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Women suffrage movie 'Mothers of Men': Dorothy Davenport becomes a judge and later State Governor in socially conscious thriller about U.S. women's voting rights. Women suffrage movie 'Mothers of Men': Will women's right to vote lead to the destruction of The American Family? Directed by and featuring the now all but forgotten Willis Robards, Mothers of Men – about women suffrage and political power – was a fast-paced, 64-minute buried treasure screened at the 2016 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, held June 2–5. I thoroughly enjoyed being taken back in time by this 1917 socially conscious drama that dares to ask the question: “What will happen to the nation if all women have the right to vote?” One newspaper editor insists that women suffrage would mean the destruction of The Family. Women, after all, just did not have the capacity for making objective decisions due to their emotional composition. It...

The world is all out of whack: multiple Dutch tilts are on display in Voyage sans espoir (1943), an unbelievably glossy poetic realist proto-noir from Christian-Jaque: the film actually begins with railway tracks viewed from the front of a speeding train, upside down, as the camera drunkenly rolls upright and titles come flying towards us, slapping flat across the frame like flies hitting a windshield.

The plot is convoluted but crisp—chance encounters tie together Jean Marais, fleeing his job at a bank to see life and settle in Argentina, with an escaped jailbird of psychopathic demeanor (Paul Bernard) and his girlfriend, the radiant Simone Renant. There's also a likably crooked ship's captain carrying a torch for Renant, a sinister ethnic-type sailor (Ky Duyen), and a pair of hard-drinking but eternally sober detectives who resemble nothing more than the Thompson Twins from Tintin. The French had a nifty way with...

“From The Arthouse to The Slaughterhouse” is a new column that will take a look at the films that have impacted the history of cinema by blurring the line between the beautiful and the grotesque; the thoughtful and the bizarre; the artistic and the horrific. Not content with settling for a straightforward approach to either the arthouse or horror genre, these films defy the standards of “talky” arthouse films and “B movie” shocks and find a way to bridge the gap between the two categories. It’s a look into the films that oppose explanation, interpretation, and reasoning. Yet for some reason, they stick in the minds of both scholars and horror fans alike long after the final reel.

The 1929 silent film, Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog), is the first film we will be taking a look at. Nothing seems more appropriate to say the least. At a time...