Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Stolen Moments (1920)

In Stolen Moments (1920), Rudolph Valentino is a wonderfully smarmy cad, and classical music artist Marguerite Namara proves she is no actress (and no beauty).

Stolen Moments has apparently not survived in a complete form, and what does survive has for the most part done so in a few 16mm reduction prints.

This DVD edition of Stolen Moments (1920) is presented from a very-good surviving 16mm reduction print of an edited three-reel version, rereleased in 1922. The slightly windowboxed video transfer does excellent work of holding the good to very-good but softly-detailed image and greytone range of the, what is assumed to be, vintage 16mm print. The print is lightly scratched, speckled and dusty, with some rough editing splices and sprocket damage to the image area late in the film, but still quite watchable.

The presentation is accompanied by a music score composed and performed on piano by Jon C. Mirsalis.

Supplementary material includes a 12-page insert booklet featuring an essay by Emily W. Leider; and a few seconds of color-toned 35mm footage from Stolen Moments.

The DVD’s high video bit rate ensures that, despite how rough the source prints are, the disc will render the best-possible image, even on high-definition television monitors. Incomplete prints of films are rarely available on home video, so the occasion of the release of this DVD set is cause for celebration of the opportunity to view what is, at least, cohesive representations of these films that have been hard to locate or thought lost forever. We highly recommend this edition.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition is also available directly from . . .