London After Midnight

Now, i saw this movie thinking at first that i was going to get to see the original, as i didn't yet know the history, but thankfully at the beginning, they tell you the history. Given that, the script was amazing, and the stills leave you wanting more. Really i think that if anything this will cause more people to be aware of the greatness of LAM and maybe bring that lost reel out of the woodwork.

The stills are more than i've found anywhere else, and it's amazing so many quality pictures still exist. The only questionable part is at the beginning when they mention the previous movie, they say "21* years ago" *don't remember the actual number, but it was in the 20's... when the remake was made in 2002. Curious. Was there a remake made in 1950something?

but it can't replace the original film work as others have said here. While it certainly casts some new light on LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927) and some of us finally get to see what it was all about, it's never going to be able to in any way duplicate the experience those who first enjoyed the film in the theater had..still it was fascinating to see so many previously unseen stills from this movie especially those which show off Lon Chaney's most unusual make-up.

I would like to disagree with the above. I thought that the use of the remaining stills to recompose this movie, was brilliantly done. It was, indeed, obviously a labor of love, but now, we at least have SOME idea of what the audience saw in 1927...here it is, 2006, and I thought that for it's time, it probably WAS frightening. And Chaney's makeup is outstanding. The people of that era weren't used to those kinds of images on the screen, so I imagine that they were probably petrified by Chaney and his ghastly makeup, which, for its day, was superb, as I stated before. I'm clearly a Chaney fan, however, so, more than likely, I am truly biased.

All in all, this was brilliant, I thought.

A 45/47-minute reconstruction using the same still photographs with added camera motion, released by Turner Classic Movies in 2002.

It's such a shame that we had to watch an influential film like this in this format. I'm grateful for TCM for this reconstruction.

This reconstruction was obviously a labor of love. But it simply reinforces the uniqueness of film - a compendium of stills set to music is an entirely different medium - and makes the loss of London After Midnight and all other vanished films all the more heart-breaking. That's not to say there's no place for this kind of thing; certainly it was used in a positive way to fill in the gaps in the 1954 A Star Is Born. But to watch a reconstruction of an entire film becomes rather tedious. So, this is interesting, useful - but inevitably unsatisfying.