10 great films of 1926

In March 1926, Virginia Woolf visited the Film Society in London and described “peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer”. European cinema was more ambitious than ever, especially in Germany, with a string of prestige releases and Fritz Lang toiling away at Ufa on an epic that would not be released until the following year – Metropolis. 

Hitchcock had been taking note, and was incorporating the shadows of expressionism in a film, also released the following year, that was shooting in London – The Lodger. Meanwhile, working on a small scale, with grand repercussions, paper-cut animator Lotte Reiniger made her first feature-length film. The avant-garde flourished in France, in short-form, documentary, experimental film and narrative features, and the young Soviet filmmakers expressed themselves in yet more challenging and confrontational ways. 

It was a year no one in Hollywood could forget. The early death of Rudolph Valentino in August rocked the business and the whole world, as young women in particular went into mourning everywhere. It felt like the end of an era, because it was. The winds of change were gathering speed, thanks to new technology and new business practices. 

Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckled his way through The Black Pirate (Albert Parker), a feature shot in eye-scorching two-strip Technicolor. Warner Bros put out the romance Don Juan (Alan Crosland), starring John Barrymore, with a continuous Vitaphone soundtrack and scored its biggest hit yet, even though the critics hated it. This was the first volley in the talkie revolution that was to turn the business upside down. And all the major studios were at work integrating their businesses, so they could control their films from studio to cinema, a consolidation of power that set the conditions for the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

Yet the influence of that astonishing art cinema from across the Atlantic was felt everywhere.

Director: Rex Ingram

Apt enough, as the cinema teeters between artistic experimentation and deeper industrialisation, to begin with this unusual feature, released at the start of the year and directed by the man who made Valentino a star in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). 

This is an MGM picture, made over 15 painstaking months by Ingram, working out of his own studio just outside Nice, France, and shot on location across Europe. Ulysses (Antonio Moreno) is a Spanish sailor who falls for Freya (Ingram’s wife Alice Terry), a German spy, during World War I. Ingram tells their romance in the most breathtakingly beautiful way, and submitted a four-hour edit to the studio. The two-hour release cut was a hit everywhere, except, inevitably, in Germany. Michael Powell, who worked as a trainee on the production, claimed it as an influence, and Orson Welles took inspiration from a scene where the lovers visit an aquarium for a key sequence in The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

Director: William Beaudine

At the height of her Hollywood heyday, Mary Pickford had the audacity and brilliance to make a film inspired by her admiration for German expressionism, about a group of young orphans trapped on a farm by a leering villain, played by Gustav von Seyffertitz. If you’ve seen it, then you will know that it is a stunning example of a star-led Hollywood studio picture inspired by European art. The cinematography, by Charles Rosher, Karl Struss and Hal Mohr is exceptional, conjuring a powerful atmosphere of Southern Gothic as well as sharp double-exposures, including such grand flourishes as a pastoral vision of Jesus. 

The critics balked at the excess of peril, not least in the sequence when Pickford leads her young brood to safety through the alligator-riddled swamp, which in retrospect Pickford wished had been another trick shot. But Sparrows has aged well: it’s a sometimes vicious thriller, adorned with unexpected imagery that borders on the surreal, and always tempered by Pickford’s genuine sweetness.

Director: Dimitri Kirsanoff

Running just shy of 40 minutes, Dimitri Kirsanoff’s impressionistic street melodrama is named for the working-class district of Paris in which it is set, and in which it was shot. Two sisters, orphaned when a violent maniac kills their parents with an axe, move to the city and try to make a new life in a milieu stalked by predators. There are no intertitles, which leaves room for a little ambiguity in the plot, but there is plenty of radical montage editing, and two haunting lead performances from Nadia Sibirskaïa, Kirsanoff’s Breton wife, and Yolande Beaulieu, as the vulnerable heroines. 

The film was first shown in Paris as part of a double-bill curated by critic Jean Tedesco alongside Chaplin’s The Pilgrim (1923) and was instantly acclaimed, with Sibirskaïa earning comparisons to Gish and Nazimova. It’s a landmark in French silent cinema, but nothing else that Kirsanoff – an émigré from Tartu in Estonia (then the Russian Empire – made reached such a wide or appreciative audience.

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa

A sad, sad story told in a bold experimental style, A Page of Madness offers a terrific rush of cinematic excitement, effectively conveying horror and bereavement rather than narrative clarity. Made by a group of avant-garde artists, known as the ‘School of New Sensations’, A Page of Madness immerses its plot in a blizzard of rapid cuts, fast camera movements and non-linear storytelling. 

In a mental institution, an elderly janitor reflects on one of the inmates, his wife, who is now lost to her illness. In the film we learn that his long absences from home threw her into mental distress and that she tried to kill herself and their daughter. The child’s visit ends in violence, and an outbreak of manic dancing in the asylum sparks a riot. Amid the mayhem, the janitor’s harrowing flashbacks and fantasies collide to reach new levels of melancholy. 

Director: Victor Sjöström

Lillian Gish, the cinema’s favourite waif, and veteran of an earlier era of sentimental blockbusters, worked with Victor Sjöström, Swedish director of sumptuous art films, and leading screenwriter Frances Marion to adapt Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel into a first-rate silent melodrama, one that defied Hollywood’s increasing tendency toward regressive moralism. 

The setting is a puritan colony in Massachusetts, and Gish plays Hester Prynne, the seamstress who is ostracised and forced to wear a mark of shame after she has a child out of wedlock. Swedish actor Lars Hanson plays the child’s father, a local minister, and Henry B. Walthall is her husband, who was presumed lost at sea. It’s a vivid character study with Gish at her very best, a love story, and a rich portrait of a community racked by horror and hypocrisy. However, it is the climax of the film, with Gish and Hanson together on the scaffold, that still leaves audiences reeling.

Director: Lotte Reiniger

Reiniger’s artistry is visible in every frame of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, with her filigree silhouette cutouts dancing across the screen and rich jewel-toned tinting bringing the story to life. She, and her cinematographer-husband Carl Koch, made use of an early multiplane camera to achieve the film’s breathtaking layered, dimensional effects. 

The story of this groundbreaking shadow play is inspired by the tales of the Arabian Nights and concerns the travels of Achmed and his flying horse through magical lands, where he encounters characters including Aladdin. Reiniger chose her fantastical subject because she wanted to tell a story better suited to illustration than photography. It took three years to make and required ingenuity as well as patience, with Reiniger using sand, paint and lots of soap to add texture to her enchanted worlds. Without a distribution deal, she had to preview the film privately, but it travelled the world and astonished the critics.

Director: F.W. Murnau

The theatrical stylings of early, pure German expressionism gave way by degrees to a fluid and fantastical style of filmmaking that owes as much to painting as to cinematography, creating whole worlds with in-camera effects and studio creativity. A case in point: Murnau’s delirious take on the Faust legend, with Gösta Ekman in the title role and Emil Jannings as the diabolical Mephisto, who offers him a pact with the devil. 

Murnau’s camera pulls back and back to show the shadow of plague falling over a town, to travel the skies on Mephisto’s carpet ride. This elaborately shot film is a folktale, a cinematic magic show and a deeply touching drama, with Camilla Horn particularly effective as Faust’s beloved Gretchen. It was at that point Ufa’s most expensive production to date, but it flopped at home, and Murnau left the country, to make his own deal with Hollywood.

Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin

In this adaptation of a novel by Maxim Gorky, set during the Russian revolution of 1905, Pelageya, a working-class woman played by Vera Baranovskaya, is radicalised after a series of events inducing the death of her abusive husband during a strike and her dissident son’s arrest for sedition. Pelageya joins forces with the only people who can end his life sentence: the revolutionaries who plan a prison break on May Day. 

This is the first in Pudovkin’s revolutionary trilogy and is rich in symbolism and action. It is rightly celebrated for such small moments as a shot of an insect trying to extricate itself from a dish of sticky ointment, as well as great set pieces, including the climactic chase across the ice floes. The image of Pelageya wielding a flag in a procession of workers is still as stirring as it was intended to be, and what happens next remains a brutal call to arms.  

Director: Henrik Galeen

Conrad Veidt, who went on to work in Hollywood and Britain, was an established star of German cinema by this point, and he takes the lead in this movie, a remake of a 1913 film based on various literary sources, directed by Henrik Galeen, who was a pillar of German expressionism. 

The titular scholar, Balduin, is renowned for his drinking and swordsmanship more than his intellect, and he is flat broke. He makes a deal with Scapinelli (Werner Krauss), a mysterious stranger: 600,000 florins for any item from his lodgings. Scapinelli pays up, and absconds with Balduin’s reflection from the mirror. Can Balduin enjoy his newfound life of luxury, as his own doppelgänger marauds across the city? And in the crucial moment will he be able to tell the difference himself? A chilling tale, expertly handled with atmospheric cinematography by the great Günther Krampf. The already wraithlike, hollow-eyed Veidt is perfect as both the flawed hero and his uncanny shadow.

Directors: Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman

What is there left to say about Buster Keaton’s timeless comedy? The General appears on this list as a classic in its own right and as a marker for the heights of slapstick perfection reached by American screen comedians by this point in the decade. It is a war film with laughs, told from the losers’ side: our hero (Keaton) wants to fight for the South in the civil war but is rejected. However, when his beloved locomotive, The General, is hijacked by Union Army spies, the little man goes in hot pursuit of the enemy. 

Based on a true story and rigorously researched, veiling its chase plot in astonishing realism, The General looks like the war photographs of Mathew Brady but animated with pratfalls. Each gag is meticulously placed and timed for maximum gasp value, whether Keaton is clearing fallen sleepers from the path of his locomotive or blowing up an enormous bridge, the most expensive stunt ever attempted at that point.