The Museum of Modern Art’s fourth annual Silent Film Week will present seven programs from 29 July through 4 August 2026, featuring major films by major filmmakers. Aside from the chance to see these films in a theatre with live music, the special treat for many silent film buffs will be the chance to see MoMA’s own restorations of two dazzling films that aren’t currently on home video, Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory (1926) and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927).
First, let’s consider the other films. Opening night belongs to one of D.W. Griffith’s epics, Way Down East (1920), based on Lottie Parker Blair’s hit play of 1897. The film stars Lillian Gish as her patented suffering heroine, Lowell Sherman as his patented swinish cad, and Richard Barthelmess as his patented rural nice boy. The fact that these actors perfected these types doesn’t mean they don’t play them brilliantly; they do, and Griffith graces them with the time and the close-ups to do it.
Way Down East remains famous for Sherman’s climactic flight across ice floes that are heading towards a waterfall, an idea frankly borrowed from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its stage and screen versions. That bone-freezing climax remains a thrillingly conceived and edited piece of cinema, and the whole film is beautifully done. Many modern critics have observed that Way Down East is a perfect example of D.W. Griffith’s style at its apex without the racism and heavy-handed moralizing. MoMA will screen it with a ten-piece orchestra performing a newly commissioned reconstruction of the score heard by audiences at the 1920 premiere.
Buster Keaton’s The Navigator (1924) finds a pampered millionaire (Keaton) and his would-be girlfriend (Kathryn McGuire) trapped on an empty, drifting ship and having to make do. This “high concept”, inspired by the purchase of an actual decommissioned ship, is really the whole movie and the foundation for a series of brilliant sight gags that become an homage to technical ingenuity. Ben Model will provide accompaniment on the organ.
John Ford’s 3 Bad Men (1926) is a masterpiece of vigorous action and manly sentimentality that opens with the context of the 1877 Dakota land rush, which displaced the Sioux from their territory following the discovery of gold. As miles of wagons pass by, Ford focuses on close-ups of silent Sioux looking on.
The three bad men are lovably comedic horse thieves (Tom Santschi, J. Farrell MacDonald, Frank Campeau) fond of whisky, cards, and tobacco. They’re the “good bad men” pitted against a dandified varmint of a sheriff (Lou Tellegen) who has seduced and prostituted the sister (Priscilla Bonner) of one of them. Meanwhile, romance brews between a cowboy (George O’Brien) and a natty, spunky frontier gal (Olive Borden). Personal justice and redemptive sacrifice avail during the climactic, excitingly edited land rush.
3 Bad Men features what’s probably Ford’s first scene of a band of people in a building being attacked by outsiders. Ford reuses the “three outlaws” theme that he’d first told in Marked Men (1919, lost) and would remake in 3 Godfathers (1948). As in so many later Ford westerns, 3 Bad Men is populated with a tonal variety of characters and allows much of the story to assemble itself from atmospheric digressions. George Schneiderman’s photography is magnificent.
F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) was an artistic triumph in which Murnau applied his liberated camera and technical proficiency to a simple story of The Man (George O’Brien) and The Wife (Janet Gaynor). Under the spell of a positively Biblical temptation by The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston), The Man considers killing his wife! Makia Matsumura will accompany the film on piano.
A further note on Sunrise: Academy Award revisionism claims that William Wellman‘s Wings (1927) won the first award for Best Picture, but it actually was named Outstanding Picture. Sunrise was awarded the first and only Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Picture and was considered an equal co-winner that night. The following year, the Academy abolished the Unique and Artistic category. In other words, it’s merely by procedural afterthought that Sunrise isn’t called the first Best Picture, not that we’re taking anything away from the terrific Wings.
A night devoted to writer-director-producer-star Charles Chaplin is important for the first restorations of two 1918 films to their original theatrical form. Running just over half an hour, A Dog’s Life parallels the Tramp’s life to that of a stray dog called Scraps, “a thoroughbred mongrel”. Their identification foreshadows the Tramp’s informal adoption of an orphan in The Kid (1921).
There’s much business about avoiding the police, a persistent and popular trope in Chaplin’s shorts, and a hilarious charade among drunken thieves. Along the way, the man and the dog meet a frightened dance-hall girl (Edna Purviance), leading to an extravagantly happy ending quite different from the Tramp’s typical marches into the horizon.
A Dog’s Life was advertised onscreen as Chaplin’s “first million dollar picture”, and his “second million dollar picture” is the 46-minute Shoulder Arms, a huge hit that makes slapstick comedy out of the trench warfare of WWI that was still going on when Chaplin made it. The opening military drills showcase Chaplin’s balletic skill as he spins around, now pigeon-toed, now splay-footed. Scenes of going to sleep in a flooded dug-out are only outclassed by the surrealism of the scenes where our hero’s dressed as a tree. A climax in a bombed-out house with a French woman (Purviance) leads to an encounter with the Kaiser.
As MoMA’s notes explain, when Chaplin went to repackage these films for re-release in the late 1950s, he found the negatives unusable, so he asked his cameraman to reassemble the films based on outtakes and alternate unused footage. The two films have now been restored by MoMA using original prints in archives around the world. Thrown in as a bonus is an 11-minute fundraising short of the same year, The Bond, made to sell war bonds. The Kaiser again makes a wish-fulfillment appearance.
Now to focus on What Price Glory and The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, both of which will be presented by Matsumura’s piano score.
What Price Glory Restored to Glory After a Century
Though now largely forgotten, Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory was an important silent hit and part of what we now call a franchise that lasted decades in the first half of the 20th Century. The film’s origin is a 1924 Broadway smash by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings that wraps its sobering messages about war in a raucous, character-driven comedy that became popular and controversial for its profanity and sexual allusions.
The main characters are U.S. Marines stationed in France during WWI, Captain Flagg (Victor McLaglen) and Sgt. Quirt (Edmund Lowe). The film version of What Price Glory opens up the play by introducing them as sergeants in two earlier stations. In China, they compete for the attentions of one Shanghai Mabel (Phyllis Haver), a professional… entertainer. She and other women flaunt so much waving of the hind quarters as to become a visual motif.
Mabel has a pet monkey that Flagg calls a son of a bitch. Of course, that doesn’t appear in the title cards, but it’s clearly read on his lips, and it’s not the last time the epithet will be obvious. Flagg and Quirt spend practically the whole film beetling their brows at each other in three-quarter profile and snarling things that go unclarified to the viewer’s tender sensibilities. That’s part of the iconography of What Price Glory and a perfect example of what silent films could get away with.
Another brief anecdote about a woman occurs in the Philippines, presumably during the Philippine-American War of 1899 to 1902. Interestingly, the woman is played by Elena Jurado, whom Wikipedia identifies as the first Filipina in Hollywood silents. She’s good.
Flagg is promoted to captain in France, which he calls the best war he’s ever had. His old frenemy Quirt gets assigned to his regiment, and the two womanizing rivals now alternately spend time with Charmaine (Dolores Del Rio), the landlord’s fiery and physically forthright daughter. She tells the feuding Marines that they love each other, but it won’t become clear until the very end.
All this saucy sexual amusement contrasts with the two major battle setpieces, which go well beyond what could be staged on Broadway. Walsh and photographer Barney McGill not only wield sheer spectacle but also create striking effects with superimposition. When countless soldiers march in rows through a forest, they seem like the ghosts they’re about to become. One startling edit of superimposed images obliterates a whole entrenched platoon before we can process what’s happening. The camera flows with advancing soldiers into enemy trenches. John Ford directed much of this second unit material. Throughout, the firing of cannon and other explosions are embellished with eerie red hand-tinted flashes in this gorgeous restoration.
The emotional highlight of What Price Glory occurs during the death of a character whose non-survival we’d long anticipated. It’s handled with tenderness and sadness by concentrating on Flagg’s reaction. The kiss he bestows on the dead soldier foreshadows a similarly emotional moment in Wings.
The death is immediately followed by another soldier’s tirade that quotes the title phrase. This highly theatrical moment is lifted directly from the play, but, depending as it does on the intertitles to convey an angry speech, it doesn’t work so well cinematically as the simple power of the death scene.
The template of US soldiers competing for a local woman makes What Price Glory the link between King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and Wings. Perhaps more pertinent to pop culture, McLaglen and Lowe’s convincing portrayals of Flagg and Quirt proved so popular that the characters appeared in three talking sequels, two of which were directed by Walsh. They also reprised the roles in a short-lived radio series, Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt (1941-42), which aired as the US was entering the next war. John Ford directed a 1952 remake of What Price Glory with James Cagney and Dan Dailey.
What Price Glory? War may be hell, but restoring Walsh’s film to its former glory after the passing of a century was worth every penny.
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg Reaches for Sublime Romance
The project’s origins are complex. Wilhelm Meyer-Förster’s 1901 play Old Heidelberg, based on his 1898 novel Karl Heinrich, is now more famous as The Student Prince, a 1924 operetta composed by Sigmund Romberg. The operetta has had many revivals and was filmed in 1954. The first film of Old Heidelberg was a 1915 silent directed by John Emerson and produced by D.W. Griffith, with at least some input from Erich Von Stroheim, who played a supporting role. That version, as discussed by PopMatters, injects a war into the plot. The original play, as reflected in Lubitsch’s film, has no such war, and its onscreen title combines the operetta’s title with the play’s. Obviously, the silent film isn’t a musical.
Karl Heinrich, first seen as a child played by Philippe De Lacy, is a sheltered “poor little rich boy” who’s not allowed to play like other boys. He’s told by his uncle, the king (Gustav Von Seyffertitz), that “princes never cry.” One of the repeated bits of dialogue in the intertitles is when commoners say, “It must be nice to be a prince.” The first time it happens, we cut to the castle behind its iron fence, and the boy looks out like a prisoner from its bars.
Fortunately, he gets a friendly, affectionate, unstuffy old tutor in the form of Dr. Friedrich Jüttner. He’s played by Jean Hersholt, a beloved actor for whom the Academy’s humanitarian award is named. Jüttner tutors Karl Heinrich into adulthood, as played by Ramon Novarro, the silent heart-throb and “Latin lover” who here radiates a naive, awkward, and sheltered quality. Jüttner whisks Karl Heinrich off to be a student in Heidelberg, where most studies are conducted by fellows carousing over steins of beer. Karl Heinrich makes fast friends with all and instantly falls for the innkeeper’s daughter, Kathi (Norma Shearer).
Karl Heinrich and Kathi stage a romantic scene so overwhelmingly idyllic that it seems possible only in silent cinema. The scene features a lone tree in a grassy field dotted with hundreds of flowers, mirrored by the stars in the sky, as Karl Heinrich looks up at them in wonder and satisfaction. Do the lovers go all the way? A fairy tale such as this can’t commit to that, but the delicate “Lubitsch touch” makes us wonder.
Karl Heinrich is certainly forward enough to chase Kathi through a panning shot across several archways until we realize they aren’t reappearing yet on the other side of the final arch. A small dog runs into the frame from the other side, halts, and dashes away again.
The bittersweet point of Meyer-Förster’s story is that the demands of royal politics don’t permit the love of Karl Heinrich and a commoner to consummate in marriage. Will Hollywood respect the source or rewrite its own ending? The answer to this question is what brings The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg to its profundity.