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

Through the Back Door (1921)

This comedy-drama, directed by Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford, stars Mary Pickford and Adolphe Menjou, with Peaches Jackson, Gertrude Astor, Elinor Fair and Wilfred Lucas.

This DVD edition has been mastered from very-good 35mm print that is presented in slightly windowboxed video transfer. The print itself has the usual amount of speckling, a few scratches and a greater amount than usual of dust, black spots and schmutz, but it also features a broad range of tones from highlights to shadows. There are a few noticeable snippets of missing footage, likely lost to print breaks.

However good the print may be, the disc encoding is a bit coarse as there are compression artifacts that are visible when the picture is in motion on high-definition monitors and very apparent in any still frame. The visual quality is representative what was being produced on DVD in the late 1990s, not in 2005.

The film is accompanied by an excellent orchestral music score arranged and conducted by Robert Israel. The music adds considerably to the presentation appeal of this edition.

The disc’s supplemental material includes the early Mary Pickford feature Cinderella (1914) accompanied by music composed by Donald Sosin, and a still image gallery (34 images).

This disc is recommended until a better-looking edition can be produced, remastered in high-definition and released on Blu-ray Disc.

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 has been discontinued and is . . .

Other silent film music scores by ROBERT ISRAEL available on home video.