Colleen Moore
1899 - 1988A huge star in her day, approximately half of Moore's films are now considered lost, including her first talking picture from 1929. What was perhaps her most celebrated film during her lifetime, Flaming Youth (1923), is now mostly lost as well, with only one reel surviving.
Moore took a brief hiatus from acting between 1929 and 1933, just as sound was being added to motion pictures. After the hiatus, her four sound pictures released in 1933 and 1934 were not financial successes. Moore then retired permanently from screen acting.
Forsaking All Others
Émile Chautard
Colleen Moore, Cullen Landis
Jealous of her son Oliver's interest in Penelope Mason, Mrs. Newell takes him to a resort where he is easy prey for designing Enid Morton. After some near-disastrous situations with Enid's suspicious husband, Penelope comes to Oliver's rescue at Mrs. Newell's request.
Forsaking All Others
The Wilderness Trail
Edward LeSaint
Tom Mix, Colleen Moore
Set in the Northwoods of Canada, Tom Mix stars as Donald MacTavish, the newly appointed head commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company. This promotion infuriates MacTavish's rival Angus Fitzpatrick (Frank Clark) who wanted the job. Angus Fitzpatrick takes his anger and resentment out on MacTavish then sets out to get MacTavish fired.
The Wilderness Trail
Common Property
William C. Dowlan, Paul Powell
Colleen Moore, Robert Anderson
Russian Paval Pavlovitch is married to an American woman when a decree is handed down that nationalizes women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five as common property of the state for the use of its citizens. Passports are refused for Pavlovitch's family. His old servant takes out a certificate claiming Pavlovitch's wife Anna, and the son of the village priest claims Pavlovitch's daughter. Matters appear bleak for the Pavlovitch family, but a troop of American cavalry arrives and battles the Russian mob in the streets of Saratov.
Common Property
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Fred Niblo
Ramon Novarro, Francis X. Bushman
Erstwhile childhood friends, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala meet again as adults, this time with Roman officer Messala as conqueror and Judah as a wealthy, though conquered, Israelite. A slip of a brick during a Roman parade causes Judah to be sent off as a galley slave, his property confiscated and his mother and sister imprisoned. Years later, as a result of his determination to stay alive and his willingness to aid his Roman master, Judah returns to his homeland an exalted and wealthy Roman athlete. Unable to find his mother and sister, and believing them dead, he can think of nothing else than revenge against Messala.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
So Long Letty
Al Christie
T. Roy Barnes, Colleen Moore
Harry Miller is a "natural-born mixer" while his wife Grace is a homebody, distressed by her husband's errant ways. Grace finds a kindred spirit in Tommy Robbins, who lives in an adjoining bungalow and whose wife Letty is devoted to the cabarets. Harry admires Letty as much as Tommy admires Grace, and suggests to his neighbor that they arrange an exchange of wives. The wives overhear their husbands' plotting to obtain divorces and, still in love with the men they married, conceive a counter-plan of a week of platonic trial marriages. Over the seven-day period, the wives make life so miserable for each other's husbands that the two men gladly return to their respective spouses.
So Long Letty
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films
Baby Peggy, Heather Linville
Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films
Synthetic Sin
William A. Seiter
Colleen Moore, Antonio Moreno
A young woman impulsively marries a young playwright who whisks her away to New York promises her a role in his next production. Unfortunately the production is a disaster and her husband proclaims her unfit for the role. Rather then return home in defeat, she stays in New York and accidentally gets involved with some vicious gangsters.
Synthetic Sin
Her Wild Oat
Marshall Neilan
Colleen Moore, Larry Kent
In this feature comedy, silent film star Colleen Moore plays a woman who owns a small lunch wagon and falls for a duke’s son, played by Larry Kent, who is pretending to be his own chauffeur. With her savings, she pursues him to a resort hotel, only to be mistaken for a duchess.
Her Wild Oat
The Desert Flower
Irving Cummings
Colleen Moore, Lloyd Hughes
A mining camp girl attempts to reform a young derelict addicted to drink. Colleen Moore broke her neck in a fall from a moving handcar during the making of this rousing sagebrush melodrama. The pert Moore, an idol of her generation, quickly regained her mobility but was reportedly forced to sleep in a leather neck support for nearly ten years.
The Desert Flower
Flaming Youth
John Francis Dillon
Colleen Moore, Milton Sills
When Mona Frentiss dies, she has her confidante "Doctor Bobs" watch over her family, especially her youngest daughter Patricia. The family has been raised in a most unconventional manner, with Mona having a much younger lover and the father Ralph keeping his own lover on the side. As Patricia grows older, she attracts the attention of her mother's former lover, the much older (than Patricia, who in the book is in her early to mid teens) Carey Scott. Patricia tempts fate with her wild ways, nearly loses her virtue to a musician aboard an ocean-going boat, and is saved in time by Carey. Realizing that he is the man for her, she settles down into an experimental marriage.
Flaming Youth
Ella Cinders
Alfred E. Green
Colleen Moore, Lloyd Hughes
Poor Ella Cinders is much abused by her evil step-mother and step-sisters. When she wins a local beauty contest she jumps at the chance to get out of her dead-end life and go to Hollywood, where she is promised a job in the movies. When she arrives in Hollywood, she discovers that the contest was a scam and the job non-existent. But through pluck, luck, and talent, she makes it in the movies anyway, and finds true love.
Ella Cinders
The Nth Commandment
Frank Borzage
Colleen Moore, James Morrison
A department store clerk decides to marry a withdrawing colleague with tuberculosis, over another dashing, ambitious suitor, leads to a life of hardship and struggle. Though The Nth Commandment survives incomplete, enough exists of director Frank Borzage’s last film while under contract with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures for scholar Hervé Dumont to declare “it the first truly Borzagian work.”
The Nth Commandment
