This dazzling example of late silent cinema was available only in shoddy, awful looking prints for 80 years or more, until it was restored in 2016 and finally released on home video in 2019, and now for the most part looks fantastic. It was the final film made by the great Paul Leni, whose magnificent "The Man Who Laughs" is one of the absolutely essential silent works everyone needs to see at least once before they die.
The story of this one is a cross between The Cat And The Canary and The Phantom of The Opera, but not really as good as either: an actor is killed onstage and everyone in the cast and crew becomes a suspect; the theatre closes for years until the play is revived, and the killer plans to kill all over again. There's secret passageways and cobwebs galore, and a decent enough mystery, but it's got to be said the plot's a little messy and hard to follow at times.
It's in the visuals that The Last Warning really shines, with the camera in every scene swooping and zooming in on every action taking place, and great use of depth of field to draw one's eyes to things happening in the background: the camera is always doing something, always telling us something about the story and the characters, purely through visual means. This is the very peak of what silent cinema was reaching for at the end of the 1920s, just before the talkies came in the following year and largely destroyed that artform and the box of tricks it used for everyone but Alfred Hitchcock, at least until Citizen Kane came along. I always like to imagine what might have happened if sound had not been introduced for another 15 or twenty years; what visual magic and ways of imparting story through image might have been achieved.
In summation, then: not the most compelling or meaningful story but one full of energy, movement and endless inventiveness. A great delight for the eyes.
7½/10.
The story of this one is a cross between The Cat And The Canary and The Phantom of The Opera, but not really as good as either: an actor is killed onstage and everyone in the cast and crew becomes a suspect; the theatre closes for years until the play is revived, and the killer plans to kill all over again. There's secret passageways and cobwebs galore, and a decent enough mystery, but it's got to be said the plot's a little messy and hard to follow at times.
It's in the visuals that The Last Warning really shines, with the camera in every scene swooping and zooming in on every action taking place, and great use of depth of field to draw one's eyes to things happening in the background: the camera is always doing something, always telling us something about the story and the characters, purely through visual means. This is the very peak of what silent cinema was reaching for at the end of the 1920s, just before the talkies came in the following year and largely destroyed that artform and the box of tricks it used for everyone but Alfred Hitchcock, at least until Citizen Kane came along. I always like to imagine what might have happened if sound had not been introduced for another 15 or twenty years; what visual magic and ways of imparting story through image might have been achieved.
In summation, then: not the most compelling or meaningful story but one full of energy, movement and endless inventiveness. A great delight for the eyes.
7½/10.