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It is hard to overstate how important Bill Morrison’s work is to the language and history of cinema. As much a historian as he is a filmmaker, Morrison seeks out long-lost work and brings them back to life. In often merging these rescued images with beautiful, cerebral music, a new piece of art is built atop the old, offering both a celebration of what’s been found and what is still to come.

Morrison’s new feature The Village Detective: A Song Cycle is a slight departure, though no less effective. This time around the discovered film is one that was never lost. In fact, it’s a movie rather well-known in its native country of Russia. In 2016, the late, great composer Jóhann Jóhannsson reached out to Morrison about some film canisters that a fishing boat had caught in their net off the coast of Iceland. The four reels...

Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in ‘Mata Hari’: The wrath of the censors (See previous post: "Ramon Novarro in One of the Best Silent Movies.") George Fitzmaurice’s romantic spy melodrama Mata Hari (1931) was well received by critics and enthusiastically embraced by moviegoers. The Greta Garbo / Ramon Novarro combo — the first time Novarro took second billing since becoming a star — turned Mata Hari into a major worldwide blockbuster, with $2.22 million in worldwide rentals. The film became Garbo’s biggest international success to date, and Novarro’s highest-grossing picture after Ben-Hur. (Photo: Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in Mata Hari.) Among MGM’s 1932 releases — Mata Hari opened on December 31, 1931 — only W.S. Van Dyke’s Tarzan, the Ape Man, featuring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, and Edmund Goulding’s all-star Best Picture Academy Award winner Grand Hotel (also with Garbo, in addition to Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and...

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg / Old Heidelberg (1927) Direction: Ernst Lubitsch Screenplay: Hans Kräly; titles by Ruth Cummings and Marian Ainslee; from Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly’s operetta The Student Prince, based on Wilhelm Meyer-Förster’s novel Karl Heinrich and play Old Heidelberg Cast: Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer, Jean Hersholt, Philippe de Lacy, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Edgar Norton, Bobby Mack, Edward Connelly Ramon Navarro, Norma Shearer The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg The theme of a prince who gives up the girl he loves in order to fulfill his royal duty has been tried many times, but Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg is the best. The plot is simple and predictable. After a brief opening of pomp and circumstance [...]...