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

The Kentucky Derby (1922)

This Universal adventure drama, directed by King Baggot, stars Reginald Denny and Lillian Rich, with Emmett King, Gertrude Astor, Lionel Belmore, Kingsley Benedict and Bert Woodruff.

This DVD-R edition has been mastered at standard-resolution from an 8mm reduction print and it looks as awful as you might expect. The picture contains the usual amount of dust, speckling, scratches and schmutz, with some mild frame jitters. Some intertitles and insert shots will be cut-off around all sides of the picture due to the tight cropping in the source material and the tight video transfer framing. The resulting blurry image will test the patience of many viewers. We have to wonder if a projector was set-up to cast a picture on the wall and a video camera was used to capture the image, the transfer is so poor.

The film is accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting mono jazz music sources abruptly edited together.

Not a great presentation, and not really worth the modest cost, but this is the only home video edition of the film we know of. Only worth the money if you absolutely need to view this film.

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