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

Tess of the Storm Country (1922)

This is Mary Pickford’s remake of her 1914 film of the same title, directed by John S. Robertson, and costarring Lloyd Hughes, David Torrence and a smarmy Jean Hersholt.

This edition presents a good natural-speed video transfer, originally prepared for VHS videotape release in the 1990s from a very-good 35mm preservation print that has been provided by the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education, that generally features a broad grayscale range, but is a little blasted out in its highlights from time to time. Some intertitles in the full-frame transfer will be clipped off on some television monitors.

Reevaluating this DVD release with its older video transfer on high-definition equipment that upscales a standard 480-line interlaced NTSC signal up to a 1080-line progressive HD signal reveals how coarse the resolution of the disc’s transfer and encoding is, since the upconversion cannot hide the low-resolution lines in the picture image. The disc looks good enough on standard televisions, but collectors will want to upgrade this disc as soon as a new edition has been remastered to today’s standards.

The film is accompanied by a music score composed by Jeffrey Mark Silverman and performed by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra.

USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com.
Canada: Click the logomark at right to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca.

Other silent era JEAN HERSHOLT films available on home video.