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You might expect Joseph Conrad to be an author whose darkly ironic tales of colonialism were turned to romantic mush by the silent movies, yet here's an outstanding, completely unknown 1929 silent by Herbert Brenon that conveys much of his worldview in the course of a tale of desperate sea adventure. Colman plays Tom Lingard, a sort of Bogartish, cynical both-sides-of-the-law trader in the South Seas; a yacht run by a rich jerk gets becalmed near a dangerous island, Colman wants to keep the navy (any navy) out of his territory and sets out to rescue them, falling in love with Lili Damita as the rich jerk's bored wife. (When Ralph Richardson played Lingard in Outcast of the Islands, he was more Old Testament Patriarch than To Have and Have Not.)

Given the date, I worried this would be the silent version of a sound film, and painfully dull; what it actually looks like is that they wrote a talkie script, then filmed it silently anyway. So there are scenes that are a bit static at first, and overreliant on titles, yet it soon grows more visual and, more importantly, retains Conrad's sensibility, depicting the blundering, destructive ways of western powers in the east without holding back for the sake of the romance. A mature, well-made film (said to be missing one reel, but there is only one jump in the narrative that looks like a scene or two is missing) that deserves rediscovery as a major late silent. Shown at Capitolfest in 2018, and mostly in very good condition, this would be a worthy title for any festival or archival series.

In 1928, this was one of the first Soviet films to reach the west and considered on a par with Potemkin; Variety felt it was so important that they reviewed it twice (once from the artistic perspective and once from the average exhibitor's jaundiced viewpoint). If not the stylistic groundbreaker that Potemkin was, it's an impressive work of both visual beauty and emotional impact (rare among Soviet silents), that warrants rediscovery for itself and for its director, whose first solo effort (after co-directing Miss Mend with Boris Barnet) this was.

Maria (Anna Sten) and Jacob (I.I. Koval Samborski) are a happy peasant couple soon to become unhappy; the local baron, who rented them the rockiest piece of land this side of Man of Aran, has a daughter, who forces Sten to abandon her own family and wetnurse hers. She in turn has a husband (Vladimir Fogel of Miss Mend) who lusts after the peasant girl whose bare shoulder he's exposed to on a regular basis, and all this leads to Maria having a fight with her husband, trying to flee the home, and winding up with the infamous Yellow Ticket certifying her as a member of the profession of prostitute. (Note: this film bears no resemblance to any other film of that title, most of which are based on a famous American play of the teens.)

Clearly Ozep, in devising this Zolaesque story, was looking for material that would fly with the regime, and there's a perfectly good expose of the decadence of the Tsarist regime here, chaining peasants to aristocratic whim just as the land is chained with barbed wire, and using their bodies for feeding or pleasure indiscriminately. If Ozep's visual lyricism about peasants and the land doesn't go to the florid extremes of, say, Dovzhenko, on the other hand it has a sharp point which it makes with precision and a mordant wit, which you can't really say of Earth.

In fact, though the scenes of Maria and Jacob's peasant life have a rough-edged believability (as in his next film, The Living Corpse, Ozep is a great caster of weatherbeaten, non-actor extras) and quite a lot of visual beauty, the strongest section of the film is when Maria sinks into the profession for which she mistakenly has the ticket. It's worth noting that Ozep made three films in a row with substantial brothel sequences (The Living Corpse and The Murderer Dmitri Karamasoff), and in each case he seems to evince a real, ahem, love for the milieu in all its forced joviality, wanton desire, and seedy decadence, music and lust and self-loathing combining for a vivid impression of manic-depressive hell on earth. Sten, too, reaches the high point of her performance here, trading Maria's customary cow-like blank stare for a despondent world-weariness.