Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

marym52 John Gilbert DIDN'T exit pictures because of a high voice. In fact, his voice was a gravelly baritone; not mellifluously romantic, but perfectly suited to the characters he played in his later sound films. It's too bad this was released as a silent.This pre-code desert adventure film features solid performances by the leads (I always perk up when I see Ernest Torrance in the cast list), beautiful photography, and a plot full of tension from shifting power and sexual tension.Gilbert plays a bad good guy-- roguish, gritty, full of dark humor, and willing to play his captors off each other with anything it takes for his survival. One reviewer compares him to Errol Flynn. I can see that, but also the Clark Gable of "Red Dust".A good, suspenseful film with all the advantages of the late silent period.

MartinHafer Of all the major American studios, MGM was the slowest to switch from silents to talking pictures. The studio head, Louis B. Mayer, insisted that talkies were just a fad...and so they continued making silent films up through 1929. Other studios had pretty much gone all talking by 1929. One of the later silents, and John Gilbert's last silent, was this dandy film "Desert Nights".The film is set somewhere in Southern Africa. You aren't sure of the country but you know that the Kalahari Desert is in the region. This desert plays an important part because the boss of a diamond mine, Hugh Rand (Gilbert) is kidnapped and a fortune in diamonds is stolen by some clever crooks. However, Rand turns out to be the clever one as he ends up taking the crooks for a strange adventure.There really wasn't anything I didn't like about the film. Gilbert is good, as always and the film is well written and exciting. Additionally, the end if smart and works well. Surprisingly, I don't think this film was ever re-made as a talking picture and with such an interesting plot, it should have been.

IMDBcinephile John Gilbert is an elegant and aplomb man; in this movie, he leaves little of that screen presence to great longevity. It's decent in parts, like how the woman's father plays the piano and it actually does manifest in the score; but really this movie is terribly old fashioned even for that time and it leaves little revolution. Is it entertaining? Well, yeah sometimes it can put you into the tracking field of what its intent is.William Nigh tries to intertwine avarice in the stages of love which is contrived. It's not like in Michael Curtiz' "Casablanca" where Rick actually is spiteful to Ingmar but there is a deep and rather oozing love that is poured into it; in this, John Gilbert is enamored, scoffing about how it's going to be a crooked old woman and having this completely changed, feels to me as if his character is sort of a pessimistic, which could bring an interesting dichotomy if it wasn't embedded into this movie with this type of old age romance.Though to be fair, the themes are already there from the get-go; it is supposed to be escapist. The problem is that in the Calihari you see no reason for the attachment between Mr Randy and Nolan's character; he is a derisive character, of course, only used for their greedy and rapacious thirst for the diamonds, using him as part of the experience. He so delightfully embraces Nolan, the only hiccup being her Dad's disapproval of the whole affair. "Oxen must not go loose or it will kill" - I don't actually recall seeing one but that's kind of irrelevant. The dehydration and murky desert atmosphere give it a real sense of the desert, though still pretty old fashioned theater for that point.William Nigh must have perspired as well as the whole cast (while not a lot) of this film; that also makes it feel genuine.The ending is actually rather bittersweet; still John Gilbert's performance did give this movie a certain weight. I don't think I have ever seen a movie with this type of cast and it made it feel a bit different, of course onwards there have been movies like this but I mean where the desert felt so small, yet feel like the sphere of it in such a short movie.Anyway, I do think it's a shame for Gilbert subsequent from this; that line "Your lips told me so, your eyes told me so..." and so on is the greatest travesty in the devolution of sound cinema and it's a shame to see an actor under the wing of the producer Irving Thalberg to die so young and be panned like that... So while it's all in all all right, I'll give this movie a 5 for the effort and toil that was most likely put into this movie. However, "The Jazz Singer" would have most likely snobbed its box office revenue at that point, seeing that it was a pretty big movie and got raved about for most of that year; I do understand that MGM's reluctance with Sound may have been the reason they showcased this movie at ease and so I don't really blame them for it; as we know the vitaphone was the failure to John Gilbert's career.

max von meyerling The standard foci in John Gilbert studies have always been the early talkies and the great successes of the twenties. Everything has been directed to the great John Gilbert question: his precipitous fall from grace - did he fall or was he pushed? Seeing Desert Nights raises more questions than it answers. It certainly, to paraphrase Defence Secretary Rumsfeldt, lets us know that there are more secrets that we didn't know that we didn't know.There is this last John Gilbert silent film for example. Very late. So there was something of a reluctance to commit to sound films for John Gilbert. Was this the reasoning of Louis B. Mayer or John Gilbert? This late silent film could only have added to the general high tension surrounding Gilbert's transition to sound. Was this a deliberate psychological ploy by Mayer who knew both how to make stars and unmake them or were other reasons such as changing tastes, a high pitched voice either in fact or because of a sabotaged sound recording, or the fact that Gilbert was now obliged to vocalize the romantic swill which had previously been expressed with his face and body.Was Gilbert merely not as clever as he thought he was or were his weaknesses noted by Mayer and used to drive Gilbert off the cliff? Who was the driving force behind making this last silent film might go a good way to sorting these this questions out.Certainly Gilbert gets to do a lot of the Gilbert schticks that made him a star. He waltzes the same way he did in the Merry Widow, his shoulder and his arm are as stiff as if set in plaster, his body gilding ever so smoothly across the floor, the lady inseparable from his force field. He appeared with his usual super macho devil-may-care persona, hands on hips, bending backwards and laughing loudly signature move, literally laughing at danger.Still however good or bad he was and no matter how good or bad the film was, it's being released as a silent in 1929 doomed it to obscurity the moment it was first threaded into a projector. In the world where you're only as good as your last picture, a total and absolute flop like this made Gilbert's transition to sound just that much more problematical.As it is Desert Nights isn't very good, what there is of it. Someone has written that it's copyright length is listed as 80 minutes and the version available on Turner Classic Movies, which I presume is the MGM library copy, is only 63 minutes. In the film as shown there are vast problems in continuity. Transitions from the automobile escape to a safari are strangely incomplete giving it something of the routine illogic which drove French Intellectuals wild for a time in the late 20s and early 30s as surrealism was the desired aesthetic. This of course wasn't a deliberate artistic decision. Later in the film even stranger things happen. Does he escape or doesn't he? Who has the drop on whom? Does he love her, does she love him or are they both playing a game which turns into love? With so many missing scenes, even with a bit more information, who would possibly care? Apparently in one scene John Gilbert gives Ernest Torrence, as the heavy, directions, which cause him to wander along a lush river for days until he arrives back at mine where he is promptly put in chains, but the scene has been dropped though referred to in the denouement. Time passing isn't expressed at all at any point in this picture. It all seems to just be happening then and now on the screen. Very surrealistic.Even if it had been complete, even if it had been a talkie, it would have been a bad picture. Maybe something epic could have been wrung out of the desert sequences but this was shot on an intimate yet superficial manner.(Fantastic photography from James Wong Howe). Everything is pretty perfunctory and Gilbert can't pull this one out with his famous charm alone. These were perhaps the last fleeting shots of the old self confident Jack Gilbert, as the utter failure of Desert Nights and the changeover to sound seems to have sapped the Gilbert screen persona and cast him o'er with the pale cast of doubt forever.So was this film actually released this way, or did it play a week full length and then go out to the nabes cut, perhaps as part of a double bill? Was it cut and dumped or did it fail and then cut and dumped? The Variety review might be the thing to see. So was this a disaster that Gilbert had been talked into or pressured to make or did he do it willingly and even enthusiastically and if he did was it something that Mayer use to his advantage in his plan to destroy Gilbert? Gilbert's next appearance was a cameo as himself in William Haines' A Man's Man, a dangerous title considering Haines was perhaps the most widely known homosexual leading man in the movies.Gilbert would go on to make his first Talkie in a Romeo and Juliet sequence in The Hollywood Review of 1929 where he delivered the role of Romeo in the balcony scene in something less than dulcet tones but perhaps most damagingly wearing tights and rouged up in early color. Its the conceit of the sequence that Gilbert and Norma Schearer are being directed by Lionel Barrymore.Barrymore would direct Gilbert in the famous disaster of His Glorious Night (of the famous I love you, I love you, I love you...) which, with Redemption, dug Gilbert a hole from which he could never get out. By this time he was a marked man with everyone referring to him in the past tense and leaving the foot note about his high voice to explain his fall.