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Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
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Au secours!
(1924)

This late comedy starring Max Linder, directed by Abel Gance, was his final completed film. Max takes up a bet that he can stay in a haunted castle for an hour.

Film Preservation Associates
2000 DVD edition

Lucrèzia Borgia (1935), black & white, 93 minutes, not rated, with Au secours! (1924), black & white, 23 minutes, not rated.

Film Preservation Associates, distributed by Image Entertainment, ID5744FPDVD, UPC 0-14381-57442-5.
One single-sided, dual-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at 4.6 Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to 60 fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 1.0 mono sound encoded at 192 Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, optional English language subtitles (Lucrèzia Borgia only); no chapter stops; snapper DVD case; $24.99.
Release date: 4 July 2000.
Country of origin: USA •

Ratings (1-10): video: 5 / audio: 0 / additional content: 5 / overall: 5.

This DVD edition has been mastered from a good to very-good 16mm source print prepared by The Images Film Archive in 1979. The resulting picture is a little flat, with a bit more than the usual amount of dust, speckling, print damage and fingerprints.

The film is presented without any musical accompaniment. The audio tracks are encoded into the disc but there is no music.

The appearance of the first of Abel Gance’s films on DVD home video is quite welcome, and surprisingly beats a DVD edition of Napoléon (1927) to market. (Let us hope also that a DVD of the Francis Ford Coppola produced edition is neglected in favor of Kevin Brownlow’s recent restoration of that Gance epic.) We are certain that this DVD will aid viewers in a reassessment of Gance’s cinematic career.