Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2013 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

From the Manger to the Cross (1912)

Produced by The Vitagraph Company of America, this early American feature-length religious epic features location cinematography shot in Israel and Egypt, and uses many quotations from the Holy Bible for its expository intertitles.

This edition features a windowboxed video transfer mastered from a good rerelease 35mm print from circa 1919 that appears to be little better than a standard 16mm reduction print. The windowbox presentation allows the maximum amount of surviving image to be viewed on all television monitors.

While the source material is of acceptable quality — that is, accepting its soft image details, and jittery and contrasty picture — the video transfer appears to be an older analog transfer that doesn’t come up to DVD quality standards.

The film is accompanied by a piety-evoking music score performed on theater pipe organ by Timothy Howard.

A definite case where the importance of the content surpasses quality concerns, there may never be a better-looking DVD edition of this film than this.

USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase helps support the Silent Era website.
Canada: Click the logomark at right to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase helps support the Silent Era website.

Other EARLY FEATURE-LENGTH FILMS of the silent era available on home video.