Friday | November 11, 2005 9:00 pm

What Price Glory?

Live piano accompaniment by Yakov Gubanov
Screening on Film

Directed by Raoul Walsh.
With Edmund Lowe, Victor McLaglen, Dolores del Rio.
US, 1926, 35mm, black & white, silent, 125 min.

An odd mix of harsh melodrama and bawdy comedy, this early silent from Raoul Walsh proudly wears the marks of masculine rivalry, which the director would explore throughout his career. Two soldiers spar for the love of a woman until the grim realities of World War I change their fate. Featuring graphically terrifying battle sequences, the film gained much of its notoriety from the coarse interplay between Lowe and McLaglen, who were given free rein to improvise profanities which escaped the discretion of the silent-era Hollywood censors who only responded to printed obscenity.