ambition and length—its two parts survive only with significant missing footage in the second half, but it still runs almost two-and-a-half hours. Available for the first time with English subtitles that draw on Dickens’s phrasing and with new text screens to fill in missing story information, the forgotten film proves to be one of the great silent literary adaptations.
Category: Silent
German spies, using Freya Talberg as bait, convince neutral Spaniard Ulysses Ferragut to navigate a ship to refuel German U-boats, telling him they would never fire on passenger ships. But one torpedoes the ship his son, Esteban, was on, killing him and many others. He sets out to punish the ones responsible.
Botto, a world-famous circus clown, is negative towards females, because a beautiful woman he once loved laughed at him for his job at the circus. André, a young artist, is Botto’s opposite. He loves women. His current love is Hanna, who also works in the circus. That’s when Botto meets Blanche, a middle-class girl.
All of those handsome young men in their flying machines are billeted in a field next to the Widow Berthelot’s farmhouse in France. Her daughter Jeannine is curious about the young men fighting for England in World War I and their airplanes. Then one of the aviators is killed. His replacement is Captain Philip Blythe who can’t help but notice Jeannine. When he lands the first time, she is standing in the middle of his “runway.” She makes a more favorable impression when he sees her later by the lilacs. When all of the young men depart on a mission, Blythe promises to return.
Nance Pelot is bravely trying to support herself and her father Joe, the town drunk, by playing piano in an unsavory roadside inn owned by Larry Shayne. Chet Todd, the son of a shop owner, is in love with Nance, but her reputation has been sullied by her profession, and so Chet’s mother disapproves of her. Nance inherits a small farm from her mother, and when Shayne discovers that the property is valuable, he plots to cheat Nance out of her inheritance.
After eight years in exile Martin returns to Berlin. He was involved in the German Revolution of 1918/1919 and had to leave the country as a result. Impoverished and lonely, he struggles on alone until the market saleswoman Hanne offers him shelter, although she does not have much money either. They fall in love and Martin even finds work on the construction site for the subway through Tempelhofer Feld. One day, however, he collapses there, whereupon the pregnant Hanne tries to nurse him back to health.
U.S. Marines sergeants Flagg and Quirt have been bitter rivals for years, but when Flagg is promoted to captain and Quirt is assigned to his unit as his senior non-commissioned officer, their competition flares anew. Assigned to the front lines in France during World War I, Quirt and Flagg tussle over the lovely young Charmaine de la Cognac, daughter of local innkeeper Cognac Pete.