[sabotai]

1925 Year In Review

Another up year as I had several 20+ rated movies. It started out slow, including one of the worst movies I've ever seen in the 1925 version of the Wizard of Oz, and a lackluster introduction to the Western genre with Tumblweeds. I thought it was going to be a down year, or show that 1924 was a fluke, however, once we got to the big budget movies, the innovative foreign movies and the classic comedies, the year was saved.

The advances in technology can be seen clearly. The addition of Technicolor sequences in big budget movies like Phantom of the Opera and Ben-Hur showed that it wouldn't be long until movies being made entirely in color would become the standard (unfortunately, a little thing called the Great Depression would get in the way of that).

Not just color, but in set design, the technology that controls the sets, the attention to detail, etc. have been drastically improving over the years, as has the innovation and determination to create the scenes the directors wanted. I know they have spent a ton of money on sets in the past, going back to Intolerance (1916), but just a couple of years prior to 1925, there's no way the movie studio pays such an enormous amount of movey to film that chariot race in Ben-Hur, but the movies were taking off and were big bucks.

Movies of 1925
1. The Gold Rush - 28
2. Bronenosets Potyomkim (The Battleship Potemkin) - 25
3. The Freshman - 25
4. Ben-Hur - 23
5. The Phantom of the Opera - 23
6. Stachka (Strike) - 22
7. Seven Chances - 20
8. The Lost World - 18
9. Tumbleweeds - 14
10. Don Q, Son of Zorro - 12
11. Wizard of Oz - 6

1926 Movies (Updated List - Subject to Change)
*Faust - German / Horror
*The Adventures of Prince Achmed - German / Animated
Battling Butler - Buster Keaton Comedy
The Black Pirate - Douglas Fairbanks Swashbuckler
Flesh of the Devil - Drama starring Greta Garbo
The Sea Beast - Moby Dick adaptation starring John Barrymore
The Son of the Shiek - Sequal to The Shiek starring Rudolph Valentino
Sparrows - Drama starring Mary Pickford
The Temptress - Drama / Romance starring Greta Garbo
Mat (Mother) - Russian film about the 1905 revolution

* - The only two movies that are absolute to make the list (I already have them sitting on my desk from Netflix). Faust is a must and The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the first full-length animated movie, so that's a must.

I'll probably cut one of the Garbo movies and maybe Son of the Shiek if I find other movies I would rather see (I'll keep at least one Garbo movie since I have not seen anything with her in it yet). The only other movie I consider a "must" would be The Black Pirate, since it's the first chance I'll get to see a movie shot entirely in Technicolor (2-Tone, but still). The Sea Beast looks like it gets terrible ratings, so that might go too. So far all I have done was go through the list on Wikipedia of 1926 movies and see which ones were on Netflix. I'll probably find a few more and update the list soon.