WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1928)

Enjoyable dark silent film about a magician (Lon Chaney) who, when he finds out that his wife is running off with Lionel Barrymore, gets in a fight with him and ends up paralyzed from the legs down.  Later on he hears that his wife has returned with a baby girl.  Chaney rushes to go see his wife, but she's dead.  So in an act of revenge he takes the baby and believing that it's Barrymore's child, has her raised in the "lowest dive in Zanzibar" while he himself has tracked down Barrymore who is now an ivory trader.  Chaney uses his magician skills to trick the local tribesmen and with their help he's been stealing ivory from Barrymore's men.  As planned this enrages Barrymore.  Chaney then reveals that he's behind the thefts and sets up a meeting to enact his final revenge.

For being made in 1928, WEST OF ZANZIBAR is pretty grim, especially the revenge on the child aspect.  When it was first mentioned I almost thought it was gonna go an OLDBOY way, but it ended up going the MANON OF THE SPRING direction instead.  If you are interested in silent cinema then you should definitely check it out.  It's not the greatest silent ever (or even in the Top 100), the pace is kinda slow and even though the mood is dark (and this was Pre-Code), really nothing too unacceptable happens onscreen, but it's still an enjoyable film and watching Chaney's sneering while he's dragging his legs around the joint is worth the price of admission alone.  The biggest problem I had with the film was believing that Lionel Barrymore could be evil.  He's made such a powerful impression in my handsome brain with his performances in films like GRAND HOTEL and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU that it's really difficult to take him seriously as the bad guy.

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929)

[Update 06/05/2023: Need rewatch this film and redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

In 1929 a 29-year-old Luis Bunuel asked his mother for $2,500 to make a movie. He spent half of the money in Paris and the other half making quite possibly the greatest movie of all time. Not a bad deal.

"When I made the film, I was absolutely sure that it was going to be a failure; but I didn't care because I had the conviction that it expressed something, until then never said in pictures. Above all it was sincere."

UN CHIEN ANDALOU was Bunuel's first film and only 16 minutes long, but in that 16 minutes he changed Cinema forever and 65 years later (when I saw it for the first time) it changed my life forever. Made in collaboration with fellow Surrealist Salvador Dali - nobody will ever know how much the collaboration was, but based on their later separate work I personally think the majority was Bunuel. But you do see Dali's influence in stuff like the garden scene, the woman's bare back and the cocktail shaker bell.

THE ANDALUSIAN DOG doesn't feature a dog at all, instead the narrative is more like dream flow of non-connecting visuals and objects and time. There is no explaining any of it, but it is a delight to watch the film over and over and dissecting everything. Not over analyze it, but just pick out all the small details. I won't do it here, there's plenty of books that have already done it.

Highest recommendation possible. UN CHIEN ANDALOU shouldn't just be watch, but absorbed into your mind.