Lightdeossk Captivating movie !

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Winifred The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Snow Leopard This is a good atmospheric melodrama that successfully adapts a Joseph Conrad story of human needs and emotions, and it adds a memorable supporting performance by Lon Chaney as a bonus. The first part moves at a nice, deliberate pace, allowing the characters to define themselves and the tropic island atmosphere to sink in. Then, once it gets moving, it produces some tense moments of suspense, action, and danger.Jack Holt plays a moody recluse who is drawn into helping out a musician played by Seena Owen. Just as things start to work out for both of them, the villains - Wallace Beery, as a brutish hotel manager, and a ruthless gang that includes Chaney's character - take over the course of events. The story is rather simple in itself, but (as is often the case in Conrad's novels) the key is to watch the characters as they respond to developments.Holt is actually rather bland as the hero, and this is the main thing that keeps it from being one of the finest pictures of the late 1910s. Owen is quite sympathetic in her role, and often effectively underplays her character's emotions. Beery is well-cast and performs well, but it is Chaney who grabs the attention from everyone else whenever he is on the screen. Even in a supporting role like this, his attention to detail and his understanding of his character's nature come across clearly.The cast and story work well together and with the setting. The smoldering volcano not only provides atmosphere, but is also an appropriate image for the changes taking place inside the characters, as the tense story movies towards its conclusion.

Randy Byers I had to watch this movie three times before I finally started to catch the plot details, because it's just so beautiful to look at that I don't really care about the story. All of the Maurice Tourneur films I've seen are visually fascinating to one degree or another, but this one takes the cake, even over THE BLUE BIRD (which is admittedly a far different kind of movie). I can imagine Josef von Sternberg studying this movie for clues on how to create an exotic look out of papier mache and shadows. (Okay, that papier mache volcano looks pretty silly, but that's about the only major lapse I've noticed.) Griffith may have taught people how to edit, but I'm beginning to think Tourneur taught them how to compose the frame for depth effects and complex texture. The tinting is very beautiful, too, and I love the effect when Heyst blows out the lamp.But once I focused on the plot, I was impressed on how well-constructed it was. The story moves along at a smooth, smart pace, and the tension builds very nicely. This is a pretty generic thriller in many ways, with a generic romance at the heart of it, but it's put together so effortlessly and with such visual charm that it seems fresh. Still, the real dramatic motor is the bad boys, particularly Lon Chaney as the psychopathic but strangely good-natured Ricardo and Ben Deeley as the cold, creepy Mr. Jones (looking like he stepped out of a Fritz Lang movie). There's also a good twist in the history and brute plan of Bull Montana's Pedro. Seena Owen's role is underwritten, but her weary, vulnerable resolve is beginning to grow on me.Maybe this is where the movies start for me. Certainly it's the earliest movie to hold me entranced from stem to stern, although the German classics begin full-bore within a year of this. But there's still a lot more to see from the era.

Cineanalyst Director Maurice Tourneur was one of the great pioneering filmmakers of the 1910s, and he ended the decade with one of his best: "Victory". His films are noted for their pictorial beauty. With the death of John van den Broek, René Guissart takes over the cinematography duties here. Clarence Brown, who worked as editor and assistant director on many of Tourneur's films, isn't credited here--he was beginning his own successful career as a director at about this time. Ben Carré, one of the best of early set designers, did work on this film, though.There are some impressive chiaroscuro effects here, as well as good use of tinting, in addition to Tourneur's trademark silhouettes. The film moves quickly, and the careful timing of the editing is visible in one scene where the cuts are in unison with gunfire. The film contains pictorial beauty, but also ferocity, which corresponds well with the film's narrative and intriguingly drawn characters. It climaxes in the film's volcanic dénouement.There's also a flashback in one scene, which is rather breezy; it setups Lon Chaney's character Ricardo, who narrates it, at the center of the film. There are several characters in this picture, each at some time pulling the narrative: Wallace Berry's character, who owns the hotel and tries to own Alma; the mistreated and fickle Alma herself, whose questionable loyalties turn the film's suspense on her; and even the protagonist who doesn't want to influence anything. Berry's nosey busybody, with the beard and glasses, the bestial physicality of Pedro, and the dark sunglasses and white suit of Mr. Jones make them visually intriguing characters, too--causing viewers to focus on them without the story having to.Heading all of that, however, is Chaney, whose feats in movie makeup invented the trade. Without credits, I wouldn't have known he played Ricardo. Chaney was also at the forefront of introducing cinematic acting, subtler than the theatrical and, more importantly, a fully convincing embodiment of a character. In that way, his character becomes the center of the film, and the rest of the characters unravel with the climactic events on his cue.Tourneur often adapted his pictures from literary sources, but using a novel by Joseph Conrad surely helped to make this one of his best works, as does Chaney. One of the things I like most about "Victory" is that it's more cinematic than some of his other films, although he referenced theatre in interesting and self-aware ways in such films as "The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England" (1914) and "The Blue Bird" (1918). "Victory" has both a consistent visual and cinematic style, in addition to the rarity (in Tourneur's films and in movies in general of the time) of intriguing characters convincingly and cinematically portrayed.

Richard_Harland_Smith Maurice Tourneur's VICTORY was made only four years after the publication of the source novel by Joseph Conrad, and features silent film sensation Lon Chaney in an early co-starring role.When pre WWI isolationist Jack Holt steals a girl away from predatory hotel permitee Wallace Beery, Beery sics a trio of island-hopping fortune hunters on him. Lon Chaney steals the film as the shiv-shoving Ricardo, but Seena Owen is his equal as the desperate but clever Alma. Jack Holt is the jut-jawed hero, Bull Montana (the "ape man" of 1926's THE LOST WORLD, which starred Beery) a simian heyboy and Ben Deeley is the languid, almost Ernest Thesiger-like villain of the piece.Jules Furthman's script simplifies Conrad's novel, and provides a much happier ending, but it's still surprisingly faithful and Conrad's witty butfatalistic voice rings loud and clear.