Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

marym52 John Gilbert DIDN'T exit pictures because of a high voice. In fact, his voice was a gravelly baritone; not mellifluously romantic, but perfectly suited to the characters he played in his later sound films. It's too bad this was released as a silent.This pre-code desert adventure film features solid performances by the leads (I always perk up when I see Ernest Torrance in the cast list), beautiful photography, and a plot full of tension from shifting power and sexual tension.Gilbert plays a bad good guy-- roguish, gritty, full of dark humor, and willing to play his captors off each other with anything it takes for his survival. One reviewer compares him to Errol Flynn. I can see that, but also the Clark Gable of "Red Dust".A good, suspenseful film with all the advantages of the late silent period.

mark.waltz Quick and easy to get through, this hour long silent adventure starring John Gilbert has to be seen to be believed. It's a story of the foreign manager of a diamond mine in Africa who finds himself conned and kidnapped by two jewel thieves. Ernest Torrance and his daughter (Mary Nolan) get their hands on recovered jewels and take Gilbert along with them as an insurance package. Keeping him out in the hot desert sun they believe might drain him of the desire to rebel, but he's clever and uses earlier flirtations with Nolan to break her down. It's a fun jaunt to watch him get the better of the two, particularly the nasty Torrance. There's not much to the story, corny and overloaded with clichés, a suave performance by Gilbert, and a few surprises along the way. What's fun is watching how Torrance comes to depend on Gilbert for his survival, having earlier tried to get Nolan to prevent Gilbert from getting water. Later on when they find a sudden desert oasis filled with clear water and waterfalls, the joy on Torrance's face explodes as he splashes around after seemingly days without water or a bath of any kind, and this increases the romantic entanglement between Gilbert and Nolan. Torrance goes from an extremely nasty villain to a childlike joy literally within seconds, and that makes his performance a standout. Nolan has several moments where she's romantic, then ruthless, and all of a sudden, like a star struck young girl finding love where she didn't expect it. Gilbert is more of a reactor, but several scenes show a glint in his eyes as his plans for his own survival come together. Technically, it's excellent, but overly silly and unbelievable, although the ending is one of those that gives you a sudden gasp of shock and humongous laughter to follow.

wes-connors Good-looking diamond miner Jack Gilbert (as Hugh Rand) shows visiting dignitary "Lord Stonehill" Ernest Torrence (as Steve) and his daughter around the South African "Crown Diamond Mines" before taking them out on a hunting trip. While looking forward to seeing a white woman, everyone expects "Lady" Mary Nolan (as Diana) to be unattractive, but she is unveiled as a beautiful blonde. As you might expect, Mr. Gilbert and Ms. Nolan are mutually aroused...All is not, however, as it seems...Nolan is revealed not to be the daughter, but the lover of dastardly "father" Torrence. The criminal pair plotted to abduct the real Lord Stonehill, and rob Gilbert at gunpoint. Succeeding in their deception, Torrence and Nolan take Gilbert hostage, and flee across the hot Kalahari desert. Then, "Desert Nights" becomes a tale of greed and desire, as the three struggle to survive with dwindling water in the hot sands. Gilbert's last "silent" is a fairly sound production.****** Desert Nights (3/9/29) William Nigh ~ John Gilbert, Ernest Torrence, Mary Nolan, Claude King

max von meyerling The standard foci in John Gilbert studies have always been the early talkies and the great successes of the twenties. Everything has been directed to the great John Gilbert question: his precipitous fall from grace - did he fall or was he pushed? Seeing Desert Nights raises more questions than it answers. It certainly, to paraphrase Defence Secretary Rumsfeldt, lets us know that there are more secrets that we didn't know that we didn't know.There is this last John Gilbert silent film for example. Very late. So there was something of a reluctance to commit to sound films for John Gilbert. Was this the reasoning of Louis B. Mayer or John Gilbert? This late silent film could only have added to the general high tension surrounding Gilbert's transition to sound. Was this a deliberate psychological ploy by Mayer who knew both how to make stars and unmake them or were other reasons such as changing tastes, a high pitched voice either in fact or because of a sabotaged sound recording, or the fact that Gilbert was now obliged to vocalize the romantic swill which had previously been expressed with his face and body.Was Gilbert merely not as clever as he thought he was or were his weaknesses noted by Mayer and used to drive Gilbert off the cliff? Who was the driving force behind making this last silent film might go a good way to sorting these this questions out.Certainly Gilbert gets to do a lot of the Gilbert schticks that made him a star. He waltzes the same way he did in the Merry Widow, his shoulder and his arm are as stiff as if set in plaster, his body gilding ever so smoothly across the floor, the lady inseparable from his force field. He appeared with his usual super macho devil-may-care persona, hands on hips, bending backwards and laughing loudly signature move, literally laughing at danger.Still however good or bad he was and no matter how good or bad the film was, it's being released as a silent in 1929 doomed it to obscurity the moment it was first threaded into a projector. In the world where you're only as good as your last picture, a total and absolute flop like this made Gilbert's transition to sound just that much more problematical.As it is Desert Nights isn't very good, what there is of it. Someone has written that it's copyright length is listed as 80 minutes and the version available on Turner Classic Movies, which I presume is the MGM library copy, is only 63 minutes. In the film as shown there are vast problems in continuity. Transitions from the automobile escape to a safari are strangely incomplete giving it something of the routine illogic which drove French Intellectuals wild for a time in the late 20s and early 30s as surrealism was the desired aesthetic. This of course wasn't a deliberate artistic decision. Later in the film even stranger things happen. Does he escape or doesn't he? Who has the drop on whom? Does he love her, does she love him or are they both playing a game which turns into love? With so many missing scenes, even with a bit more information, who would possibly care? Apparently in one scene John Gilbert gives Ernest Torrence, as the heavy, directions, which cause him to wander along a lush river for days until he arrives back at mine where he is promptly put in chains, but the scene has been dropped though referred to in the denouement. Time passing isn't expressed at all at any point in this picture. It all seems to just be happening then and now on the screen. Very surrealistic.Even if it had been complete, even if it had been a talkie, it would have been a bad picture. Maybe something epic could have been wrung out of the desert sequences but this was shot on an intimate yet superficial manner.(Fantastic photography from James Wong Howe). Everything is pretty perfunctory and Gilbert can't pull this one out with his famous charm alone. These were perhaps the last fleeting shots of the old self confident Jack Gilbert, as the utter failure of Desert Nights and the changeover to sound seems to have sapped the Gilbert screen persona and cast him o'er with the pale cast of doubt forever.So was this film actually released this way, or did it play a week full length and then go out to the nabes cut, perhaps as part of a double bill? Was it cut and dumped or did it fail and then cut and dumped? The Variety review might be the thing to see. So was this a disaster that Gilbert had been talked into or pressured to make or did he do it willingly and even enthusiastically and if he did was it something that Mayer use to his advantage in his plan to destroy Gilbert? Gilbert's next appearance was a cameo as himself in William Haines' A Man's Man, a dangerous title considering Haines was perhaps the most widely known homosexual leading man in the movies.Gilbert would go on to make his first Talkie in a Romeo and Juliet sequence in The Hollywood Review of 1929 where he delivered the role of Romeo in the balcony scene in something less than dulcet tones but perhaps most damagingly wearing tights and rouged up in early color. Its the conceit of the sequence that Gilbert and Norma Schearer are being directed by Lionel Barrymore.Barrymore would direct Gilbert in the famous disaster of His Glorious Night (of the famous I love you, I love you, I love you...) which, with Redemption, dug Gilbert a hole from which he could never get out. By this time he was a marked man with everyone referring to him in the past tense and leaving the foot note about his high voice to explain his fall.